Raving Monkeys

More on Libby

2005-11-14T10:23:00.000-05:00

Libby May Have Tried to Mask Cheney's Role

By Carol D. Leonnig and Jim VandeHeiWashington Post Staff WritersSunday, November 13, 2005; A06

In the opening days of the CIA leak investigation in early October 2003, FBI agents working the case already had in their possession a wealth of valuable evidence. There were White House phone and visitor logs, which clearly documented the administration's contacts with reporters.
And they had something that law enforcement officials would later describe as their "guidebook" for the opening phase of the investigation: the daily, diary-like notes compiled by I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, then Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, that chronicled crucial events inside the White House in the weeks before the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame was publicly disclosed.

The investigators had much of this information before they sat down with Libby on Oct. 14, 2003, and first heard from him what prosecutors now allege was a demonstrably false version of what happened. Libby said that, when he told other reporters about the CIA operative and her marriage to Iraq war critic Joseph C. Wilson IV, he believed he had first learned the information from Tim Russert of NBC News and was merely passing along journalistic hearsay. This was an explanation made dubious by Libby's own notes, which showed that he previously had learned about Plame from his boss, Cheney.

In the aftermath of Libby's recent five-count indictment, this curious sequence raises a question of motives that hangs over the investigation: Why would an experienced lawyer and government official such as Libby leave himself so exposed to prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald?

Libby, according to Fitzgerald's indictment, gave a false story to agents and, later, to a grand jury, even though he knew investigators had his notes, and presumably knew that several of his White House colleagues had already provided testimony and documentary evidence that would undercut his own story. And his interviews with the FBI in October and two appearances before the grand jury in March 2004 came at a time when there were increasingly clear signs that some of the reporters with whom Libby discussed Plame could soon be freed to testify -- and provide starkly different and damning accounts to the prosecutor.

To critics, the timing suggests an attempt to obscure Cheney's role, and possibly his legal culpability. The vice president is shown by the indictment to be aware of and interested in Plame and her CIA status long before her cover was blown. Even some White House aides privately wonder whether Libby was seeking to protect Cheney from political embarrassment. One of them noted with resignation, "Obviously, the indictment speaks for itself."

In addition, Cheney also advised Libby on a media strategy to counter Plame's husband, former ambassador Wilson, according to a person familiar with the case.

"This story doesn't end with Scooter Libby's indictment," said Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), giving voice to widespread Democratic hopes about the outcome of Fitzgerald's case. "A lot more questions need to be answered by the White House about the actions of [Cheney] and his staff."

But to Libby's defenders, the timing of Libby's alleged lies supports his claims of innocence. They say it would be supremely illogical for an intelligent and highly experienced lawyer to mislead the FBI or grand jury if he knew the jurors had evidence that would expose his falsehoods. Libby, they say, is guilty of nothing more than a foggy memory and recollections that differ, however dramatically, from those of several witnesses in the nearly two-year-old investigation.
"People have different memories," said lawyer Victoria Toensing, a Justice Department official in the Reagan administration. She said the fact that Fitzgerald did not indict on the crime he set out to investigate -- illegal disclosure of classified evidence -- supports the conclusion that no such crime took place. Fitzgerald has said he could not make such a determination because his inquiry was obstructed by Libby's deceptions.

Even if Fitzgerald shows beyond a reasonable doubt that Libby's version of events is wrong, he also must prove the former Cheney aide lied on purpose. But many lawyers and several White House aides said the case against Libby appears strong -- and has the potential to embarrass other administration officials if it goes to trial.

The case was prompted by Plame's name being publicized by columnist Robert D. Novak on July 14, 2003. Eight days earlier, Wilson had publicly criticized the Bush administration for allegedly twisting intelligence to justify the Iraq war. Wilson and his allies claimed Bush officials publicly identified Plame as payback for his dissent.

Libby is the only White House official charged in the case. Karl Rove, the president's deputy chief of staff and top political adviser, remains under investigation for providing misleading statements about his role in the leaking of Plame's identity, and people close to the case said he could still be charged. A final decision is expected soon on Rove's fate.

William Jeffress Jr., one of Libby's lawyers, declined to comment on the case. So did Fitzgerald's spokesman, Randall Samborn.

But the emerging case against Libby is bringing more about Fitzgerald's investigation into public view. In October 2003, agents interviewed several administration officials, who described conversations they had with Libby about Plame in June and early July of 2003. Cumulatively during Fitzgerald's probe, four officials said they mentioned Plame to Libby, investigators found; three others said Libby mentioned her to them.

This testimony makes the story Libby offered during his first FBI interview look suspicious. He said he believed that he first learned about Plame on July 10 or July 11, 2003, in a conversation with Russert. Libby said he was surprised to learn of Plame's connection to Wilson. To Fitzgerald's team, Libby did not seek to deny that he had learned about the Plame link from Cheney -- as revealed by Libby's own notes -- but simply said it had slipped his mind that the vice president was an earlier source of the information than Russert, lawyers familiar with the case said.

Even early in the investigation, two key people were publicly known at the time to have been interviewed by the FBI: Ari Fleischer, then-White House press secretary, and Catherine Martin, a Cheney press aide. Martin had learned about Plame's employment at the CIA from another senior government official, the indictment says, and told Libby sometime in late June or the first week of July. Fleischer reportedly told investigators that, at a lunch on Monday, July 7, Libby told him that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA and confided that the information was not widely known.

Fitzgerald, in announcing the indictment two weeks ago, called attention to this conversation with Fleischer to show how improbable he regarded Libby's account: "What's important about that is that Mr. Libby . . . was telling Mr. Fleischer something on Monday that he claims to have learned on Thursday."

Libby's defense must also reckon with his own notes. Lawyers familiar with the case said in general his notes do not recount the details of conversations and do not specifically contradict his account to investigators. Usually the notes explain with whom he met each day. One remarkable exception was when he chronicled a meeting with his boss on or about June 12, in which Libby wrote that Cheney told him that he learned from the CIA that Wilson's wife worked at the agency.

But when Libby was called to answer Fitzgerald's questions under oath before the grand jury on March 5 and again on March 24, 2004, he stuck to the story he had given in October.

He repeated that he believed he had learned the information from a reporter and had forgotten Cheney had told him about Plame. He explained that he had not thought the material was classified because reporters knew it. But Fitzgerald pressed Libby -- and not so subtly raised the specter of a coverup. "And let me ask you this directly," Fitzgerald said. "Did the fact that you knew that the law could . . . turn on where you learned the information from affect your account for the FBI -- when you told them that you were telling reporters Wilson's wife worked at the CIA but your source was a reporter rather than the vice president?" Libby denied it: "No, it's a fact. It was a fact, that's what I told the reporters."

After lengthy court battles over journalists' duty to testify in the case -- including several contempt citations by a trial court judge, appeals to the Supreme Court and one reporter's jailing -- Fitzgerald got all the reporters' testimony that he had sought. Russert, Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper and Judith Miller of the New York Times all testified about their conversations with Libby. All contradicted Libby.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company
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More Abramoff.....

2005-11-03T15:40:00.000-05:00

Norton Ex-Aides Clash on Lobbyist's InfluenceLawyer Says He Accused Griles of Aiding Abramoff

By Susan Schmidt and James V. GrimaldiWashington Post Staff WritersThursday, November 3, 2005; A19

Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton's former legal counselor yesterday accused J. Steven Griles, the department's recently departed second in command, of improperly trying to meddle in decisions affecting tribal clients of lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

Former legal counselor Michael G. Rossetti, seated beside Griles before the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, said he repeatedly rebuffed Griles's efforts and, at one point, confronted him in front of other officials. He accused Griles of attempting to do Abramoff's bidding on an issue affecting the Coushatta tribe of Louisiana, an Abramoff gambling client.

"I wanted Mr. Griles to know I had my eye on him because I was worried about it -- whether founded or not, I was worried about it," Rossetti said. He said he demanded to know from Griles "whose water was he carrying," Rossetti testified.

Griles, flushed and agitated, denied aiding Abramoff. "I don't recall intervening on behalf of Mr. Abramoff, ever," he said. "There was no special relationship with Abramoff in my office."

The face-off between two former senior Bush administration officials was the latest twist in the unfolding story of Abramoff's efforts to influence Congress and executive branch agencies. A Justice Department public corruption task force is investigating the former GOP lobbying powerhouse; yesterday's hearing was the fourth the committee has held to look into the $82 million Abramoff and associates received from tribal clients over three years.

The panel's chairman, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), called the saga "a complex and tangled web . . . a story alarming in its depth and breadth of potential wrongdoing. It is breathtaking in its reach."

One witness -- Italia Federici, depicted in e-mails as a go-between from Abramoff to Griles -- refused to appear, citing prior family considerations. U.S. marshals have been looking for her since last week to serve her a subpoena, and McCain said he would require her to come before the committee on her own.

McCain questioned Griles about a discussion he had with Abramoff about joining his lobbying firm in September 2003, two months before Griles's confrontation with Rossetti. McCain cited an e-mail obtained by the committee in which Abramoff told his lobbying colleagues that he had met with Griles and expected him to join their team.

"This cannot be shared with anyone not on this distribution list," Abramoff wrote. "I met with him tonight. He is ready to leave Interior and will most likely be coming to join us. He had a nice sized practice before he joined Interior, and expects to get that and more rather soon. I expect he will be with us in 90-120 days. This will restrict what he can do for us in the meantime," wrote Abramoff, but said Griles "gave me some suggestions" on several tribal related issues.
Griles told the panel he had been offered a job but immediately declined it and told Interior Department ethics officials about the overture.

Interior Department spokesman Daniel J. DuBray said that Griles did confer with an ethics officer over the job offer. He said he could not comment further on yesterday's hearing, citing the investigations into "all aspects of Mr. Abramoff's contacts with the department -- both direct contacts and those which may have been conducted by surrogates."

Much of yesterday's hearing centered on Griles's dealings with Federici, who introduced Griles and Abramoff to each other around the time of President Bush's election. Federici, a former Norton campaign aide in the secretary's native Colorado, is president of a conservative environmental group Norton founded with anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist.
Abramoff had his tribal clients send at least $250,000 to the group -- Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy -- between 2001 and 2003.

"The question is why," McCain said. He said e-mails show that Abramoff and his team "believed that Ms. Federici had 'juice' at the Department of Interior and deemed her 'critical' to his tribal lobbying practice." In numerous e-mails, Federici told Abramoff she had or would raise the lobbyists' concerns with Griles.

The Washington Post reported earlier this year that Federici and Griles had a personal relationship that is an element in the investigation into Abramoff's influence at the department.
"I recall a few conversations where she asked me to call Abramoff," said Griles yesterday, adding that he remembered calling Abramoff on one occasion.

Griles said the only time he remembered Abramoff being in his office was for a "photo op" with the former chief of the Coushatta tribe on Feb. 5, 2002. That meeting occurred as Abramoff and the Coushattas were in the midst of a furious effort to prevent another Louisiana tribe, the Jena Band of Choctaw Indians, from winning concessions at the Interior Department that would pave the way for them to open a casino.

Rossetti said Griles repeatedly sought to intervene in the department's two-year consideration of the Jena matter. "He had a very keen interest," Rossetti testified, and made "constant requests to be involved in meetings." Rossetti said he tried to block the efforts because he did not want Norton to be vulnerable to criticism that the normal decision-making process had not been followed.

Griles denied he had ever sought to weigh in on tribal issues during his tenure at the department, which lasted from 2001 until last year.

But Rossetti said that in late 2003, with Norton about to make a decision on the Jena, Griles presented him with a binder full of legal arguments and congressional letters arguing against the Jena bid. Rossetti demanded to know where it had come from, and after much discussion, he testified, Griles acknowledged it had come to him "by way of Mr. Abramoff."
"Mr. Rossetti has a different memory than I have on that issue," Griles said. He said he showed the binder to Rossetti and asked him to share it with Norton, recalling that he asked, "Please make sure she knows all sides of this issue."

"I do not know and did not know where it came from," Griles said. He said his secretary was called down to pick it up at the department's front desk, and once it was placed in his office, he thought he should give it to Rossetti because it was now an official Interior Department document.

In a statement yesterday, Andrew Blum, spokesman for Abramoff, said the lobbyist was in the "impossible position" of not being able to give his side of the story because of the ongoing investigations.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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Arguments of Convenience

2005-10-28T14:58:00.000-04:00

This sums up pretty well how the right does not believe in it's own arguments. They only believe in means to an ends:

A Departure's Lasting Damage

By E. J. Dionne Jr.Friday, October 28, 2005; A23

The damage President Bush and the conservative movement have inflicted on their drive to pack the Supreme Court with allies will not be undone by Harriet Miers's decision to withdraw her nomination.

In picking such a vulnerable nominee, Bush single-handedly undercut the conservatives' long-standing claim that the Senate and the rest of us owed great deference to a president's choice for the court. Conservatives displayed absolutely no deference to Bush when he picked someone they didn't like. The actual conservative "principle" was that the Senate should defer to the president's choice -- as long as that choice was acceptable to conservatives. Some principle.

Republicans had railed against Democratic efforts to press court nominees (including Chief Justice John Roberts) for their views on legal issues. Back in July The Post disclosed a planning document circulated among Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee. The document said nominees for the Supreme Court should avoid disclosing "personal political views or legal thinking on any issue." Liberals were terribly gauche and inappropriate for wanting to know someone's opinions before awarding that person life tenure on the nation's most powerful court.

But it was neither gauche nor inappropriate for conservatives to demand that Miers clarify her views on a slew of issues, notably Roe v. Wade . When liberals asked for clarity, they were committing a sin. When conservatives asked for clarity, they were engaged in a virtuous act. Thus are conservatives permitted to alter their principles to suit their own political situation.

There was also that small matter of a nominee's religious views. Conservatives condemned liberals who suggested it was worth knowing how Roberts's religious convictions might affect his judging. But when Miers started running into trouble with conservatives, the Bush administration encouraged its allies to talk up Miers's deep religious convictions to curry favor among social conservatives. I guess it's okay for conservatives to bring up religion whenever they want, but never appropriate for liberals to speak of spiritual things.

Even the manner of Miers's exit was disingenuous, not to mention derivative. In announcing her withdrawal, the White House said that "it is clear that senators would not be satisfied until they gained access to internal documents concerning advice provided during her tenure at the White House -- disclosures that would undermine a president's ability to receive candid counsel." Miers's decision, the statement said, "demonstrates her deep respect for this essential aspect of the constitutional separation of powers."

The White House was following, almost to the letter, the exit strategy outlined last week by my conservative colleague Charles Krauthammer. But Krauthammer was honest enough to admit what the White House could not: that all this verbiage was about saving face. The president had to know when he named Miers that her lack of a judicial paper trail would make her advice as White House counsel all the more important for the Senate to know. Bush figured that conservatives would do what they have so often done before: roll over, back him up, resist requests for documents and help him force Miers through. Bad call.

Bush and the conservatives would now like to pretend that none of this happened. The idea on the right is that Bush should nominate a staunch conservative with an ample judicial record and pick a big fight with Democrats that would unite the conservative movement. It's hard to escape the idea that with special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald breathing down the administration's neck, the president decided he could not afford any further fractures in his own political coalition. So he threw Miers over the side.

This has been a powerfully instructive moment. The willingness of conservatives to abandon what they had once held up as high and unbending principles reveals that this battle over the Supreme Court is, for them, a simple struggle for power. It is thus an unfortunate reminder of the highly unprincipled Supreme Court decision in 2000 that helped put Bush in the White House. Conservatives who had long insisted on deference to states' rights put those commitments aside when doing so would advance the political fortunes of one of their own.

Miers will recover from all this in a way Bush and the conservatives will not. She has suffered collateral damage caused by a president who did not understand the degree to which his power has eroded and did not grasp the nature of the movement that elected him. And conservatives will come to regret making their willingness to contradict their own principles plain for all to see.

postchat@aol.com

© 2005 The Washington Post Company
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Thought Stacey could use this for her class (if needed)

2005-10-28T11:53:00.000-04:00

Evolution Debate in Kansas Spurs Battle Over School MaterialsTeaching of Theory's Doubts Spurs National Academy of Sciences, Teachers Association to Bar Use of Curriculum Guidelines

By Rick WeissWashington Post Staff WriterFriday, October 28, 2005; A02

In an escalation of the nation's culture war over the teaching of evolution, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Science Teachers Association announced yesterday that they will not allow Kansas to use key science education materials developed by the two organizations.

The refusal came after the groups reviewed the latest draft of the Kansas State Department of Education's new science education standards and concluded that they overemphasize uncertainties about the theory of evolution and fail to make it clear that supernatural phenomena have no place in science.

Until those issues are properly dealt with, the two groups said in a letter to state Assistant Education Commissioner Alexa Posny, the state will not be granted permission to use their science curriculum materials.

Those include the National Science Education Standards, which serve as the foundation for science curricula in virtually every state in the nation and which were written by the academy's affiliate, the National Research Council. They also include the science teachers' Pathway to the Science Standards, which help translate the NRC's guidelines for everyday use. Both are protected by copyrights.

The new draft of the Kansas education standards, written by a committee appointed by the former state education commissioner and subject to an up-or-down vote by the state education department early next month, "inappropriately singles out evolution as a controversial theory despite the strength of the scientific evidence supporting evolution as an explanation for the diversity of life on Earth and its acceptance by an overwhelming majority of scientists," the science groups said in a joint statement.

The organizations said they were also disappointed that a crucial statement present in an earlier draft had been deleted. It had defined science as "a search for natural explanations of observable phenomena." The deletion could lead students to believe that supernatural explanations also may fall within the purview of science, said Jay Labov, a senior adviser for education at the academy, which was chartered by Congress to advise it on science matters.

Kathy Toelkes, a spokeswoman for the Kansas education department, said the department was reviewing the draft standards, but not with the goal of changing the contested sections. Rather, she said, the goal is to paraphrase those parts that had been taken from the two national organizations, so that the copyright issues would become moot.

Toelkes said she anticipated that the board would approve "the substance of the standards" as written.

The standoff is a reprise of events in 1999 when the National Academy, the science teachers group, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science withheld copyright permission for materials that Kansas sought to incorporate into science education standards it developed that year. At the time the board had a majority who espoused creationism or intelligent design, beliefs that hold, respectively, that the Earth is only a few thousand years old and that complex life could not have arisen without help from a superintelligent being.

Scientific evidence indicates that the Earth is more than 4 billion years old and that evolution can explain all of life's biological complexities.

The Kansas standards were revised to accommodate scientists' complaints after anti-evolutionists lost their majority on the state board in 2000, but the balance of power recently reversed again. When a subcommittee of the board held hearings in May to debate evolution, scientific organizations boycotted the event, saying science would not get a fair hearing.

John G. West of the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, the major force behind the intelligent design movement, decried the science organizations' latest moves.

"This is clearly an effort to censor the discussion of scientific criticism of Darwinian theory by intimidation and threat," West said.

Gerald F. Wheeler, a nuclear physicist and executive director of the Arlington-based science teachers association, which represents 55,000 science teachers and others, disagreed.

"Science is not a dance card or jukebox where you can choose the songs you want," Wheeler said. "It's about what is the best explanation for the observations and the data we have. It's about the facts."

© 2005 The Washington Post Company
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State of the Disunion

2005-10-28T09:57:00.000-04:00

A Weakened President Faces New Risks

By Dan Balz and Juliet EilperinWashington Post Staff WritersFriday, October 28, 2005; A01

President Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers on Oct. 3 was made from a position of weakness by a White House beset by political problems and eager to avoid a fight over the Supreme Court. Twenty-four excruciating days later, the supposed safe choice crashed, exposing the president as even weaker than before.

Bush now has an opportunity to recover from one of the biggest political miscalculations of his term, the failure to anticipate the backlash Miers would cause with his own conservative base. But in repairing that breach, he risks a new confrontation with Democrats and further estrangement from the political center -- precisely the situation he hoped to avoid when he tapped his loyal and unassuming personal lawyer in the first place.

Few Republicans in Washington saw the timing of Miers's withdrawal as coincidental. With potential indictments of senior White House officials looming in the CIA leak case, the president could ill afford a sustained and increasingly raw rupture within the GOP coalition.

The Miers nomination was more than a humiliation for Bush, however. It was an episode that seemed wholly out of character with the president's style. No Republican president -- not even Ronald Reagan -- has catered to the right more methodically than Bush. But on a matter of first-order significance to many conservatives, the president let personal loyalty override what had been a central tenet of his political strategy.

Across Washington yesterday, there were all manner of explanations being offered: that special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald's leak investigation had distracted top advisers such as White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove; that growing insularity within the president's inner circle had skewed his judgment; that Bush had grown cocksure, blithely assuming conservatives would respect the choice because it came from him.

The uproar over Miers was distinctive in another way: The loudest opposition came from conservative intellectuals, not grass-roots activists. Bush's team managed at first to keep cultural and religious conservatives divided over Miers with aggressive lobbying of leading figures such as Focus on the Family's James C. Dobson, who endorsed Miers immediately. But they could not withstand the battering that came from opinion-shapers such as columnists George Will and Charles Krauthammer, Weekly Standard Editor William Kristol and former White House speechwriter David Frum. By the end, even Dobson announced he probably would have reversed course and opposed her.

Nor in the end could Bush stand up to the barrage of criticism coming from Capitol Hill, where the nominee's meetings with senators stirred unease about her prospects of surviving the grilling that was coming in confirmation hearings. Rarely has a nominee faced the kind of criticism that Miers heard from Republican leaders such as Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (Pa.).

This convergence of special factors in the Miers situation makes its long-term impact hard to predict. A number of Republicans said yesterday that, assuming Bush selects a new nominee widely judged to be well qualified, the damage may dissipate quickly. Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) described Miers's withdrawal as "a speed bump" that will have no lasting significance. Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, said, "The sense was of disappointment, not of betrayal."

John J. Pitney Jr., a professor at Claremont McKenna College in California, said: "I think the base is eager to renew its alliance with Bush. Who else do they have? If they remain estranged from Bush, the advantage goes to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, and that prospect will bring them very rapidly back into Bush's camp." Pelosi, of California, is the Democratic leader of the House; Reid, of Nevada, is the party's Senate leader.

Others said Bush's decision to accept Miers's withdrawal before Fitzgerald announces his decision could prove to be an essential step in rallying his supporters for what may be even more turbulent times.

"It was the wisest course of action, both for himself and for Ms. Miers," said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster and strategist. "This opens the door for the president to turn around a run of bad luck and bad stories. Obviously, the special prosecutor will have something to say on that score, but a step in the right direction is a step in the right direction."

But the withdrawal of the Miers nomination may subtly alter the relationship between the president and conservatives, who have now prevailed over GOP leaders in two significant instances in the past two months. Conservatives beat Bush over the Miers nomination and House conservatives defeated their leadership over how much to cut spending to pay for the cleanup costs of Hurricane Katrina.

Some of those in the forefront of stopping Miers said yesterday Bush could see more resistance to his decisions. "There will be less deference to his [Bush's] judgment" in the future, Kristol said, adding that "there will be full support for Bush when he's conservative."

The next test will be Bush's selection of another Supreme Court nominee. If he selects someone to the right's liking, what happened the past few weeks may be judged as little more than a family quarrel.

What isn't clear is just what the right will demand in another nominee -- whether activists will tolerate someone with good qualifications and generally conservative instincts, or will insist on someone who has been with them in the trenches of the conservative legal movement. The latter would rally the right but also guarantee a fight with the Democrats. "His first priority is to get the base behind him, even if that produces a nominee that is really fought over in the Senate and possibly defeated," said Earl Black, a political scientist at Rice University.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) noted that, having endured a barrage of criticism about the war in Iraq, rising gasoline prices and the government's handling of Hurricane Katrina, Bush has bowed to his traditional allies by scuttling Miers's candidacy. But he challenged Bush not to move too far right in picking a new nominee. "He can yield to the political exigency of the time because he's embattled, or do the right thing for the country, the Senate, and most of all, the Supreme Court."

Matthew Dowd, chief strategist in Bush's 2004 reelection campaign, said the fact that much of the opposition to Miers came from Washington elites, not from conservatives around the country, meant Bush may be able to satisfy the bulk of his base without inflaming the Democrats.

"I think conservatives generally know that after watching Bush for five years that he's conservative," he said. "I don't think that's a problem. I don't think it means necessarily there has to be a fight picked with Democrats."

That strategy worked with the nomination this summer of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., but it failed badly with Miers. Now with the special prosecutor circling and conservative expectations rising, Bush's margin of error may be smaller than ever. The embattled president will need a fully energized base to survive potentially difficult days ahead and he now must decide just how far he has to go to restore harmony within the family.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company
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The suspense is killing me...

2005-10-26T12:56:00.000-04:00

Bush Aides Brace for ChargesGrand Jury May Hear Counts in Leak Case Today

By Jim VandeHei and Carol D. LeonnigWashington Post Staff WritersWednesday, October 26, 2005; A01

The prosecutor in the CIA leak case was preparing to outline possible charges before the federal grand jury as early as today, even as the FBI conducted last-minute interviews in the high-profile investigation, according to people familiar with the case.

With Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald in Washington yesterday, lawyers in the case and some White House officials braced for at least one indictment when the grand jury meets today. I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, is said by several people in the case to be a main focus, but not the only one.

In a possible sign that Fitzgerald may seek to charge one or more officials with illegally disclosing Valerie Plame's CIA affiliation, FBI agents as recently as Monday night interviewed at least two people in her D.C. neighborhood. The agents were attempting to determine whether the neighbors knew that Plame worked for the CIA before she was unmasked with the help of senior Bush administration officials. Two neighbors said they told the FBI they had been surprised to learn she was a CIA operative.

The FBI interviews suggested the prosecutor wanted to show that Plame's status was covert, and that there was damage from the revelation that she worked at the CIA.

Underscoring the uncertainty surrounding the probe, two Republican officials said Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove, the president's top strategist, is not sure whether he will face indictment as the case winds down. Rove was said to be awaiting word from Fitzgerald, even as prosecutors questioned at least one former Rove associate about Rove's contacts with reporters before Plame's name was disclosed. The White House expects indictments to come today, according to a senior administration official.

The news of the eleventh-hour moves came on the same day that Cheney himself was implicated in the chain of events that led to Plame's being exposed. In a report in the New York Times that the White House pointedly did not dispute, Fitzgerald was said to have notes taken by Libby showing that he learned about Plame from the vice president a month before she was identified by columnist Robert D. Novak.
There is no indication Cheney did anything illegal or improper, but the report was the first to indicate that he was aware of Plame well before she became a household name.

Fitzgerald's investigation has centered on whether senior administration officials knowingly revealed Plame's identity in an effort to discredit a critic of the Bush administration -- her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. On July 6, 2003, Wilson accused the administration in The Washington Post and the Times of using flawed intelligence to justify the war with Iraq. Eight days later, Novak revealed Plame's name and her identity as a CIA operative.

The grand jury, whose term expires Friday, is scheduled for a session today. Before a vote on an indictment, prosecutors typically leave the room so jurors can deliberate in private, and ask that the jury alert them when it has reached a decision.

Unlike the jury in a criminal trial, grand jurors are not weighing proof of guilt or innocence. They must decide whether there is probable cause to charge someone with a crime, and they must agree unanimously to indict. The prosecutor could seek to seal any indictments until he announces the charges.

Officials described a White House on edge. "Everybody just wants this week over," said one official.

The key figures in the probe, including Rove and Libby, yesterday attended staff meetings and planned President Bush's next political and policy moves. Others sat nervously at their desks, fielding calls from reporters and insisting they were in the dark about what the next 24 hours would bring.

. But officials are bracing for the kind of political tsunami that swamped Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan in their second terms and could change this presidency's course.

It is not clear what charges Fitzgerald will seek, if any. After setting out on his original investigation, he won the explicit authority to also consider perjury and other crimes government officials might have committed during the nearly two-year-long probe.

Fitzgerald has looked closely not only at the possible crimes, but also the context in which they would have been committed.
This search, say lawyers in the case, has provided him a rare, glimpse into the White House effort to justify the Iraq war and rebut its critics.

The trail has often led to Cheney's office, which officials describe as ground zero in the effort to promote, execute and defend the Iraq war and the campaign to convince Americans and the world that Saddam Hussein had amassed a stockpile of the most dangerous kinds of weapons. According to the report in yesterday's Times, the investigation also led to Cheney himself.

Cheney has the security clearance to review and discuss classified material, and no information has been made public to suggest he did anything illegal. But this is the first time the vice president has been directly linked to the chain of events that eventually led to Plame's identity being disclosed.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Cheney has always been honest with the American people.

In September 2003, Cheney told NBC's Tim Russert he did not know Wilson or who sent him on the trip to Africa.
Republicans close to the White House said Cheney was careful to distance himself from Wilson in the interview without lying about what he knew about the diplomat and his wife.

Two lawyers involved in the case said that, based on Fitzgerald's earlier questions, the prosecutor has been aware of Libby's June 12 conversation with Cheney since the early days of his investigation. The lawyers said Libby recorded in his notes that Cheney relayed to him that Wilson's wife may have had a role in Wilson taking the CIA-sponsored mission to Niger. According to a source familiar with Libby's testimony, Libby told the grand jury he believed he heard of Wilson's wife first from reporters.

The Times reported that Libby said Cheney learned information about Plame from former CIA director George J. Tenet.

Tenet said yesterday he has not discussed Fitzgerald's investigation in the past and does not want to talk about it now before the prosecutor reaches his conclusions.

In a sign that Fitzgerald continues to gather evidence, FBI agents interviewed at least two of Wilson's neighbors in the Palisades section of Northwest Washington on Monday night.

In interviews yesterday, Marc Lefkowitz and David Tillotson said they told two FBI agents they had no clue that Plame, whom they knew by her married name, Valerie Wilson, worked for the agency until Novak's column appeared.

"They wanted to know how well we knew her, which is very well," Tillotson said. "Did we know anything about her position before the story broke? Absolutely not."

Staff writer Paul Schwartzman contributed to this report.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company
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The following story should be listed as the definition for politician in the dictionary

2005-10-21T12:41:00.000-04:00

For a Senate Foe of Pork Barrel Spending, Two Bridges Too Far

By Shailagh MurrayWashington Post Staff WriterFriday, October 21, 2005; A08

Republicans in Congress say they are serious about cutting spending, but they learned yesterday to keep their hands off the "Bridge to Nowhere."

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), a staunch opponent of pork barrel spending, tried to block $453 million for two Alaska bridges that had been tucked into the recent highway bill. Coburn wanted to redirect the money to the Interstate 10 bridge across Lake Pontchartrain, a major thoroughfare that was severely damaged during Hurricane Katrina.

Sen. Ted Stevens, the veteran Alaska Republican, was dramatic in his response. "I don't kid people," Stevens roared. "If the Senate decides to discriminate against our state . . . I will resign from this body."

Coburn's measure, offered as an amendment to the 2006 transportation appropriations bill, failed 82 to 15. The Senate also narrowly defeated spending an additional $3.1 billion on emergency heating-bill assistance for low-income people, a major priority for many Democrats, who said they would try to attach the increase to other bills this fall.
Although the Coburn amendment lost, it struck a chord among lawmakers as they face increasing belt-tightening pressure.
Katrina and the war in Iraq have created billions in unexpected expenses, and Republicans as well Democrats would like to trim other programs to offset the cost. But yesterday's debate showed even an obscure budget item has its patrons.

One of the Alaska bridges, dubbed the "Bridge to Nowhere" by its critics, would connect one small town to a tiny island. It received $223 million in the highway bill that Congress passed this summer. The second bridge, named "Don Young's Way" in honor of its patron, House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Don Young (R-Alaska), received about $230 million -- but that is just a down payment on a cost that could hit $1.5 billion.

Coburn had wanted to shift all the money to the I-10 rebuilding project, which is expected to cost $500 million to $600 million. Because of restrictions in the way highway dollars are distributed, Coburn's amendment would have redirected $75 million to the Pontchartrain bridge while unfunding the two Alaska bridges.

"I believe that we should spend taxpayer dollars where they are most needed," Coburn wrote fellow senators asking for support.

The amendment became a cause celebre on the left and the right, with watchdog and conservative groups reporting updates on their Web sites throughout the day. The Club for Growth alerted readers early yesterday on its Web log, or blog: "As of last night, the opposition is putting up a big fight. They sense this amendment, if successful, as establishing a precedent. A precedent where all pork is vulnerable and no lawmaker is safe."

