Week of: |
11:45 AM
Note for our readers
The Mojo Blog team is out of the office today. Back Monday.
Have a great weekend.
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5:05 PM
Bill O'Reilly's All-Sin Zone
Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly is having to defend himself against sexual harassment allegations that, if true, could signal the end of his much-hyped domination of cable news. The producer of O'Reilly's "The O'Reilly Factor," Andrea Mackris, filed a lawsuit last week that makes the Starr Report seem dry by comparison. O'Reilly's offensive monologues, which can be read in their entirety on thesmokinggun.com, include his outrageous descriptions of Caribbean shower fantasies, Thailand sex shows, and more, much more.
The allegations are based on =extensive quotations cited in the complaint (it's likely that Mackris taped some, if not all, of O'Reilly's lurid phone calls). However, her lawyer, Benedict Morelli has refused to confirm or deny that Mackris taped her conversations with O'Reilly, only stating on NBC's "Dateline": "We have concrete, irrefutable evidence. Do I look worried?" O'Reilly continues his macho bravado, ranting that Mackris challenged the "wrong guy," but he has reason for worry.
The indictment of O'Reilly has already shifted from the New York State Supreme Court to a tête-à-tête between the most self-absorbed journalist of the Right and his many detractors on the Left. Let's face it, O'Reilly has not endeared himself to many prominent journalists, along with millions of other Americans, and one of his arch-rivals, The New York Times columnist Frank Rich, gets the best of him in a must-read column in this Sunday's edition (which the Times released today). The fight between the two has brewed for years, with O'Reilly most recently calling Rich a "back door knife artist" and challenging him to some kind of journalist dual:
"At least your far-left colleague, Paul Krugman, had the guts to face me. You are a cowardly smear merchant who uses a newspaper column to promote defamation under the guise of opinion."
And Rich's response is evidently, "You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet." This time, O'Reilly has just provided too many juicy details and Rich goes for the jugular in second paragraph:
"Only in America could Mr. O'Reilly appear on 'Live With Regis and Kelly' to plug his new moralistic children's advice book (sample dictum: 'Healthy sex is a combination of sensible behavior and sincere affection') just as old and young alike were going online to search thesmokinggun.com for the lewd monologues attributed to him in Ms. Mackris's 22-page complaint. Everyone is now so busy matching Mr. O'Reilly's alleged after-hours oratory -- none of which he or his lawyer immediately denied -- with his past condemnations of Janet Jackson, Ludacris, wet T-shirt contests, Joycelyn Elders and the televised Madonna-Britney smooch that the findings could fill another Starr report. My own favorite example, hands down, is Mr. O'Reilly's reverie about hooking up with 'hot' Italian women during a visit to the Vatican while his pregnant wife was marooned at home in Plandome, Long Island."
Now, this is a debate fit for pay-per-view. While this back and forth continues, the fallout for O'Reilly will likely be decided in a lucrative settlement or a court of law. But, once-and-for-all, the moralizing charlatan is exposed for his hypocrisy; and his insensitive tirades against gay teenagers or children of 9/11 victims (because they oppose the president) seem more vain and irrelevant than ever.
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4:22 PM
Canadians for ... whom?
When it comes to the U.S. election, Canada's prime minister has a simple message for his cabinet -- keep it to yourselves.
George Bush is not a popular man in the neighbor to the north, where only 20 percent of prefer him to John Kerry, based on a recent poll. Prime Minister Paul Martin has been critical of Bush in the past, refusing to join the war in Iraq and chiding his opponent in last June's election for trying to make Canada more "like the United States." So he would presumably agree with the recent comments by his environment minister and human resources minister in which both said they prefer Kerry.
However, Martin's also realistic enough to know he must smooth relations if Bush wins re-election. That's why he warned cabinet members to stop talking about the U.S. election, while also calling the U.S. Congress "the real problem" behind trade subsidies that anger some Canadians:
"The Americans will choose their president like Canadians will choose their prime minister and I think the commentary should end there."
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2:15 PM
Kerry a liberal?
As previously noted here, George Bush's tendency to call John Kerry the Senate's most liberal member (and the accompanying groaner that "Ted Kennedy is the conservative senator from Massachusetts) is based on a National Journal report of only one year's votes, and that Kerry's record is more, well, nuanced than that. In a story published Wednesday, Knight Ridder looked at the senator's overall record, and found him to be a centrist within his party:
"In his 20 years in the Senate, Kerry has accumulated a voting record that puts him almost smack in the middle of his Democratic Senate colleagues, according to an authoritative analysis of congressional votes by professors Keith T. Poole of the University of Houston and Howard Rosenthal of Princeton. Kerry is to the right of his Massachusetts' colleague Edward Kennedy, to the right of Sen. Hillary Clinton, and even to the right of his Massachusetts predecessor, the late Sen. Paul Tsongas, who won fame as a "neo-liberal" moderate devoted to fiscal responsibility."To be sure, Kerry has cast votes with the most liberal wing of his party. His opposition to the Contras, his rejection of missile-defense systems, his votes to cut defense spending after the Cold War, his resistance to virtually all tax cuts and his defense of abortion rights are classic liberal positions. Last year, as he campaigned, he recorded votes only in the most partisan roll calls, skewing his record and causing National Journal to rank him as that year's most liberal senator.
"But he's tacked against the left, too. He signed on early to a 1985 law mandating a balanced budget by automatic spending cuts if necessary. He's voted consistently in favor of international trade agreements despite labor opposition. He's supported virtually every presidential request for the use of force, from Panama in 1989 to the current war in Iraq -- with one great exception, the Persian Gulf War under President Bush's father in 1991."
That analysis shouldn't be surprising, considering Kerry is hardly the favorite of the Democrats' left faction or the right-of-center Democratic Leadership Council. He floats directly in his party's mainstream, which is more than Bush supporters can say about the incumbent.
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1:48 PM
Did Kerry really cause violence in Haiti?
A few days ago, a BBC report emerged blaming John Kerry, of all people, for violence in Haiti. As the theory goes, Kerry had mentioned several months ago that he would have sent troops to protect ousted president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and this, supposedly, "emboldened" Aristide supporters and caused the violence we're seeing today. Conservatives, needless to say, jumped all over this story.
Now, Kerry is always being accused of "emboldening" this or that enemy, so consider me skeptical. Over at Beautiful Horizons, Randy Paul digs up the relevant transcripts and reports and figures out that all this Kerry-bashing is, well, ludicrous:
Kerry made the comment that he would abide by the [Inter-American Democratic Charter, supporting Aristide's elected government] - to which [Colin Powell] also affixed his signature - and that it was important to respect democracy in a region where democracy has all too often been threatened. He also said that we would have sent in troops earlier (something that may very well have saved lives on both sides). That's all he said, while simultaneously acknowledging Aristide's numerous shortcomings. It also occurred more than seven months ago. Are we believe that the Chimeres marked down Kerry's words and have followed the US elections closely, noting the polls in a nation with an incredibly poor communications infrastructure, waiting anxiously and committing their horrific acts in the hopes that John Kerry, if elected will ignore the beheadings and other atrocities that the followers of Aristide have done?
Read the whole post for a good retrospective on Haiti. It's worth noting that it was Kerry who wanted to support what fragile democratic institutions existed in Haiti, while acknowledging that Aristide was far, far from ideal. Meanwhile, "champion of the free world" George W. Bush managed to flip-flop on the whole idea of power-sharing in Haiti, and decided to let one bunch of thugs overthrow the other. Kerry gets a lot of grief for supposedly not sharing in Bush's commitment to democracy, but Haiti, for starters, seems to suggest quite the opposite.
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11:56 AM
Kerry has the edge in the newspaper-endorsement race
President Bush claims never to read newspapers -- even conservatives ones -- and now we know why. According to Editor and Publisher, Bush continues his weekly slide in the number of newspaper endorsements, and Senator Kerry now holds a 52 to 36 edge over Bush. In total circulation, Kerry is now over the 9 million mark, with Bush still below 5 million.
Most important for the Kerry campaign, they've picked up at least nine "switches" -- papers that endorsed Bush in 2000 -- with a total circulation totaling more than a million, while Bush has picked up one "switch," with a circulation under 50,000. Bush is losing support from Republican-leaning newspapers that endorsed him in 2000, including widely read papers like the Seattle Times; the Portland Oregonian; Columbia Missouri's Daily Tribune; and the Tampa Tribune.
And these newspapers are not the only conservative publications running from Bush. The American Conservative magazine's upcoming issue is now online and includes an editorial board non-endorsement along with individual and extensive arguments for each of the five major candidates and one case for not voting at all:
"Unfortunately, this election does not offer traditional conservatives an easy or natural choice and has left our editors as split as our readership. In an effort to deepen our readers' and our own understanding of the options before us, we've asked several of our editors and contributors to make "the conservative case" for their favored candidate."
Although he may not be reading it himself, Bush's handlers must be concerned that large chunks of even the conservative press are not backing him in 2004.
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11:44 AM
No shortage of flu vaccine for members of Congress
If the third presidential debate taught the mass media anything, it was that there's a massive shortage of flu vaccine in America. And it was only a matter of time until someone pointed out that members of the House and Senate had no trouble getting their flu shots.
As the Washington Post reported Wednesday, the Capitol physician's office has already dispensed almost 2,000 flu shots to members of Congress, their staffs and employees:
"That is a steep drop from last year's 9,000 shots, a spokesman for attending physician John F. Eisold said, because many congressional employees have voluntarily abided by federal guidelines that call for this season's limited supply to go mainly to the elderly, the very young, pregnant women, long-term-care patients and people with chronic illnesses."But people of all ages who are credentialed to work in the Capitol can get a shot by saying they meet the guidelines, with no further questions asked, said the spokesman, who cited office policy in demanding anonymity."