Later in the day, the Heritage Foundation circulated a paper, "The Bridge to Nowhere: A National Embarrassment," and noted, "fiscally responsible members of Congress should be eager to zero out its funding." Even the Sierra Club backed the amendment, noting, "We must fix the nation's existing infrastructure first."

And, there is a curious twist to the story: Many residents of Alaska appear to support forfeiting the bridge money for hurricane relief. "This money, a gift from the people of Alaska, will represent more than just material aid; it will be a symbol for our beleaguered democracy," reads a typical letter to the Anchorage Daily News.

Young, who made sure his state was one of the top recipients in the highway bill, was asked by an Alaska reporter what he made of the public support for redirecting the bridge money. "They can kiss my ear! That is the dumbest thing I've ever heard," he replied.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company
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Just a heart warming story

2005-10-20T15:13:00.000-04:00

Colonel Finally Saw Whites of Their Eyes

By Dana MilbankThursday, October 20, 2005; A04

As Colin Powell's right-hand man at the State Department, Larry Wilkerson seethed quietly during President Bush's first term. Yesterday, Colonel Wilkerson made up for lost time.
He said the vice president and the secretary of defense created a "Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal" that hijacked U.S. foreign policy.

He said of former defense undersecretary Douglas Feith: "Seldom in my life have I met a dumber man." Addressing scholars, journalists and others at the New America Foundation, Wilkerson accused Bush of "cowboyism" and said he had viewed Condoleezza Rice as "extremely weak." Of American diplomacy, he fretted, "I'm not sure the State Department even exists anymore."

And how about Karen Hughes's efforts to boost the country's image abroad? "It's hard to sell [manure]," Wilkerson said, quoting an Egyptian friend.

The man who was chief of staff at the State Department until early this year continued: "If you're unilaterally declaring Kyoto dead, if you're declaring the Geneva Conventions not operative, if you're doing a host of things that the world doesn't agree with you on and you're doing it blatantly and in their face, without grace, then you've got to pay the consequences."

With Bush's approval ratings dropping below 40 percent, the administration's vaunted loyalty and party discipline are suffering. David Frum, a former White House speechwriter, is campaigning against confirmation of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. Bruce Bartlett, who worked for the president's father, was fired by his think tank this week because he is publishing a book titled "Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy."

And, on Capitol Hill yesterday, Republicans joined in criticizing the administration about Iraq. When Rice said at a hearing that "we have made significant progress" in Iraq, Sen. Lincoln D. Chafee (R.I.) replied: "Well, we all wish that were true, but we can't kid ourselves, either."

Wilkerson adds a new dimension to the criticism. A 31-year military veteran and former director of the Marine Corps War College, he worked for Powell in the public and private sectors for much of the past 16 years, and he was often described by colleagues as the man who would say what Powell was thinking but was too discreet to say.

Wilkerson's beef with the administration was, for the most part, not ideological. He argues that U.S. forces must remain in Iraq, and he describes George H.W. Bush as "one of the finest presidents we've ever had."

Rather, the colonel objected to the administration's secrecy, which allowed Cheney, Rumsfeld and others to subvert the foreign policy apparatus that has been in place since 1947.

"What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld," he said. By cutting out the bureaucracy that had to carry out those decisions, "we have courted disaster in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran, and generally with regard to domestic crises like Katrina." If there is a nuclear terrorist attack or a major pandemic, Wilkerson continued, "you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that'll take you back to the Declaration of Independence."
Wilkerson, part military man and part academic, said "hell" a lot but also used words such as "desultory" and "titular."

Peering from large wire-rimmed glasses, armed with a flag lapel pin, he spoke with barely restrained anger. He had given critical quotes about the administration before, but yesterday's New America Foundation speech was his coming out as an administration critic.

He had barbs for lawmakers ("truly abandoned their oversight responsibilities") and said past presidents had also circumvented the national security structure. But, he said, "the case that I saw for four-plus years was a case I have never seen in my studies of aberrations, bastardizations, perturbations, changes to the national security decision-making process."

Wilkerson blamed Bush, "not versed in international relations and not too much interested," for letting the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal to take over. He blamed Rice for dropping her role as honest broker to "build her intimacy with the president." And he blamed whoever gave Feith "carte blanche to tell the State Department to go screw itself."

The cabal's end run around the bureaucracy, he argued, stalled nuclear diplomacy with North Korea and Iran. He said top officials "condoned" prisoner abuse and left the Army "truly in bad shape."

"You and I and every other citizen like us is paying the consequences," he said, "whether it was a response to Katrina that was less than adequate certainly, or the situation in Iraq which still goes unexplained."

The colonel said his old boss is not pleased with his decision to go public with his criticism. Powell, he said, "is the world's most loyal soldier." Wilkerson said he admired that, but he took a different view of loyalty: not to the administration, but to the country.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company
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It is reaching the point where I cannot post all the articles relating to crooked Repubs...

2005-10-18T12:56:00.000-04:00

Lawmaker's Abramoff Ties InvestigatedOhio's Ney Has Disavowed Lobbyist

By James V. Grimaldi and Susan SchmidtWashington Post Staff WritersTuesday, October 18, 2005; A01

As federal officials pursue a wide-ranging investigation into the activities of Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff, his arrest on fraud charges in the purchase of a Florida casino boat company has increasingly focused attention on a little-known congressman from rural Ohio.

Rep. Robert W. Ney (R-Ohio) placed comments in the Congressional Record favorable to Abramoff's 2000 purchase of the casino boat company, SunCruz Casinos. Two years later, Ney sponsored legislation to reopen a casino for a Texas Indian tribe that Abramoff represented.

Ney approved a 2002 license for an Israeli telecommunications company to install antennas for the House. The company later paid Abramoff $280,000 for lobbying. It also donated $50,000 to a charity that Abramoff sometimes used to secretly pay for some of his lobbying activities.

Meanwhile, Ney accepted many favors from Abramoff, among them campaign contributions, dinners at the lobbyist's downtown restaurant, skybox fundraisers, including one at his MCI Center box, and a golfing trip to Scotland in August 2002. If statements made by Abramoff to tribal officials and in an e-mail are to be believed, Ney sought the Scotland trip after he agreed to help Abramoff's Texas Indian clients. Abramoff then arranged for his charity to pay for the trip, according to documents released by a Senate committee investigating the lobbyist.

Ney is under investigation by Florida federal prosecutors looking into Abramoff's acquisition of SunCruz, according to sources familiar with the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Abramoff and his business partner Adam Kidan were indicted in August on fraud charges related to the purchase.

Ney declined to be interviewed. He has said his actions benefiting Abramoff had nothing to do with the favors he received. He said he was misled by Abramoff and his associates.

"I am absolutely outraged by the dishonest and duplicitous words and actions of Jack Abramoff," Ney said last year when Abramoff's statements about Ney first came up in e-mails released by the Senate Indian Affairs Committee. "As the testimony at both committee hearings has revealed, Jack Abramoff repeatedly lied to advance his own financial interests."

Abramoff, whose attorneys declined to comment for this article, has publicly denied that he misled Ney.

This spring, Ney hired a prominent Washington criminal defense lawyer, Mark Tuohey, to handle inquiries from the Justice Department and congressional investigators pursuing the widening scandal. Tuohey has not returned phone calls in recent weeks to discuss his client.Comments for SunCruz
A six-term congressman from rural eastern Ohio, Ney, 51, does not have a national profile. A former teacher and public safety director for his home town of Bellaire, Ney was an Ohio legislator in 1994 when he defeated the Democratic incumbent in the congressional district once represented by Wayne Hays (D).

But to members of Congress, Ney is known as the mayor of Capitol Hill. Ney is Administration Committee chairman, a powerful position that doles out budgets, equipment, offices and parking spaces to House members. These perks are used by House Republican leaders to keep their rank and file in line.

Ney became chairman of the committee thanks to his political patron, Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), who recently stepped down as House majority leader after he was indicted on a charge of conspiracy to violate a Texas campaign law. Shortly after Ney arrived in the House in 1994, he became a part of DeLay's Retain Our Majority Program (ROMP), a fundraising effort in which GOP colleagues donated to Republicans such as Ney in districts without a safe majority. After lines were redrawn to make Ney's district more Republican, he returned the favor, donating to other vulnerable House Republicans. That helped him earn his chairmanship in 2001, leapfrogging over a colleague with more seniority.

Ney and Abramoff, whom DeLay once described as "one of my closest and dearest friends," crossed paths as early as 1996.
That year Ney took a trip to Montenegro sponsored by a foundation that had links to Abramoff, who was a lobbyist for Montenegro.

A few years later, Ney paid unusual attention to another Abramoff client, the Florida gambling boat company SunCruz, which was headquartered more than 1,000 miles outside of Ney's congressional district. Abramoff and his business partner were trying to buy the cruise ship fleet from Konstantinos "Gus" Boulis, but Boulis was demanding unwelcome additional terms.

In March 2000, Ney used the Congressional Record to assail Boulis.

"On the Ohio River we have gaming interests that run clean operations and provide quality entertainment," Ney wrote. "I don't want to see the actions of one bad apple in Florida, or anywhere else to affect the business aspect of this industry or hurt any innocent casino patron in our country."

Ney's remarks were orchestrated by Michael Scanlon, a former DeLay spokesman who had just been hired to work for Abramoff at Preston Gates & Ellis LLP. Scanlon had approached Ney through his chief of staff, Neil Volz, according to sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Volz has repeatedly declined to be interviewed.

A few months later, Boulis agreed in principle to sell SunCruz to Abramoff and Kidan for $147.5 million. The deal closed in the fall. But Abramoff and Kidan failed to make good on a $23 million payment owed to Boulis, court records show.

When Boulis was being difficult in the negotiations, Ney again made an official statement, this time heaping praise on Kidan.

"Since my previous statement, I have come to learn that SunCruz Casino now finds itself under new ownership and, more importantly, that its new owner has a renowned reputation for honesty and integrity," Ney said in the Congressional Record on Oct. 26, 2000. "The new owner, Mr. Adam Kidan, is most well known for his successful enterprise, Dial-a-Mattress, but he is also well known as a solid individual and a respected member of his community.

"While Mr. Kidan certainly has his hands full in his efforts to clean up SunCruz's reputation, his track record as a businessman and as a citizen lead me to believe that he will easily transform SunCruz from a questionable enterprise to an upstanding establishment that the gaming community can be proud of."

But Kidan's "track record" included a string of lawsuits, judgments, liens, bankruptcies and failed businesses. His Dial-a-Mattress franchise in the District was in bankruptcy. He had filed personal bankruptcy, and he had surrendered his law license in New York after being accused of fraud. One of his mentors, Anthony Moscatiello, was alleged by law enforcement to be an accountant for New York's Gambino crime family.
Ney later said he did not know about Kidan's background.

Four months after Ney's remarks in the Congressional Record, Boulis was murdered in Fort Lauderdale. Police did not make any arrests in the case until September, when they charged four men in the slaying, including Moscatiello and a business associate of Moscatiello's whom Kidan had paid $250,000 as catering consultants.

Five weeks after the Boulis killing, SunCruz officials, including Kidan, threw a $1,000-a-head fundraiser for Ney at Abramoff's skybox at the MCI Center, according to Abramoff's fundraising log.

Language for Tiguas

In early 2002, Volz left his post as Ney's chief of staff to join Abramoff's lobbying team. Soon after, in March 2002, Ney agreed to sponsor legislation that would benefit the Tigua tribe of El Paso, an Abramoff and Scanlon client. They wanted Ney's help to reopen the Tiguas's casino, which the state of Texas had shut down.

"Just met with Ney!!! We're f'ing gold!!!! He's going to do Tigua," Abramoff told Scanlon in a March 20, 2002, e-mail.

Six days later, Abramoff directed tribal officials to make three contributions totaling $32,000 to Ney's campaign and political action committees. A Ney spokesman recently said that money has been donated to Ohio charities.

On June 7, 2002, Abramoff wrote in an e-mail to Tigua consultant Marc Schwartz that "our friend" had "asked if we could help (as in cover) a Scotland golf trip for him and some staff."

The e-mail does not name "our friend," but Schwartz testified in the Senate last fall that it was Ney.

Abramoff wrote that "the trip will be quite expensive (we did this for another member -- you know who) 2 years ago." He was referring to an earlier Scotland golf trip that Abramoff had arranged in 2000 for DeLay. Abramoff suggested to Schwartz that the tribe send $50,000 to a charity he directed, the Capital Athletic Foundation, which would pay for the trip "as an educational mission."

Ney later stated on disclosure forms filed with the House that the August 2002 trip cost $3,200 and was paid for by the National Center for Public Policy Research, a conservative advocacy group on whose board Abramoff served. The Washington Post reported last year that the trip was actually paid for by the Capital Athletic Foundation, which reported in tax records that it spent $150,225 on the trip.

Ney has said he was misled by Abramoff about who paid for the trip.

"In April, 2002, I was approached by Mr. Abramoff, who I believed to be a respected member of the community, and asked to go on a trip to Scotland which Mr. Abramoff said would help support a charitable organization, that he founded, through meetings he organized with Scottish Parliament officials," Ney said in a statement last November.

Ney's report to Congress listed as a purpose of the trip: "speech to Scottish Parliamentarians." However, there is no record of Ney's speech in the Scottish Parliament's register of official visits kept by the external liaison office, which is available on the Web. In addition, at the time of Ney's trip, the Scottish Parliament was out for its August recess, spokeswoman Sally Coyne said.

Ney is not the first public official who has come under scrutiny by investigators for the Scotland trip. David Safavian, then chief of staff at the General Services Administration, also went on the trip with Ney, Abramoff and former Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed Jr. Safavian, who went on to become the chief White House procurement officer, was indicted this month on charges that he lied to investigators looking into the Scotland trip when he said that Abramoff had no business before the his agency.

The trip, Ney said in his statement last year, had nothing to do with legislation for the tribe.

"I want to be absolutely clear that at no point, ever, was I made even remotely aware that any Indian tribe played any role in this trip," Ney said in his statement.

Ney said he supported the Tigua legislation at Abramoff's request after the lobbyist told him the provision was supported by Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), who was sponsoring the election reform bill that would carry the Tigua provision.
"I then [in July 2002] personally asked Senator Dodd about this provision and he expressed no knowledge of it," Ney said.

"In short, I had been misled by Jack Abramoff. I then asked Jack Abramoff why Senator Dodd was apparently not supporting it and Mr. Abramoff told me that someone had lied to him. The matter was then closed from my perspective."
However, the Tiguas say no one told them the matter was closed. Tigua consultant Schwartz later testified to the Senate Indian Affairs Committee that Ney remained a strong supporter of the Tigua legislation and Abramoff long after his conversation with Dodd.

Schwartz said that in August 2002 -- a month after Ney's reported conversation with Dodd and around the time of the Scotland trip -- Abramoff arranged for Ney to meet with Tigua representatives in his office. Before the meeting, "in an e-mail to me, Abramoff mentioned that Congressman Ney didn't want his trip to Scotland brought up, as he would show his appreciation to the Tribe later," Schwartz testified.

The meeting lasted more than 90 minutes, two tribal members testified at the Senate hearing. The tribal leaders who attended the meeting were pleased and impressed with the outcome, Schwartz said.

"During that meeting, Congressman Ney was very animated about Mr. Abramoff's skill and repute as a leader in the lobbying circles," Schwartz testified. "We were told about the impending success of Mr. Abramoff's legislative plan and how much Congressman Ney wanted to help to restore the Tribe's ability to conduct gaming on their reservation."

Two months later, on Oct. 8, after the election bill came out of a House-Senate conference committee without a Tigua provision, Ney held a conference call with tribal officials and told them of his "disbelief that Dodd had gone back on his word" to support the provision, Schwartz testified. Ney also expressed his continued support for the Tiguas, tribal officials said.

Ney responded to Schwartz's testimony by saying, "I, like these Indian tribes and other members of Congress, was duped by Jack Abramoff."

Ney later said he was very angry at Abramoff and Scanlon, who he said had misled him about Dodd. Ney has called Abramoff and Scanlon's activities in the Tigua episode "nefarious."

Abramoff shot back by referring to the conference call when he spoke to the New York Times Magazine this spring. "It's crazy" for Ney to say he was duped, Abramoff said. "He was on the phone for an hour and a half!"Contract for Foxcom
In the late 1990s, members of Congress became increasingly frustrated at the lack of cell phone coverage inside the Capitol and its nearby office buildings.

The House decided to let the major wireless companies select -- and pay for -- a company to install antennas for cellular phones. In 1999, AT&T Wireless had asked LGC Wireless of San Jose to work with the House bureaucracy to put the antennas and repeaters into House buildings. The project was one of the largest of its kind, worth more than $3 million.
At the time, LGC was the world's leading provider of such equipment and had wired the headquarters of most cellular phone companies, including Nextel and AT&T. During the next year, LGC worked with the architect of the Capitol and the House Information Resources office to develop a plan.

Then Foxcom Wireless, an Israeli start-up telecommunications firm, entered the picture. Foxcom, which has since moved headquarters from Jerusalem to Vienna, Va., and been renamed MobileAccess Networks, lobbied for the job.

In early 2001, Ney took charge of the House Administration Committee, which was ultimately responsible for the antenna job. Sometime that year, exactly when is unclear, Foxcom donated $50,000 to the Capitol Athletic Foundation, Abramoff's charity. Foxcom officials have declined to be interviewed about the donation or the wireless project. A spokesman for Foxcom, now MobileAccess, referred all questions Monday to Ney's committee.

Also that same year, a decision was delayed on the antennas, which caught House staff by surprise.

"We were really surprised, given all the work we put in with LGC in designing the system," said Henry F. "Bud" Collins Jr., the senior network systems engineer for the House. "Then, all of a sudden this other company showed up. We had to go through this whole thing again."

LGC Chief Operating Officer Alex Gray wrote to Ney to complain about the "highly politicized selection process" that favored the Israeli company despite the House's "Buy American" posture. "Only Foxcom was permitted a full and fair hearing on the merits of its proposal -- essentially a 'back room' deal based on political expediency alone," Gray wrote.
Assistant House Counsel Carolyn Betz, replying on behalf of Ney, said in a letter to LGC that in the fall of 2001 the major wireless companies were receiving ballots to vote on who should get the contract.

In a letter to Betz, LGC president and chief executive Ian Sugarbroad called the election process "deeply flawed and unfair." He said each wireless company was sent a ballot and allowed to vote for LGC, Foxcom or "no preference." There were no details on the bid proposals, such as cost, security features, band capacity or critical performance metrics, Sugarbroad said.

Brian Walsh, Ney's spokesman, provided The Post redacted copies of the ballots. Three show checkmarks in a box next to Foxcom. The other three ballots are marked "no preference."
But representatives of all six companies said they voted no preference, according to interviews and documents. Five of them were interviewed by The Post, and the sixth made its preference known in a letter obtained by The Post.

Spokesmen for the companies -- Cingular, Nextel, Sprint, Verizon Wireless, AT&T Wireless and Voicestream -- said they remained neutral because both LGC and Foxcom were considered capable of doing the job.

Walsh said those statements are "an absolute contradiction to the documentation."

Ney awarded the license to Foxcom on Nov. 26, 2002, Walsh said. He declined to make public a copy of documents relating to the agreement, noting that the Freedom of Information Act does not apply to Congress. He noted that the work was paid for by the wireless companies and not by Congress, and he pointed out that the Senate also chose Foxcom.

LGC had no right to appeal. "This is not a traditional House procurement and, thus, House procurement policies do not apply," Betz stated in her letter to LGC.

Collins, the House engineer who has since retired, said, "It almost seemed like the cards were stacked for them."

After the contract was awarded, Foxcom listed Abramoff as its lobbyist. Over the next two years, Foxcom paid Abramoff's team $280,000.

Researcher Alice Crites and database editor Derek Willis contributed to this report.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

Scum.............plain and simple

2005-10-18T09:06:00.000-04:00

Pay particular attention to the number of religious right organizations tied to this:

How a Lobbyist Stacked the DeckAbramoff Used DeLay Aide, Attacks On Allies to Defeat Anti-Gambling Bill

By Susan Schmidt and James V. GrimaldiWashington Post Staff WritersSunday, October 16, 2005; A01

Lobbyist Jack Abramoff and his team were beginning to panic.
An anti-gambling bill had cleared the Senate and appeared on its way to passage by an overwhelming margin in the House of Representatives. If that happened, Abramoff's client, a company that wanted to sell state lottery tickets online, would be out of business.

But on July 17, 2000, the Internet Gambling Prohibition Act went down to defeat, to the astonishment of supporters who included many anti-gambling groups and Christian conservatives.

A senior aide to then-Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) helped scuttle the bill in the House. The aide, Tony C. Rudy, 39, e-mailed Abramoff internal congressional communications and advice, according to documents and the lobbyist's former associates.

Rudy received favors from Abramoff. He went on two luxury trips with the lobbyist that summer, including one partly paid for by Abramoff's client, eLottery Inc. Abramoff also arranged for eLottery to pay $25,000 to a Jewish foundation that hired Rudy's wife as a consultant, according to documents and interviews. Months later, Rudy himself was hired as a lobbyist by Abramoff.

The vote that day in July was just one part of an extraordinary yearlong effort by Abramoff on behalf of eLottery, a small gambling services company based in Connecticut. Details of that campaign, reconstructed from dozens of interviews as well as from e-mails and financial records obtained by The Washington Post, provide the most complete account yet of how one of Washington's most powerful lobbyists leveraged his client's money to influence Congress.

The work Abramoff did for eLottery is one focus of a wide-ranging federal corruption investigation into his dealings with members of Congress and government agencies. Abramoff is under indictment in another case in connection with an allegedly fraudulent Florida business deal.

Abramoff had deep roots in the conservative movement and rose to prominence by helping Republicans tap traditionally Democratic K Street lobbyists for campaign dollars. But in the eLottery fight, he employed a win-at-any-cost strategy that went so far as to launch direct-mail attacks on vulnerable House conservatives.
Abramoff quietly arranged for eLottery to pay conservative, anti-gambling activists to help in the firm's $2 million pro-gambling campaign, including Ralph Reed, former head of the Christian Coalition, and the Rev. Louis P. Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition. Both kept in close contact with Abramoff about the arrangement, e-mails show. Abramoff also turned to prominent anti-tax conservative Grover Norquist, arranging to route some of eLottery's money for Reed through Norquist's group, Americans for Tax Reform.

At one point, eLottery's backers even circulated a forged letter of support from Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R).

Rudy declined to comment for this report. A spokesman for Reed -- now a candidate for lieutenant governor of Georgia -- said that he and his associates are unaware that any money they received came from gambling activities. Sheldon said that he could not remember receiving eLottery money and that he was unaware that Abramoff was involved in the campaign to defeat the bill. Norquist's group would say only that it had opposed the gambling ban on libertarian grounds.

Abramoff's lawyer declined requests for a comment.
DeLay, an outspoken opponent of gambling, was an instrument, witting or unwitting, in eLottery's campaign, documents and interviews show. Along with Rudy, he was a guest on a golfing trip to Scotland. As majority whip, he cast a rare vote against his party on the Internet gambling bill and for the rest of the year helped keep the measure off the floor. He told leadership colleagues that another vote could cost Republican seats in the hard-fought 2000 elections.

A statement from DeLay's lawyer said his votes "are based on sound public policy and principle."

The Scotland trip is one aspect of the gambling matter being investigated by the corruption task force. The trip took place more than five years ago, which ordinarily would be beyond the five-year statute of limitations on certain possible corruption charges. But legal sources say prosecutors have obtained a waiver of the time limit because of the need to gather information abroad.

Desperate Company

Like many Internet companies emerging from the overheated 1990s, eLottery's money was drying up in the spring of 2000.
The company was founded in 1993 on the gamble that even a small fraction of the market for helping states and others put lotteries online could be worth a billion dollars a year. But the company faced many obstacles.

In 1998, the Justice Department had used existing gambling laws to force eLottery to shut down its first online lottery venture, with an Idaho Indian tribe. ELottery had not earned a dime since.

The Senate had passed the Internet Gambling Prohibition Act in late 1999, aiming to make it easier for authorities to stop online gambling sites. With a companion bill by Rep. Robert W. Goodlatte (R-Va.) advancing in the House in the spring of 2000, eLottery was desperate to ramp up its Washington lobbying. It had to sell off assets to stay afloat and raise cash.
In May, eLottery hired Abramoff's firm, Preston Gates & Ellis LLP, for $100,000 a month, according to lobbying reports. In the following months, Abramoff directed the company to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to various organizations, faxes, e-mails and court records show. The groups included Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform; Sheldon's Traditional Values Coalition; companies affiliated with Reed; and a Seattle Orthodox Jewish foundation, Toward Tradition.

Robert Daum, a former eLottery official, said he could not recall the names of the groups that received the payments but noted that all the money spent by the company at Abramoff's direction was for the purpose of defeating the Internet bill.
"We were willing to pursue all legitimate means to ensure that outcome, as people do all the time in Washington," Daum said. "Nothing more, nothing less."

Arrayed against eLottery were many leading groups on the religious right who were pushing to ban Internet gambling, including the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition. James Dobson, influential leader of Focus on the Family, praised the bill in an opinion piece for the New York Times.
Still, according to his strategy e-mails, Abramoff thought he could turn conservatives in the House against the bill. He seized on some compromise language in the bill making exceptions for jai alai and horse racing.

Abramoff's plan: argue that the legislation and its exemptions would actually expand legalized gambling.Check in the Mail
To reach the House conservatives, Abramoff turned to Sheldon, leader of the Orange County, Calif. - based Traditional Values Coalition, a politically potent group that publicly opposed gambling and said it represented 43,000 churches. Abramoff had teamed up with Sheldon before on issues affecting his clients. Because of their previous success, Abramoff called Sheldon "Lucky Louie," former associates said.

Checks and e-mails obtained by The Post show that Abramoff recruited Reed to join Sheldon in the effort to pressure members of Congress. Reed had left the Christian Coalition in 1997 and started a political consulting firm in Georgia.

Abramoff asked eLottery to write a check in June 2000 to Sheldon's Traditional Values Coalition (TVC). He also routed eLottery money to a Reed company, using two intermediaries, which had the effect of obscuring the source.

The eLottery money went first to Norquist's foundation, Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), and then through a second group in Virginia Beach called the Faith and Family Alliance, before it reached Reed's company, Century Strategies. Norquist's group retained a share of the money as it passed through.

"I have 3 checks from elot: (1) 2 checks for $80K payable to ATR and (2) 1 check to TVC for $25K," Abramoff's assistant Susan Ralston e-mailed him on June 22, 2000. "Let me know exactly what to do next. Send to Grover? Send to Rev. Lou?"
Minutes later Abramoff responded, saying that the check for Sheldon's group should be sent directly to Sheldon, but that the checks for Norquist required special instructions: "Call Grover, tell him I am in Michigan and that I have two checks for him totaling 160 and need a check back for Faith and Family for $150K."

According to the e-mails, Reed provided the name and address where Norquist was supposed to send the money: to Robin Vanderwall at a location in Virginia Beach.

Vanderwall was director of the Faith and Family Alliance, a political advocacy group that was founded by two of Reed's colleagues and then turned over to Vanderwall, Vanderwall said and records show.

Vanderwall, a former Regent University Law School student and Republican operative, was later convicted of soliciting sex with minors via the Internet and is serving a seven-year term in Virginia state prison.

In a telephone interview, Vanderwall said that in July 2000 he was called by Reed's firm, Century Strategies, alerting him that he would be receiving a package. When it came, it contained a check payable to Vanderwall's group for $150,000 from Americans for Tax Reform, signed by Norquist. Vanderwall said he followed the instructions from Reed's firm -- depositing the money and then writing a check to Reed's firm for an identical amount.

"I was operating as a shell," Vanderwall said, adding that he was never told how the money was spent. He said: "I regret having had anything to do with it."

Abramoff had previously paid Reed's consulting firms to whip up Christian opposition to Indian casinos and a proposed Alabama state lottery that would compete with the gambling business of Abramoff's tribal clients, sometimes using Norquist's foundation as a pass-through, a Senate investigation has found.

A spokeswoman for Reed said Century Strategies had no business relationship with eLottery. She said Reed did anti-gambling work for Abramoff but was assured by Abramoff's firm "that our activities would not be funded by revenues derived from gambling activities."

Norquist declined to be interviewed. His spokesman did not answer questions about the movement of funds.

Another check issued in 2000 by eLottery at Abramoff's direction wound up helping to fund the Scotland golfing trip attended by Rudy and DeLay. On May 25, 2000, as the trip got underway, the company sent $25,000 to the National Center for Public Policy Research, where Abramoff was a board member at the time. Along with money from another Abramoff client, that payment covered most of the Scotland travel costs, according to records and interviews.

DeLay has said that he thought the National Center sponsored and paid for the trip.

A few weeks after the golfing trip, Abramoff took Rudy to the U.S. Open in Pebble Beach, Calif. They traveled aboard a corporate jet belonging to SunCruz Casinos, a Florida cruise line Abramoff was negotiating to buy, according to a participant who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation. Rudy did not report this trip in his House travel records.

Abramoff listed Rudy as a financial reference that summer in the SunCruz purchase. That transaction ultimately led to the indictment two months ago of Abramoff and a business partner on charges that they had forged a $23 million wire transfer.

Working the Bill

In early June 2000, DeLay had not yet taken a position on the Internet gambling ban. But his aide, Rudy, was already providing advice to Abramoff about how to kill it.

Five days after Rudy and DeLay got back from the Scotland trip, Rudy sent an emergency message to Abramoff from a wireless device.

"911 gaming," Rudy typed on June 8.

He followed up with a suggestion that Abramoff's team get a conservative House caucus to seek a meeting with the chamber's top leaders, Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and Majority Leader Richard K. Armey (R-Tex.) -- a key supporter of the bill. Abramoff forwarded the idea to his team members. "Message from Tony Rudy. Don't share it please. However we should take his advice."

Sheldon was also hard at work, holding news conferences and buttonholing House conservatives to argue against the bill. On July 10, he called Abramoff's group saying he had run into resistance from the staff of an influential member who still favored the bill.

"Lou just called," team member Shawn Vasell told colleagues in an e-mail. "We need to get together and draft a response for Lou." Kevin Ring, Vasell's associate, responded: "This is a disaster."

Abramoff weighed in minutes later, saying he would get Reed to ramp up efforts. "I just chatted with Ralph. We are going to have to go on the air nationally on radio. We must get the conservatives back on this or we are doomed," he told the team.
Abramoff got another strategy e-mail the next morning from Rudy. Rudy was on DeLay's staff but wrote "we" as though he belonged to Abramoff's team. "I think we should get weyrich to get like 10 groups to sign a letter to denny and armey on gaming bill," Rudy wrote, referring to Free Congress Foundation Chairman Paul M. Weyrich and the House leaders.
Sheldon got a private meeting with DeLay on July 13. "I told him I strongly opposed the bill," Sheldon told Congressional Quarterly at the time.

A former DeLay staff member who spoke on the condition of anonymity said, "Lou was a credible face" because Sheldon's religious credentials carried some weight with conservative voters.

DeLay then told House Republican leaders that he was prepared to go against the anti-gambling bill.The Bush Forgery
Still, the Abramoff team was worried about the vote. So the eLottery forces pressed the argument that the Internet bill was an unfair infringement of the right of individual states to sell lottery tickets online. Amid the frenzied lobbying, a potentially influential letter making that case began circulating on Capitol Hill. It was purportedly signed by Jeb Bush.

"While I am no fan of gambling, I see this bill as a violation of states' rights and I am looking to prevent this encroachment," the letter said.

A surprised Hill staffer called the Florida governor's office, and the letter was exposed as a forgery.

Months later, a little-noted investigation by Florida authorities resulted in a confession from a Tampa man hired by a division of Shandwick Worldwide, a public affairs company. Shandwick was working on the eLottery account with Abramoff's team. The Florida man, Matthew Blair, told authorities in a plea bargain agreement that he was hired to get letters opposing the bill from the governor and others. He said he created the forged letter on his own after he was unable to obtain one from Bush's office.

Brian Berger, then a Shandwick official, said his firm had been hired to produce the letters by Abramoff associate Michael Scanlon, a former DeLay press aide. Berger said in a recent interview that although he and Scanlon knew Blair, they did not sanction the forgery. "Essentially, we had a bad operative," Berger said.

But the letter still had an impact. It fed the confusion about the bill in the days before the floor vote. Goodlatte, the sponsor, had more than enough votes for his carefully crafted compromise. Yet he became worried that amendments might be introduced during the debate that could kill the bill.

One way to avoid a floor fight is to place a bill on the suspension calendar, which is supposed to be for non-controversial legislation; it suspends the usual rules, banning amendments and limiting debate. But doing so would require a two-thirds majority for passage.

Goodlatte agreed to the suspension calendar approach because he thought he could get the two-thirds. "We were told [by House leaders] to bring it up on the suspension calendar so you won't have to deal with all these amendments," said a member of Goodlatte's staff who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

That opening was exploited by the Abramoff team with Rudy's help -- fewer votes would be needed to stop the bill.
On July 17, the House debated for about 40 minutes. Rumors continued to fly about the Bush letter. Some members remained confused about the bill's contents. About 30 did not vote. "There was a lot of misinformation," said a congressional staff member who worked on the bill.

Still, Goodlatte had reason to be optimistic because nine out of 10 bills on the suspension calendar pass.
But Abramoff's efforts had eroded just enough votes. The roll call -- 245 in favor, 159 against -- left Goodlatte 25 members short. The bill failed.

'All Systems Go'

The eLottery team was euphoric. Abramoff lobbyist Patrick Pizzella, who was in the Capitol to watch the vote, wrote in an e-mail to colleagues the next day that he saw Sheldon celebrating the victory, too. "There was lucky Louie out front hi-fiving with some lobbyists," said Pizzella, who the following year was named an assistant secretary of labor. Others partied across from the Capitol at the restaurant Tortilla Coast.
Supporters of the Internet gambling ban, though, were outraged. They vowed to resurrect it, perhaps as part of an appropriations bill.

The Christian Coalition issued an "action alert." Dobson took to the airwaves, saying, "I'm just sick about what the Republican leadership is doing with regard to gambling." He urged listeners to contact DeLay and other House leaders to revive the measure.

Abramoff's team realized there was no way to win enough support for a simple majority because they were down more than two dozen votes. Instead, they had to persuade the leadership to keep the bill off the House floor, despite intense pressure from Goodlatte and another backer, Rep. W.J. "Billy" Tauzin (R-La.) .

On July 21, DeLay's legislative director, Kathryn Lehman, e-mailed Rudy: "Goodlatte and Tauzin asked Tom [DeLay] what they needed to do to get his vote, and Tom said to talk to you!"
Rudy immediately forwarded the e-mail to Abramoff asking for help.

Documents show that Abramoff's strategy was to dispatch Sheldon to pressure about 10 social conservatives in their home districts, accusing them of being soft on gambling for supporting Goodlatte's bill. Abramoff's group hoped those members would stir fears among House leaders that another vote on the gambling bill could threaten those members and thus the GOP's thin 13-seat majority.

On Aug. 18, Abramoff faxed a message to eLottery's Daum ordering more money for Reed's activities. "I have chatted with Ralph and we need to get the funding moving on the effort in the 10 congressional districts," Abramoff wrote. "Please get me a check as soon as possible for $150,000 made payable to American Marketing Inc. This is the company Ralph is using."

ELottery issued the requested check to American Marketing on Aug. 24 and delivered it to Abramoff at Preston Gates. Five days later, Abramoff e-mailed Reed. The subject, "Internet Gambling: And so it continues." The message asked, "Where are we? You got the check, no? Are things moving?"
Reed answered the next day: "1. Yes, they got it. 2. Yes, all systems go.

"Targeting 'Our Guys'

Weeks later, a political mailer from Sheldon's group landed like a small bomb in the North Alabama district of Rep. Robert Aderholt.

The Republican was a member of the religious right's Values Action Team in Congress, a champion of public displays of the Ten Commandments and a vigorous gambling opponent. But now, in the midst of a tough reelection race, Aderholt was accused of being soft on gambling.

"Congressman Robert Aderholt voted with them in support of HR #3125 with the law the gamblers want on horse and dog racing," said Sheldon's mailer. Sheldon urged voters to call Aderholt's Washington office "and ask him to vote NO this time." Aderholt's opponent quickly incorporated Sheldon's attack in an ad of his own.

The bulk rate stamp on the mailing said it was paid for by American Marketing. Records show that the company is run by Robert Randolph, the president of Reed's direct-marketing subsidiary. A spokeswoman for Reed said that American Marketing is "a different company" and that she could not respond to questions about it.

Sheldon's fliers also targeted Rep. J.C. Watts of Oklahoma, then the House GOP deputy whip, and vulnerable incumbents, including Rep. James E. Rogan of California, one of the managers of the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, and Rep. Robin Hayes of North Carolina.

Angry House members targeted by Sheldon complained to the leadership. "Certainly our displeasure was relayed on up the chain, so to speak," said Andrew Duke, the chief of staff for Hayes.

Abramoff's willingness to jeopardize Republican House seats startled his lobbying team, some of whom had come from DeLay's office. "Once we started talking about taking out our guys, I got worried," said a former associate of Abramoff's who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The same former Preston Gates lobbyist said Rudy played a key role in getting House leaders to pay attention to the plight of members under attack.

"Tony would say to members, 'Oh, you're getting phone calls on this? I better go tell the whip.' Lou Sheldon sending a letter is not going to do anything unless you have somebody on the inside. Tony exaggerated to leadership how backing the bill could hurt those members," the former Abramoff associate said.

The outrage prompted Sheldon to back off in some of the races. In Aderholt's district, he issued a letter praising the congressman and claiming that his previous mailer had been mistakenly distributed. In Rogan's district, he stopped pressuring the incumbent and, instead, attacked his challenger as "a champion of the homosexual agenda."

Sheldon said in an interview this week that he recalled little about his efforts against the bill in 2000. He said he did not remember receiving a $25,000 check from eLottery, but added that it is possible that his organization did receive it. He said he remembered some money coming in to pay for fliers he had printed and mailed to congressional districts to persuade members to oppose the bill.

"I wasn't aware the money was coming from them [eLottery]," Sheldon said. "I don't think I ever saw the check. It came in, and we paid the bill for some of the printing."

Sheldon also said he had no idea that Abramoff was lobbying against the bill or that he was working for eLottery.

"This is all tied to Jack?" Sheldon said. "I'm shocked out of my socks.

"Chilling Effect

Rudy, who had known Abramoff for years, went to work for Abramoff when the lobbyist switched law firms, to Greenberg Traurig LLP, in January 2001.

Rudy's wife, Lisa, was also drawn into Abramoff's orbit. She was paid fees by Toward Tradition, the Seattle-based Orthodox Jewish foundation that often allies with the Christian right on social issues. The foundation is headed by longtime Abramoff friend Rabbi Daniel Lapin and the lobbyist served as chairman of the board.

Toward Tradition was issued a $25,000 check dated Aug. 24, 2000, by eLottery. A copy of the check was obtained by The Post. Daum, the former eLottery official, said he could not remember the check but said all funds Abramoff directed him to spend were intended to defeat the Internet gambling bill.
Lapin said in an interview that he could not remember a check from eLottery but that the company could have made donations to his foundation. He said that any such donation would have been separate from his foundation's hiring of Liberty Consulting, a political firm founded and operated by Lisa Rudy.

"Lisa Rudy worked for us for six months -- six to nine months -- to organize groundwork for a conference," Lapin said. He said she was paid more than $25,000 but was unsure exactly how and when Lisa Rudy was hired. Lapin said her work could have been for an interfaith conference held in Washington in mid-September 2000. That conference, which opened a few weeks after the eLottery check was sent to Toward Tradition, featured such speakers as DeLay, Sheldon and Norquist.
Rudy declined to comment on the Toward Tradition contract and said that his wife was not available for a comment.

A month after the interfaith conference, the gambling bill's sponsors agitated to get House leaders to let them attach the measure to an end-of-the-year spending bill.

But Sheldon's campaign in conservative districts had the desired chilling effect on GOP leaders. That became clear on Oct. 24, when House Republicans met to discuss their year-end strategy.

What happened at the meeting was relayed to Abramoff by a former associate, David H. Safavian, who was then a lobbyist for a coalition of online gambling companies and who this month was indicted for allegedly lying to federal investigators in the Abramoff probe.

DeLay, Safavian wrote in an e-mail, "spoke up and noted that the bill could cost as many as four House seats. At that point, there was silence. Not even Rep. Dick Armey (R-Texas) -- our previous opponent -- said a word."

When Congress prepared to adjourn in 2000 without revisiting the gambling bill, Safavian was ecstatic. He sent his clients an e-mail, which was posted on the Web site of the Fantasy Sports Trade Association.

"Relax a bit," Safavian wrote. "Policy beat politics once again. (Maybe the American system isn't really that bad.) The good guys won."

Researchers Alice Crites and Julie Tate contributed to this report.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

Poor Scouter, looks like him and Turdblossom could have troubles ahead

2005-10-17T16:23:00.000-04:00

and it couldn't have happened to a couple more deserving assholes...

Miller's Lawyer Says Aide May Face 'Problem' in ProbeAttorney for Reporter Cites Possibility of Conflicting Testimony

By Walter Pincus and Howard KurtzWashington Post Staff WritersMonday, October 17, 2005; A03

Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, has "a problem" in the investigation of the leak of a CIA operative's identity if his testimony conflicts with information given to the grand jury by New York Times reporter Judith Miller, her lawyer said yesterday.

Robert S. Bennett, speaking on the ABC program "This Week" on the day the Times disclosed new information about three conversations Miller had with Libby about the CIA employment of a White House critic's wife, said that "much would depend upon what Mr. Libby said to the grand jury.
"If he said that he had not talked to Judy about these things or didn't talk about the wife, then he's got a problem," Bennett said, referring to CIA operative Valerie Plame, the woman at the center of the leak investigation. Miller told prosecutors that "to the best of her recollection she did not know of" Plame's employment at the CIA "before she spoke to Mr. Libby," he said.

Bennett would not speculate whether Libby was trying to steer Miller's eventual testimony -- an action that could be considered an attempt to obstruct justice, through an alleged suggestion by his lawyer and language in a personal letter sent to her last month that encouraged her to testify.

But he did call Libby's reference to part of the Sept. 15 letter to Miller "very troubling."

"Our reaction when we got that letter, both Judy's and mine, is that was a very stupid thing to put in a letter because it just complicated the situation," Bennett said.

The details of Miller's exchanges with Libby come as special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald appears to be winding up his 22-month investigation of whether any government official leaked Plame's name to retaliate for criticism of the administration by Plame's husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. The grand jury's term will expire Oct. 28.

Fitzgerald's investigation began in December 2003 as an inquiry into whether disclosure of Plame's identity as a CIA operative to columnist Robert D. Novak by two senior administration officials was a violation of federal law. Novak, in his column of July 14, 2003, disclosed the name of Wilson's wife, described her as a CIA "operative," and described her alleged role in arranging Wilson's trip to Niger to determine whether Iraq was seeking uranium from that country.

But over the past year, Fitzgerald's inquiry has apparently broadened. Some people familiar with the case believe he is trying to determine whether the leak of Plame's identity was part of a conspiracy within the Bush administration to discredit Wilson for his statements critical of the White House's use of intelligence in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.

Karl Rove, President Bush's senior political adviser, who testified before the grand jury for the fourth time on Friday, is another possible target of Fitzgerald's inquiry. Rove told Time magazine correspondent Matt Cooper about the CIA employment of Wilson's wife two days before Novak's column appeared, and did not tell investigators about that conversation when first interviewed, according to lawyers familiar with his testimony.

Joseph E. diGenova, a U.S. attorney in the Reagan administration and former independent counsel who investigated the leak of information about President Bill Clinton's passport file, said that "there's no question that when you don't reveal something that appears to be material to an investigator initially, it raises questions in a prosecutor's mind and perhaps a grand juror's mind."

Speaking on ABC, he added that Fitzgerald has to determine whether that initial failure to disclose "was purposeful or an accident."

Bennett said: "Fitzgerald is putting together a big case, and he's looking for little pieces of a puzzle."

Miller, in her article in yesterday's Times, said she had conversations with Libby that took place on June 23, July 8 and July12, 2003. All three occurred before Plame's identity was publicly disclosed in Novak's column. According to Miller's notes, Libby spoke about Wilson's wife during all three conversations and associated her with the CIA.

The possibility of an obstruction-of-justice charge arises out of separate events, both associated with Miller's refusal to testify about her conversations with Libby until she felt she had a completely voluntary waiver of their confidentiality agreement. Miller spent 85 days in jail for refusing to testify before a grand jury.

According to the Times story, one of Miller's lawyers, Floyd Abrams, was authorized in the summer of 2004 to talk to Libby's lawyer, Joseph A. Tate, about whether Libby, who had signed a paper waiver, "really wanted her to testify." The story said that "Tate had said she was free to testify," but Abrams added that "Tate also passed along some information about Mr. Libby's grand jury testimony: that he had not told Ms. Miller the name or undercover status of Mr. Wilson's wife."
With that information, the Times said, Miller concluded that Libby was sending her a message that he did not want her to testify. The newspaper added that "Mr. Tate called Ms. Miller's interpretation 'outrageous.' "

Yesterday, Bennett would not say that Tate was trying to steer Miller's testimony, but that he thought it "complicated things" and that "Judy felt she did not have the clear personal waiver she needed."

In an interview yesterday, Abrams declined to endorse Miller's account that Libby did not want her to testify unless she was going to exonerate him. "That's Judy's interpretation," Abrams said. Tate "certainly asked me what Judy would say, but that's an entirely proper question."

Abrams also minimized Miller's assertion that another source may have given her the name "Valerie Flame," as she recorded it in the same notebook used for her first interview of Libby. Abrams said others may have mentioned Plame only "in passing. . . . The central and essentially only figure who had information was Libby."

In mid-September, with Miller having been in jail for more than two months, further negotiations involving Fitzgerald, Tate and Miller's lawyers, including Bennett, took place. The result was the Sept. 15 letter from Libby to Miller, in which he again told her that he wanted her to testify. But the letter included this sentence: "The public report of every other reporter's testimony makes clear that they did not discuss Ms. Plame's name or identity with me."

Bennett said the sentence "was a very stupid thing to put in a letter," and though he would notsay it was another possible attempt to steer her testimony, "it was a close call and she was troubled by it."

According to Miller's first-person account, Fitzgerald asked during her grand jury testimony about Libby's letter. Miller said, "This portion of the letter had surprised me, because it might be perceived as an effort by Mr. Libby to suggest that I, too, would say that we had not discussed Ms. Plame's identity." But she added that "my notes suggested that we had discussed her job."

Staff writer Jim VandeHei contributed to this report.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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Death Knell for Compasionate Conservatism

2005-10-17T16:17:00.000-04:00

Just weeks after watching the poor stranded and dying in New Orleans the House Republican leadership prepares to give the middle finger to the rest of the poor in the country:

House GOP Leaders Set to Cut SpendingLeadership Shake-Up Spurred Policy Shift

By Jonathan WeismanWashington Post Staff WriterMonday, October 17, 2005; A01

House Republican leaders have moved from balking at big cuts in Medicaid and other programs to embracing them, driven by pent-up anger from fiscal conservatives concerned about runaway spending and the leadership's own weakening hold on power.

Beginning this week, the House GOP lawmakers will take steps to cut as much as $50 billion from the fiscal 2006 budget for health care for the poor, food stamps and farm supports, as well as considering across-the-board cuts in other programs. Only last month, then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (Tex.) and other GOP leaders quashed demands within their party for budget cuts to pay for the soaring cost of hurricane relief.

DeLay told a packed room of reporters on Sept. 13 that 11 years of Republican rule had already pared down the federal budget "pretty good." If lawmakers had suggestions for cuts, DeLay said he would listen, but he was not offering anything up.

But faced with a revolt among many conservatives sharply critical of him for resisting spending cuts, DeLay three weeks later told a closed meeting of the House Republican Conference, "I failed you," according to a number of House members and GOP aides. Then, in a nod to the most hard-core conservatives, DeLay volunteered, "You guys filled a void in the leadership."

The abrupt shift reflects a changed political dynamic in the House in which a faction of fiscal conservatives -- known as the Republican Study Committee, or RSC -- has gained the upper hand because of DeLay's criminal indictment in Texas, widespread criticism of the Republicans' handling of Hurricane Katrina, and uncertainty over the future of the leadership, according to lawmakers and aides.

Now, cutting the budget -- which only months ago seemed far from possible -- is at the center of the agenda in the House. "No one wants to have an argument with friends, but that argument facilitated the debate that led to the package [of cuts] that [House Speaker J. Dennis] Hastert has now put out there," said Rep. Mike Pence (Ind.), chairman of the RSC and a leading proponent of cuts to offset new government spending.
But Republicans could be taking a big risk by cutting Medicaid programs while their standing in the polls has plummeted and Democrats gear up for a fight. "We have seen a sea change in the budget policies of House Republicans," said Thomas S. Kahn, the Democratic staff director of the House Budget Committee. "Clearly, the RSC's influence over their budget policies is in the ascendancy."

The RSC launched a public crusade for spending cuts last month, with its leaders using news conferences, television appearances and media interviews to all but accuse the GOP leadership of profligacy. House leaders at first tried to crush the RSC, or at least push its efforts back behind closed doors.
But a Texas grand jury's Sept. 28 indictment of DeLay changed the balance of power, forcing the leadership to shore up its conservative base and raising the prospect of a new leadership election that would further undermine GOP unity entering an uncertain election season.

DeLay may continue to exercise power informally, as he did Oct. 7 in working the floor to help narrowly pass an energy bill. But DeLay and his leadership allies are mindful that the rank and file could demand new elections to permanently fill the majority leader's post -- temporarily being held by Rep. Roy Blunt (Mo.) -- if members grow impatient with GOP policies.
"Our real leverage has come from the fear that DeLay will not have a post to come back to," said Rep. Jeff Flake (Ariz), another RSC leader. "They are deathly afraid of a leadership election in January."

A revolt has been stirring within the House GOP ranks for months. Fiscal conservatives had accepted an expanded federal role in education enshrined in President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act, had lost a fight to block the Medicare prescription drug benefit -- the largest entitlement expansion since Lyndon Johnson was president -- and had even embraced the mammoth transportation law that passed this summer with a record-shattering number of pork-barrel projects.

Since Bush came to office, federal spending had grown by a third, from $1.86 trillion to $2.47 trillion, while record budget surpluses turned to record deficits. Conservative activists, led by talk show hosts and opinion columnists, had begun pressing Republicans hard on what they saw as Big Government Conservatism.

"Congress had found itself very much on the defensive," said Ronald D. Utt, a federal budget expert at the Heritage Foundation. Then came Katrina in late August.

Lawmakers rushed back to Washington, eager to demonstrate their sympathy for the victims of the storm after Bush was widely criticized for his tardy response.

A planned conservative agenda of tax cutting, a permanent end to the estate tax, and the first cuts in Medicaid and other entitlement programs in nearly a decade appeared lost. Some Republicans were even suggesting it might be time to raise taxes, joining a chorus of Democrats pressing to roll back some of Bush's tax cuts.

"There was an element of the last straw in this," Pence said.
By Sept. 7, Congress had already enacted a $10.5 billion hurricane-relief measure, with a $52 billion bill pending. Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Tex.) went to the House Rules Committee with an amendment to pay for the next installment with a one-time, 3 percent cut to all federal programs subject to Congress's annual spending bills, outside of defense, homeland security and veterans affairs.

The move was crushed. Instead, House leaders put the Katrina funding up for a vote under the rules reserved for non-controversial bills -- such as the renaming of a courthouse -- with no amendments allowed.

Conservatives were furious, Flake said, but not nearly as furious as they would become Sept. 13. The RSC was created in the early 1970s by conservative gadfly Paul Weyrich and other outside activists to watch over the House GOP leadership, but its power has waxed and waned, largely according to the dictates of the leadership it was supposed to be watching over.
Now, under Pence, the group was flexing its muscles. He had announced a news conference for Sept. 14 to unveil "Operation Offset," a menu of spending cuts that would more than pay for hurricane relief. On Sept. 13, DeLay suggested that "after 11 years of Republican majority, we've pared [the government] down pretty good." Then he issued what conservatives took as a challenge.

"My answer to those that want to offset the spending is, 'Sure, bring me the offsets,' " he said. "I will be glad to do it, but no one has been able to come up with any yet."

That afternoon, Pence attended a leadership meeting in Hastert's conference room, where he would get an earful, according to several leadership aides. It was one thing to suggest that Republicans consider budget cuts to pay for Katrina relief, but it was quite another to call a news conference, the leaders told Pence. And to suggest that the RSC was reining in a free-spending party was out of bounds. The deficit for 2005 was coming in nearly $100 billion below initial forecasts, they said, and GOP leaders that spring had muscled through Congress a budget blueprint that ordered up $35 billion in entitlement cuts over five years, the first such effort since 1997.

The appeals appeared only to harden the conservatives' resolve. And DeLay, for so long a symbol of conservative power, found himself an object of ridicule. One member, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Republicans joked that one of the cuts could not be the president's proposed mission to Mars, because DeLay was already up there.
DeLay spokesman Kevin Madden said that some of the criticism of DeLay was unfounded. He had challenged lawmakers to bring forward budget cuts, but he had also emphasized that the cuts already ordered in the budget would go through.

But two confidants of DeLay, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to not jeopardize their relationship with the still-powerful Texan, said he now knows he and other Republican leaders stirred up a hornet's nest that day.

"He screwed up," one of the confidants said of DeLay's comments. "People were completely taken aback. That more than anything else was the reason Republicans were upset."

The events of Sept. 13 ricocheted through conservative talk shows, the Internet and newspaper columns, where Republicans were taking a beating from the right.

Then on Sept. 28, DeLay was indicted by a Texas grand jury on charges that he had conspired to funnel illegal corporate donations to Texas candidates.

Under House rules, DeLay had to relinquish his post as majority leader, but he pleaded with Republicans not to permanently replace him while he is fighting the charges.
In the turmoil, leaders had no choice but to firm up support with their conservative base and try to head off a leadership fight, lawmakers and leadership aides said.

After several meetings, Hastert emerged from a closed Republican session the night of Oct. 6 to announce that he had gotten the message. Cuts to entitlement programs such as Medicaid, food stamps and farm supports would be raised from $35 billion to $50 billion in the massive budget bill that will be compiled in November. Republicans would push an additional across-the-board spending cut for 2006 and would try to trim programs already funded.

"We went from being in the doghouse to being feted as the heart and soul of the party," Flake said jokingly.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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Seeing articles like this everyday makes life so much more enjoyable...

2005-10-14T08:52:00.000-04:00

Scandals Take Toll On Bush's 2nd Term

By Jim VandeHei and Peter BakerWashington Post Staff WritersFriday, October 14, 2005; A01

A series of scandals involving some of the most powerful Republicans in Washington have converged to disrupt President Bush's agenda, distract aides and allies, and exacerbate political problems for an already weakened administration, according to party strategists and White House advisers.

With Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove returning to a grand jury as early as today, associates said the architect of Bush's presidency has been preoccupied with his legal troubles, a diversion that some say contributed to the troubled handling of Harriet Miers's nomination to the Supreme Court. White House officials are privately bracing for the possibility that Rove or other officials could be indicted in the next two weeks.

Bush's main partners on Capitol Hill likewise are spending time defending themselves as the president's legislative initiatives founder. The indictment of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) for alleged campaign funding illegalities has thrown Republicans into one of the most tumultuous periods of their 11-year reign and created the prospect of a leadership battle. And while Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) deals with a subpoena in an insider-trading investigation, a bipartisan majority rebuked Bush over torture policies.

Most of the scandals have little direct connection with one another, but their accumulation in a compressed period has challenged a White House already beset by political problems stemming from the Iraq war, Hurricane Katrina and high gasoline prices, according to Republican advisers close to the Bush team, several of whom said they could speak candidly only if they were not identified by name.

"The Rove thing has gotten to be enormously distracting," said one outside adviser to the White House. "Knowing the way the White House works, being under subpoena like this, your mind is not on your work, it's on that."

"It looks like a perfect storm," said Joseph E. diGenova, a Republican and former independent counsel, who noted that so many investigations can weigh on an administration. "People have no idea what happens when an investigation gets underway. It's debilitating. It's not just distracting. It's debilitating. It's like getting punched in the stomach."

Beyond the short-term problems, Republicans are particularly anxious about the sprawling investigations of conservative lobbyist Jack Abramoff, whose business and political dealings regularly brought him into contact with dozens of lawmakers and top White House officials. Among insiders, he was one of the most familiar faces among the generation of operatives and lobbyists who came of age when Republicans took control of Congress after the 1994 elections.

"The one that people are most worried about is Abramoff because it seems to have such long tentacles," said former congressman Vin Weber (R-Minn.), a lobbyist with close ties to the White House. "This seems to be something that could spread almost anywhere . . . and that has a lot of people worried."

The Abramoff scandal has already resulted in two unanticipated casualties: David H. Safavian, a former Rove business partner serving as the top White House procurement official, recently resigned and was arrested on charges that he lied about and impeded an investigation into his dealings with Abramoff. And Timothy E. Flanigan, Bush's nominee for deputy attorney general, the number two job at the Justice Department, withdrew last week after questions were raised about his interactions with the lobbyist.

"The Abramoff thing is a lingering nuisance to everybody," said GOP lobbyist Charles Black. "I don't know who else might be caught up in it."

Twin investigations of Abramoff by the Senate Indian Affairs Committee and a multi-agency federal task force appear likely to tar a host of lawmakers the White House has relied on for passage of critical legislative initiatives. At the same time, the House ethics committee, which has been essentially shut down over a staffing dispute, is expected to get back in business and look into allegations against DeLay and nearly a dozen other lawmakers, Democrats included. This is where the Abramoff and unrelated investigations could start to merge.

House Administration Committee Chairman Robert W. Ney (R-Ohio), a DeLay ally, is facing questions about ties to Abramoff, including his participation in a golf outing in Scotland that the lobbyist organized in 2002. And Rove allies have also been entangled in the Abramoff investigation. One is Ralph Reed, the former Christian Coalition leader who has struggled during a campaign for lieutenant governor of Georgia to shake off suggestions that he received Indian gambling money to mount a lobbying effort against rival casinos.

The current atmosphere is not what Bush envisioned as a candidate in 2000. Coming off the Clinton years, which were dominated by seven independent counsel investigations and the impeachment of the president, Bush vowed to run a cleaner and more ethical Washington. "In my administration," Bush told voters in Pittsburgh in October 2000, "we will ask not only what is legal but what is right, not what the lawyers allow but what the public deserves."

It was a vow that was welcomed in a capital weary of scandal, and the Bush White House made it through the first term without losing many scalps . With the lapse of the independent counsel statute and congressional oversight committees in the hands of the president's party, the instruments of political investigations were more limited.

But scandal historically has ripened in second terms, including Watergate for Richard M. Nixon, the Iran-contra affair for Ronald Reagan, and the Monica S. Lewinsky investigation for Bill Clinton. "It always comes back," said Larry J. Sabato, a University of Virginia scholar who has written on Washington scandals. "There may be a couple of dry years occasionally, but it is a style of American politics -- always has been, always will be. And now it's back with a vengeance."

Some administration allies lament the return of the scandal culture. "There was essentially none of that for the first five years," said Indiana Gov. Mitchell E. Daniels Jr. (R), Bush's first budget director. "That doesn't make the current situation any easier to watch."

Other White House advisers see politics behind the recent spurt of investigations. "Some of it is cyclical politically," said Leonard A. Leo, who has taken leave as executive vice president of the conservative Federalist Society to help promote the Miers nomination. "And some of it, I'll be honest, is when the left and the Democrats are losing the battle of ideas, they turn to manufacturing scandal."

In the end, some Republicans argue, it will not add up to much or turn off voters. "I don't think people feel there is a sleaze factor at all," said Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.), adding that most voters are more aggrieved over excessive spending and gas prices.

Several Republicans close to Bush said they believe the CIA leak investigation has taken a particular toll, reducing Rove's role in key decisions and prompting Bush to rely on other, less sure-footed advisers. One well-connected outside adviser cited the Miers pick as an example. He said even if Rove considered the selection a risk or mistake, he knew he was in no position to press Bush on it.

"My sense is Karl knows he has spent a lot of political capital with the president on this CIA leak case," the adviser said. "No matter how close Karl is to the president, there is a limit of how much capital you can spend even with a close, close friend."

White House press secretary Scott McClellan denied that Rove had little input in the Miers nomination. "I don't think that's an accurate reflection at all," he said. Asked if Rove's involvement in White House issues had shifted, McClellan said: "No. He continues to perform his duties."

Two Republicans close to the White House said officials are nervous that Rove and Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the two most powerful staffers in the federal government, could be indicted by special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald within two weeks. While the idea struck many on the Bush team as unfathomable a few months ago, now the common assumption is that both men could be in trouble.

Staff writers R. Jeffrey Smith and Dan Eggen contributed to this report.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

This is just funny stuff...

2005-10-13T15:11:00.000-04:00

From the Washington Post:

'Conservative Crackup?'

Howard Fineman writes in Newsweek.com: "President George W. Bush may have no military exit strategy for Iraq, but the 'necons' who convinced him to go to war there have developed one of their own -- a political one: Blame the Administration.

"Their neo-Wilsonian theory is correct, they insist, but the execution was botched by a Bush team that has turned out to be incompetent, crony-filled, corrupt, unimaginative and weak over a wide range of issues.

"The flight of the neocons -- just read a recent Weekly Standard to see what I am talking about --- is one of only many indications that the long-predicted 'conservative crackup' is at hand."

Well at least the world is coming to an end...

2005-10-13T08:49:00.000-04:00

World Temperatures Keep Rising With a Hot 2005

By Juliet EilperinWashington Post Staff WriterThursday, October 13, 2005; A01

New international climate data show that 2005 is on track to be the hottest year on record, continuing a 25-year trend of rising global temperatures.

Climatologists at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies calculated the record-breaking global average temperature, which now surpasses 1998's record by a tenth of a degree Fahrenheit, from readings taken at 7,200 weather stations scattered around the world.

The new analysis comes as government and independent scientists are reporting other dramatic signs of global warming, such as the record shrinkage of the Arctic sea ice cover and unprecedented high ocean temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico.

Late last month, a team of University of Colorado and NASA scientists announced that the Arctic sea ice cap shrank this summer to 200 million square miles, 500,000 square miles less than its average area between 1979 and 2000. And a scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration determined that sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico were higher in August than at any time since 1890, which may have contributed to the intense hurricanes that struck the region this year.

"At this point, people shouldn't be surprised this is happening," said Goddard atmospheric scientist David Rind, noting that 2002, 2003 and 2004 were among the warmest years on record.

Many climatologists, along with policymakers in a number of countries, believe the rapid temperature rise over the past 50 years is heavily driven by the burning of fossil fuels and other human activities that have spewed carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse gases" into the atmosphere. A vocal minority of scientists say the warming climate is the result of a natural cycle.

Rind compared the warming trend to what happens when a major league baseball team owner spends lavishly on players' salaries. Pumping heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere, he said, produces the same kind of predictable results as boosting a team's payroll.

"When they get into the playoffs, should we be surprised?" he asked. "We're putting a lot more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and we're getting a lot higher temperatures."

Global temperatures this year are about 1.36 degrees Fahrenheit (0.75 Celsius) above the average between 1950 and 1980, according to the Goddard analysis. Worldwide temperatures in 1998 were 1.28 degrees Fahrenheit (0.71 Celsius) above that 30-year average. The data show that Earth is warming more in the Northern Hemisphere, where the average 2005 temperature was two-tenths of a degree above the 1998 level.

Climate experts say such seemingly small shifts are significant because they involve average readings based on measurements taken at thousands of sites. To put it in perspective, the planet's temperature rose by just 1 to 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit over the past century.

Rind, who said it would probably take a major event such as a massive volcanic eruption to keep this year from setting a record, said that scientists expect worldwide temperatures to rise another degree Fahrenheit between 2000 and 2030, and an additional 2 to 4 degrees by 2100.

From that perspective, this year's higher temperatures are "really small potatoes compared to what's to come," he said.
But one skeptic, state climatologist George Taylor of Oregon, said it is difficult to determine an accurate global average temperature, especially since there are not enough stations recording ocean temperatures.

"I just don't trust it," Taylor said of the new calculation, noting that Goddard's findings are "mighty preliminary."

Several scientists said yesterday that Earth's rapid warming could become self-perpetuating as the buildup of heat in the air, on land and in the sea accelerates. Ted A. Scambos, the lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., said the shrinkage of sea ice in the Arctic makes it more likely that the region will warm faster, because open water absorbs much more heat from the sun than snow and ice.