On Thursday, Sen. Bill Frist, who had sent letters urging all senators to get the shots, defended shots for congressmen, as they come in contact with large crowds during campaign season and could easily catch and pass on the illness. As the Associated Press reports:
"Frist, himself a physician, said he got his own inoculation before new federal guidelines were announced Oct. 5. Those guidelines urged healthy people to reserve remaining flu vaccine for older adults and young children who are most at risk for flu complications. Frist also noted that one-third of Senate members are 65 or older, which is within the guidelines for receiving the vaccine."
Frist has a perfectly good point that a member of Congress who catches the flu has the chance to spread it to hundreds of people. But it fits nicely with Kerry's debate line that he's "going to let everybody buy into the same health-care plan senators and congressmen give themselves."
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10:27 AM
Who disbanded the Iraqi army?
I understand that the New York Times' Michael Gordon is trying to figure out what went wrong in Iraq, rather than actually assess blame. Still, like his report on prewar intelligence yesterday, today's story on the decision to disband the Iraqi Army is maddeningly vague. Sending the Iraqi Army home -- which filled the insurgency with hordes of angry, unemployed, and well-trained fighters -- was one of the most disastrous decisions of the entire occupation. So who ordered it? Gordon doesn't say.
We know Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, Iraq's first proconsul, asked that the Iraqi Army be kept in place and put to work. Garner wanted to hold elections as quickly as possible and turn Iraq over to the Iraqis. In May, the White House replaced Garner with Paul Bremer, partly because Garner opposed rapid privatization of Iraq's industries. Bremer came in and made it his goal to show Iraqis that "we are determined to eradicate Saddamism." This sort of rhetoric, according to Gordon, helped Bremer curry favor with neoconservatives in the Pentagon like Doug Feith. But Gordon is agnostic on whether anyone in the Pentagon or White House actually ordered Bremer to disband the army. This little fact seems important in light Newsweek's original reporting that the order from the president himself:
According to one official who attended a meeting that Bremer had with his staff upon his arrival in Baghdad in mid-May of 2003, Bremer was warned he would cause chaos by demobilizing the army. The CIA station chief told him, "That's another 350,000 Iraqis you're pissing off, and they've got guns." According to one source who was at the meeting, Garner then asked if they could discuss the matter further in a smaller meeting. Garner then said: "Before you announce this thinglet's do all the pros and cons of this, because we are going to have a hell of a lot of problems with it. There are a hell of a lot more cons than there are pros. Let's line them all up then get on the phone to [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld." Bremer replied: "I don't have any choice. I have to do this." Garner then protested further, but Bremer cut him off. "The president told me that de-Baathification comes before the immediate needs of the Iraqi people."
As Gordon notes, a number of military officials -- Gen. John Abizaid, Gen. Tommy Franks, Maj. Gen. David Petraeus -- expressed serious concerns about disbandment. But they were all overruled. In the second debate, President Bush declared, "I listen to the generals." That certainly doesn't seem to be the case here.
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10:02 AM
News you can use
The Bush campaign under Karl Rove has been notoriously effective in getting its political talking points into mainstream media coverage, and surrogate groups like the Swift Boat vets have followed suit. But as the Washington Post reports Wednesday, the Kerry campaign has taken one of the GOP's media strategies to heart. As Howard Kurtz reports:
"John F. Kerry's strategists pride themselves on the sheer speed of their advertising effort as they churn out one response after another to President Bush's attack spots."Now it turns out that some of the Kerry commercials are being written, edited, produced and put on satellites for the purpose of generating news articles. They have not actually aired on any network or local station -- except in reports about the Democrat's campaign."
The purpose of such a strategy is to gain maximum media exposure without spending the money to air ads nationally, by getting news organizations to cover the release of an ad (and, often, air clips of it in broadcasts). As political ad guru Bill Hillsman told MotherJones.com in August, the fairly small ad buy from the Swift Boat vets relied on this technique:
"If the press really looked at how much that spot was actually running, they'd hardly pay any attention to it at all. Instead, the group shoots a commercial, calls a news conference and says, 'hey, we're putting this ad up all over the United States.' Then everybody covers it and the press jumps all over it, but nobody ever does the follow-up to see if they actually put this up all over the United States and, if they did, to what level did they do it? Is it really an ad buy or just a video press conference?"
Kurtz said Kerry advisers acknowledge some of the campaign's ads are designed to generate free media in the same way:
"'We're certainly not trying to be disingenuous,' Tad Devine, a senior Kerry adviser, said yesterday. 'We've announced that we've created these and are prepared to use them at a time and place of our choosing.' He said the Kerry team had to be able to show Bush's campaign "that the gun is loaded on this side, too."
It's easy to understand why Kerry's camp would take advantage of a tactic long used by its opposition. Kudos to the Post for doing some follow-up on this, and hopefully some broadcast networks will examine both sides more closely.