"Change is really happening in the Arctic. We're going to see this again and again," Scambos said. He added that, because the Arctic helps keep global temperatures down, any warming there can mean "you're going to change [the world's] climate significantly."

In response to recent warming in the Arctic, a coalition of environmental groups said it plans to sue the Interior Department to force it to list polar bears as threatened under the Endangered Species Act because the sea ice they depend on is disappearing. The Natural Resources Defense Council, the Center for Biological Diversity and other groups petitioned for the listing in February, but they say Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton has yet to respond.

"The polar bear's a harbinger of what's to come. It's the first animal to be threatened with extinction by climate change, but it won't be the last," said NRDC attorney Andrew Wexler. He noted that polar bears cannot adapt well to rising temperatures because they are dependent on sea ice for survival.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service spokesman Chris Tollefson said the agency is analyzing the petition. "We haven't really reached a conclusion," Tollefson said.

The Bush administration has consistently advocated funding for technological research rather than requiring curbs in carbon dioxide emissions, saying that such limits could damage the economy.

William O'Keefe, chief executive of the George C. Marshall Institute, which is skeptical of global warming predictions, said policymakers should not rush to impose new rules on industry when it remains unclear whether the current warming worldwide reflects natural climate variability or a human-induced trend.

"It still remains very complicated," O'Keefe said.

But Rafe Pomerance, who served as deputy assistant secretary of state for the environment under President Bill Clinton and who now chairs the bipartisan Climate Policy Center, said a modest system to limit and trade carbon dioxide emissions could help curb global warming.

"We need to develop a range of very serious policies and put them in place," Pomerance said.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company
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The suspense is killing me...

2005-10-13T08:38:00.000-04:00

Times Reporter Testifies Again in CIA Leak Probe

By Jim VandeHeiWashington Post Staff WriterThursday, October 13, 2005; A10

New York Times reporter Judith Miller testified for a second time in the CIA leak case yesterday, providing new details about a previously undisclosed conversation she had with Vice President Cheney's chief of staff about the diplomat at the center of the 22-month investigation.

Miller was told by special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald that she is done testifying in the case and free to return to work without a contempt-of-court threat hanging over her head, her lawyers said. Miller refused to comment after spending nearly 75 minutes in front of the grand jury.

"The contempt has been lifted, and I am delighted that Judy can go forward with her great reporting," said Robert S. Bennett, Miller's attorney.

Miller, who spent 85 days in jail for refusing to testify in the case, told the grand jury about a June 23, 2003, conversation she had with I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's top adviser, regarding former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, who had accused the White House of twisting intelligence to justify the Iraq war.

Bennett refused to discuss Miller's testimony, but lawyers in the case said Fitzgerald appears increasingly interested in whether White House officials were involved in a broad effort to discredit Wilson as early as May or June of 2003, in part by unmasking his wife, CIA operative Valerie Plame.

Wilson was sent on a CIA-funded mission to Niger in 2002 -- at the suggestion of his wife -- to investigate whether Iraq had sought to buy nuclear weapons-grade material in Niger. Libby and Karl Rove, the president's top political adviser, have testified that they each discussed Plame with two reporters in July of 2003 but never mentioned her by name or her covert status at the agency, according to lawyers involved in the case.
The two officials have testified that they were trying to wave reporters off Wilson's allegation.

The June 23 conversation would be significant if Miller and Libby discussed Plame, the lawyers in the case said. If they did, it could help Fitzgerald establish that Libby was involved in an administration effort to unmask Plame weeks before she was publicly outed by conservative columnist Robert D. Novak in the middle of July.

As early as May of that year, Cheney's office was actively seeking information about Wilson from the CIA, according to former senior administration officials. Libby was aware of the diplomat and his mission by the time he talked with a Washington Post reporter in early June. By then -- one month before Plame was unmasked -- the State Department had prepared a memo on the Niger mission that contained information in a section marked "(S)" for secret. Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, brought the memo on a trip to Africa by President Bush in the days before Novak's column was published.

The lawyers said Fitzgerald does not appear likely to charge anyone with the crime he originally set out to investigate: whether anyone in the Bush administration knowingly disclosed the identity of a CIA operative whose covert status the agency was actively trying to keep secret. That crime is difficult to prove because Fitzgerald would have to show that the officials knew Plame was a covert operative and that the CIA did not want her name revealed.

Instead, based on the questions Fitzgerald is asking, the lawyers surmised that he is looking into a broad conspiracy charge against a group of administration officials or into charging one or more officials with easier-to-prove crimes such as disclosing classified material, making false statements or perjury.

As the investigation comes to its expected conclusion, Fitzgerald appears to be focusing on Libby and Rove, according to people involved in the case. Rove, who is expected to make his fourth appearance before the grand jury this week, has not been guaranteed by Fitzgerald that he will not be charged in the investigation, a source close to Rove has said.

"This prosecutor may have new information that may contradict prior testimony or may have questions about prior testimony, [or] may simply seek a clarification," Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said yesterday on NBC's "Today" show, when asked why a person would be called back to testify. "I'm not going to try to speculate what the motivation is behind Mr. Fitzgerald in asking a return by any witness. But there are a variety of reasons that someone might be called back to answer additional questions before a grand jury."
The grand jury has been hearing evidence for the past two years. It is due to expire on Oct. 28.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

Pay particular attention to the section in bold...

2005-10-12T08:38:00.000-04:00

Special Prosecutor Again Queries Reporter

By Carol D. LeonnigWashington Post Staff WriterWednesday,
October 12, 2005; A02

New York Times reporter Judith Miller answered questions yesterday about a previously undisclosed conversation she had with Vice President Cheney's chief of staff in June 2003 and is scheduled to testify before a grand jury today to answer more questions in the investigation of how a covert CIA operative's identity was leaked to reporters.

Special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who has indicated he is nearing a decision about whether to charge anyone in the case, questioned Miller about notes she said she discovered last week involving a June 23, 2003, conversation with Cheney's top aide, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, according to a source familiar with Miller's account.

According to the source, the notes reveal that the two discussed Bush administration critic and former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV about three weeks before the name of Wilson's wife, covert CIA operative Valerie Plame, appeared in a syndicated column written by Robert D. Novak.

The publication of Plame's identity ultimately led to Fitzgerald's investigation of whether Plame's name was illegally leaked by administration officials in retaliation for Wilson's public criticism of the administration.

One source close to Miller said it appears that the notes were Fitzgerald's first indication that Miller and Libby had spoken in June.

Last year, Fitzgerald subpoenaed Miller's notes for discussions she had with Libby from July 6 to July 13 but included no mention of June, the source said.Previously, Fitzgerald was focused on a July 8 breakfast meeting Miller had with Libby and a phone call they had on July 12 or 13. Miller was questioned by the grand jury last month after spending 85 days in jail for initially refusing to testify about her conversations with Libby.

Libby's attorney, Joseph Tate, did not return calls yesterday seeking a comment on the implications of the notes and the conversation with Miller. Fitzgerald's office declined to comment, but New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller said in an e-mail to the newspaper's staff that Miller would appear before the grand jury today, delaying the newspaper's promised report about her evidence in the probe because she faces the threat of contempt of court until she finishes testifying.

"Judy has talked to our reporters already about her legal battle, but the story is incomplete until we know as much as we can about the substance of her evidence, and she is under legal advice not to discuss that until her testimony is completed. This may be frustrating to our armchair critics," Keller wrote.

Numerous lawyers involved in the 22-month investigation said they are bracing for Fitzgerald to bring criminal charges against administration officials. They speculated, based on his questions, that he may be focused on charges of false statements, obstruction of justice or violations of the Espionage Act involving the release of classified government information to unauthorized persons. The grand jury's term is to expire Oct. 28.

"This is not a guy who would walk away with nothing," said one lawyer involved in the case.

Libby and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove have both testified that they mentioned Wilson's wife to reporters during the summer of 2003 but did not reveal her name or her covert status, according to sources.

After Miller testified before the grand jury Sept. 30, a source close to Miller said, Fitzgerald and her attorney urged her to go back through her old notes and turn over any that involved Libby or would be relevant to the case, the source said.

A June 2003 conversation about Wilson between Miller and Libby occurred at a time of growing White House concern about the former ambassador after a May 6 column in the New York Times and a June 12 article in The Washington Post.

Without using Wilson's name, the reports drew attention to a CIA-sponsored mission that found no evidence for a Bush administration claim used to justify war with Iraq: that Iraq was trying to purchase uranium in Niger for use in developing nuclear weapons. The CIA had sent Wilson to Niger to investigate the claim.

Some legal sources are focused on their clients' exposure under the broad language of the Espionage Act. They say a prosecutor could argue that any official or private citizen committed a felony by transferring classified information about Plame to reporters.

But veteran defense lawyer Plato Cacheris, who represents a former Pentagon policy analyst who pleaded guilty last week to violating that portion of the act in a separate case, said using it for contacts with reporters would be "stretching it to something the statute didn't intend."

Staff writer Jim VandeHei contributed to this report.

Just a little Delay update...

2005-10-07T11:48:00.000-04:00

DeLay Meeting, RNC Actions CoincidedFinancial Transactions Began on Day Texan Met With Fundraiser

By R. Jeffrey SmithWashington Post Staff WriterFriday, October 7, 2005; A05

Former House majority leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) met for at least 30 minutes with the top fundraiser of his Texas political action committee on Oct. 2, 2002, the same day that the Republican National Committee in Washington set in motion a series of financial transactions at the heart of the money-laundering and conspiracy case against DeLay.

During the meeting at his Capitol office, DeLay conferred with James W. Ellis, the head of his principal fundraising committee in Washington and his chief fundraiser in Texas. Ellis had earlier given the Republican National Committee a check for $190,000 drawn mostly from corporate contributions. The same day as the meeting, the RNC ordered $190,000 worth of checks sent to seven Republican legislative candidates in Texas.

In the past two weeks, two separate Texas grand juries have returned indictments against DeLay, Ellis and a political associate alleging that these transactions amounted to money laundering intended to circumvent a Texas campaign law barring the use of corporate funds for state election purposes. The aim of the alleged scheme was to ensure that Republicans gain control of the Texas House, and thus reorder the state's congressional districts in a manner favoring the election of more Republicans to Congress.

The prosecutor who brought the indictment, Ronnie Earle, has not described the evidence he presented to the grand jury linking DeLay to the $190,000 transactions. But the fact that DeLay and his alleged co-conspirator, fundraiser Ellis, conferred on the same day the checks were ordered has attracted the attention of lawyers involved in the case because of speculation that the two men shared important information that day.

To prove that DeLay participated in money laundering or in a conspiracy to conduct it -- the two allegations in the felony indictment brought against DeLay on Monday morning -- Earle will have to prove two things, according to lawyers who are closely following the case: The transactions involving the $190,000 were illegal, and DeLay played some critical role, by approving them or by helping to carry them out.

DeLay and Ellis have so far given slightly different accounts of the substance of their discussion. Ellis's attorney, Jonathan D. Pauerstein, said that Ellis recalls that their Oct. 2 discussion did not concern or involve Texas or Texas candidates. But DeLay, interviewed last weekend on "Fox News Sunday," said that during a "scheduling meeting" with Ellis in October, Ellis said while they were leaving his office that "by the way, we sent money" to Washington.

DeLay's lead attorney, Dick DeGuerin, said in an interview this week that "there is no question that at some point Ellis told him," but that DeLay does not recall the precise timing. DeGuerin said "it could have been that day" -- Oct. 2, the day the same arm of the RNC began to process the seven checks for printing two days later, on Oct. 4.

But DeGuerin said that this does not mean DeLay was "the one who made those decisions" about collecting the funds, sending them to Washington and returning the same total amount to candidates in Texas. "It wasn't his role or his authority" because DeLay was not involved in the day-to-day operations of the committee.

Ellis, who still directs DeLay's Washington-based Americans for a Republican Majority political action committee (ARMPAC), "is the kind of guy who would say, 'I did this, how about that?' " according to DeGuerin. DeLay may have responded, DeGuerin said, by saying, "Hey, that's great," but "that does not make him a part of the agreement to do that."
In the indictment, the grand jury accused DeLay, Ellis and John Colyandro -- then the director of Texans for a Republican Majority, an ARMPAC offshoot -- of agreeing with the Republican National Committee to conduct the offense of money laundering and set forth a sequence of key events that began on Sept. 11, 2002. It alleges that Ellis "did request and propose" on that day that an arm of the RNC make the payments to Texas Republicans once it had received the check from Texas.

The next day, according to the indictment, Ellis delivered the check to the Republican National State Elections Committee, an arm of the RNC, and also provided it "with a document that contained the names of several candidates." He also "requested and proposed" how much each candidate should receive, the indictment said.

Earle has never disclosed the evidence behind these allegations, and Ellis, through his lawyer Pauerstein, denies this account. Pauerstein says that Ellis did not discuss donations to candidates while delivering the check, and that he did not "deliver the list, if there was a list," of the candidates that should receive checks.

According to documents disclosed earlier this year in a civil trial related to the same transactions, a staff member in the office of then-RNC Chairman Marc Racicot requested on Oct. 2 that checks be sent to the Texas Republicans. The next day, Racicot arrived in Texas to appear at a series of fundraising events organized by Texans for a Republican Majority, including a dinner with Gov. Rick Perry, a DeLay ally. With the approval of the RNC's lawyers and political directors, the checks were written and sent to Texas on Oct. 4.

The RNC has denied any wrongdoing and has asserted that all the transactions were legal.

Although the indictment alleges that DeLay and his two aides "conducted, supervised, and facilitated" the transactions, DeLay said last weekend, about the $190,000 sent from Texas to Washington, that "there was no way that I knew before this event happened that it would happen." Earle would need to prove otherwise to sustain his case.

DeLay, one of the most powerful politicians in Washington, was forced under House GOP rules to step down as majority leader on Sept. 28 after his first indictment.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company
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Rumors of the Apocolypse proven to be exagerated...

2005-10-05T10:52:00.000-04:00

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/04/AR2005100401525_pf.html

News of Pandemonium May Have Slowed AidUnsubstantiated Reports of Violence Were Confirmed by Some Officials, Spread by News Media

By Robert E. Pierre and Ann GerhartWashington Post Staff WritersWednesday, October 5, 2005; A08

Five weeks after Hurricane Katrina laid waste to New Orleans, some local, state and federal officials have come to believe that exaggerations of mayhem by officials and rumors repeated uncritically in the news media helped slow the response to the disaster and tarnish the image of many of its victims.

Claims of widespread looting, gunfire directed at helicopters and rescuers, homicides, and rapes, including those of "babies" at the Louisiana Superdome, frequently turned out to be overblown, if not completely untrue, officials now say.
The sensational accounts delayed rescue and evacuation efforts already hampered by poor planning and a lack of coordination among local, state and federal agencies. People rushing to the Gulf Coast to fly rescue helicopters or to distribute food, water and other aid steeled themselves for battle. In communities near and far, the seeds were planted that the victims of Katrina should be kept away, or at least handled with extreme caution.

"Rumor control was a beast for us," said Maj. Ed Bush of the Louisiana National Guard, who was stationed at the Superdome. "People would hear something on the radio and come and say that people were getting raped in the bathroom or someone had been murdered. I would say, 'Ma'am, where?' I would tell them if there were bodies, my guys would find it. Everybody heard, nobody saw. Logic was out the window because the situation was illogical."

There was an unnerving amount of lawlessness, especially looting, in the streets of New Orleans after the hurricane. But many of the more salacious reports have not withstood close examination by government officials or the media.

CNN reported repeatedly on Sept. 1, three days after Katrina ravaged New Orleans, that evacuations at the Superdome were suspended because "someone fired a shot at a helicopter." But Louisiana National Guard officials on the ground at the time now say that no helicopters came under attack and that evacuations were never stopped because of gunfire.

Later that morning, during a briefing carried live on local radio and local and national television, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) said, "We have gotten reports, but unconfirmed, of some of our deputies and sheriffs that have either been injured or killed." Of the thousands of law enforcement officials who converged on New Orleans, only one was shot. The wound to the leg was self-inflicted in a struggle, a spokesman for the Guard said last week.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune reported that National Guard troops found 30 to 40 bodies decomposing inside a freezer in the convention center, including a girl whose throat was slashed. The newspaper quoted a member of the Arkansas National Guard, which was deployed in the building. Other news organizations then passed the information on.
That, too, was untrue. On Monday, Bob Johannessen, a spokesman for the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, said that four bodies were found -- one was a gunshot victim. He said officials had no record of a dead girl with her throat cut.

The Washington Post, in a Sept. 1 front-page article, noted that evacuees at the Superdome were repeating rumors of rapes and killings but quoted Maj. Bush as saying "none of that" occurred. A Sept. 15 front-page story said the precise number of people who died in the convention center was not known at the time, but officials believed it could be as many as 10.
Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honore, commander of Joint Task Force Katrina, said that reporters got bogged down trying to tell people how bad the situation was rather than "gathering facts and corroborating that information."Communication Woes
The suspect reports of violence and mayhem in the city, some of which originated from frightened and confused victims, added to the confusion for political leaders, including Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D), seeking to get a handle on the situation.

With nearly all communications systems with people on the ground crippled, live television became a primary information source. It was how the governor first heard about levee breaches and reports of extreme violence, particularly at the Superdome.

"The television stations were reporting that people were literally stepping over bodies and violence was out of control," said Blanco press secretary Denise Bottcher, who was at the governor's side. "But the National Guardsmen were saying that what we were seeing on CNN was contradictory to what they were seeing. It didn't match up."

In Gretna, La., a suburb of 17,500 across the Mississippi River from downtown New Orleans, officials fired a warning shot to keep about 5,000 people from entering by walking across a bridge connecting the two communities. The crowd retreated.

Gretna Mayor Ronnie Harris said his town has been unfairly labeled racist and defended the decision. His own residents, he said, did not have water, food or electricity after Katrina struck, and officials feared, partly because of what they had heard through word of mouth and from electronic news media, that its residents were in danger. A nearby mall had been burned the day before; officials think looters did it.
"We were going to protect the lives of our residents," he said. "It's impossible to know what happened unless you were here. At the time, you don't know what to believe, but you don't want to be in a place to find out if what you heard is true."

The morning that CNN reported about the Superdome helicopter shooting and Landrieu talked of sheriffs being killed, "Baton Rouge was in a near-panic," U.S. Attorney David R. Dugas recalled in an interview Friday. He said it was hard to keep track of all the rumors -- riots in the city's River Center, a shelter for 5,000 evacuees from New Orleans; a Wal-Mart robbed and all the guns stolen; opposing gangs rampaging in the streets. The stories ricocheted from television to all-news radio to officialdom to citizens and back again.
Police and sheriffs chased each one down: All were unfounded. In a hastily called news conference, Dugas and Baton Rouge's mayor and police chief pleaded with residents to resist believing the worst. Meanwhile, an East Baton Rouge Parish official begged the local radio station to screen calls before putting them live on the air to avoid spreading unconfirmed reports.Plausible Rumors

Although many of the displaced have been the recipients of overwhelming generosity, the rumors of violence have followed them to Houston, Salt Lake City and New Iberia, La. "You would hear that two people got into a fight at a red light and cut each other to death," said Iberia Parish Sheriff Sid Hebert. "It was all violent crime, rape and pillaging. But none of it was true."

To some in the public and in the news media, the images of barely checked violence in New Orleans, and its fleeing residents, seemed plausible. New Orleans is a violent city with an average of 200 homicides a year.

The scenes of poor black people engaged in lawlessness after such events as the acquittal of the police officers who beat Rodney King or the 1977 New York City blackout are depressingly familiar, said writer and social critic Stanley Crouch. "The public is accustomed to riotous behavior from black people in lower-class neighborhoods," he said. "Anybody who has looked at television over the last 40 years has seen black Americans tearing up places, looting places."

Finally, New Orleans was not crime-free in Katrina's aftermath. People were seen on television taking things from stores. Some were items to eat, drink or wear -- what the police call "essential items," for which people were not being arrested because the situation was so dire. Others took television sets, jewelry and guns.

Four New Orleans police officers have been suspended and one has been reassigned over allegations of looting, city police said. In the first three weeks after the storm, about 470 suspects were processed from New Orleans and adjacent Jefferson Parish. Half of them were arrested for looting, said Jim Letten, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana.

But there turned out to be little evidence to support CNN host Paula Zahn speaking of "reports" of "bands of rapists, going block to block," or New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin on national television, describing the scene as "animalistic."

In recent days, the retractions have begun. Then-Police Chief Eddie Compass appeared with Nagin on Sept. 6 on "The Oprah Winfrey Show." The mayor said people inside the Superdome had witnessed murders and rapes. Compass added that "little babies [are] getting raped." Both have since pulled back. "The information I had at the time, I thought was credible," Compass told the Times-Picayune last week before submitting his resignation. The paper had pointed out several inconsistencies in his statements.

Violent crimes with a weapon, such as aggravated battery, numbered only a few dozen, Letten said. Officials made arrests for a double homicide and two rapes in Jefferson Parish and one rape in Orleans Parish, said Pam Laborde of the Louisiana Department of Corrections. Federal agents arrested a man for shooting at a helicopter, on Sept. 5. But several officials, including Blanco, now believe that some of the gunfire people reported in the city was attempts to signal rescuers because residents have told them so.Setting the Record Straight
Maj. Bush of the Louisiana National Guard said he is glad the record is being corrected.

"I certainly saw fights, but I saw worse fights at a Cubs game in Chicago," he said. "The people never turned into these animals. They have been cheated out of being thought of as these tough people who looked out for each other. We had more babies born [in the Superdome] than we had deaths."
Media companies have begun to retrace their steps. The Los Angeles Times said last week that its story about the evacuation of the Superdome "adopted a breathless tone." Jonathan Klein, president of CNN/US, said reporting was challenging because official sources -- in particular Compass, the police chief -- initially confirmed many of the things reported on the air. As more information has become available, Klein said, the network has corrected the record and highlighted the danger of swirling rumors.

"We are ever vigilant about separating rumor from fact," Klein said. "This story is a good reminder of the need to do that."
Keith M. Woods, faculty dean at the Poynter Institute for journalists, is willing to cut reporters some slack. "Every institutional source for quality information was uprooted," said Woods, a New Orleans native whose father's and sister's homes were flooded. "It was different than 9/11 because everything was underwater, and you are relying totally on word of mouth. In that situation, invariably, we will get some things wrong. One of the questions that would have served us better is 'How do you know that?' "

Staff writers Lynne Duke and Ann Scott Tyson and researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company
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Just a little reminder that getting rid of individual pieces of scum does nothing to destroy the pond which produces the scum

2005-09-30T14:14:00.000-04:00

The Dispensable Man

By Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson
Friday, September 30, 2005; A19

Back when clouds began to gather around Tom DeLay, a White House source warned that the loss of "The Hammer" would be catastrophic. "It would be complete and total chaos," the source explained. "The House would descend into 'Lord of the Flies.' "

That's possible, but not likely, as the quick replacement of DeLay by his erstwhile sidekick, Roy Blunt, suggests. Commentators love personalities, especially ones as colorful as Tom DeLay's. But politics is also about building organizations, institutions and networks. And over the past 15 years, the Republicans have worked at the grass-roots and national levels to recruit and fund ultraconservative candidates and shift the electoral playing field in their favor. In Washington they have sought to build strong alliances with moneyed interests and perfect techniques to shield their most vulnerable members from public backlash -- all with remarkable success.

DeLay is one of the most important architects of this new power structure, but he's not essential to its continuance. Grover Norquist -- head of the conservative group Americans for Tax Reform and another key GOP power broker -- recently joked that if a bus ran him over, someone else could easily step into his place and assume his role and relationships. Some might see this as false modesty, but Norquist is right.

The same conclusion applies to DeLay. His role is crucial not because of who he is but because of where he sits -- at the intersection of money, organization and influence. What Tom DeLay does is vital. Tom DeLay himself is not.

Indeed, the GOP majority has repeatedly moved quickly -- once it decided to move -- to throw a discredited leader overboard and replace him with the person best placed to play the same part. DeLay joins the ranks of Gingrich, Armey, Lott and Livingston -- leaders who have capsized without causing more than a ripple. Despite speculation that the GOP is splitting between "moderates" and "hard conservatives," House Republicans are likely to coalesce rapidly around the new leadership.

After all, the defining characteristic of the House GOP since 1994 has been its coordination. Defying all precedent in modern American politics, Republicans have operated as a near-parliamentary party. They have given the leadership enormous control over the legislative agenda, over the party's message, over committee assignments, and over the crafting of legislation.

This has been possible in large part because hard-core conservatives constitute the overwhelming majority of the Republican Party in the House. But it's also been possible because the system has delivered. The GOP's electoral margins have been razor thin, but coordination has enabled Republicans to consolidate power and patronage, to pursue an extremely conservative agenda with surprising (though not unlimited) success, and to protect loyal members.

The examples are endless, but two suggest the whole. The Republican leaders play a game called "catch and release," in which they allow moderate Republicans to vote against conservative GOP legislation, thereby burnishing their reputations for "independence" -- but only once it's clear that the leadership has a majority. Along with their Senate compatriots, House leaders have also perfected their use of conference committees (which are supposed to "merge" House and Senate bills) to shift legislation to the right and then slam it through Congress on an up-or-down vote.

Like DeLay, Blunt has been a major player in a key part of this new regime: the aggressive effort of GOP leaders to induce powerful private interests to work with and through them. In tandem with the White House, the leadership has encouraged major elements of the Republican coalition -- both politicians and organized interests -- to act as a team. Cooperation with the leadership is the price of access.

Not all of these efforts have been successful, but they've increased the willingness of key groups to cooperate with the GOP, which has enhanced the ability of Republican leaders to deliver the goods.

This edifice of power looks more vulnerable today than at any time in the past decade. But the House Republican leadership won't go down without a fight. Roy Blunt is a product and an experienced practitioner of contemporary GOP politics, and his rise to power promises more of the same. House Republicans may be ready to dump their beloved dance partner, but they aren't likely to change their steps.

Jacob S. Hacker, a fellow at the New America Foundation, is an associate professor of political science at Yale University. Paul Pierson is a professor of political science at the University of California at Berkeley. They are the authors of "Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy."

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

I'm shocked...

2005-09-30T09:36:00.000-04:00

You are an Atheist

When it comes to religion, you're a non-believer (simple as that).
You prefer to think about what's known and proven.
You don't need religion to solve life's problems.
Instead, you tend to work things out with logic and philosophy.

What's Your Religious Philosophy?

Slow Friday...

2005-09-30T09:32:00.000-04:00

This one seems pretty dead on

You scored as Existentialist. Existentialism emphasizes human capability. There is no greater power interfering with life and thus it is up to us to make things happen. Sometimes considered a negative and depressing world view, your optimism towards human accomplishment is immense. Mankind is condemned to be free and must accept the responsibility.

Existentialist

94%

Materialist

81%

Modernist

75%

Postmodernist

38%

Cultural Creative

25%

Idealist

Romanticist

Fundamentalist

What is Your World View? (updated)
created with QuizFarm.com

Now this one I saw coming....

2005-09-30T09:20:00.000-04:00

What Classic Movie Are You?
personality tests by similarminds.com

I'm a laid back guy who faces assissination...................hey the dudes in Easy Rider were killed also. I'm not sure I like this trend...................

Looks like I found out how I'm gonna die......didn't see that coming

2005-09-30T09:10:00.000-04:00

What Famous Leader Are You?
personality tests by similarminds.com

Love those personality tests....................

One Indictment down...........hopefull much more to come

2005-09-28T16:46:00.000-04:00

DeLay Indicted in Campaign Finance ProbeRep. Roy Blunt Selected to Fill Majority Leader Role on Temporary Basis

By William Branigin, Amy Goldstein and R. Jeffrey SmithWashington Post Staff WritersWednesday, September 28, 2005; 4:30 PM

A Texas grand jury today indicted Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) on a criminal count of conspiring with two political associates to violate state campaign finance law, and DeLay announced he was temporarily stepping down as House majority leader.
DeLay later denounced the charge against him as "reckless," and he acerbically blasted the Democratic district attorney prosecuting the case as "an unabashed partisan zealot" seeking revenge for Democratic political defeats in Texas.

House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), emerging from a meeting with House GOP leaders, announced that Rep. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), the Republican whip, was elected to assume DeLay's role as majority leader on a temporary basis. Hastert also said some duties would be transferred to Rep. David Dreier (R-Calif.), the Rules Committee chairman, and Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), the deputy whip.

The indictment was disclosed in Travis County, Tex., on the last day of a grand jury investigating a campaign financing scheme involving allegedly illegal use of corporate funds.
DeLay, 58, attended a meeting in Hastert's office shortly after receiving word of the indictment and said afterward he notified Hastert that he would "temporarily step aside" as majority leader. GOP House rules require that any member of Congress who is indicted must step down from a leadership position. However, there is no requirement that DeLay leave his congressional seat.

"In accordance with the rules of the House Republican Conference, I will temporarily step aside as floor leader in order to win exoneration from these baseless charges," DeLay told reporters.

"This morning, in an act of blatant political partisanship, a rogue district attorney in Travis County, Texas, named Ronnie Earle charged me with one count of criminal conspiracy: a reckless charge wholly unsupported by the facts," DeLay said, reading from a prepared statement. "This is one of the weakest, most baseless indictments in American history. It's a sham and Mr. Earle knows it."

He went on to call Earle a "partisan fanatic" who was conducting a "vengeful investigation" as part of a "coordinated, premeditated campaign of political retribution."

DeLay said, "I have done nothing wrong. I have violated no law, no regulation, no rule of the House. I have done nothing unlawful, unethical or, I might add, unprecedented. . . . My defense in this case will not be technical or legalistic; it will be categorical and absolute. I am innocent. Mr. Earle and his staff know it. And I will prove it." DeLay did not answer questions at the end of his six-minute statement.

Earle, speaking to reporters earlier in Austin, refused to comment on criticism by DeLay's representatives or to go into details about the evidence against the congressman.

"Our job is to prosecute abuses of power," Earle said.
Hastert said after the vote on DeLay's temporary successor that "he will fight this, and we will give him our utmost support." He said the House has important work to do, necessitating a replacement for DeLay.

Blunt, the GOP whip in the House, said DeLay was targeted "largely because of his effectiveness" as majority leader. "I will act as temporary leader, and Tom will come back as leader" after he is exonerated, Blunt said. He called the indictment "terribly unfair."

The indictment accuses DeLay of criminally conspiring to inject illegal corporate contributions into 2002 state elections that helped the Republican Party reorder the congressional map in Texas and cement its control of the House of Representatives in Washington.

The four-page indictment alleged for the first time that DeLay himself participated in a conspiracy with others to funnel corporate money into the 2002 state election "with the intent that a felony be committed."

In the indictment, DeLay is accused of conspiring with two associates: John D. Colyandro, the former executive director of a political action committee in Texas that was formed by DeLay, and James W. Ellis, the head of DeLay's national political committee. Colyandro and Ellis had previously been charged in an indictment that did not name DeLay.

DeLay helped organize the Texas election fundraising effort at the core of today's indictment, Texans for a Republican Majority. The committee itself was indicted on Sept. 8 for accepting illegal corporate funds. Eight corporations and an industry lobbying group have also been indicted during the 34-month probe.

The indictment charges that DeLay entered "into an agreement" with Colyandro and Ellis to circumvent the state's ban on corporate contributions by arranging for the donations to be sent first to an arm of the Republican National Committee in Washington, and then back to Republican candidates in Texas named on a written list prepared in Texas.
According to the indictment, DeLay, Colyandro and Ellis conspired to make a political contribution in violation of the Texas Election Code for the benefit of candidates for the Texas House of Representatives. Colyandro formerly directed the Texans for a Republican Majority Political Action Committee, known as TRMPAC.

"This is a political vendetta," said Kevin Madden, a spokesman for DeLay. "They could not get Tom DeLay at the polls," he said, apparently referring to the powerful Republican leader's political enemies. "Now they're trying to get him in court."
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said today that President Bush still views DeLay as a "good ally" and "a leader we have worked closely with to get things done for the American people." McClellan added, "The president's view is that we need to let the legal process work."

In the House, Rep. Kenny Marchant, a freshman Republican from Dallas, said, "I'm very disappointed in the indictments," Washington Post staff writer Charles Babington reported. Marchant told reporters the charges were partisan and expressed confidence that DeLay would be fully cleared.
Asked what steps the party would take, he said, "We're all waiting for something from the speaker." He said he had no comment on whether the indictment would harm the Republican Party.

A lawyer for DeLay, Bill White, denounced the charge against his client as a "skunky indictment" that "stinks to high heaven."

Earle, the district attorney, refused to comment on White's characterization of the indictment or to provide any details of the case against DeLay.

He did not reply directly when asked if he had sought money-laundering charges against DeLay, saying only that "the grand jury returned indictments that the grand jury felt were appropriate."

"The investigation is continuing," he said. Although the grand jury that returned the indictments leaves office today, he said, it was "entirely possible" that a new grand jury would take up the matter.

The conspiracy charge against DeLay carries a potential penalty of six months to two years in state prison and a fine of up to $100,000. DeLay, unlike the two others named in the indictment Wednesday, was not charged with money-laundering, an offense that can bring a 10-year prison term.
One of the other alleged conspirators, Ellis, is still a director of DeLay's principal fundraising committee, Americans for a Republican Majority, which provided the seed money for the Texas offshoot in 2001. The other, Colyandro, is a veteran of White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove's former direct-mail firm.

The facts of the central transactions at issue in the case -- the transfer to Washington in September 2002 of $190,000 in corporate funds collected by the committee in Texas and the subsequent donation of those funds to seven Texas House candidates on Oct. 4, 2002 -- have never been at issue. A copy of the relevant check has long been in the prosecutor's hands.
DeLay, an 11-term congressman from the Houston area, was elected majority whip in 1994 and became House majority leader in November 2002. His tough tactics in keeping his party in line and opponents at bay have earned him the nickname, "The Hammer."

With DeLay under fire for three admonishments by the House ethics committee on separate issues, and amid concerns about the grand jury investigation in Texas, House Republicans changed a rule in November 2004 so that DeLay could keep his leadership post in the event he were indicted. But intense criticism forced House Republicans to scuttle the change two months later.

Ellis, Colyandro and another DeLay associate and fundraiser, Warren RoBold, were originally indicted in September 2004 on charges involving the alleged illegal use of corporate funds to aid GOP candidates for the Texas state legislature in the 2002 elections.

Two weeks ago, the grand jury in Travis County issued an expanded indictment against Colyandro and Ellis that included new charges of criminal conspiracy, as well as felony charges of violating Texas election law.

Under Texas law, corporate contributions cannot legally be used to campaign politically for the election or defeat of state legislative candidates.

The fundraising activities behind the case were aimed at achieving the key DeLay goal of assuring Republican control of the Texas legislature, enabling the body to redraw the state's 32 U.S. House districts in a way likely to secure more victories by GOP congressional candidates and an expanded House majority for the party.

That goal was achieved after the Texas legislature redrew the boundaries in a controversial redistricting in 2003, leading to the defeat of several Democratic House incumbents in the November 2004 elections.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company
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No Monkey to Man Business

2005-09-28T12:59:00.000-04:00

Intimidation Alleged On 'Intelligent Design'Teacher Cites School Board Pressure

By Michael PowellWashington Post Staff WriterWednesday, September 28, 2005; A03

HARRISBURG, Pa., Sept. 27 -- Parents in federal court Tuesday described an atmosphere of intimidation and anger when school board members in Dover, Pa., last year decided to require high school biology teachers to read a statement that casts doubt on the theory of evolution.

Bryan Rehm, a parent who also taught physics at Dover High School, testified of continual pressure from board members not to "teach monkeys-to-man evolution." He said that the board required teachers to watch a film critical of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and that board members talked openly of teaching creationism alongside evolution.

The atmosphere became so heated that neighbors began to call him an "atheist with . . . a lot of words added on to it," Rehm said. He said that "it was turning into a real zoo" and that students were quarreling about evolution.

Rehm is one of 11 people from Dover, a small town south of Harrisburg, who want to block their school board from requiring the reading of that four-paragraph statement that criticizes evolutionary theory. The statement notes that "intelligent design" offers an alternative theory for the origin and evolution of life -- namely, that life in all of its complexity could not have arisen without the help of an intelligent hand.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania and Americans United for Separation of Church and State are representing the parents, along with lawyers from Pepper Hamilton LLP.

Advocates of intelligent design, who include a small band of scientists and philosophers, are silent on whether that intelligent hand belongs to God or perhaps some other being.

"It will be clear that this isn't about religion," said Allan Bonsell, 45, a school board member who has attended the opening two days of the trial. "We're not teaching intelligent design. We're making the kids aware of it."

Sworn testimony as well as two newspaper accounts note that Bonsell and other board members dismissed the separation of church and state as a myth, and initially favored equally teaching creationism and evolution. Bonsell and the board members have denied making these statements or have said they were misquoted. The board meetings were taped, but the tapes apparently were destroyed.

U.S. District Judge John E. Jones directed reporters with two local newspapers, the York Dispatch and the York Daily Record, to testify about what was said in open meetings. The two reporters have declined, citing reportorial privilege, and could face penalties including jail time on Wednesday.

The board's lawyers have framed the case as one of free inquiry. They note that college classes -- including those taught by a key witness for the plaintiffs -- often make students aware of intelligent design, if only to dismiss it. Why, they ask, shouldn't the same hold for high school?

"Compromises have been made -- this is not being taught in class," said Richard Thompson, whose Thomas More Law Center represents the board. "We don't advocate teaching intelligent design at this point."

Rehm had a different bottom line. Intelligent design, he said, is inherently religious -- a view shared by many scientists. And, he added: "Nine board members without degrees in science should not be dictating science curriculum."

© 2005 The Washington Post Company
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This shit just gets crazier and crazier

2005-09-28T12:54:00.000-04:00

3 Charged in Killing Of Fla. BusinessmanBoulis Slain After 2000 Abramoff Deal

By Susan Schmidt and James V. GrimaldiWashington Post Staff WritersWednesday, September 28, 2005; A03

Fort Lauderdale police said yesterday that they charged three men in the 2001 gangland-style slaying of a Florida businessman who was gunned down in his car months after selling a casino cruise line to a group that included Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

Konstantinos "Gus" Boulis was killed on a Fort Lauderdale street on Feb. 6, 2001. Two of the three men charged had been hired as consultants by Adam Kidan, one of Abramoff's partners in the SunCruz Casinos venture.

Anthony Moscatiello, 67, identified by authorities as a former bookkeeper for the Gambino crime family, was arrested Monday night in Queens, N.Y. Anthony Ferrari, 48, was arrested in Miami Beach. Both were charged with murder, conspiracy and solicitation to commit murder. James Fiorillo, 28, was arrested in Palm Coast, Fla., yesterday and charged with murder and conspiracy.

Boulis, millionaire founder of the Miami Subs sandwich chain, sold SunCruz to Abramoff and Kidan in September 2000, at a time when Abramoff was one of Washington's most powerful lobbyists. Abramoff and Kidan were indicted last month on charges of wire fraud and conspiracy in connection with a $60 million loan they obtained to purchase the casino company.
Abramoff is at the center of a federal investigation into lobbying for Indian tribes and influence-peddling in Washington. Abramoff used contacts with GOP Reps. Tom DeLay (Tex.) and Robert W. Ney (Ohio) and their staffs as he worked to land the SunCruz deal, interviews and court records show.

The indictment in the Boulis slaying remained under seal yesterday, and authorities declined to disclose details of the charges against the defendants. Michael D. Becker, a Miami lawyer who has represented the men in other matters, said yesterday that he has not spoken to them yet.

Attorneys for Kidan and Abramoff said their clients have no knowledge about who killed Boulis. The two men were on a business trip abroad the night Boulis was shot. "Adam has cooperated with police right from the beginning. He's never been told he is a subject or a target," said Kidan's attorney, Martin Jaffe.

Fort Lauderdale police say they have long been interested in interviewing Abramoff, but he has repeatedly begged off, citing scheduling difficulties. Abramoff's attorney, Neal Sonnett, said after the fraud indictment that his client knows nothing about the slaying but would be willing to meet with detectives. He said he had no comment on the murder charges.

Abramoff and Kidan have been friends since their days as College Republicans in Washington. Kidan, of New York, owned the Dial-a-Mattress franchise in the District until it filed for bankruptcy in the 1990s. Their third partner in the SunCruz deal was Reagan administration official Ben Waldman.

Dealings between Boulis and the Abramoff group were often tense. At key points in the negotiations, Ney placed comments in the Congressional Record -- first sharply criticizing Boulis and later praising the new ownership under Kidan. Ney later said he had been unaware of Kidan's background.
Also during the negotiations, Abramoff brought a lender he was trying to impress to hobnob with DeLay in Abramoff's FedEx Field skybox at a Redskins-Cowboys game. DeLay has said he does not remember meeting the lender.

After the sale, the friction led to a December 2000 fistfight between Kidan and Boulis, who had remained as a minority partner. Kidan told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel that Boulis had said, "I'm not going to sue you, I'm going to kill you." Kidan said that SunCruz thereafter barred Boulis from its casino boats.

Homicide detectives have been investigating payments made to Moscatiello, his daughter and Ferrari in the months before the killing. SunCruz paid $145,000 to Moscatiello and his daughter for catering, consulting and "site inspections," Kidan said in a 2001 civil court deposition.

There is no evidence that food or drink was provided or that any consulting documents were prepared, according to court documents. The checks to Jennifer Moscatiello were made at Anthony Moscatiello's instruction, although his daughter provided no services for the money, Kidan said in his deposition.

Moscatiello was indicted on federal heroin-trafficking charges in 1983 along with Gene Gotti, brother of John Gotti, then head of the Gambino family. Gene Gotti and several others were sent to prison, but the charges against Moscatiello were later dropped.

Kidan met Moscatiello in 1990 while he was running New York City's Best Bagels in the Hamptons and Moscatiello was running a catering hall. Moscatiello provided Kidan advice on running the business. Kidan said in a deposition that he was unaware of Moscatiello's 1983 indictment or his affiliations with the Gottis.

SunCruz also paid a company called Moon Over Miami Beach Inc. $95,000 for surveillance services in 2001. Ferrari is a principal in Moon Over Miami Beach. Ferrari and several associates also reportedly received $10,000 in SunCruz casino chips.

Kidan has denied that the SunCruz payments to Moscatiello and Ferrari had anything to do with the slaying. In 2001, he told the Miami Herald: "If I'm going to pay to have Gus killed, am I going to be writing checks to the killers? I don't think so. Why would I leave a paper trail?"

Abramoff and Kidan were indicted last month by a federal grand jury in Fort Lauderdale on five counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy relating to their $147.5 million SunCruz purchase. Prosecutors alleged that Abramoff and Kidan faked a wire transfer of $23 million -- the down payment they had agreed to put into the deal for the day-cruise casino boats.

In civil filings in the bankruptcy of SunCruz, Abramoff blamed Kidan for defrauding lenders. Kidan has said the lenders were aware that the buyers were not actually putting up the $23 million in cash for the purchase. Their trial is scheduled for Jan. 9.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company
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Dylan & Scorcese

2005-09-26T09:08:00.000-04:00

'No Direction': Scorsese Points The Way to Dylan

By Ann HornadayWashington Post Staff WriterMonday, September 26, 2005; C01

"No Direction Home" represents a great musical-cinematic summit, as no less than the great Martin Scorsese directs -- with superb control and judgment -- what surely qualifies as the definitive documentary about Bob Dylan. "No Direction Home" will be broadcast in two parts tonight and tomorrow night on PBS's "American Masters" series, and in the bargain viewers get two masters -- one a hugely influential singer and songwriter with a canny, thoroughly American knack for self-invention and the other a filmmaker with a thumb (to recycle an encomium Dylan has dodged throughout his career) firmly on the pulse of his generation.

It's a happy collaboration. "No Direction Home" offers a lively, absorbing, often deeply moving account of how Robert Zimmerman from the small mining town of Hibbing, Minn., became -- through talent, luck and calculating ambition -- the musician, icon and enigma we know as Bob Dylan. Wisely, Scorsese limits his scope to the early years, from Dylan's birth in 1941 to 1966, when he outraged fans and folk purists by going electric. The result isn't a comprehensive compendium of factoids or deep dish -- there's precious little personal information related in the 207-minute running time -- but instead a tightly focused portrait of a young artist searching for his musical and professional identity and whose search happened to bring him to the very center of the American political and cultural zeitgeist.

Most of the facts of Zimmerman's journey to Dylan are well known by now, thanks to endless hagiographic deconstructions of his life and to his own well-regarded autobiography, which came out last year. So Scorsese -- who long ago earned his rock-doc bona fides with "The Last Waltz," about the Band -- wisely structures "No Direction Home" around a central tension, in this case the startlingly hostile reception Dylan received when he toured with the Band (then called the Hawks) in Britain in 1966. When those concerts were released in 1998 as part of Dylan's ongoing "Bootleg" recording series, fans heard the famous "Judas!" episode, when a fan yelled the epithet at Dylan and the appalled singer responded with, "I don't believe you!" then ripped into a blistering version of "Like a Rolling Stone."

That song, with fans booing all the way through, opens "No Direction Home," and Scorsese returns to those contentious concerts throughout the film. They not only provide much-needed narrative tension but the ideal leitmotif for an artist who for so long has engaged in an ambivalent gavotte with his fans, as interested in courting them as he is in confounding them. "No Direction Home" gets to the heart of that ambivalence, with Dylan -- a famous trickster who began to mythologize his past almost as soon as he got to Greenwich Village in 1961 -- at least appearing to provide some straight answers to what has driven him all these years. Scorsese also interviews Dylan's longtime friends, collaborators and mentors, among them Dave Van Ronk, Liam Clancy, Maria Muldaur and Joan Baez, who recounts her personal and professional power struggles with Dylan with tart, candid affection. (One question: Where's Robbie Robertson?)

Dylan has been the subject of documentaries before, most famously in D.A. Pennebaker's 1967 "Don't Look Back." Scorsese avails himself of clips from that film, as well as Pennebaker's rarely seen "Eat the Document" and Murray Lerner's "Festival," about the Newport Folk Festival (there's footage of Dylan's notorious first electric set at the 1965 festival, but none of the legendary and probably apocryphal fistfight between folklorist Alan Lomax and Dylan manager Albert Grossman). Perhaps only a director of Scorsese's caliber could have produced not just a fascinating portrait of Dylan's meteoric rise but a vivid social history and an obliquely witty examination of the packaging and marketing of the folk craze in the 1960s (some scenes seem plucked directly from Christopher Guest's satire "A Mighty Wind"). It should be noted that the director, with editor David Tedeschi, accomplishes all of this without the crutch of narration; the only time you hear a voice-over is when Scorsese reads a speech that Dylan wrote but never delivered when he received an award from the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee in 1963.

But the most valuable material, by far, is that of Dylan's less publicized influences -- not only Woody Guthrie but Odetta, Leadbelly, Webb Pierce and John Jacob Niles -- as well as early scenes, such as a 1963 performance of "Man of Constant Sorrow," in which an impossibly green kid from Hibbing seems literally to be finding his voice and the persona that would undergo so many transformations in successive years. Then there are the occasional grace notes, such as a goosebump-inducing duet with Johnny Cash on "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry."

Throughout "No Direction Home," Dylan emerges as a cultural magpie -- he calls himself "a musical expeditionary" -- who is constantly reaching back into the canon even while he reinvents it, and his own songs, again and again. During one of several painful encounters with a clueless 1960s press corps, Dylan -- by then a reluctant mascot for the antiwar and civil rights movements -- is asked whether he considers himself the voice of his generation. "I think of myself as a song-and-dance man," he says simply. Gracefully interweaving Dylan's artistry and ambition, "No Direction Home" puts him in his rightful place, not only alongside America's greatest poets and visionaries but also its showmen; he's an heir to Guthrie and Jack Kerouac, it's true, but there's a playful tip of the hat as well to such archetypal entertainers as Stephen Foster, George M. Cohan and P.T. Barnum.

"No Direction Home" ends on an electrifying note, literally and figuratively, as viewers see for the first time on-screen the famous Judas performance; the moment -- defiant, thrilling and deeply emotional -- is a triumphant conclusion to a story that, gratifyingly, hasn't ended. In a postscript, Scorsese informs viewers that after his motorcycle accident in the summer of 1966, Dylan stopped touring for eight years. What the filmmaker might have added is that then, he never stopped.

No Direction Home airs at 9 p.m. on Channel 26 (90 minutes tonight; two hours tomorrow night) and on Maryland Public Television (two hours each night).

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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The more things change, the more they stay the same

2005-09-26T09:02:00.000-04:00

Evolution Debate Heads to Pa. Court
By MARTHA RAFFAELEThe Associated PressMonday, September 26, 2005; 4:29 AM

HARRISBURG, Pa. -- Eighty years after the Scopes Monkey Trial, the latest legal chapter in the debate over the teaching of evolution in public schools is to unfold in federal court.

The Dover Area School District on Monday was to start defending its policy of requiring ninth-grade students hear about "intelligent design" before biology lessons on evolution.

Dover is believed to be the first school system in the nation to require students be exposed to the concept under a policy adopted by a 6-3 vote in October 2004.

Intelligent design, a concept some scholars have advanced over the past 15 years, holds that Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection cannot fully explain the origin of life or the emergence of highly complex life forms. It implies that life on Earth was the product of an unidentified intelligent force.
Critics say intelligent design is merely creationism _ a literal reading of the Bible's story of creation _ camouflaged in scientific language, and it does not belong in a science curriculum. Eight Dover families are suing the school district, alleging that the policy violates the constitutional separation of church and state.

"The intelligent-design movement is an effort to introduce creationism into the schools under a different name," said Eric Rothschild, a Philadelphia attorney representing the families.

The history of evolution litigation dates back to the famous 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, in which Tennessee biology teacher John T. Scopes was fined $100 for violating a state law that forbade teaching evolution. The Tennessee Supreme Court reversed his conviction on the narrow ground that only a jury trial could impose a fine exceeding $50, and the law was repealed in 1967.
In 1968, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned an Arkansas state law banning the teaching of evolution. And in 1987, it ruled that states may not require public schools to balance evolution lessons by teaching creationism.

The clash over intelligent-design is evident far beyond this rural district of about 3,500 students 20 miles south of Harrisburg. President Bush has weighed in, saying schools should present both concepts when teaching about the origins of life.

In August, the Kansas Board of Education gave preliminary approval to science standards that allow intelligent design-style alternatives to be discussed alongside evolution.

Richard Thompson, president and chief counsel of the Thomas More Law Center, which lobbies for the religious freedom of Christians and is defending the school district, said Dover's policy takes a modest approach.

It requires teachers to read a statement that says intelligent design differs from Darwin's view and refers students to an intelligent-design textbook, "Of Pandas and People," for more information.

"All the Dover school board did was allow students to get a glimpse of a controversy that is really boiling over in the scientific community," Thompson said.

The Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based think tank that represents many scholars who support intelligent design, opposes mandating it in public schools. Nevertheless, it considers the Dover lawsuit an attempt to squelch voluntary debates over evolution.

"It's Scopes in reverse. They're going to get a gag order to be placed on teachers across the country," said institute senior fellow John West.
Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, which supports the teaching of evolution in public schools, said the controversy has little to do with science because mainstream scientists have rejected intelligent-design theory.

Intelligent design supporters "seem to have shifted virtually entirely to political and rhetorical efforts to sway the general public," Scott said. "The bitter truth is that there is no argument going on in the scientific community about whether evolution took place."

Who needs experience, when you can get the job by simply following orders and ignoring evidence....

2005-09-25T11:05:00.000-04:00

More important to appoint loyalists to Bush then loyalists to America.........

How Many More Mike Browns are out There?A TIME inquiry finds that at top positions in some vital government agencies, the Bush Administration is putting connections before experience

By KAREN TUMULTY, MARK THOMPSON AND MIKE ALLEN I WASHINGTON

In Presidential politics, the victor always gets the spoils, and chief among them is the vast warren of offices that make up the federal bureaucracy. Historically, the U.S. public has never paid much attention to the people the President chooses to sit behind those thousands of desks. A benign cronyism is more or less presumed, with old friends and big donors getting comfortable positions and impressive titles, and with few real consequences for the nation. But then came Michael Brown. When President Bush's former point man on disasters was discovered to have more expertise about the rules of Arabian horse competition than about the management of a catastrophe, it was a reminder that the competence of government officials who are not household names can have a life or death impact. The Brown debacle has raised pointed questions about whether political connections, not qualifications, have helped an unusually high number of Bush appointees land vitally important jobs in the Federal Government.

The Bush Administration didn't invent cronyism; John F. Kennedy turned the Justice Department over to his brother, while Bill Clinton gave his most ambitious domestic policy initiative to his wife. Jimmy Carter made his old friend Bert Lance his budget director, only to see him hauled in front of the Senate to answer questions on his past banking practices in Georgia, and George H.W. Bush deposited so many friends at the Commerce Department that the agency was known internally as "Bush Gardens." The difference is that this Bush Administration had a plan from day one for remaking the bureaucracy, and has done so with greater success.

As far back as the Florida recount, soon-to-be Vice President Dick Cheney was poring over organizational charts of the government with an eye toward stocking it with people sympathetic to the incoming Administration. Clay Johnson III, Bush's former Yale roommate and the Administration's chief architect of personnel, recalls preparing for the inner circle's first trip from Austin, Texas, to Washington: "We were standing there getting ready to get on a plane, looking at each other like: Can you believe what we're getting ready to do?" The Office of Personnel Management's Plum Book, published at the start of each presidential Administration, shows that there are more than 3,000 positions a President can fill without consideration for civil service rules. And Bush has gone further than most Presidents to put political stalwarts in some of the most important government jobs you've never heard of, and to give them genuine power over the bureaucracy. "These folks are really good at using the instruments of government to promote the President's political agenda," says Paul Light, a professor of public service at New York University and a well-known expert on the machinery of government. "And I think that takes you well into the gray zone where few Presidents have dared to go in the past. It's the coordination and centralization that's important here."

The White House makes no apologies for organizing government in a way that makes it easier to carry out Bush's agenda. Johnson says the centralization is "very intentional, and it starts with the people you pick ... They're there to implement the President's priorities." Johnson asserts that appointees are chosen on merit, with political credentials used only as a tie breaker between qualified people. "Everybody knows somebody," he says. "Were they appointed because they knew somebody? No. What we focused on is: Does the government work, and can it be caused to work better and more responsibly? ... We want the programs to work." But across the government, some experienced civil servants say they are being shut out of the decision making at their agencies. "It depresses people, right down to the level of a clerk-typist," says Leo Bosner, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA's) largest union. "The senior to mid-level managers have really been pushed into a corner career-wise."

Some of the appointments are raising serious concerns in the agencies themselves and on Capitol Hill about the competence and independence of agencies that the country relies on to keep us safe, healthy and secure. Internal e-mail messages obtained by Time show that scientists' drug-safety decisions at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are being second-guessed by a 33-year-old doctor turned stock picker. At the Office of Management and Budget, an ex-lobbyist with minimal purchasing experience oversaw $300 billion in spending, until his arrest last week. At the Department of Homeland Security, an agency the Administration initially resisted, a well-connected White House aide with minimal experience is poised to take over what many consider the single most crucial post in ensuring that terrorists do not enter the country again. And who is acting as watchdog at every federal agency? A corps of inspectors general who may be increasingly chosen more for their political credentials than their investigative ones.

Nowhere in the federal bureaucracy is it more important to insulate government experts from the influences of politics and special interests than at the Food and Drug Administration, the agency charged with assuring the safety of everything from new vaccines and dietary supplements to animal feed and hair dye. That is why many within the department, as well as in the broader scientific community, were startled when, in July, Scott Gottlieb was named deputy commissioner for medical and scientific affairs, one of three deputies in the agency's second-ranked post at FDA.

His official FDA biography notes that Gottlieb, 33, who got his medical degree at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, did a previous stint providing policy advice at the agency, as well as at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and was a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. What the bio omits is that his most recent job was as editor of a popular Wall Street newsletter, the Forbes/Gottlieb Medical Technology Investor, in which he offered such tips as "Three Biotech Stocks to Buy Now." In declaring Gottlieb a "noted authority" who had written more than 300 policy and medical articles, the biography neglects the fact that many of those articles criticized the FDA for being too slow to approve new drugs and too quick to issue warning letters when it suspects ones already on the market might be unsafe. FDA Commissioner Lester Crawford, who resigned suddenly and without explanation last Friday, wrote in response to e-mailed questions that Gottlieb is "talented and smart, and I am delighted to have been able to recruit him back to the agency to help me fulfill our public-health goals." But others, including Jimmy Carter-era FDA Commissioner Donald Kennedy, a former Stanford University president and now executive editor-in-chief of the journal Science, say Gottlieb breaks the mold of appointees at that level who are generally career FDA scientists or experts well known in their field. "The appointment comes out of nowhere. I've never seen anything like that," says Kennedy.

Gottlieb's financial ties to the drug industry were at one time quite extensive. Upon taking his new job, he recused himself for up to a year from any deliberations involving nine companies that are regulated by the FDA and "where a reasonable person would question my impartiality in the matter." Among them are Eli Lilly, Roche and Proctor & Gamble, according to his Aug. 5 "Disqualification Statement Regarding Former Clients," a copy of which was obtained by Time. Gottlieb, though, insists that his role at the agency is limited to shaping broad policies, such as improving communication between the FDA, doctors and patients, and developing a strategy for dealing with pandemics of such diseases as flu, West Nile virus and sars. Would he ever be involved in determining whether an individual drug should be on the market? "Of course not," Gottlieb told Time. "Not only wouldn't I be involved in that ... But I would not be in a situation where I would be adjudicating the scientific or medical expertise of the (FDA) on a review matter. That's not my role. It's not my expertise. We defer to the career staff to make scientific and medical decisions."
Behind the scenes, however, Gottlieb has shown an interest in precisely those kinds of deliberations. One instance took place on Sept. 15, when the FDA decided to stop the trial of a drug for multiple sclerosis during which three people had developed an unusual disorder in which their bodies eliminated their blood platelets and one died of intracerebral bleeding as a result. In an e-mail obtained by Time, Gottlieb speculated that the complication might have been the result of the disease and not the drug. "Just seems like an overreaction to place a clinical hold" on the trial, he wrote. An FDA scientist rejected his analysis and replied that the complication "seems very clearly a drug-related event." Two days prior, when word broke that the FDA had sent a "non-approvable" letter to Pfizer Inc., formally rejecting its Oporia drug for osteoporosis, senior officials at the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research received copies of an e-mail from Gottlieb expressing his surprise that what he thought would be a routine approval had been turned down. Gottlieb asked for an explanation.

Gottlieb defends his e-mails, which were circulated widely at the FDA. "Part of my job is to ask questions both so I understand how the agency works, and how it reaches its decisions," he told Time. However, a scientist at the agency said they "really confirmed people's worst fears that he was only going to be happy if we were acting in a way that would make the pharmaceutical industry happy." The Oporia decision gave Pfizer plenty of reason to be unhappy: the drug had been expected to produce $1 billion a year in sales for the company. Pfizer's stock fell 1.4% the day the rejection was announced. The FDA has not revealed why it rejected the drug, and Pfizer has said it is "considering various courses of action" that might resuscitate its application for approval. Health experts note that Gottlieb's appointment comes at a time of increased tension between the agency and drug companies, which are concerned that new drugs will have a more difficult time making it onto the market in the wake of the type of safety problems that persuaded Merck to pull its best-selling painkiller Vioxx from the market last year. The agency's independence has also come under question, most recently with its decision last month to prevent the emergency contraceptive known as Plan B from being sold over the counter, after an FDA advisory panel recommended it could be. That Gottlieb sits at the second tier of the agency, critics say, sends anything but a reassuring signal.

David Safavian didn't have much hands-on experience in government contracting when the Bush Administration tapped him in 2003 to be its chief procurement officer. A law-school internship helping the Pentagon buy helicopters was about the extent of it. Yet as administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, Safavian, 38, was placed in charge of the $300 billion the government spends each year on everything from paper clips to nuclear submarines, as well as the $62 billion already earmarked for Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts. It was his job to ensure that the government got the most for its money and that competition for federal contracts—among companies as well as between government workers and private contractors—was fair. It was his job until he resigned on Sept. 16 and was subsequently arrested and charged with lying and obstructing a criminal investigation into Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff's dealings with the Federal Government.
Safavian spent the bulk of his pregovernment career as a lobbyist, and his nomination to a top oversight position stunned the tightly knit federal procurement community. A dozen procurement experts interviewed by Time said he was the most unqualified person to hold the job since its creation in 1974. Most of those who held the post before Safavian were well-versed in the arcane world of federal contracts. "Safavian is a good example of a person who had great party credentials but no substantive credentials," says Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit Washington watchdog group. "It's one of the most powerful positions in terms of impacting what the government does, and the kind of job—like FEMA director—that needs to be filled by a professional." Nevertheless, Safavian's April 2004 confirmation hearing before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee (attended by only five of the panel's 17 members) lasted just 67 minutes, and not a single question was asked about his qualifications.
The committee did hold up Safavian's confirmation for a year, in part because of concerns about work his lobbying firm, Janus-Merritt Strategies, had done that he was required to divulge to the panel but failed to. The firm's filings showed that it represented two men suspected of links to terrorism (Safavian said one of the men was "erroneously listed," and the other's omission was an "inadvertent error") as well as two suspect African regimes. Ultimately, the committee and the full Senate unanimously approved Safavian for the post.
His political clout, federal procurement experts say privately, came from his late-1990s lobbying partnership with Grover Norquist, now head of Americans for Tax Reform and a close ally of the Bush Administration. Norquist is an antitax advocate who once famously declared that his goal was to shrink the Federal Government so he could "drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." As the U.S. procurement czar, Safavian was pushing in that direction by seeking to shift government work to private contractors, contending it was cheaper. Federal procurement insiders say his relationship with Norquist gave Safavian the edge in snaring the procurement post. But Norquist has "no memory" of urging the Administration to put Safavian in the post, says an associate speaking on Norquist's behalf. A White House official said Norquist "didn't influence the decision." Clay Johnson, who was designated by the White House to answer all of Time's questions about administration staffing issues and who oversaw the procurement post, says Safavian was "by far the most qualified person" for the job. Perhaps it also didn't hurt that Safavian's wife Jennifer works as a lawyer for the House Government Reform Committee, which oversees federal contracting.

In addition, Safavian had worked at a law firm in the mid-'90s with Jack Abramoff, one of the capital's highest-paid lobbyists, a top g.o.p. fund raiser and a close friend of House majority leader Tom DeLay. Abramoff was indicted last month on unrelated fraud and conspiracy charges. In 2002, Abramoff invited Safavian on a weeklong golf outing to Scotland's famed St. Andrews course (as Abramoff had done with DeLay in 2000). Seven months after the trip, an anonymous call to a government hotline said lobbyists had picked up the tab for the jaunt. That wasn't true; Safavian paid $3,100 for the trip. But the government alleges that he lied when he repeatedly told investigators that Abramoff had no business dealings with the General Services Administration, where Safavian worked at the time.

Prosecutors alleged last week, however, that Safavian worked closely with Abramoff—identified only as "Lobbyist A" in the criminal complaint against Safavian—to give Abramoff an inside track in his efforts to acquire control of two pieces of federal property in the Washington area. Safavian, who is free without bail, declined to be interviewed for this story. His attorney, Barbara Van Gelder, said the government is trying to pressure her client to help in its probe of Abramoff. "This is a creative use of the criminal code to secure his cooperation," she said.

Three days after the sept. 12 resignation of FEMA's Michael Brown, Julie Myers, the Bush Administration's nominee to head Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ice) came before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. The session did not go well. "I think we ought to have a meeting with (Homeland Security Secretary) Mike Chertoff," Ohio Republican George Voinovich told Myers. "I'd really like to have him spend some time with us, telling us personally why he thinks you're qualified for the job. Because based on the resume, I don't think you are."
Immigration and Customs Enforcement is one of 22 agencies operating under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security, but its function goes to the heart of why the department was created: to prevent terrorists from slipping into the U.S. If that weren't enough, the head of ice must also contend with money launderers, drug smugglers, illegal-arms merchants and the vast responsibility that comes with managing 20,000 government employees and a $4 billion budget. Expectations were high that whoever was appointed to fill the job would be, in the words of Michael Greenberger, head of the University of Maryland's Center for Health and Homeland Security, "a very high-powered, well-recognized intelligence manager."