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3:48 PM
Hey, at least we're not Azerbaijan
Sure, the U.S. political system suffers from excessive corporate influence, but at least it's not Azerbaijan.
The Germany-based watching Transparency International report on global corruption on Tuesday. The report names Bangladesh, Haiti, Nigeria, Chad, Burma, Azerbaijan and Paraguay as the most corrupt of the nations examined, but some criticism is reserved for the United States:
"Although they are not breaking laws, U.S. businesses exert unfair influence over the political process. While irregular payments and illegal donations are perceived to be less common in the United States than in the average of the 102 countries polled, legal donations are perceived to have a noticeably greater impact on policy outcomes."
Still, the report finds plenty of nations more corrupt than America, mostly those with oil as a bargaining chip:
"As the Corruption Perceptions Index 2004 shows, oil-rich Angola, Azerbaijan, Chad, Ecuador, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Libya, Nigeria, Russia, Sudan, Venezuela and Yemen all have extremely low scores," TI chairman Peter Eigen, said.
On the other end of the spectrum, the least corrupt countries studied were Finland, New Zealand, Denmark, Iceland, Singapore, Sweden and Switzerland.
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1:14 PM
It's off the front pages, but Sudan's nightmare continues
The U.S. election has kept developments in Sudan far off the front page, so it's important to point out that neither the genocide or the refugee crisis is close to a solution.
To nobody's surprise, the United Nations envoy to Sudan announced on Wednesday that the cease-fire is "definitely" not holding, with reports of new aerial bombings carried out by the government-backed Arab militias. The African Union has promised to send more peacekeeping forces, increasing its 390-person force to 3,320. That's still shy of the 5,000 troops the AU has wanted to raise, but represents a $220 million commitment from the EU and U.S. to finally help with enforcing the cease-fire on the ground.
The refugee crisis is also dire, with an estimated 1.5 million people in refugee camps threatened by hunger, disease and attacks against the camps. Columnist Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times -- one of the few writers to give Darfur the attention it deserves -- has been reporting from the region for the past week, providing specific examples of the devastation:
"This land stinks of fear and death, but perhaps just as striking as the murder and rape are the moral choices that families here are forced to make each day."For Abdelrahim's family members, the choice is whether to let adults and older siblings try to hike to safety in Chad - it's a six-day walk. They could leave one adult behind to try to keep Abdelrahim and Muhammad alive. Or should the whole family stay, putting more people at risk but increasing the chance that the boys can be saved?"
Kristof also details the dilemma of foreign aid organizations, which often can't reach the refugees without putting their workers in harm's way. As an example, he points to a Save the Children vehicle that hit a landmine, killing two employees and making other aid groups less likely to visit the same area.
While Sudan has drawn less U.S. coverage of late than "Bush's bulge" or Mary Cheney's sexuality, an estimated 100,000 people have already died there, and another 10,000 casualties are expected each month the crisis continues. As Kristof writes:
"We in America could save kids like Abdelrahim and Muhammad. This wouldn't require troops, just a bit of gumption to declare a no-fly zone, to press our Western allies and nearby Arab and African states, to impose an arms embargo and other targeted sanctions, to push a meaningful U.N. resolution even at the risk of a Chinese veto, and to insist upon the deployment of a larger African force."Instead, President Bush's policy is to chide Sudan and send aid. That's much better than nothing and has led Sudan to kill fewer children and to kill more humanely: Sudan now mostly allows kids in Darfur like Abdelrahim to die of starvation, instead of heaving them onto bonfires. But fundamentally, U.S. policy seems to be to "manage" the genocide rather than to act decisively to stop itŠWe should look Abdelrahim and Muhammad in the eye and feel deeply ashamed."
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12:02 PM
Bunning Missing in Kentucky
In his first Senate debate with Democrat Daniel Mongiardo, Jim Bunning, the first-term Republican incumbent from Kentucky, decided to attend the debate via satellite from party headquarters in Washington. That did not endear him to undecided voters in the Bluegrass state and his poll numbers suffered. In last night's second debate, Bunning outdid that performance by not showing at all.
Mongiardo appeared alone on the thirty-minute televised program shown across the state. The Bunning camp did not provided any explanation for their lost senator but Mongiardo expressed disappointment with the incumbent:
"I wish my opponent were here tonight so that you could see the differences between the two of us and you could make an informed decision who to vote for and what direction we need to take."
Democrats see an opportunity to pick up a seat in a neck-and-neck fight for control of the Senate. While Bunning figures to benefit from Bush's expected ten-point win in Kentucky and his 3 million dollar war chest, Dr. Mongiardo's campaign received a financial boost in recent days when it received $466,000 -- the maximum allowed by federal law -- from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Brad Woodhouse a DSCC spokesman dismissed those obstacles facing Mongiardo and focused on the increased concern that Bunning -- about whose mental health rumors are swirling -- is not ready to serve:
"This race is going to be decided on who the people of Kentucky believe is fit to serve them. And fitness rises above party labels, it rises above ideology, it rises above the outcome of the presidential race there."
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11:46 AM
Kerry taps into the Clinton mojo
Bill Clinton's approval ratings have only gone up since he left office, as the relative peace and prosperity of the 1990s has been replaced by the instability of the Bush years. Now the Kerry campaign hopes to remind the public of those days by deploying the former president on the campaign trail.
The Associated Press reports Wednesday that Clinton will stump for Kerry in Pennsylvania next week, followed by visits to other battleground states. Clinton has also recorded a phone message for a get-out-the-vote effort, and will travel as much as his post-bypass-surgery health allows.
At the very least, Clinton should be an asset in Arkansas, a battleground Bush won in 2000 and where -- depending on which poll you believe -- Bush has a slight lead or it's back-and-forth.
Four years ago, Al Gore inexplicably tried to distance himself from Clinton's popularity. John Kerry, on the other hand, has embraced the former president, hiring former Clinton advisers like Joe Lockhart and Mike McCurry and now taking the "man from Hope" out of mothballs. Clinton's health will ultimately decide how much he can do, but if he's half as effective on the stump as he was at the Democratic National Convention, he should help the Kerry campaign.
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10:54 AM
Did anyone see the insurgency coming?
Michael Gordon has yet another New York Times piece out discussing the run-up to the Iraq war. In this installment, we learn that the National Intelligence Council was in fact responsible for the U.S.'s failure to prepare for the insurgency:
The National Intelligence Council, senior experts from the intelligence community, prepared an analysis in January 2003 on postwar Iraq that discussed the risk of an insurgency in the last paragraph of its 38-page assessment. "There was never a buildup of intelligence that says: 'It's coming. It's coming. It's coming. This is the end you should prepare for,' " said Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the former head of the United States Central Command and now retired, referring to the insurgency. "It did not happen. Never saw it. It was never offered."
Is this true? Was it all the intelligence community's fault? Forgive me for being a bit skeptical of what Gen. Franks has to say, since these days he seems to be focused primarily on getting Bush re-elected. Here's how the Washington Post's Walter Pincus reported on the NIC analysis in back in September 2003:
Former Army secretary Thomas E. White said that during discussions he had in the Pentagon before the war, he was told "the situation once the war was over would be contentious." Although White said he did not see intelligence on postwar Iraq first hand, it was discussed in meetings with Shinseki, who said there were reports that "you could expect a major influx of Islamic fighters."
It was for those reasons, White said in a telephone interview, that Shinseki saw the need "to size the postwar force bigger than the wartime force."
Speaking of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, White said, "Their view of the intelligence was much different. Their notion of it was resistance would run away as the few remaining Saddam loyalists were hunted down."
Despite what Franks claims, Gen. Shinseki had no trouble figuring that all signs pointed to an insurgency, and asked for more soldiers. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz read the same report, found stuff they didn't agree with, and played the report down. Now the NIC's analysis was probably vague enough to support multiple interpretations. But it's pretty clear from Pincus' reporting that Shinseki wanted to prepare for the worst and protect his troops, while the Pentagon just wanted to roll in to Baghdad and prove a point -- that the U.S. was the most powerful military in the world and could topple dictators at a snap of the fingers. It's also worth noting that, several months later, the White House ordered the disbanding of the Iraqi Army over the fairly strenuous objections of the CIA station chief in Iraq. In this case, of course, the CIA was right. So it's one thing to fault the intelligence community for patchy intelligence on Iraq; but it's wholly unfair to blame them for the mess the U.S. is in now.
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4:19 PM
Dick Cheney's "big thought" for the day
As Dick Cheney sharpens his "Vote for us, or you and your babies will get nuked" stump speech today, he also reveals a little bit about how seriously he takes nuclear proliferation:
"The biggest threat we face now as a nation is the possibility of terrorists ending up in the middle of one of our cities with deadlier weapons than have ever before been used against us -- biological agents or a nuclear weapon or a chemical weapon of some kind to be able to threaten the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans," Cheney said.
"That's the ultimate threat. For us to have a strategy that's capable of defeating that threat, you've got to get your mind around that concept," Cheney said.
The thing is, nuclear terror really isn't a concept you have to "get your mind around". There are any number of tangible and straightforward steps we could take to stop nuclear proliferation. The Carnegie Endowment's report on this subject, Universal Compliance: A Strategy for Nuclear Security, lists a bunch of them. Unfortunately, those steps are all tedious and boring -- like implementing nuclear fuel-cycle policies, or establishing contact groups for disarmament. And Dick Cheney, as we know, doesn't seem to have time for the tedious and boring. He wants to think big, big thoughts. Thoughts so big you have to wrap your mind around them. But in the meantime, none of those little things actually get done.
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1:25 PM
Sinclair: from bad to worse
The effects of Sinclair Broadcasting's cynically partisan decision to make its stations air an anti-Kerry movie continue to ripple through the industry. While Sinclair (whose owners are major Bush contributors) still plans to air the film, the reaction remains negative, and Sinclair's behavior isn't helping.