Instead the Administration nominated Myers, 36, currently a special assistant handling personnel issues for Bush. She has experience in law-enforcement management, including jobs in the White House and the Commerce, Justice and Treasury departments, but she barely meets the five-year minimum required by law. Her most significant responsibility has been as Assistant Secretary for Export Enforcement at the Commerce Department, where, she told Senators, she supervised 170 employees and a $25 million budget.
Myers may appear short on qualifications, but she has plenty of connections. She worked briefly for Chertoff as his chief of staff at the Justice Department's criminal division, and two days after her hearing, she married Chertoff's current chief of staff, John Wood. Her uncle is Air Force General Richard Myers, the outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Julie Myers was on her honeymoon last week and was unavailable to comment on the questions about her qualifications raised by the Senate. A representative referred Time to people who had worked with her, one of whom was Stuart Levey, the Treasury Department's Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Crime. "She was great, and she impressed everyone around her in all these jobs," he said. "She's very efficient, and she's assertive and strong and smart, and I think she's wonderful."

To critics, Myers' appointment is a symptom of deeper ills in the Homeland Security Department, a huge new bureaucracy that the Bush Administration resisted creating. Among those problems, they say, is a tendency on the part of the Administration's political appointees to discard in-house expertise, particularly when it could lead to additional government regulation of industry. For instance, when Congress passed the intelligence reform bill last year, it gave the Transportation Security Administration (tsa) a deadline of April 1, 2005, to come up with plans to assess the threat to various forms of shipping and transportation—including rail, mass transit, highways and pipelines—and make specific proposals for strengthening security. Two former high-ranking Homeland Security officials tell Time that the plans were nearly complete and had been put into thick binders in early April for final review when Deputy Secretary Michael Jackson abruptly reassigned that responsibility to the agency's policy shop. Jackson was worried that presenting Congress with such detailed proposals would only invite it to return later and demand to know why Homeland Security had not carried them out. "If we put this out there, this is what we're going to be held to," says one of the two officials, characterizing Jackson's stance. Nearly six months after Congress's deadline, in the wake of the summer's subway bombings in London, tsa spokeswoman Amy Von Walter says the agency is in the process of declassifying the document and expects to post a short summary on its website soon.

In the meantime, Myers' nomination could be in trouble. Voinovich says his concerns were satisfied after a 35-minute call with Chertoff, in which the Homeland Security Secretary argued forcefully on Myers' behalf. But other senators are raising questions, and Democrats have seized on Myers' appointment as an example of the Bush Administration's preference for political allies over experience.

The post-watergate law creating the position of inspector general (IG) states that the federal watchdogs must be hired "without regard to political affiliation," on the basis of their ability in such disciplines as accounting, auditing and investigating. It may not sound like the most exciting job, but the 57 inspectors general in the Federal Government can be the last line of defense against fraud and abuse. Because their primary duty is to ask nosy questions, their independence is crucial.

But critics say some of the Bush IGs have been too cozy with the Administration. "The IGs have become more political over the years, and it seems to have accelerated," said A. Ernest Fitzgerald, who has been battling the Defense Department since his 1969 discovery of $2 billion in cost overruns on a cargo plane, and who, at 79, still works as a civilian Air Force manager. A study by Representative Henry Waxman of California, the top Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee, found that more than 60% of the IGs nominated by the Bush Administration had political experience and less than 20% had auditing experience—almost the obverse of those measures during the Clinton Administration. About half the current IGs are holdovers from Clinton.
Johnson says political connections may be a thumb on the scale between two candidates with equal credentials, but rarely are they the overriding factor in a personnel decision. Speaking of all such appointments, not just the IGs, he said, "I am aware of one or two situations where politics carried the day and the person was not in the job a year later."

Still, several of the President's IGs fit comfortably into the friends-and-family category. Until recently, the most famous Bush inspector general was Janet Rehnquist, a daughter of the late Chief Justice. Rehnquist had been a lawyer for the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and worked in the counsel's office during George H.W. Bush's presidency before becoming an IG at the Department of Health and Human Services. In that sense, she was qualified for the job. But a scathing report by the Government Accountability Office asserted that she had "created the perception that she lacked appropriate independence in certain situations" and had "compromised her ability to serve as an effective leader." Rehnquist also faced questions about travel that included sightseeing and free time, her decision to delay an audit of the Florida pension system at the request of the President's brother, Governor Jeb Bush of Florida, and the unauthorized gun she kept in her office. She resigned in June 2003 ahead of the report.

Three weeks ago, however, Joseph Schmitz supplanted Rehnquist as the most notorious Bush IG. Schmitz, who worked as an aide to former Reagan Administration Attorney General Ed Meese and whose father John was a Republican Congressman from Orange County, Calif., quit his post at the Pentagon following complaints from Senate Finance Committee chairman Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa. In particular, Grassley questioned Schmitz's acceptance of a trip to South Korea, paid for in part by a former lobbying client, according to Senate staff members and public lobbying records, and Schmitz's use of eight tickets to a Washington Nationals baseball game. But those issues aren't the ones that led to questions about his independence from the White House. Those concerns came to light after Schmitz chose to show the White House his department's final report on a multiyear investigation into the Air Force's plan to lease air-refueling tankers from Boeing for much more than it would have cost to buy them. After two weeks of talks with the Administration, Schmitz agreed to black out the names of senior White House officials who appeared to have played a role in pushing and approving what turned out to be a controversial procurement arrangement. Schmitz ultimately sent the report to Capitol Hill, but Senators are irked that they have not yet received an original, unredacted copy. Congressional aides said they are still scratching their heads about how Schmitz got his job. He now works for the parent company of Blackwater USA, a military contractor that, in his old job, he might have been responsible for investigating.

—With reporting by Massimo Calabresi

They built a museum, so it must be true

2005-09-25T10:20:00.000-04:00

In Evolution Debate, Creationists Are Breaking New GroundMuseum Dedicated to Biblical Interpretation Of the World Is Being Built Near Cincinnati

By Michael PowellWashington Post Staff WriterSunday, September 25, 2005; A03

PETERSBURG, Ky. -- The guide, a soft-spoken fellow with a scholarly aspect, walks through the halls of this handsome, half-finished museum and points to the sculpture of a young velociraptor.

"We're placing this one in the hall that explains the post-Flood world," explains the guide. "When dinosaurs lived with man."

A reporter has a question or two about this dinosaur-man business, but Mark Looy -- the guide and a vice president at the museum -- already has walked over to the lifelike head of a T. rex, with its three-inch teeth and carnivore's grin.
"We call him our 'missionary lizard,' " Looy says. "When people realize the T. rex lived in Eden, it will lead us to a discussion of the gospel. The T. rex once was a vegetarian, too."

The nation's largest museum devoted to the alternative reality that is biblical creation science is rising just outside Cincinnati. Set amid a park and three-acre artificial lake, the 50,000-square-foot museum features animatronic dinosaurs, state-of-the-art models and graphics, and a half-dozen staff scientists. It holds that the world and the universe are but 6,000 years old and that baby dinosaurs rode in Noah's ark.

The $25 million Creation Museum stands much of modern science on its head and might cause a paleontologist or three to rend their garments. But officials expect to attract hundreds of thousands of visitors when the museum opens in early 2007.

"Evolutionary Darwinists need to understand we are taking the dinosaurs back," says Kenneth Ham, president of Answers in Genesis-USA, which is building the museum. "This is a battle cry to recognize the science in the revealed truth of God."

"Intelligent design," the theory that the machinery of life is so complex as to require the hand -- subtle or not -- of an intelligent creator, has stolen the media thunder of late. This week a trial will begin in federal court in Pennsylvania, in which 11 parents accuse the Dover school board of violating the separation of church and state by requiring high school biology teachers to read a statement in class that intelligent design is an alternative explanation of life's origins.

Most scientists dismiss intelligent design as flawed science, and they fear cultural conservatives intend it as a religious wedge. The small band of scientists who promote intelligent design retort that theirs is a scientific inquiry, albeit with theistic implications.

But by any measure, Young Earth Creationism -- which holds that the Bible is the literal word of God and that He created the universe in seven days-- has a more powerful hold on the beliefs of Americans than evolutionary theory or intelligent design. That grip grows stronger by the year.

Polls taken last year showed that 45 percent of Americans believe that God created humans in their present form 10,000 years ago (or less) and that man shares no common ancestor with the ape. Only 26 percent believe in the central tenet of evolution, that all life descended from a single ancestor.
Another poll showed that 65 percent of Americans want creationism taught alongside evolution.

In the early 20th century, many creationist thinkers viewed Genesis as metaphorical, accepting that Earth formed over hundreds of thousands, even millions of years. But as society became more secular, and science offered an implicit challenge to fundamentalist beliefs, creationist leaders took a more literal line.

"The creationists have been very successful in persuading conservative Christians to abandon any nonliteral interpretation of the Bible," said Ronald L. Numbers, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and author of "The Creationists." "There is a very large constituency of Americans who are quite comfortable with Young Earth Creationism."

To drive past the stegosaurus silhouettes at the gate to the parking lot at the Creation Museum here is to enter a creationist world in great ferment. Answers in Genesis is one of about a half-dozen creationist organizations and museums, each with its own headquarters, radio studios and Web sites, and scholarly and popular magazines. (A family-oriented column even ferrets out covert evolutionary messages in "Finding Nemo" and "My Big Fat Greek Wedding.")
Another creationist museum launches expeditions to the Papua New Guinea highlands in search of living pterodactyls.

All of this -- creationist zoology, paleontology, archaeology -- is framed in a distinctive academic language.

So one reads of post-Babel studies, and floodology and post-diluvium studies, these being the study of the world after Noah and the Great Flood, which is regarded as purest fact. The sanctified imagination, which is to say inspired by God, helps the scientists and artists at Creation Museum re-create the world of Adam and Eve, from sauropods playing with children to the "humongous" mature trees that God created in a single day.

"Our artists anticipated some challenging . . . work," the Answers of Genesis Web site notes.

Young Earth Creationists emphasize the rigor of their science. Looy rattles off the names of experts with doctorates, many of whom obtained degrees from mainstream universities. A creationist scientist, Kurt Wise, worked as a graduate student at Harvard with prominent biologist Stephen Jay Gould. John Baumgardner of the Los Alamos National Laboratory became a well-regarded designer of computer models for planetary catastrophes.

They herald successes. Recent discoveries by geologists tend to support creationists' beliefs that great floods -- albeit not necessarily ordered up by God -- played a role in gouging out some canyon lands.

But often, scientists say, the creationist bottom line is a through-the-looking-glass version of science. The scientific method of theory, experiment and assumptions upended does not apply. Ask Ham if he could accept evidence that conflicts with his reading of Genesis -- proof, say, that a fossil is more than 6,000 years old -- and he shakes his head.

Creationists believe man became mortal when God cast Adam and Eve out of Eden 6,000 years ago. Death did not exist before that.

"We admit we have an axiom: We have a book and it's the Bible and it's revealed history," says Ham. "Where the Bible teaches on science, we can trust it as the word of God."

Scientists place the age of Earth at 4.5 billion years. Many tend to act resigned at the mention of creationists, seeing a worldview so different as to defy debate.
"There are people who are prepared to accept that the universe is a pretty untidy place," said Ian Tattersall, a curator at the American Museum of Natural History. "And there are people, like the creationists, whose minds rebel at this notion."

Ham, whose voice carries broad hints of his native Australia, is a charismatic speaker and skilled debater, and he has built Answers in Genesis into the world's leading creationist organization in less than a decade. He raised nearly $20 million to build the museum, and the average donation was about $70, officials say.

Answers in Genesis hews to no particular evangelical line. Ham's politics lean strongly to the right, seeing America as under siege by homosexuality and abortion. In a recent column for the Rev. Jerry Falwell's newspaper, Ham described his mission as "fighting the 'Philistines' of our day."

"By and large, much of the church has compromised God's Word in Genesis by allowing millions of years and evolutionary ideas to be embraced by God's people," Ham wrote. "We need to take back the maligned Grand Canyon, the majestic mountain ranges, the massive coal beds . . . and the dinosaur fossils."
Ham is ambivalent on the question of intelligent design. He admires the movement's founders and applauds their battles. But he is skeptical of creationists who see intelligent design as a battering ram that might smash down the constitutional doors and allow the Bible back into schools.

"They are not a Christian movement, they are not about the Bible," he says in his spacious corner office at the museum. "It's not even against evolution, not really, because they don't tell you what that intelligence is. It could open a door for Muslim belief, for Hindus, for New Age.

"We are telling you unashamedly that the word of the Bible is the way."

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

And the hits keep on coming

2005-09-25T10:09:00.000-04:00

These fuckers just can't help themselves........they have yet to find an ethics violation they didn't like:

Frist Issue Adds to GOP's Ethics TroublesSale of Stock Before Its Price Fell Gives Critics Opening to Target Senate Leadership

By Charles Babington and Jeffrey H. BirnbaumWashington Post Staff WritersSunday, September 25, 2005; A06

Two federal inquiries into Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's stock sales have handed Democrats a chance to broaden their long-stated claim that Republicans push ethical boundaries and focus on laws that help the rich, political analysts said yesterday.

Until now, such accusations have centered on the House and White House. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (Tex.) has been chastised three times by the chamber's ethics committee, and a Texas grand jury recently indicted a political action committee he had organized. The Bush administration's top federal procurement official, David H. Safavian, was arrested last week on charges of obstructing a criminal investigation into lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who has close ties to DeLay and other prominent GOP lawmakers.

Now, with the revelation that federal prosecutors and the Securities and Exchange Commission are looking into Frist's sale of hospital stock shortly before its value fell, Democrats are expanding their ethics accusations into the Senate's GOP leadership ranks.

Activists in both parties agree it is much too early to say whether Frist (R-Tenn.) engaged in insider trading, a charge that could cripple his 2008 presidential hopes. But the mere launch of inquiries by the SEC and the Justice Department allows Democrats to claim that both House and Senate majority leaders operate under ethical clouds.

"It is a drip, drip, drip," said former House majority leader Tony Coelho (D-Calif.), who knows the corrosive power of ethics charges. Coelho, who resigned in 1989 following accusations about a loan deal, said, "With DeLay and now Frist, it's a buildup of arrogance of power. . . . With [President] Bush's numbers down, this could be a very negative thing for the Republicans."

Democratic consultant Jenny Backus said many Americans already think "things are rotten" in the capital's Republican-dominated political circles. "To have the Senate majority leader under an ethics cloud is going to drive this point home for the voters," she said.

Republicans expressed confidence in Frist and his ability to weather the controversy. "Democrats will try to make a lot out of this and pounce on whatever they can," said Nicholas E. Calio, a former aide to both Presidents Bush. "To me, it's inconceivable that he [Frist] would sell stock based on inside information. He doesn't need the money."

In carefully worded statements, Frist's office has said the senator instructed managers of his "qualified blind trust" in June to sell his family's shares in HCA Inc., the nation's largest hospital chain, founded by Frist's father and brother. A month later, the stock's price dropped 9 percent after the company predicted weakening earnings. It is illegal to trade stocks based on inside information. Frist, a wealthy surgeon, "had no information about the company or its performance that was not available to the public when he directed the trustees to sell the HCA stock," his office said.

The senator's spokesmen say he sold the HCA stock to avoid possible conflicts of interest as Congress deals with health care legislation. For years, however, Frist had rejected arguments that his stock holdings could cause a possible conflict.
Frist, asked in a January 2003 TV interview whether he should sell his HCA stock, replied that his assets were in a blind trust and, "as far as I know, I own no HCA stock." Referring to his trust and those of his family, he added: "It is illegal right now for me to know what the composition of those trusts are. So I have no idea."

Financial disclosure documents filed with the Secretary of the Senate by the trustees, and reviewed Friday by the Associated Press, show that two weeks before the interview, a trustee notified Frist that HCA stock had been contributed to his trust. Spokesman Bob Stevenson said yesterday that Frist was truthful in the TV interview because the trustee can sell assets at any time without notifying the senator, and, therefore, on any given day the trust's contents are unknown to him. Stevenson said Frist declined to be interviewed for this article.

The Senate Ethics Manual allows a lawmaker to instruct the trustee of a qualified blind trust "to sell all of an asset" if the senator determines it "creates a conflict of interest or the appearance thereof due to the subsequent assumptions of duties" by the senator.

Some nonpartisan analysts said the Frist case could fizzle, in legal and political terms, if anything short of insider trading is proved. For one thing, they say, the story has broken at a time when hurricanes are dominating the national news. Moreover, they say, questions of blind trusts and stock transactions may prove too arcane to captivate the average voter.

"I'm not yet convinced that the cloud over Frist is all that dark and all that big," said Stuart Rothenberg of the nonpartisan Rothenberg Political Report. "The Democrats are going to have to make the case about party corruption. What's more, this is a stock deal. Partisan people will say this proves a lot. Other people will say, 'Stocks and trusts, I don't know this stuff.' "

Backus disagrees. Average Americans, she said, understand the notion of powerful and privileged people getting sweetheart deals. Many are already suspicious of a Republican Party that pushes tax cuts, bankruptcy policies and other measures that disproportionately benefit the wealthy, she said.
In fact, Backus said, DeLay's controversial dealings with Texas campaign finance laws and legislative redistricting are more difficult to explain than the questions surrounding Frist. "You have to talk a lot of Washington talk" to outline the case against DeLay, she said. People will more readily grasp the implications of a "less-than-blind trust" and GOP leaders who seem more intent on "the interests of their friends than the interests of the American people."
Backus also noted that ethics inquiries sometimes claim unintended victims. For instance, she said, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales's possible shot at a Supreme Court seat could be complicated by the fact that his Justice Department is scrutinizing the leader of the Senate, which will confirm or reject the next nominee.

Another Democratic consultant, Jim Jordan, said Frist's troubles could prompt other GOP senators to view him warily, just as some House Republicans worry that DeLay's ethical lapses might tarnish them. "The interesting question is whether rank-and-file Republican members decide to try to save themselves by throwing their corrupt leadership overboard," Jordan said.

Charlie Cook of the independent Cook Political Report said the Frist news comes at a time of sagging approval ratings and other problems for the Republican Party. "You wonder if it's death by a thousand cuts," he said. "All these little bitty scandals. Individually they don't amount to much. Collectively they sort of add up."

"The biggest toll," Cook said, "is for Frist's presidential aspirations. They were already on the ropes. He's not gotten good reviews as the Republican leader in the Senate. . . . The guy is pretty damaged merchandise in terms of presidential aspirations."

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

I love how Baby Bush approaches investigations

2005-09-23T09:46:00.000-04:00

just appoint someone who would have been investigated as the investigator. Kinda like having Enron investigate possible accounting fraud perpetrated by Enron:

Bush Katrina Probe Nominee Draws FlakQuestions raised over Frances Townsend's role in Katrina failings

By TIMOTHY J. BURGER/WASHINGTON

President Bush's choice of Homeland Security Adviser Frances Townsend to handle the Administration's internal inquiry into its flawed handling of Hurricane Katrina has drawn criticism from both sides of the aisle on Capitol Hill. "Anyone who has basically had responsibilities to respond to this should not be the folks looking at it, in my judgment," Congressman Christopher Shays of Connecticut, a senior Republican on the House Committee on Homeland Security, told TIME. Though Townsend is "a tough lady," Shays said, "I don't think she can be objective because, frankly, I would want to know what was she doing in that time, before the storm, during the storm, after the storm. She is going to be one of the people that, in a sense, is being investigated. So I'm not sure that she's the logical choice."

Democrats, who have demanded an independent probe along the lines of the 9/11 Commission and have rejected the principle of an internal inquiry into Katrina failures, went even further: "There is a huge conflict of interest here," said Rebecca Kirszner, communications director for Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada. "As the President's homeland security adviser, Townsend certainly was part of the Administration's response to Katrina."

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino declined to directly address such criticism, saying Wednesday that "the President has said he is committed to finding out what went wrong and what went right and the lessons to be learned. We are also committed to fully supporting the congressional investigation in addition to this internal review."

Townsend, according to a 2003 Executive Order issued in the course of establishing the Department of Homeland Security, is "the official primarily responsible for advising and assisting the President in the coordination of domestic incident management activities of all departments and agencies in the event of a terrorist threat, and during and in the aftermath of terrorist attacks, major disasters, or other emergencies, within the United States."

A holdover from the Clinton Administration, the former prosecutor has served in a number of counter-terrorism capacities in both the previous and current administrations. Top-level liaison with allied governments and intelligence agencies on terrorism matters has been a major aspect of her work — one that she relishes, according to a knowledgable former U.S. official.

Despite the domestic upheaval caused by Katrina, Townsend left town on September 9 — the day then-FEMA director Michael Brown was relieved of his duties supervsing the hurricane response — for a previously-scheduled five-day trip for consultations with intelligence chiefs in such countries as Morocco and Afghanistan, as well as with Saudi Arabia's new ruler, King Abdullah bin-Abdulaziz.

Critics have questioned whether it was appropriate for her to have made that trip as the administration scrambled to respond to Katrina. Perino had previously told TIME that President Bush had wanted Townsend to remain focused on vigilance against possible terrorist attack. "From the beginning it was important that we also stay focused on our national security and so, as her title is both homeland security and counter-terrorism [adviser], this trip, which was already scheduled way in advance, went forward," Perino said. Perino said Townsend had delegated Katrina duties to Deputy Assistant to the President for Homeland Security Ken Rapuano, who had "been engaged from well before the storm hit the coast." Still, Perino said, Townsend stayed personally involved in the response: "She was certainly engaged — I should say strongly engaged — up through the Friday night and then went on her previously-scheduled trip to fulfill her counter-terrorism responsibilities, but received updates and participated in the response efforts during her travel."

Copyright © 2005 Time Inc. All rights reserved.Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.

The Abramhoff story keeps going, and going, and going...

2005-09-23T08:07:00.000-04:00

This scumbag is gonna bring everyone down:

Tyco Exec: Abramoff Claimed Ties to Administration

By R. Jeffrey SmithWashington Post Staff WriterFriday, September 23, 2005; A06

Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff bragged two years ago that he was in contact with White House political aide Karl Rove on behalf of a large, Bermuda-based corporation that wanted to avoid incurring some taxes and continue receiving federal contracts, according to a written statement by President Bush's nominee to be deputy attorney general.

Timothy E. Flanigan, general counsel for conglomerate Tyco International Ltd., said in a statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee last week that Abramoff's lobbying firm initially boasted that Abramoff could help Tyco fend off a special liability tax because he "had good relationships with members of Congress," including House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.).

Abramoff later said "he had contact with Mr. Karl Rove" about the issue, according to the statement by Flanigan, who oversaw Tyco's dealings with Abramoff and his firm and received reports from Abramoff about progress in the lobbying campaign. Flanigan's statement is the latest indication that Abramoff promoted himself as having ready access to senior officials in the Bush administration.

A White House spokeswoman, Erin Healy, said Rove "has no recollection" of being contacted by Abramoff about Tyco's concerns.

Abramoff was indicted last month on unrelated wire fraud and conspiracy charges and has lost his high-stakes lobbying clients. He was hired in 2003 by Tyco when the company was in turmoil. Abramoff's firm, Greenberg Traurig, promoted him as Tyco's savior on the tax issue, according to Flanigan's statement and others familiar with the process.

Tyco -- whose executive L. Dennis Kozlowski had just departed under an ethics cloud -- was worried that the Bush administration might embrace legislation promoted by Democrats that would impose higher taxes on domestic-centered companies that had moved offshore to cut their tax bills. The legislation was motivated by popular anger over such offshore moves, and carried the additional penalty of barring such firms from receiving federal contracts.

Lobbying disclosure statements filed by Abramoff listing his work for Tyco cite the "Executive Office of the President" as one of his lobbying targets on the tax and contracts issues. Others were the Department of Commerce, the General Services Administration and Congress. Greenberg Traurig records submitted to Tyco describe specific contacts with the White House legislative office, a source familiar with the matter said yesterday.

Rove's personal assistant at the time, Susan Ralston, formerly worked as Abramoff's secretary. It could not be learned yesterday whether she was among those contacted by any of the 14-person Greenberg team recorded as working on the Tyco account.

The Bush administration was never enthusiastic about the tax penalty, but both the House and Senate approved language in 2002 denying federal contracts to companies largely based in the United States but incorporated in tax havens.

Tyco was among a raft of companies, including Ingersoll-Rand and Noble Corp., that hired an army of lobbyists to stall the legislation and ultimately kill most of it. House Republican leaders argued that corporate flight was merely a symptom of a much broader problem with the U.S. tax code that should be treated in a larger tax reform package.

Abramoff remains the focus of a lengthy investigation by a task force led by prosecutors at the Justice Department and including investigators at the Internal Revenue Service, the Interior Department and General Services Administration. The probe was initially focused on whether he bilked Native American tribes that paid him tens of millions of dollars in lobbying and other fees, but has since widened to include other matters.

Flanigan, who is still at Tyco while awaiting a committee vote on his nomination, said in his Sept. 15 written statement that he would "consult with DOJ ethics officials . . . and apply normal recusal standards" about the Justice Department's investigation of Abramoff.

Flanigan said he would recuse himself from any Abramoff investigation involving Tyco. Portions of his statement were first reported in the Los Angeles Times.

The ties between Tyco and Greenberg Traurig have already been investigated by a special counsel appointed by Greenberg to examine Abramoff's activities at the firm. According to knowledgeable sources and Flanigan's written statement, Greenberg has promised to repay three-quarters of a $2 million fee that Tyco paid, at Abramoff's direction, to a firm called Grassroots Interactive.

The fee was supposed to finance a letter-writing campaign by Tyco suppliers against the offshore tax bill, but Greenberg concluded that $1.5 million of it was "diverted to entities controlled by Mr. Abramoff" and misspent, according to Flanigan's statement.

Andrew Blum, a spokesman for Abramoff's law firm, declined to comment, as did Jill Perry, a spokeswoman for Greenberg Traurig.

Staff reporter Jonathan Weisman contributed to this report.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
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Christopher Reeve checked out too soon

2005-09-20T08:49:00.000-04:00

Stem Cell Injections Repair Spinal Cord Injuries in MiceScientists Say Approach Is Not Ready for Testing in Humans

By Rick WeissWashington Post Staff WriterTuesday, September 20, 2005; A02

Mice with severe spinal cord injuries regained much of their ability to walk normally after getting injections of stem cells taken from the brains of human fetuses, scientists in California reported yesterday.

The work strengthens recent evidence that various kinds of stem cells -- including some from human embryos and others from fetuses -- have the capacity to nurse injured nerve cells back to health and in some cases even become replacement neurons themselves.

Scientists cautioned that the approach was not ready for testing in patients with spinal cord diseases or injuries. "This is a first step in what has to be a long series of steps to get to anything clinical," said Aileen Anderson, a neuroscientist at the University of California at Irvine, who led the latest work with colleague Brian Cummings.

But at least three companies are racing to become the first to inject their neural stem cells into patients, and some researchers say the first of those studies could begin within the next nine months.

Yesterday, StemCells Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif., whose cells were used in the new mouse study, filed an amended application to the Food and Drug Administration asking permission to start injecting the cells into the brains of infants with Batten disease, a fatal, inherited syndrome that destroys the central nervous system.

The new research, described in the Sept. 27 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, tracked mice injected with a kind of human stem cells called neurospheres. They are the laboratory-grown progeny of human cells retrieved from the brains of 16- to 18-week aborted fetuses.

Nine days after getting identical spinal cord injuries, each animal received about 75,000 neurospheres in four injections around the injury.

Within a day, the team reported, the cells began to migrate into the injured spinal cord. After 16 weeks, the mice were given tests of agility and leg coordination, and compared with two other groups. Mice that had received the stem cells scored significantly better than similarly injured mice that had not -- and also better than those injected with ordinary skin cells, a test to see whether just any kind of cellular injection might trigger healing. Researchers who scored the tests did not know which mice had received the injections.

The differences were "obvious to the untrained eye," Anderson said, with improvements both in terms of how many weight-bearing steps the mice could take and their ability to place their rear feet precisely where needed to cross a ladderlike bridge.

Microscopic analysis showed that most of the injected cells had turned into two different kinds of cells around the injury, said Anderson, who does not have a direct financial stake in the company but whose team included two members who do. Some became oligodendrocytes, which wrap themselves around injured nerve cells to help them transmit electrical signals. Others turned into neurons themselves.

Very few turned into a third kind of central nervous system cell, astrocytes, which contribute to scar formation and are generally undesirable around injuries.

Moreover, the neurospheres that became new neurons appear to have made connections with nerve cells that survived the initial injury -- a crucial development if those new nerves are really to help.

In a test to see whether the new human cells were really key to the animals' recovery, the team gave some of the recovering mice injections of a toxin that selectively kills human cells. The mice that got the injections regressed in their ability to walk, while those not injected continued to improve.

Two other U.S. companies also say they are close to the goal of testing human neural stem cells as therapies.

Earlier this year, Hans Keirstead and his colleagues, also at the University of California at Irvine, reported that rats with disabling spinal injuries could walk nearly normally again after getting injections with human embryonic, rather than fetal, cells developed by Geron Corp. of Menlo Park, Calif.

Those cells were initially harvested from days-old human embryos and then cultivated under special laboratory conditions that forced them to become immature oligodendrocytes. Once injected into injured spinal cords, the cells matured and wrapped themselves around injured neurons, which often lose those natural coverings as a result of injury-induced inflammation, leaving even intact neurons unable to function properly.

Geron has said it hopes to begin clinical trials in patients next year.

A third company, NeuralStem Inc. of Gaithersburg, is also in the race.

In unpublished research, rats with spinal cord damage improved significantly after getting injections of human fetal spinal cord cells, said neuroscientist Martin Marsala of the University of California at San Diego, who led the studies with NeuralStem's cells. The animals had ischemic paraplegia, a paralysis of the lower body and rear limbs caused by a temporary blockage of blood flow to the spine.

Patients with this syndrome, which can occur when one of the body's large arteries bursts, are not only paralyzed but also suffer from spastic twitches because of the loss of a kind of neuron that normally suppresses those movements. In rat and pig studies, about one-third of the human fetal cells morphed into exactly that type of neuron, resulting in far less spasticity, Marsala said.

NeuralStem has been talking with the FDA with the aim of getting the go-ahead to begin human testing next year.
The FDA has said several questions will have to be answered before such tests can go forward, including whether some stem cells might turn into the wrong kinds of cells after being injected.

One down

2005-09-20T08:04:00.000-04:00

well here is one Bush administration official down.....................

Bush Official Arrested in Corruption Probe

By R. Jeffrey Smith and Susan SchmidtWashington Post Staff WritersTuesday, September 20, 2005; A01

The Bush administration's top federal procurement official resigned Friday and was arrested yesterday, accused of lying and obstructing a criminal investigation into Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff's dealings with the federal government. It was the first criminal complaint filed against a government official in the ongoing corruption probe related to Abramoff's activities in Washington.

The complaint, filed by the FBI, alleges that David H. Safavian, 38, a White House procurement official involved until last week in Hurricane Katrina relief efforts, made repeated false statements to government officials and investigators about a golf trip with Abramoff to Scotland in 2002.

It also contends that he concealed his efforts to help Abramoff acquire control of two federally managed properties in the Washington area. Abramoff is the person identified as "Lobbyist A" in a 13-page affidavit unsealed in court, according to sources knowledgeable about the probe.

Until his resignation on the day the criminal complaint against him was signed, Safavian was the top administrator at the federal procurement office in the White House Office of Management and Budget, where he set purchasing policy for the entire government.

The arrest occurred at his home in Alexandria. A man who answered the phone there yesterday hung up when a reporter asked to speak to Safavian.

Abramoff was indicted by federal prosecutors in Miami last month on unrelated charges of wire fraud and conspiracy. He remains the linchpin of an 18-month probe by a federal task force that includes the Internal Revenue Service, the Interior Department and the Justice Department's fraud and public integrity units. His lawyer did not respond to phone calls seeking comment.

Abramoff's allegedly improper dealings with Indian tribes -- which netted him and an associate at least $82 million in fees -- prompted the federal probe. But investigators have found that his documents and e-mails contain a trove of information about his aggressive efforts to seek favors for clients from members of Congress and senior bureaucrats.

Accompanying Safavian and Abramoff on the 2002 trip to Scotland, for example, were Rep. Robert W. Ney (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Administration Committee, lobbyist and former Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed and Neil Volz, a lobbyist with Abramoff at the Washington office of Greenburg Traurig.

Like Abramoff, Safavian is a veteran Washington player. He is a former lobbying partner of anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist and previously worked with Abramoff at another firm. Both he and Abramoff have represented gambling clients and Indian tribes with gambling interests.