On Monday, Sinclair fired the head of its Washington bureau for having the temerity to criticize the airing of one-sided propaganda (ironic, considering Sinclair is claiming a First Amendment right to air the film). Jon Lieberman had correctly pointed out that running the film brought the network's credibility into question, telling the Baltimore Sun:
"[It's] biased political propaganda, with clear intentions to sway this election. For me, it's not about right or left -- it's about what's right or wrong in news coverage this close to an election."
It didn't take long for Sinclair to send its top DC reporter packing, issuing a statement that labeled him a "disgruntled employee":
"Everyone is entitled to their personal opinion, including Jon Lieberman. We are disappointed that Jon's political views caused him to speak to the press about company business."
So Leiberman's entitled to his opinion, he'll just be fired for expressing it.
Also on Monday, one of the veterans who appears in the film filed a libel lawsuit against its producer (who, it should be noted, is a former Tom Ridge aide). Kenneth Campbell, a former Marine and now a university professor, said the producer used deceptive editing to delete key context from his comments. Lawyers for Campbell sent letters to Sinclair and to a movie theater planning to air the film; the theater canceled the screening.
Like Lieberman, Campbell is not connected to the Kerry campaign, just someone angered by Sinclair's decision. In addition, the broadcast network's stock has continued to drop with investors concerned about a loss of ad revenue.
No doubt in response to this backlash, the nationwide In Demand pay-per-view network has decided not to offer a Nov. 1 showing of Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" (Moore is now reportedly considering legal action). Obviously, there's a big difference between an opt-in, pay-per-view offering and the preemption of primetime network coverage on free TV, but if In Demand is worried about violating the fairness doctrine, Sinclair is well beyond the pale.
Like the candidate it supports, Sinclair Broadcasting is sticking to its guns, even if it means going alone.
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12:42 PM
Blind into Kirkuk
Asharq al-Awsat, a Saudi paper based in London, is reporting that Masoud Barzani, president of the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP), has vowed to make the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, located in Northern Iraq, part of Kurdistan.
Kurds have been migrating to Kirkuk en masse over the last few months, to make up for their forced exodus from the city under the Hussein regime. They are trying to create an ethnic majority in the city in time for the national census, so that they can vote to add Kirkuk to the Kurdish provinces. The only problem is that they're displacing a lot of Arabs, Turks, and Turkomen in the process, creating the possibility of a large-scale civil war. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has already warned the Kurds not to even think about seizing Kirkuk. Kurdish leaders, meanwhile, are hoping that Turkey will be too worried about its potential EU membership to intervene.
A civil war in Kirkuk would make the current violence in Iraq look like a plastic-sword fight. So what has the U.S. done to try to head it off? Absolutely nothing. Back in 2003, the Pentagon set up an Iraqi Property Claims Commission to evaluate property claims in Kirkuk and set up some sort of compensation system. I am told by Kurdish experts that not a single claim has been processed to date. There have been no summits or international talks to try to defuse tensions. Nothing. If the Bush administration thinks this situation will just "solve itself", they're badly deluded.
There's been a lot of talk over Michael Gordon's New York Times piece today, describing how the Pentagon never expected an Iraqi insurgency. Let's hope we don't read another long analysis seven months from now about how the Pentagon never "expected" ethnic cleansing and civil war in Kirkuk.
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12:10 PM
Supreme Court on Texas redistricting
The Supreme Court handed Texas Democrats a paper victory Monday, refusing to affirm a lower court's support of the controversial, Tom DeLay-backed gerrymandering plan that will probably cost five Democratic incumbents their jobs. While the ruling gives Democrats some hope for challenging the redistricting, however, it won't affect the election in two weeks, when those five legislators will almost certainly be removed from Congress.
Congressional districts are usually redrawn once a decade, allowing states to adjust their boundaries using new Census data. But in Texas, Republicans chose to gerrymander for the second time since the 2000 Census, using their majority in the state legislature to create a highly partisan map. That's when Democrats fled to Oklahoma to deny the legislature a quorum, but the standoff eventually ended and the GOP got its way.
Democrats sued over the gerrymander, claiming it was an unconstitutional move done for partisan gain. In January, a three-judge panel in Austin ruled against the Democrats, and many legal experts expected the Supreme Court to simply uphold that ruling. Instead, the court ordered a reconsideration of that ruling.
For Democrats, or anyone who opposes this sort of redistricting for political gain, the Supreme Court ruling provides another chance to make the case. But even if the DeLay plan is overturned, some members of the new Texas congressional delegation will owe their jobs to it.
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11:35 AM
Why wealth inequality matters
The Pew Hispanic Center has put out a new study of household wealth in the United States, and the findings are rather dismal. As of 2002, the median Hispanic family had a net worth of only $7,932 and the median black family had $5,998. By way of contrast, the median white family has about $88,651 saved up for a rainy day, or unemployment, or health catastrophes, or what have you.