At the time of the golf trip, Safavian was chief of staff at the General Services Administration, where ethics rules flatly prohibited the receipt of a gift from any person seeking an official action by the agency. When Safavian asked GSA ethics officers for permission to go on the trip, he assured them in writing that Abramoff "has no business before GSA," according to the affidavit signed by FBI special agent Jeffrey A. Reising.
Reising alleged, however, that Abramoff had by then already secretly enlisted Safavian in an effort to buy 40 acres of land that GSA managed in Silver Spring for use as the campus of a Hebrew school Abramoff founded. Safavian also allegedly tried to help Abramoff lease space for Abramoff's clients in an old post office building downtown.

On July 22, 2002, Abramoff sent Safavian an e-mail with a proposed draft letter that "at least two members of Congress" could send to GSA supporting the lease, according to the affidavit. "Does this work, or do you want it to be longer?" Abramoff asked.

Three days later, Safavian forwarded Abramoff an e-mail describing how an employee at OMB was resisting Abramoff's plan to lease space at the post office. "I suspect we'll end up having to bring some Hill pressure to bear on OMB," Safavian messaged Abramoff.

On the same day Safavian discussed the golf trip with the ethics office, he sent an e-mail to Abramoff from his home computer, advising him how to "lay out a case for this lease." Abramoff subsequently wrote in an e-mail to his wife and two officials of the school that Safavian had shown him a map of the property at his GSA office but had cautioned that Abramoff should not visit again "given my high profile politically."

Safavian nonetheless arranged a meeting for Abramoff's wife and business partner with officials at GSA on the day before he departed for Scotland aboard Abramoff's chartered jet. The trip cost more than $120,000 and was paid for mostly by a charity founded and run by Abramoff, the Capital Athletic Foundation.

When Safavian was questioned by The Washington Post about the trip in January, he said he paid his share of the expenses and took unpaid leave. "The trip was exclusively personal; I did no business there. . . . Jack is an old friend of mine," Safavian said.

But the complaint alleges that Safavian lied about his contacts with Abramoff on three occasions after his initial false pledge to the GSA ethics officer. The first was during a 2003 investigation by GSA's inspector general, who was responding to an anonymous tipster's hotline complaint; the second was in a March 17, 2005, letter to the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs; and the third was during an FBI interview on May 26, 2005.

This is a classic example of the govt. response to Katrina

2005-09-15T16:54:00.000-04:00

Taken from Time:

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1105526,00.html?cnn=yes

But the feds haven't totally forgotten this stretch of coastline. On a recent day, a lone piece of paper weighed down by a brick flapped in the Gulf breezes on one of the concrete slabs that had been swept clean by the storm surge. Printed large in the upper left corner of the page was the seal of the Department of Homeland Security. The letter, addressed to the owner Gladis Miskell, read: "I visited your home today to perform an inspection of the damages to your home and personal property caused by the recent disaster. Since you were not here, I was unable to complete the inspection. Your application for temporary Housing Assistance and the Individual and Family Grant Program cannot be processed until the inspection is completed. It is very important that you contact us as soon as possible."

And Republicans wonder....

2005-09-13T15:09:00.000-04:00

why people believe they (especially the current admin. of Republicans) care more about oil then people:

pulled from todays Washinton Post:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2005/04/11/LI2005041100879.html?referrer=email

The News From Hattiesburg

Sometimes the best place to find out what the White House is doing is, well, anywhere but the White House.

Case in point: Nikki Davis Maute writes in the Hattiesburg (Miss.) American: "Shortly after Hurricane Katrina roared through South Mississippi knocking out electricity and communication systems, the White House ordered power restored to a pipeline that sends fuel to the Northeast.

"That order - to restart two power substations in Collins that serve Colonial Pipeline Co. - delayed efforts by at least 24 hours to restore power to two rural hospitals and a number of water systems in the Pine Belt. . . .

"Dan Jordan, manager of Southern Pines Electric Power Association, said Vice President Dick Cheney's office called and left voice mails twice shortly after the storm struck, saying the Collins substations needed power restored immediately."

Billy Bob Thornton Interview

2005-09-13T10:48:00.000-04:00

Here is a pretty good interview in which he mentions WSP, Vic Chesnutt, and Col. Bruce:

http://www.glidemagazine.com/articles193.html

Billy Bob Thornton: Slinging a New BladeEric WardMonday, September 05, 2005

Aside from the academy award, established acting career, esteemed directing work, acclaimed screenwriting, notable pitching arm and the enviable Angelina Jolie connection, Billy Bob Thornton also happens to be a lifelong musician and songwriter. And that’s not just some side project to keep an actor entertained in the off-season. In the midst of another busy movie year, his third album, Hobo, is due this fall. It’s the long anticipated follow-up to his previous two efforts which earned him a gold record and a headline spot at last year’s SXSW. So yeah, this isn’t David Hasselhoff doing remixes, this is a serious musician who just happens to also write and direct feature films. It’s quite a resume, but he’s quick to note the absurdity of making the distinction between careers, or as he puts its, worrying if an album is made by a plumber or an actor, and just let it stand on it’s own. Fair enough…I suppose it really doesn’t matter he almost played for the Kansas City Royals before going on to win the Oscar for Sling Blade. It’s still one of the greatest movies of all time.

And for all his successes, Thornton somehow remains humble and empathetic. Hobo is a storyteller’s album, offering vivid tales of the pilgrimages made every day to the land of swimming pools and movie stars. It’s a path he knows well, but only one of the many he’s taken so far.

You’ve obviously developed as an actor over the years, but now that you’re releasing your third album, how have you developed as a songwriter?

Well, I think actually the songwriting gets better every time. I think this is really my best record…and a lot of the reason is because it’s a little more cohesive. What we’ve done on our past records, we’ve had sort of an eclectic mix of songs, which would have been ok in 1969, but now, its hard for people to listen to more than one sound on a record. It’s a little bit different now. So this record, its got sort of a thru-line in terms of the vibe, and sonically. And the whole record was made but just me, Randy Mitchell and Matt Laug, just three of us.

It was all recorded at your home studio right, which used to be Slash’s place?

Yeah, it used to be the Snake Pit, now its called The Cave.

What’s the set up down there, is it totally digital? You seem like you’d be into analog.

Well, I really am. We’ve always cut on RADAR, which is so warm and fat, people never know its not analog. But this is the first record that we used ProTools. And I was always against it, but the thing is, its so fast, and so handy - particularly when you’re making a record with only a couple of you.
What we did was, Randy and I would write songs and then put them down, just with an acoustic guitar and vocal, but we did them all to a click [track]. Sometimes we’d find a [drum] loop to put in there, just for the time being, and that way, at the end of it, when we’d written everything, and everything was down - we had all the guitars, all the vocals, everything - then Matt Laug, our drummer came in, and in two or three days played drums to every song. And some drummers are not as good at that, and some are great at it, Matt happens to be really good at it. Anyhow, that’s the way we made it. And since Randy always used ProTools, we gave it a shot.

We have a Trident 80 board down here, so we cut in ProTools and mixed it through the Trident board to 1 inch tape. And when you hear it, the record’s very lush, very warm sounding. So its really got an analog sound. I think mixing to 1 inch tape really did something.
We had an amazing time on it. I’m real proud of the songs, I’m proud of the lyrics, the melodies…everything. And I’m proud of the other records too. Private Radio, it was a fairly critically acclaimed record - it’s not like we sell a lot of records, but for the most part anyway, the critics liked that record - on the second one, it wasn’t so much that way. And I think a lot of the reason is ‘cause we start the record off with a bunch of rock songs, and by the end of the record, its mostly like, country stuff. And I’m not sure people are geared these days to wrap their heads around that.

On this latest record, the running theme is California, and the land of dreams, and people naively coming to L.A. with stars in their eyes. Of course most of your characters go through the ringer, but in the end, they seem to have some sense of resolution. Is it safe to assume that these are loosely autobiographical?

Yeah, I mean for the most part it is. They’re not all stories about myself necessarily, some are stories about people I’ve known or whatever, situations I’ve observed, but it’s just a collection of stories about success, failure, fear, joy, sadness - kind of everything that goes into trying to get somewhere, trying to make it - and California being the final frontier in a way. And it still is, a frontier. There is still a pilgrimage here all the time by people. Some people end up on the street, some people end up successful, some people end up like on the song “Gray Walls,” kind of shut behind their wall, even though it seems on the surface they have the perfect life. And then the story of the hobo guy, the homeless person, isn’t necessarily, in a spiritual sense, any different then the guy behind the walls. They’re both kind of shut off from society in some way.
These characters are all quite vivid. I assume you use the same skill set to develop characters on screen as you do lyrically?
Yeah, its not any different. As hard as people try to separate music from movies, its really the same thing. I mean there’s not much difference between a sculptor and a painter. But for some reason prejudice doesn’t go both ways. Like the movies don’t traditionally shut out musicians. The music world tends to shut out movie actors, or at least place a great burden to succeed, because you start with a strike against you. It’s like “oh, an actor is making a record.” Well, I don’t even know what that means (laughs). I’m mean, I’m not sure how that was ever defined. People can talk, “oh, Travolota made a pop record” or whatever it is, but the fact of the matter is, there have been plenty of musicians in movies who were shitty too. But there are plenty of actors who are shitty who have never been musicians, and vice versa. There are plenty of bands out there that just suck, and none of them have ever been in a movie. But when their record is reviewed, even if the critic doesn’t like the record, they still judge it based on it’s musical merit. They just go, “well, the Doorknobs have come out with another turkey,” or whatever. “This time the guitar playing is not up to snuff, blah, blah, blah.” They never say “oh, here we go, another group of plumbers from Cincinnati trying to make a record” (laughs). But if its an actor, they say that.
I think the music business is a very closed off, jealous business. More so now than ever. And maybe a lot of the reason is, it’s so hard these days to get in the music business, and actually get a record deal, sell records, all that kind of stuff. If you’re not one of the top pop people, top country people, top rap people, then you’re screwed. So there’s not a lot of room, and everybody else ends up…well, let me put it this way, I can talk to somebody who’s 25 years old, or 19 years old or whatever, probably 35, and mention John Prine or JJ Cale or somebody like that, and they’re like, “who?” But they know Ashlee Simpson.

John Prine needs a reality show.

Exactly (laughs). That’s right. Put him in an apartment with some other songwriters for six months to see which one of them gets married to the other one…

Do those preconceived notions concern you at all? "Actor makes an album."

Not as much anymore. I like making records so much that…well sure it bugs me when it comes up, but it’s not something I spend time thinking about just when I’m hanging around or when I’m making a record. But when it comes up it bugs me.

They throw the term “country” around when they describe your sound, but this record is really about as country as Tom Waits is. So what does that say about the state of country music, or the industry as a whole for that matter?

Well its all mixed up out there. But first of all…I’m glad you said that, because I rarely get somebody saying what you just said, which is I’m as country as Tom Waits is. If I weren’t from the south, lets say I was from Connecticut, and my name was, I don’t know, Chad Worthington, or something like that, I probably wouldn’t have my music called country. But the fact that people sort of think of Texas or Arkansas, and because of my name, I think they automatically throw that on there.
But I think country music, really now, is not what country music was initially. When I was growing up…it’s almost like the guys who really are country, like Merle Haggard or George Jones or somebody like that, its almost like they’ve been put into some “old guy” category, like they’re folk singers like Woody Guthrie or somebody. Like it's this whole different kind of thing. And people say, “yeah, I listen to old country sometimes,” instead of just calling it country. Because what country has become, in Nashville anyway, its really 80’s pop ballads, 80’s rock ballads. You throw a cowboy hat on some guy and have a steel guitar in there, and yet you’re playing a song that may as well be Def Leppard. And a lot of those cats that produced those 80’s ballads are producers in Nashville now. So that’s where it comes from. Its like, “oh well, the bottom fell out of this, we’ll go do this thing for a while.”
Yeah, I think commercial radio country music these days - it’s really suffering. You got a few people out there, well Dwight [Yoakam] always stays true. And then you got other guys like Steve Earle or Pat Green, or Steven Bruton, a good friend of ours who tours with us some, they’re like alt-country, or "Americana" or whatever. So they’re having to create categories these days for real music (laughs). Its like they had to invent some [new genres] because you can’t be in those other things anymore. Whereas when I was growing up, you turn a radio station on, you could hear Johnny Cash on a station that you heard JJ Cale on. Or a better example, you’d hear Deep Purple and James Taylor on the same station.

When you were younger you had a band called Hot ’Lanta, named after the Allman Brother’s song, and you’ve praised their Fillmore East album - but that was an originals band, you weren’t just playing Allman covers?

No. We would play an Allman Brothers song from time to time, but it wasn’t like an Allman Brothers cover band or anything like that. I think the only song we did was…well we did “Stormy Monday” and we did more their version of it. [That] was in the early 70’s.

You also directed Widespread Panic’s Live At The Georgia Theatre documentary back in ‘91, and then followed up years later by doing their video for ‘Aunt Avis.”

[Live At The Georgia Theatre] was the first thing I ever directed. Back in the 80’s, I was managed by a guy…who wasn’t really in the movie business (laughs). I had my theatrical agent, but I was managed by a guy who’d been a big record producer, record executive, had his own label forever, who was one of my heroes named Phil Walden. And Phil’s the guy that had the Allman Brothers and Marshall Tucker…was Otis Reddings manager early on. And he and I got to know each other, and he became my manager, and the only actors he managed were me and Jim Varney…so I used to hang out with him and Varney all the time. And when Capricorn [Records] got back on it’s feet again he signed up Widespread Panic. And he said, “would you want to direct a long-form video on this band Widespread Panic?” And when I thought about it, I said “yeah, might be nice to make it also just kind of a flavor of Athens, Georgia maybe too, as opposed to just a concert film.” Looking back on it, that was in my formative years as a director, and maybe it could have been better, but it’s actually pretty good. I look at it every now and then…we did ok for people who didn’t know what we were doing. Yeah, I love those guys, I always did. You know, they lost Mikey [Houser], their guitar player a couple of years back and that was really sad. A great guy, I tell ya…

Yeah, that was a terrible loss. And you’ve actually directed musicians quite a few times over the years. In Sling Blade, you cast Dwight [Yoakam], Col. Bruce Hampton and Vic Chestnutt as the band. How well did you know them before casting? Because aside from obviously being a great film, that musical element, and those band scenes in particular are classics.

Yeah, I didn’t know Vic that well, I knew him, but not that well. I knew Bruce very well…(laughs) Bruce is a whole different cat man, I love him. Also, Ian Moore was in there and I knew Ian a little bit…and Mickey Jones was the drummer.

It’s funny, cause those scenes, you know, we all went through that growing up in bands. You were always in some garage band that wasn’t really worth a shit, and you had one guy in the band that was an asshole and thought he ran things, and there’s another guy who thought he was a poet (laughs). It’s just taking the experiences we all had and just throwing them in there. But I have to say, I did sort of make that poem that Colonel Bruce recites in the movie, I actually wrote that sort of specifically for Bruce, cause that’s kind of the way he talks anyway…so when other people heard it they thought it was hilarious and bizarre, and Bruce, he just thought it was normal (laughs).

Have you thought about combining the two arts, and doing soundtracks?

I’d love to. I work very closely with the people who do music for my movies, Daniel Lanois in particular. I’m going to be directing another movie next year, and Dan and I are gonna collaborate on that one.

With all the success you’ve had, how do you remain grounded in Hollywood?

Well, I don’t really hang out with people in the movie business. I gotta couple of friends who are actors…I would consider John Cusack a friend and Matt Damon. But I don’t really go anywhere, so I don’t have to get involved with it too much. I mean, when I have to go do press for movie I gotta go, but other than that I’m home with the kids or down in the studio, so I just kind of stay out of it.

What changed after you won the Oscar? At that point, you could have gone any number of directions with your career.

Well, you just have to keep making good choices. One of the keys to being a good actor is making good choices. And every now and then you’ll do a movie - it’s not that I’m opposed to doing a commercial movie, a big movie if it’s a good one, I’ve done a few, but you just have to keep picking roles where you can play a different person every time. You can’t all of a sudden just want to play the hero guy that’s kind of one note throughout the movie…that’s a mistake a lot of people make. The lead role is not always the best one, I’ll put it that way. So when something pops up where you’re the only move star and everybody else is just incidental to you, sometimes those aren’t the best roles.

It’s been said you’re rather particular about things, so I’m curious, is your music collection strictly organized?

Well, I’m anal to a point. I want to know where they are. If I’m missing a record, I can’t get it off my mind. I have to either go out and buy it or find it. I’ve got a lot of them…I mean I’ve got thousands of CDs and they’re all over the house. No, I’m not one of those guys who’s built his own special drawers and everything’s in perfect alphabetical order, all kinds of cleaning rags everywhere and shit like that. I’m not like that, I’m too lazy for that. But I do collect records. I have my own sort of system. And I’ve got records of all kinds. On any given day I’ll listen to Jim Reeves and Johnny Cash and Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa and the Bonzo Dog Band and Bruce Hampton and Deep Purple (laughs). And Dean Martin is a big one for me, I listen to a lot of Dean Martin. Mel Torme, stuff like that.

You’re also an avid sports fan…you almost ended up playing pro baseball, so I wanted to ask you about your favorite team - you think the Cardinals will be back in the Series this year?

I sure hope so. It’s funny, a friend of mine, my co-producer and engineer Jim Mitchell is from Boston so he got to gloat quite a bit last year. And I told him the other day that I’m hoping the Red Sox get there again, have the Cardinals kick their asses. But the thing about baseball, like right now, the Cardinals are hard to beat, and they don’t even have some of their top guys in the lineup. Scott Rolen is still out, Larry Walker, guys like that, and yet they still keep winning...you know, 12, 13 games out in front. And a lot of my friend’s who are Cardinal fans, they get upset [like the other week when] we lost 3 out of 4 to the damn Cubs. And it annoys me…telling my friends, “you know what, that’s ok” - if they’re going out there, maybe they’re lackluster a little bit right now sometimes, and they go let like the Royals or the Rockies or somebody like that beat them…“don‘t worry about it, because we want them to get that shit out of their system now and not in [late] September or October.”

Well football season starts this week…any predictions for this year?

Well, I’m an Indianapolis Colts fans, so I would hope the Colts are gonna get in there, but the Colts are one of those teams that…they’re kind of like, remember Susan Lucci on the soap opera? You know, she would get nominated for an Emmy every year and never win it.

So Peyton Manning is the new Susan Lucci? (laughs)

(Laughs) Well I don’t know about that. Peyton Manning, that guy is so amazing, that guy is so good..I don’t think it’s anybody’s fault. They could use a little something defensively, but its such a powerful offense, they’re passing game is so great, but it just seems like, I think its more about, you know, once you lose something like that, you lose a big game, I think psychologically it does something to you. So I think it’s more of a psychological thing than anything else. But also it doesn’t help any that you play inside a house with a carpet and then you go over to Boston every year and play with these guys in like 5 below weather where the ground is hard as a rock and there’s snow in your face (laughs). That doesn’t help any.
That’s the other thing, Jim Mitchell, every night in the studio he’s got a different Patriots shirt on, and it just annoys the shit out of me. But I guarantee you this, the Patriots are not winning the Super Bowl this year. Not gonna happen. If I could predict anybody actually winning the Super Bowl this year, I would say the Steelers. I mean, I hope it’s the Colts. But I think last year, [Rothlisberger] got a little too popular, went on a few too many tv shows, and its like, “hey man, you’re still a rookie, you’re in the big time now, you better go out there and play.” (laughs).

Lastly, Happy Birthday…you just celebrated a big one. So with everything you’ve got going on right now, is 50 the new 30?

Absolutely! Brown is the new black and 50 is the new 30.

Corrupt Cops of the Week

2005-09-09T15:44:00.000-04:00

Weekly: This Week's Corrupt Cops Stories 9/9/05
http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/402/thisweek1.shtml

Another mass bust of cops and soldiers in Arizona, a pair of DC cops having to explain why they had 90 pounds of coke in their luggage coming into Miami from South America, and a Honolulu cop busted for selling speed all make the Corrupt Cops feature this week. Without further ado:

In Tucson, federal prosecutors announced last week they had snared another 16 current and former soldiers and law enforcement officers in Arizona for agreeing to help FBI agents posing as cocaine traffickers get their wares through the border. Just four months ago, those same federal prosecutors arrested 17 more police and soldiers on similar charges. All 16 of those arrested last week have agreed to plead guilty, the prosecutors said. They included two current and three former members of the Arizona Army National Guard, seven former corrections officers with the Arizona Department of Corrections, two former soldiers, an ex-Marine and a former Nogales, AZ, police officer. The conspiracy in which they were charged was responsible for transporting nearly 1500 pounds of cocaine, said acting Assistant Attorney General John Richter in a press statement. The defendants wore official uniforms, carried official ID, and used official vehicles to skate through border and Arizona Department of Public Safety checkpoints, and to avoid police stops, searches, and seizures. They face up to five years in prison on cocaine conspiracy charges, but prosecutor John Scott said all pleading guilty would probably only serve 34 to 36 months.

In Honolulu, Police Officer James Corn Jr. was arrested August 24 on charges of selling methamphetamine. The bust came in a joint operation involving the DEA and the local High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) team. His police powers had been suspended after another investigation last year and he had been working in the department's communications department. Now he will be working on preserving his freedom.

In Washington, DC, two veteran police officers have been placed on administrative leave in connection with a cocaine bust last week at Miami International Airport. Officer Thomas Stephenson, 51, a 20-year veteran, and Lt. Wayne Stevenson, 48, a 22-year veteran, were detained and questioned but not arrested after federal agents seized 90 pounds of cocaine in their luggage upon their return from Guyana, where they had a contract to train police officers. DC police and US border services are both keeping mum so far.

The ScumSucker does not fall far from the ScumSucking tree

2005-09-08T14:15:00.000-04:00

Now we know where W. gets his compassion..............pay particular attention to the quote from Barbara Bush at the bottom:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/07/AR2005090702341_pf.html

Floods Scour the Political Landscape, Too
By Tina BrownThursday, September 8, 2005; C01

Even though it is so familiar in our imaginations, it is still a wonderful moment in the upcoming Discovery documentary "The Flight That Fought Back" when the doomed passengers on Flight 93 seize the food cart and race it down the aisle toward the cockpit like a battering ram, united in courage and rage. At the preview of the movie at the Bryant Park Hotel in Manhattan you could feel the exhalation of tension in the audience during the reenactment: the wish-fulfillment, the satisfaction at the virility of the gesture.

New York may have superficially recovered since 9/11, but the Bush victory in the election last year left a hangover of self-doubt that drained the city's mojo. Katrina's perfect meteorological and political storm has at least blown away that mood. New York's sullen sense of carrying around a deviant secret -- that President Bush is an empty flight suit -- has gone with the wind.

If 9/11 was Bush's Woodstock, Katrina is his Altamont -- the place where his ability to unite people behind a flurry of flag-waving came to look like the hollow sham it always was. John Edwards's mantra of Two Americas doesn't sound so corny now that Bush's soaring vision of democracy on the march has suddenly been laid as bare as an abandoned Superdome where the toilets are overflowing.

But for New Yorkers, the dimensions of the pain mean there is not much glee in saying "I told you so." Ever since 9/11 we've been endlessly stiffed on "homeland security." Millions for red Montana, nickels for blue New York.

We had to grit our teeth and host the cynical hijacking of 9/11 by the Republican convention last year, where even Rudy Giuliani franchised his (and our) authentic moment of heroism to the Bush reelection machine.

The twin towers are still a gaping hole in the ground fought over by greedy real estate agents, prima donna architects and culture warriors distractedly arbitrated by a Republican governor preoccupied with national political ambitions. The current plans for a third-rate office building on top of a bunker with a censored museum seems like a strange advertisement for freedom. But perhaps it suits the city's mood of lingering disappointment after 9/11's squandered goodwill. Osama bin Laden's outrage goes unavenged while we continue to suck wind in Baghdad.

But now, in Katrina's aftermath, there's something different in the air: the scent of insurrection. The needless torment of New Orleans has reignited the dormant passions of the election. E-mails are flying again between friends who've been out of touch for months, enclosing Web links to new polemics of disgust. The big donors with wallet fatigue after John Kerry's loss are ready to write checks again, big time, for any Democrat who shows courage.

It's as if the tragedy in the Gulf Coast has awakened us from a deep materialistic sleep to acknowledge the pain of poverty and racial inequality for the first time in years. Those Democrats who still temporize for fear of being tagged as "playing politics" don't seem to understand that being all kissyface and timid is as over as strategy as it is as substance. Better to play politics than play possum. Maybe Hillary should stop going on fact-finding trips to Alaska with her new Republican pals. Even before Katrina changed the landscape, her careful tactics of sleeping with the enemy had begun to annoy the town that adored her.

Out, damned euphemism! We are in a blazing moment of truth-telling that is holding the nation rapt before its TV screens. Two days after CNN's Anderson Cooper bawled out Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana for her and other politicians' "thanking each other" on the fabulous job they were all doing -- even as he'd just seen rats gnawing at a woman's body in the water behind him -- we saw the real Landrieu on ABC's "This Week."

Red-eyed and combative, she gave George Stephanopoulos an air tour of devastation and talked about the New Orleans sheriffs gripping handcuffs in their teeth as they swam to secure prisoners who would have terrorized the town further if allowed to escape. "If one person criticizes them or says one more thing," she told Stephanopoulos, "including the president of the United States . . . I might have to punch him literally."
Way to go, Mary! This is what America needs. The media-political axis has enabled a culture of talking points and spin to the point that harsh reality had nearly vanished from the national conversation. It's an index of the president's disconnect that last week he could utter the words "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job!" to FEMA Director Michael Brown. Or that he imagined he could actually suggest the administration should investigate the scandal itself. (And drag its feet on its conclusions until after the next election. We know the score now.)

In yesterday's New York Post, Dick Morris wrote that W's reputation will surely recover because rebuilding New Orleans can now become a rallying theme, a "new source of popularity. . . . A disaster like Katrina is just what a president needs to anchor his second term." The cynicism is breathtaking but also shrewd.

What's so troubling about Bush is not that he is incompetent, as many currently charge. It's that he is dismissive, unless programmed to be otherwise. His competence, as Justin Franks pointed out in "Bush on the Couch," extends only to personal self-preservation -- to winning. When the less fortunate are endangered, he reverts to the primal aphasia he learned at his mother's knee. "Everybody is so overwhelmed by the hospitality," Barbara Bush commented from Houston on NPR Monday evening, adding, with a chilling matriarchal chuckle, "And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway. This is working very well for them."

Wow. How's that for one family's values? New York's only consolation this 9/11 is that we no longer feel so marginal as we recoil.

2005Tina Brown

Jesus Says

2005-09-06T11:02:00.000-04:00

"You're Fired!"

I found someone who needs to hang with Bush

2005-09-01T14:53:00.000-04:00

I was reading Maxim at lunch and they had an interview with Carl Everett, who plays for the Chicago White Sox:

Q) Let’s cut to the chase. You don’t think dinosaurs ever existed?
A) Nope. And that never will change. First of all, paleontologists don’t believe one another on their own discoveries—how can I believe in people who don’t even believe in it themselves? And biblically, there’s no mention of dinosaurs. According to the word of the Bible, Adam had dominion over all animals; according to man, dinosaurs ruled the Earth. So either God’s a liar.

Q) What about all the bones they’ve found?
A) You can make bones in the lab nowadays. And every year they come out with a different dinosaur movie, so does that mean that that dinosaur existed? A lot of things are being made that you would never see walk on this Earth.

Q) But why would people make this stuff up?
A) Why would they say a lot of things that aren’t real? That’s the thing—no one things for themselves. If everybody would thing logically, then they would come to their own conclusions. That’s what I do.

First of all I don’t think he knows the definition of “logically.” Second, I had to stop reading for fear of having an aneurism.

Cut It Off

2005-09-01T09:04:00.000-04:00

Another disgusting religious practice.
By Christopher Hitchens

I can never read the name "Michael Bloomberg" without an automatic free-association that flashes up in my mind. "Little putz," is what my internal prompter always cues to me. Obviously this and other intuitions must be prompted by whatever grand intelligence originally designed me, because here's what I read on page B5 of the New York Times on Friday, Aug. 26:

A circumcision ritual practiced by some Orthodox Jews has alarmed city health officials, who say it may have led to three cases of herpes—one of them fatal—in infants. … The practice is known as oral suction, or in Hebrew, metzitzah b'peh: after removing the foreskin of the penis, the practitioner, or mohel, sucks the blood from the wound to clean it.

The continuing scandal of this practice, which most Jews abandoned many years ago, is newly illustrated by the death of one little boy from type-1 herpes, and the infection of two others, in Staten Island and Brooklyn, after they had been subjected to this ritual by the same mohel. Let's be clear what's involved here. The Times refers to an article published last year in the journal Pediatrics that argued that metzitzah b'peh carries a serious health risk and is, for that reason alone, a violation of Jewish law. ("We suspect … that this entity is underreportedfor cultural reasons and that the studies described here areonly the "tip of the iceberg" of the true incidence of the disease," the authors note). None of this should be hard to comprehend: If it risks the life or health of an infant, then no religious allegiance is or should be required for its condemnation. Q.E.D., as you might say.

What's Bloomberg got to do with this, you may be impatient to know by now. Well, the mayor of the great city where these children were deliberately exposed to infection and death has had a meeting with the Orthodox authorities who like to see this happening to small putzes, and he has expressed himself thus, on his own radio show, again as per the Times:

We're going to do a study, and make sure that everyone is safe and at the same time, it is not the government's business to tell people how to practice their religion.

Study? What study? Can't the fool get through an article by a Jewish authority in Pediatrics? For the Times reporter to add that Mayor Bloomberg's comment appeared to be designed not to "upset a group that can be a formidable voting bloc" was, in the circumstances, worse than superfluous.

Where to start with this? I could wish that Bloomberg were always so careful about keeping out of other peoples' business: He has made it legally impossible to have a cigarette and a cocktail at the same time, anywhere in the city. But I'll trade him his stupid prohibitionist ban if he states clearly that it is the government's business to protect children from religious fanatics. Female genital mutilation, for example, is quite rightly banned under federal law, and no religious exemption is, or ever should be, permitted. The Mormons were obliged to give up polygamy and forcible marriage before they, or the state of Utah, could be part of the United States. A Christian Scientist who denies urgent medical treatment to his or her children may well be hauled up for reckless endangerment, as may those whose churches teach redemption through violent corporal punishment. The First Amendment does indeed forbid any infringement of religious freedom, but it is not, as was once said, part of a suicide pact, let alone a child-abuse one.

Let's by all means hear from Rabbi David Niederman of the United Jewish Organization in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, who emerged from his meeting with Bloomberg to inform us that: "The Orthodox Jewish community will continue the practice that has been practiced for over 5,000 years. We do not change. And we will not change." You can preach it, rabbi, but you have no more right to practice it than a Muslim imam who preaches the duty of holy war has the right to put his teachings into effect. And Rabbi Yitzchok Fischer, the 57-year-old man who ministered to the three boys in question, is currently under a court order that forbids him from doing it again—pending an investigation by the health department. What "investigation?" If another man of that age were found to be slicing the foreskins of little boys and then sucking their penises and their blood, he would be in jail—one hopes—so fast that his feet wouldn't touch the ground. If he then told the court that God ordered him to do it, he would be offering precisely the defense that thousands of psychos have already made so familiar. Preach it rabbi. Preach it to the judge.

A few years ago I traveled to Calcutta with the brilliant photographer Sebastião Salgado, who has made the eradication of polio his signature cause. In 2001, there was a real chance that this childhood-wrecking and frequently lethal malady could go the way of smallpox. Only a few outposts, usually in very bad war zones like Afghanistan, had not been reported as "clear." (The two sides in the civil war in El Salvador observed a truce so that the vaccine could be safely distributed.) But some mullahs in Bengal spread the rumor that the vaccine led to impotence and diarrhea (a bad combo) and urged mothers to keep their children away from the nurses and physicians. Most Bengalis are too smart to listen to ravings like these, which exactly resemble the view of Dr. Timothy Dwight, one of America's founding divines, that vaccination against smallpox was an interference with the divine design. However, in northern Nigeria, where imams now hold state power in many provinces, the polio vaccine has been denounced as a plot "by the US and the UN [!]" to "sterilize Muslims." In consequence of this fatwa, the disease has returned to Nigeria this year and also spread back to several African countries that thought they had bidden farewell to it. Decades of patient and skillful work have been ruined, along with the lives of uncounted children.

Jewish babies exposed to herpes in New York, thousands of American children injured for life after the rape and torture they suffered at the hands of a compliant Catholic priesthood, prelates and mullahs outbidding each other in denial of AIDS … it's not just your mental health that is challenged by faith. Anyone who says that this evil deserves legal protection is exactly as guilty as the filthy old men who delight in inflicting it. What a pity that there is no hell.

This is why religion and Politics dont mix

2005-08-30T10:56:00.000-04:00

This is from the article below. The quote is discussing a follower of Sadr in Iraq. I think it sums up why religion and politics do not mix, especially democratic govt. Democracy is contingent on compromise, but for people who feel they are working for god there can be no compromise. Why would you compromise when god is on your side and you are doing his bidding?

"There are moments in conversations in Iraq when politics transcend the rules the Americans and their allies play by: The questions are not about negotiations, compromises and bargains. Terms like "democracy" and "individual rights" ring hollow. Abdel-Hussein's words were infused with something larger and more mystical. They had an unyielding quality to them, the absolutism of faith."

here is the full article:

Sadr's Disciples Rise Again To Play Pivotal Role in IraqFreed Aides Join Newly Robust Movement

By Anthony ShadidWashington Post Foreign ServiceTuesday, August 30, 2005; A01

NAJAF, Iraq -- Hazem Araji's résumé reads like a story of Iraq's recent past -- and perhaps its near future.
In the tumult that followed the U.S. invasion in 2003, he hit the streets with a clique of fellow Shiite Muslim clerics to organize what became Iraq's first postwar popular movement. Their symbol was Moqtada Sadr, a young, radical clergyman and son of a revered ayatollah. The next year, Araji emerged as the group's public face, as it twice fought U.S. troops. He and others were arrested, and for nine months he languished in U.S. custody in Abu Ghraib prison, then at Camp Bucca.
Now, as the country enters a time as politically uncertain as any since the fall of President Saddam Hussein, Araji is a free man. So are a handful of Sadr's other closest, most dynamic aides, men in their thirties who have helped shape the organization's combustible mix of Iraqi and Arab nationalism, millenarian religious ideology, grass-roots protest and gun culture. With customary bravado, Araji and the others today are sending a message: They are ready to make up for lost time.

"It's a new dawn," said the turbaned cleric, with a hint of a smile. He leaned against a wall plastered with Iraqi flags and portraits of the Sadrs and those killed in last year's battles. "People have been released, and they're working harder than before."

Long the bane of the U.S. project in Iraq, Sadr's movement returned to center stage last week, with what his aides describe as a new confidence following the release of Araji and other leaders, along with the experience of their sometimes quiet activism. In dramatic fashion over three days, the movement embodied virtually every aspect of power in today's Iraq: support in the street, an easily mobilized militia, and loyalists within the government that it often denounces.

After a clash Wednesday night in Najaf that they blamed on a rival Shiite militia, Sadr's armed followers poured into Baghdad and at least six other cities. Twenty-one members of parliament and three cabinet ministers loyal to him suspended their work in protest. Two days later, Sadr's followers organized some of the biggest demonstrations in recent years; ostensibly protests over government services, they were effectively shows of strength.

The newly freed aides say even they are surprised at the growing level of organization they have found within the group: clearer lines of communication, a more structured hierarchy and a sprawling social services network. In the Baghdad slum named after Sadr's father, the ramshackle headquarters that was wrecked repeatedly by U.S. troops last year only to be rebuilt sits next to the movement's newly completed, two-story stucco building with floodlights, air conditioners and seven agitprop-style megaphones clustered on the roof. A few miles away is a new office, trimmed in red and black, for the movement's social work, run by Araji. Across the street is an information center.

In a country whose sectarian and ethnic divides have relentlessly deepened, Sadr stands as a rare figure with support among both Sunnis and Shiites. At a protest Monday against Iraq's new constitution in Tikrit, near Hussein's home town, Sunnis held aloft pictures of the cleric. "Yes, yes to Sadr!" some of the 1,500 protesters shouted.

Ahead are difficult questions, namely about Sadr's still-undeclared stance on the proposed constitution: Support could anger Sunni allies, but opposition might endanger his Shiite support. One aide hinted that Sadr may leave his position ambiguous. But for the moment, Sadr officials say they are reaping the benefits of their position as a protest movement in a country with plenty to protest about.
"As for energy, we have energy. As for followers, we have followers. As for ability, we have the ability," said Mustafa Yaqoubi, a senior Sadr leader in Najaf who was released from prison on Aug. 14. "We still remain."A Revitalization
A few hours before dawn on April 3, 2004, U.S. forces arrested Yaqoubi, a quiet, lisping cleric, on charges stemming from the killing of a Shiite cleric in Najaf a year earlier, in the days after Hussein's fall. The detention sparked the battle between Sadr's militia and U.S. forces that dragged into that May, quieted, then flared again that August, wrecking parts of Sadr City and the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala.

Nearly two months after Yaqoubi's arrest, on May 23, Riyadh Nouri, another young cleric and Sadr's brother-in-law, was arrested.

In a prison in Mosul, the two clerics' cells were next to each other. For a few hours in the morning and evening, they paced the courtyard together. Otherwise, they spent their time praying and reading the Koran. Yaqoubi developed a fondness for Agatha Christie and read a translated version of Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables." Nouri focused on his state of mind.
"I didn't think about tomorrow," he said at his house in Najaf. "If you think that way, it will wear you out."

Two weeks ago, a Baghdad court unexpectedly dropped the charges against the two. On their return from the capital to Najaf a day later, both said they were struck by the changes during their absence.

"In the past, people were working for the present. There was no sense of the future," Nouri said. "Now there's organization. There's a program, there's discipline and there are policies behind our work."

In all, six of Sadr's senior leaders were arrested last year. Four have been released: Araji, Nouri, Yaqoubi and Mohammed Tabatabai. Of those, Nouri, Yaqoubi and Tabatabai were the most influential. In the years between the assassination of Sadr's father in 1999 and the ascendance of Sadr himself after Hussein's fall, they kept the movement alive, working underground.

"For sure, we've been revitalized," said Araji, as aides whispered questions into his ear.

Since his release, Araji has taken over the social affairs committee, one of the movement's more than half-dozen branches. (Others include tribal affairs, politics, culture, religious education and information, and the Mahdi Army, Sadr's militia.) As he sat at his office, Araji described some of his panel's activities, including distribution of millions of dollars to the poor in southern cities to purchase cattle for farms and supplies for small grocery stores, and the provision of food, medicine and clothes to 30,000 families.

Both Nouri and Araji called the emphasis on social demands the movement's priority. They said it reflected the ministry of Sadr's father, whose grass-roots movement in the 1990s catered to the poorest and most disenfranchised Shiites.
"The fighting prevented what we were thinking from the start," Nouri said.

Araji was blunter: "The Mahdi Army, it's finished."An Incendiary Rivalry

Abu Muamil Kurdi and Abu Muqtada Dulaim are fighters in the Mahdi Army. In their estimation, it is stronger than ever. When the clash in Najaf erupted Wednesday night, Kurdi, 35, was at Sadr's residence; Dulaim, 30, was at the organization's office near the shrine of Imam Ali.

The three-story brick office served as the headquarters for Sadr's father in the 1990s, and today his followers treat it almost as a shrine. It was closed last year, but authorities in Najaf allowed it to reopen this month. That angered some residents who still blame Sadr and his men for the destruction wrought by last year's battles. About 200 of them gathered Wednesday night. Their numbers grew as the protest headed toward the office. Fistfights soon broke out; some people threw stones.

Unexpectedly, the police force, controlled by a rival Shiite party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, withdrew. Armed guards from the nearby office of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani then fired on Sadr's men, witnesses said. Troops arrived, mainly from the Interior Ministry, which is controlled by the Supreme Council. In the melee, four of Sadr's followers were killed.

Amid the chaos, some protesters entered Sadr's office and set furniture and carpets on fire. The arson enraged Sadr's men. After 10 p.m., they were working the phones, calling followers in Najaf and offices in Baghdad and southern provinces.
"Each person called another," Dulaim said. "From the hour of the event, until the morning, we were on the phone."
The response was swift, igniting long-smoldering differences between Sadr's movement and the Supreme Council, which is led by Abdul Aziz Hakim, the oldest surviving son of Muhsin Hakim, one of Iraq's most respected grand ayatollahs.
Like much in Iraq, the rivalry draws on history and power. To varying degrees, both groups draw legitimacy through family names, and both claim leadership of the country's long-repressed Shiite community. The Supreme Council has sought that role through engagement in the U.S.-backed government, exercising influence over Iraq's security forces. Sadr's movement is represented in the government, too, but it has fashioned itself as an outsider. Its rhetoric is anti-occupation; its constituency is the street.

To Sadr's followers, the Supreme Council is beholden to Iran, where it was based in exile, its members living in relative security while the Sadr group suffered in Iraq under Hussein, the Sadr men contend.

To the Supreme Council, Sadr is a lightweight, lacking the religious credentials, seasoning and political savvy to navigate the challenges the Shiite community faces. Even now, many are reluctant to even mention Sadr's name, fearful of giving him credibility.

As the calls went out, the Supreme Council's offices were targeted in Amarah, Diwaniyah, Basra and Baghdad. In the mixed Sunni-Shiite town of Baqubah, Sadr's men attacked another office. As they headed toward it, the loudspeaker at a Sunni mosque urged the militia to fight against "those who want to divide Iraq."

"If they attack our symbols," Kurdi said, "they should know there's going to be a reaction."

As the clashes erupted, Iraq's Kurdish president personally appealed to Sadr to intervene. Sadr called his forces back by the next morning and asked the ministers and parliament members to resume their duties. For his part, Hakim denounced the attack on the office in Najaf and, in a rare acknowledgment, praised Sadr's restraint.

But virtually no one in Najaf or elsewhere thought the fight was over.

"We stand against them," said Murtadha Hajjaj, the Sadr representative in Basra. "Their ideas are Iran first, then Iraq."
Added Kurdi, the militiaman: "It depends on them, whether they got a lesson or not."An Ardent Believer

A few days before the clash in Najaf, a call went out from Sadr: The time for the government to deliver electricity, water, fuel and other necessities was up. The next step, he said, was protests. If those failed, he promised, more would follow.
One of those who answered the call was Hamid Abdel-Hussein, a slight, 22-year-old psychology student with 13 brothers and sisters. He showed up early at the outdoor prayers in Sadr City on Friday, passing the time by reading devotional prayers to a Shiite saint.

In the Sadr movement, Abdel-Hussein is what might be termed a target for its message. He studies at Baghdad's Mustansiriya University, but he said he has no hope of a job. The government, he said, "claimed it was here to serve us, and now it works against us." Sadr stands alone in defending his interests, he said; he made no distinction between the father and the son.

"We were waiting for someone," said Abdel-Hussein, his beard still tentative, as he sat barefoot on a worn red prayer rug. "We were lost and he came to save us. Sayyid Moqtada, all his steps and actions come from God," he added, using an honorific for the cleric.

"Sayyid Moqtada is paving the road ahead for the people," Abdel-Hussein said. "He's surrounded by enemies. You can see. He's the only one who speaks about what's right. He stands alone. His line is sharp, and he never compromises his position."

There are moments in conversations in Iraq when politics transcend the rules the Americans and their allies play by: The questions are not about negotiations, compromises and bargains. Terms like "democracy" and "individual rights" ring hollow. Abdel-Hussein's words were infused with something larger and more mystical. They had an unyielding quality to them, the absolutism of faith.

"God instructs Sayyid Moqtada to do his work," he said.
At 1 p.m., the prayers began. There were 20,000 people, perhaps more. Afterward, the protest began, a silent march as Sadr ordered. At the same time, others took place in at least eight other Iraqi cities, drawing thousands more.

"The country of two rivers is without water, a country of oil is without fuel," one banner read. "Iraq will remain without fuel, water and electricity as long as the occupation remains," another said. A sign behind it declared: "Oh occupier, our oil is for us, not you."

As they tramped the streets, clouds of dust swirled under a relentless sun.

"Apparently words are useless," Abdel-Hussein said, "so silence is better."

He walked past carcasses of vehicles destroyed in last year's fighting, still strewn across the street. Past a mosque where Hussein's forces crushed an uprising by Sadr's followers in 1999. Past a burst water main. Past the slum's ubiquitous green sewage. The protest to Abdel-Hussein was not a call for action; on their own, no one would answer their demands. Their audience, he said, was God.

"He will bring mercy," Abdel-Hussein said, "and force the people who see our protests to accept our demands."
He gazed across the crowds of people, marching ahead. "God," he said, "is the first and the last."

Special correspondents Salih Saif Aldin in Tikrit and Hassan Shammari in Baqubah contributed to this report.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company
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This guy is unfickingbelievable

2005-08-28T22:37:00.000-04:00

Abramoff Cited Aid Of Interior OfficialConflict-of-Interest Probe Is Underway

By Susan SchmidtWashington Post Staff WriterSunday, August 28, 2005;

A01
Indicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff claimed in e-mails sent in 2002 that the deputy secretary of the interior had pledged to block an Indian casino that would compete with one of the lobbyist's tribal clients. Abramoff later told two associates that he was trying to hire the official.

A federal task force investigating Abramoff's activities has conducted interviews and obtained documents from Interior Department officials and Abramoff associates to determine whether conflict-of-interest laws were violated, according to people with knowledge of the probe. It can be a federal crime for government officials to negotiate for a job while being involved in decisions affecting the potential employer.

The two former Abramoff associates, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are under scrutiny in the investigation, said Abramoff told them in late 2003 that he was trying to arrange for his firm, Greenberg Traurig LLP, to hire J. Steven Griles, then deputy interior secretary. Federal investigators are interested in those discussions and in job negotiations Abramoff may have had with a second department official, according to sources.

Abramoff told associates that he believed Griles was "committed" to blocking an effort by the Gun Lake Indian tribe to build a casino near Grand Rapids, Mich., according to the content of e-mail messages reviewed by The Washington Post. Abramoff said the blocking would involve an environmental challenge to the project, a tactic also proposed by Michigan business leaders opposed to the casino. Abramoff fought the project because it would draw business from a casino operated by his clients, the Saginaw Chippewas.
Environmental concerns ended up delaying action on the Gun Lake casino. The project was cleared last May by the Interior Department.
Gun Lake was not the only casino that Abramoff tried to derail through his departmental contacts. The Post has reported on e-mails indicating the lobbyist enlisted Griles to stop a Louisiana tribe's proposed casino, which threatened another Abramoff client.

Griles, who left the Interior Department earlier this year to form a consulting firm, "said he never had anything to do with the Gun Lake casino issues," a spokeswoman at his company said. He did not comment on any job discussions with Abramoff. A spokesman for Abramoff also declined to comment. Greenberg Traurig, citing the ongoing investigation, had no comment on possible job talks with department officials.

In a separate case, Abramoff and a business partner were indicted this month on federal wire fraud and conspiracy charges in Florida. They are accused of providing lenders with a counterfeit financial document to consummate their purchase of a casino cruise line in 2000. Allegations of fraud emerged after the seller was later killed in a gangland-style hit.

The Washington probe, being conducted by the Justice Department's fraud and public corruption unit, focuses on Abramoff's lobbying work on Capitol Hill for Indian tribes for which he and public relations executive Michael Scanlon were paid $82 million. Scanlon, one of about a dozen congressional staffers who went to work with Abramoff, had served as press spokesman for House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.).

The Justice Department task force, which includes the FBI and the IRS, is looking into Abramoff's dealings with lawmakers and their staffs. Investigators from the Interior Department's inspector general's office, part of the task force, have been asking witnesses about the Gun Lake casino project, according to people who have had contact with the investigators.

The task force also is examining Abramoff's relationships and influence with officials of the Bush administration, as highlighted by the previously undisclosed Gun Lake e-mails. The e-mails show how Abramoff relied on the president of a conservative group, Italia Federici, to intercede with Griles, who was her friend.

Copies of Abramoff's e-mails referencing Griles and Federici were obtained from a variety of sources, including the Interior Department. Some e-mails involving Gun Lake were read to The Post by a person who declined to release them because of the federal probe.

Department officials said the Gun Lake process was proper, adding that they could not comment further because of the ongoing investigation into Abramoff's contacts with Interior.'The Way to Stop It'
The Gun Lake tribe, formally known as the Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Band of Pottawatomi Indians, in 2001 began seeking approval for a casino on 147 acres near Grand Rapids.

As part of its application, the tribe prepared an environmental assessment and was close to approval by the end of 2002. The tribe was not asked to produce an environmental impact statement, or EIS, a much more detailed study.
On Dec. 4, 2002, Abramoff received an e-mail from Saginaw Chippewas tribal representative Chris Petras, who said that Gun Lake's proposal was moving forward rapidly. A public comment period on the tribe's environmental assessment was expected to be the last step before the Bureau of Indian Affairs -- a part of the Interior Department -- cleared the way.

That same day, Abramoff sent an urgent e-mail to Federici, president of the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy.

"This is a disaster in the making," Abramoff wrote. "This is the casino we discussed with Steve and he said that it would not happen. It seems to be happening! The way to stop it is for Interior to say they are not satisfied with the environmental impact report. Can you get him to stop this one asap? They are moving fast. Thanks Italia. This is a direct assault on our guys, Saginaw Chippewa."

Federici posted a quick reply: "I will call him asap." She met with Griles in his office two days later, according to a copy of Griles's schedule released under the Freedom of Information Act. Federici did not respond to interview requests for this article.

Federici's group, CREA, was founded in the 1990s by conservative anti-tax activist Grover Norquist and Gale Norton, now secretary of the interior. It has received financial backing from chemical and mining interests, leading some environmentalists to brand it a front for industrial polluters. Abramoff directed tribes he represented to donate $225,000 to CREA from 2001 to 2003.
Days after he appealed to Federici for help with Griles, Abramoff reassured the Saginaw Chippewas tribal representative. "The meeting with Griles went well. We have a lot to do but we'll get there," he told Petras in a Dec. 12, 2002, e-mail.

Scanlon weighed in the following week, suggesting technical roadblocks to stop the casino. "Hey, I think a real quick way to blow this Gun Lake thing out of the water is to have BIA reject the land into trust, or lay some stipulation on their application that would buy us some time," Scanlon wrote Abramoff on Dec. 16. "Any word from Griles on this?"

Abramoff wrote back: "I thought the way to do this is to have them reject the EIS, which I believe Griles has committed to do."

In the first half of 2003, the Gun Lake tribe remained under the impression that its application was about to be approved. But in July of that year, the Department of Justice's Indian law section raised concerns about the project and sought to have the tribe prepare an environment impact statement.
Federal investigators are examining the circumstances that led the section to raise its objections, according to people who have been interviewed in the probe.

Thomas L. Sansonetti, then the associate attorney general overseeing the Indian law section, told Interior Department officials that his office did not want to take on the burden of defending the department if it was sued by Michigan opponents of Gun Lake on environmental grounds.

In an interview this month, Sansonetti said that he wanted to have a strong defense in the event of a lawsuit. He said he was not moved by the Gun Lake tribe's offer to provide legal assistance for any court case.

Sansonetti said he first heard about Gun Lake from the Interior Department's solicitor's office. "I think there was a concern with the [environmental assessment] being sufficient all along," he said.

Sansonetti said he has attended events sponsored by Federici's group. He said he had no communication with Griles or Abramoff about Gun Lake and said he is unaware of any investigation of the matter. He left the Justice Department this year to join a Wyoming law firm.

Asked to comment on how his tribe's application was handled, Gun Lake leader D.K. Sprague issued a statement complaining of the cost of the delay in the casino application and urging "a thorough investigation" by the Justice Department task force. "We have been denied our federal rights, economic self-sufficiency, and jobs that will benefit our community," he said.Opponents Sue Interior
In addition to Gun Lake, in 2003 Abramoff and Griles were active in an effort to stop a casino proposed by the Jena Band of Choctaws in Louisiana, rivals of another Abramoff client.

Late in that year, Griles, who was generally not involved in Indian issues, presented Interior officials with a binder containing legal arguments and congressional letters opposing the Jena plan. Griles acknowledged to colleagues that the binder had probably been put together by Abramoff, according to one former senior department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
In March, The Post reported that Griles's involvement in the Jena case led to a clash with other Interior Department officials, including former legal counsel Michael G. Rossetti. A spokeswoman for Griles commented for that article, saying that he "didn't participate in any decision-making process regarding the Jena Band and gaming."

In April, the Interior Department solicitor's office dropped opposition to the Gun Lake tribe's casino application. The tribe subsequently received approval for its casino.

A group of Grand Rapids business leaders, who had long argued that the casino would harm the city's renewal plans and should undergo a more extensive environmental review, immediately sued the Interior Department.
One of those involved in the legal action was Peter F. Secchia, a major GOP fundraiser who served as an ambassador for President George H.W. Bush. In December 2002, he told the Kalamazoo Gazette that he was going all-out to block the casino, so much so that he spoke to presidential political adviser Karl Rove about it at a White House Christmas party for donors.

"I talked to Rove, and he put me in touch with his guy in charge of this kind of operation. I'm going to do my damnedest on this one. This is really important to us," Secchia told the Gazette that December.

In a recent interview, Secchia said he has spoken not only to Rove but also to President George W. Bush and Vice President Cheney about what he sees as the negative impact of the proliferation of tribal casinos. Both men, he said, told him it was a legislative issue. "Karl told me to talk to [congressional] committee people," he said, and put him in touch with the White House office of intergovernmental relations.

Secchia said he has not talked to officials at Interior or Justice about Gun Lake. He said he has never had contact with Abramoff, who is out on $2.25 million bond and is to be arraigned next week in Miami in the casino fleet case.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
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Old People crack me up

2005-08-26T15:56:00.000-04:00

You gotta check out this pic:

http://www.canada.com/national/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=581719e6-4f85-48bb-a52c-615ef31355e7

Crooked Cops of the Week

2005-08-26T15:14:00.000-04:00

Weekly: This Week's Corrupt Cops Stories 8/26/05

http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/401/thisweek1.shtml

A crooked police chief in Louisiana, a pair of crooked cops in Massachusetts, a quartet of crooked cops in Tennessee. But it wouldn't be "This Week's Corrupt Cops" if we didn't have at least one drug-dealing prison guard. We do. Let's get to it:
In Boston, two Worcester police officers appeared in federal court Thursday to face federal drug charges. The pair, Heriberto Arroyo, a 10-year veteran, and Brian Benedict, a 9-year veteran, were arrested Wednesday along with sports supplement store owner Thomas Viglatura, TV NewsCenter 5 reported. The charges are unclear. Worcester Police Chief Gary Gemme would not disclose the nature of the charges. "We didn't duck and say, 'No comment,'" Gemme said as he ducked and refused to comment.

In Memphis, federal prosecutors Monday indicted three Memphis police officers and a Shelby County (Memphis) sheriff's deputy on charges they stole money they thought belonged to drug dealers and conspired with undercover agents they thought were drug dealers. Memphis officer Charles Smith, 39, is accused of warning another officer he was about to be set up by the feds. He is charged with obstruction of justice and lying to a federal official. Officer Roderick Smith, 37, (no relation) is charged with theft and attempted cocaine possession. Officer Deshone Skinner, 32, is charged with conspiracy and theft. Shelby County Deputy Marvin Wilson, 40, faces two counts of theft.

In Orange, New Jersey, Essex County jail guard Jay Griggs, 35, a 10-year employee, was charged last week with official misconduct, conspiracy to violate state narcotics laws, and possession of marijuana, heroin, and cocaine with the intent to distribute, the Orange Transcript reported. Griggs was arrested August 11 after entering the jail with numerous garbage bags filled with dope and other contraband, including 30 plastic bags of marijuana, five glassine folds of heroin, three bottles of cocaine, two packs of rolling paper, one cell phone and charger, three boxes of cigarettes, 30 packs of cigarette tobacco, and three boxes of cigars.

In Lutcher, Louisiana, Lutcher Police Chief Corey Pittman was arrested August 17 on federal drug dealing charges after undercover agents told a federal grand jury they had bought drugs from him on at least five occasions. The chief made $5,200 selling them crack cocaine and hydrocodone, they testified. Pittman was selling powder cocaine by the ounce, as well as crack and hydrocodone pills, they said, according to reports on KATC-TV in Lafayette. Pittman may argue that he was conducting his own undercover drug operation, but witnesses called before the grand jury have so far failed to back him up, the station reported.

Mormons are dangerous

2005-08-26T14:40:00.000-04:00

Yet one more reason (as if we needed more) to avoid Utah at all costs:

http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/401/utah1.shtml

Feature: PLUR Meets SWAT as Utah Cops Attack Electronic Dance Party 8/26/05

What was supposed to be a night of dancing to electronic beats under the stars in the Utah desert Saturday night turned into a nightmare for some 900 party-goers as they were suddenly attacked by 90 Utah law enforcement officers dressed in combat gear and carrying assault rifles. The PLUR (Peace, Love, Unity, Respect) kids proved to be no match for the paramilitarized SWAT teams that descended on them on the orders of Utah County Sheriff Jim Tracy.

The event was shut down at gunpoint and some 60 people were arrested, although only 21 of them for drug or alcohol violations. Many more were brutalized, according to numerous eyewitness accounts. Sheriff Tracy claimed the dance party was an illegal gathering without a permit -- a claim vigorously denied by the promoter -- and that illegal drug use was observed by undercover agents at the party.

"It's not just a mass gathering, there's illicit use of drugs, distribution of drugs," Utah County Sheriff's Sgt. Darren Gilbert told the Deseret Morning News early this week as questions began to be raised about the raid. "There was a lot of criminal activity just going on at the party itself."
Many early eyewitness accounts described the police as "soldiers" or "National Guardsmen" because of their rough tactics and combat uniforms, but no members of the armed forces were involved, according to Utah County authorities. Instead, the strike force consisted of Utah County Sheriff's deputies, Utah State Police members, a Utah Department of Corrections SWAT squad, and Provo city police. Police officers acted brutally and violently, pointing guns at some party-goers and assaulting others, eyewitnesses said.

Salt Lake City resident member Jonathan Meander, the Utah director of DanceSafe, a harm reduction group that works with the dance culture, was one of the hundreds who had arrived at the party before the big bust. "About 11:30, a helicopter circled the party and people started to scatter," he told DRCNet. "The cops started coming in with cammo gear and assault rifles and dogs and tear gas, and they were yelling and pushing and hassling people. If you tried to get your stuff, you got hit. I saw people get beaten to the ground. They were also trying to prevent people from filming them. The way we got the footage that has made its way to the Internet is that one guy was filming and a cop knocked the camera out of his hand, and one of his friends grabbed the camera and ran away," Meander said.

"I am disgusted. I saw a lot of stuff that just wasn't right," said Meander. "We wanted to go dancing in the desert, and they come with their assault rifles and beat us up."
The assault is being denounced by national organizations that support the dance culture, as well as by civil liberties and drug reform groups. "That raid was atrocious," said Marc Brandl, national director of DanceSafe. "This was harm maximization. If law enforcement had any concerns, they could have brought them up beforehand, instead of ruining these young people's lives," he told DRCNet. "This wouldn't have happened if it had been a Neil Young concert. This is an attack on rave culture, but the more they crack down, the more they drive it underground."

"Throughout American history, our government has attacked every new form of youth music, including jazz, hip-hop, rock and roll, and now electronic music," said Abby Bair, outgoing Outreach Coordinator for Students for Sensible Drug Policy. "A person is no more likely to use drugs at a 'rave' than at a Rolling Stones concert," she told DRCNet. "Fifteen years from now, Americans will look back on the rave laws to see them for what they really were: an absurd effort to criminalize youth culture and a direct violation of 1st Amendment rights."
In the meantime, said Scott Morgan, associate director for Flex Your Rights, a group devoted to teaching people how to effectively exercise their constitutional rights in police encounters, the only recourse may be the courts. "There isn't much we can do to prepare citizens for an experience like this," he told DRCNet. "When law-enforcement chooses to attack rather than protect citizens, the only thing you can do is keep suing them until they can't afford helicopters and camouflage battle-suits."

The attack on Versus II, a challenge of the DJs organized by promoter Salt Lake City promoter and record store owner Brandon Fullmer, is the latest escalation on what has become an all-out assault on dance music parties and the "rave culture" by authorities in Utah County. Located just south of Salt Lake City, the county prides itself on being the most conservative in the nation, and the Mormon-dominated county wants nothing to do with electronic dance music and the youth culture that enjoys it. The Utah County Sheriff's Office reported proudly that it had shut down two previous dance parties this summer. According to the Salt Lake Tribune, Utah County cops wanted to "get their point across that such activity was not welcome in their area."

This is not the first time Sheriff Tracy and his SWAT team have been accused of excessive force. In May of this year, the Utah County SWAT team manhandled a Springville family when it erroneously raided their home. In documents filed as part of a federal lawsuit last month, the Lawrence Chidester family claimed their adult son, Larry, was tackled and his face shoved into the ground and rocks although he was standing with his hands in the air repeatedly saying "I am not resisting." The Chidesters also allege SWAT members threw homeowner Lawrence Chidester to the ground and pointed a gun at his head. While the SWAT team was aiming at the house next door, Sheriff Tracy justified the assault on the Chidesters by saying they became involved "as an ancillary issue." They were lying, anyway, he told the Provo Daily Herald.
The Utah County Sheriff's Department public relations machine was in high gear from the get-go. Sgt. Gilbert warned reporters that "raves" are a serious threat where drug use and underage drinking take place. "Reports of sexual assaults, overdoes, firearm violations, vehicle burglaries," also are to be expected, he said. At Saturday's party, a 17-year-old girl overdosed on Ecstasy, but was treated at the scene and released to her parents, he said. Gilbert also mentioned claims from women to have been sexually assaulted at an earlier party. An earlier party in nearby Little Moab had attracted 3,000 people, and the department wanted to avoid that, he said. "There's no doubt in my mind that this one could have been at 2,000 plus (people)," he said. "That's why we hit it so early."

Even in the wake of the raid and the rising clamor about Utah County assaults on the dance culture, Sheriff Tracy told the Salt Lake Tribune his office monitors the Internet, searches for party flyers, and sends up police helicopters in an effort to snuff out such gatherings. "If they're going to run one on a Wednesday night, we'll find it," he said. "We will ensure we find them and have them curtailed before they ever get to that point."

But the sheriff may have bitten off more than he can chew. The Utah dance party community is aroused, and no one more so than event promoter Brandon Fullmer, also known as DJ Loki. "The police were totally out of line," he told DRCNet. "What they did was totally uncalled for. There was no reason for them to use excessive force. They may deny it, but we have it on video. They came in without a warrant and manhandled people, including a 90-pound girl who got beat down. How are we supposed to respect the police when they come and treat us like criminals?"

Fullmer has hired noted Utah civil rights attorney Brian Bernard and plans to file a lawsuit, he said. "Our attorney is reviewing the case right now, and once we figure out how to proceed, then bam! We will take action. I've been doing this a long time and I make sure to cover everything. They've shut down other shows, and I understand that. But when I do everything needed to make this legal, they are not right to shut us down."

Fullmer disputed the sheriff's office statement that he lacked a permit. "They are saying I didn't have my permits, which is a flat-out lie," he said. "I'm not some kid; I'm a businessman and I've been doing these events for 10 years. We were in complete compliance with the requirements of Utah County."
The Utah County Sheriff's Office claimed that the event was not properly permitted because under county ordinance, events with more than 250 people must receive a permit from the county commission. But the sheriff's office was being intentionally misleading, said Fullmer. "The county law says you need the permit if you're going to have more than 250 people and the event is going to last more than 12 hours, but our event was not scheduled for more than 12 hours, therefore we did not need that permit."

Versus II had done everything required of it, said Fullmer. "We had a permit from the county health department, we had emergency medical technicians on scene, we hired security licensed through the state of Utah. By the way, six of those arrested were our security people. They had confiscated drugs from party-goers and the cops arrested them for drug possession for the drugs they confiscated!"

Fulmer and his attorney aren't the only lawyers examining the raid. "We have a lot of problems with how that entire matter was handled. We are extremely concerned, especially about the excessive force issues, as well as about the apparent attack on free expression and free assembly" said Dani Eyer, executive director of the Utah American Civil Liberties Union. "We have received complaints and are gathering stories and are in internal discussions about how to proceed."
Utah County Sheriff Tracy managed to shut down one more party, but in doing so he was brought unintended and unwanted attention to the county and his department. Now the question is how much the taxpayers of Utah County will have to pay for his attacks on young Utahns.