In general, wealth inequality matters far more than income inequality, especially since it gets passed on from generation to generation. The Washington Post has a perfect anecdote illustrating why this all matters:
Dionne Walsh craves the chance to get her family of six out of their cramped two-bedroom Landover Hills apartment and into a home of their own. With stable jobs and combined incomes of $80,000 a year, she and her husband seem like prime candidates to make it happen.
But so far, legitimate lenders have been kept away by the debt the family accumulated after Walsh left her job in 2001 to care for her children, and the savings that evaporated while they got rid of the debt. The goal of buying a house, a move that Dionne Walsh, 33, believes will give her family long-term economic stability, has been frustratingly elusive.
I should add that there's not really an easy solution here. President Bush, to his credit, has made an effort to promote minority homeownership, which would increase wealth, although Bush's preferred method -- lowering downpayment requirements -- unfortunately tends to increase the chance of bankruptcy, not reduce it. What other options are there? Cracking down on predatory and discriminatory lending would help, as would regulating interest rates -- two solutions proposed in Elizabeth Warren's book, The Two Income Trap. Both would make for a good start, but the problem of course runs much deeper, and barring a massive wealth transfer, the only long term solution is to have full employment, along with a decent safety net to prevent debt-ridden families from falling further in the hole during a crisis. Neither of which have existed over the last four years.
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5:33 PM
The secret fourth debate!
Wondering about all those issues John Kerry and George W. Bush didn't talk about in the debates? Well wonder no more. Confined Space digs up the secret "fourth debate" between the two presidential candidates, as they duke it out over workplace safety issues. A sample:
KERRY: That's not nearly good enough. More workers were killed in the workplace last year than the year before. 5,559 workers were killed in 2003, compared with 5,534 in 2002. That means that more people die on the job in this country last year than were killed on 9/11, in Afghanistan and in Iraq put together. And that's only the tip of the iceberg. 50,000 to 60,000 died from occupational diseases. The number of reported workplace injuries was over 6 million, and that number is clearly understated.
And yet we're spending just over $400 million on Occupational Safety and Health, while we'll be spending $200 billion in Iraq and Afghanistan, where, by the way, we let Osama bin Laden escape from the cave of Tora Bora because we outsourced the job of capturing him.
BUSH: We've reduced injuries and illnesses because we've reduced the adversarial relationship between OSHA and employers and we've increased the OSHA budget during my watch. And if employers violate the law, we will hold them to account, we will come down on them hard. Just like we held to account a terrorist regime in Saddam Hussein.
KERRY: We clearly need to dedicate more resources to workplace safety. We've got 2,000 job safety inspectors in the country responsible for overseeing and enforcing the safety and health laws in more than 6 million workplaces.
OSHA actually has fewer staff today than it did in 1980. The workforce and the number of workplaces has grown, but the agency's resources have not grown.
It gets a lot more serious, so read the whole thing. My take is that Kerry wins this one by a country mile, though I guess we'll have to wait for the Gallup instapolls to find out for sure.
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4:15 PM
Another Republican for Kerry
Former Michigan Gov. William G. Milliken, the state's longest-serving governor, holding office from 1969-82, broke with the Republican Party today and officially endorsed John Kerry in the presidential race. In an interview with northern Michigan's Traverse City Record-Eagle, Milliken outlined a severe rebuke of President Bush and the overall neo-conservative "partisan ideology" of the Bush administration:
Women's rights, civil liberties, the separation of church and state, the funding of family planning efforts world-wide -- all have suffered grievously under this president and his administration.
The truth is that President George W. Bush does not speak for me or for many other moderate Republicans on a very broad cross section of issues.
The former governor also issued a compelling three-page statement expressing frustration with an administration that's expunged any trace of moderate Republicanism. What should be titled, "My Republican Party," outlines the failure of President Bush to adhere to the moderate tradition of Lincoln and Roosevelt, while earnestly supporting Kerry as president that both parties can support:
[John Kerry] has put forth a coherent, responsible platform of progressive initiatives that I believe would serve this country well. He wants to balance the budget, step up environmental protection efforts, rebuild our international relationships, support stem-cell research, protect choice and pursue a number of other progressive initiatives that moderates from both parties can support.
As a result, despite my long record of active involvement in the Republican Party, and my intention still to stay in the Republican Party, when I cast my ballot November 2, I will be voting for John Kerry for President.
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3:15 PM
News flash: Zarqawi a "terrorist"
In a move that almost seems a parody of the bureaucratic process, the U.S. government has classified the group headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as a terrorist organization. As in, the government announced this decision Friday. Last weekend. After numerous beheadings of hostages, attacks on the Green Zone for which al-Zarqawi claimed credit, and numerous administration attempts to paint al-Zarqawi as the leader of resistance in Iraq. The White House chooses this as time to make a symbolic move against him.
The administration is almost certainly overstating al-Zarqawi's role in the insurgency, as if the insurgents were all united under one leader. And al-Zarqawi is often named as the so-called "link" between Iraq and Al Qaida, though no credible sources have found a working relationship between the terrorist network and Hussein's regime. But the Jordanian-born extremist is obviously a threat, responsible for the targeted killing of Americans, and now reportedly vowing allegiance to Al Qaida.
Clearly, al-Zarqawi is not a new threat, and the "terrorist" designation seems extremely belated. Now known members of his Tawhid and Jihad are banned from traveling to the U.S., and their known assets in U.S. banks can be frozen. A minor step, to be sure, but one that should have already happened. As Kerry advisor Rand Beers put it:
"It is inexplicable that President Bush waited until today to shut down (al-Zarqawi's) finances. ... This is yet another example of President Bush's failure to effectively prosecute the war in Iraq or the war on terror."
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1:29 PM
Problems at the Florida polls, already
Early voting started today in Colorado, Arkansas, Texas and Florida. And unfortunately, it just wouldn't be an election in Florida without problems at the polls. As the Associated Press reports, within the first few hours voting:
"In Palm Beach County, the center of the madness during the recount four years ago, a Democratic state legislator said she wasn't given a complete absentee ballot when she asked to opt for paper instead of the electronic touch-screen machines. Several voting sites in Broward County had problems with laptops connected to elections headquarters. And a brief computer system crash in Orange County paralyzing voting in Orlando and its immediate suburbs."
One advantage of early voting in Florida is the opportunity to request a paper ballot instead of using the electronic voting machines. However, state legislator Shelley Vana received a ballot missing its second page, which includes proposed amendments to the state constitution:
"There was absolutely no concern on the part of the folks at the Supervisor of Elections Office that this page was missing. This is not a good start. If there are incomplete ballots out there, I can't imagine I would be the only one getting it."
For weeks now, media reports and voter campaigns have questioned whether Florida would be ready for a fiasco-free election. If the first day of voting is an indication, the answer to that question is, simply, "no."
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12:54 PM
A Plan for social Security? Let's hear it.
The White House is hopping mad that Kerry would dare suggest they have a "secret" plan to privatize Social Security.
Okay, so let's hear the plan. Right now Bush has proposed to:
1. Allow young workers to divert money into private savings accounts. This money would otherwise be used to pay current retirees.
2. ???
3. Pay current retirees without slashing benefits or raising payroll taxes.
4. Let the good times roll!
Step 2 is kind of crucial there. The transitional costs for privatizing Social Security will run anywhere from $1 trillion to $2 trillion over the next ten years. How exactly do you pay for that? Now it's true, if you believe that privatization will pay for itself over the long run (via higher returns on the stock market), you can just borrow those trillions, so that it's not a real "cost." But that means running monstrous short-term deficits, and convincing bond traders that fiscal sanity will soon return and that there's no reason to expect sky-high interest rates. Maybe that's what the White House is planning. But they've said nothing of the sort, and that pretty much makes it a "secret" plan, doesn't it?
Also, media outlets are jumping on Kerry for not having a plan for Social Security. But his debate answer was perfectly sensible. Social Security will be able to pay its retirees for the next 50-75 years, depending on what assumptions you make about growth and productivity. (In fact, if you assume that we'll have 1990s level growth and productivity, Social Security could be solvent for much, much longer.) The long-term outlook for the program is better than it has ever been in its history. Besides, if we really needed to cut benefits 10-20 years out, those benefits would be much higher in real terms than they are today. There's just not a "crisis" here, and the sensible thing to do is cut the deficit and deal with Social Security later.
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12:50 PM
Florida newspapers cast their votes
Floridians head to the polls today for the first day of voting in this bitterly contested battleground state. The Kerry campaign considers early voting an opportunity to offset the edge Florida Republicans typically have on absentee votes, and they're motivating voters throughout the state with reminders of the election debacle of 2000 and the potential of a replay this year.
While the first voters cast their ballots today, the state's major newspapers cast eight significant votes yesterday. In an unprecedented sweep, seven of those papers endorsed Kerry and one paper, the Tampa Tribune, abstained from endorsing a candidate for the first time in forty years. The Tribune has endorsed every Republican candidate for president since 1952, except for a non-endorsement of either Johnson or Goldwater in 1964, and its page-long editorial decision is the most surprising:
As stewards of the Tribune's editorial voice, we find it unimaginable to not be lending our voice to the chorus of conservative-leaning newspapers endorsing the president's re- election. We had fully expected to stand with Bush, whom we endorsed in 2000 because his politics generally reflected ours: a strong military, fiscal conservatism, personal responsibility and small government. We knew him to be a popular governor of Texas who fought for lower taxes, less government and a pro-business constitution.
But we are unable to endorse President Bush for re- election because of his mishandling of the war in Iraq, his record deficit spending, his assault on open government and his failed promise to be a ``uniter not a divider'' within the United States and the world.
Meanwhile, the seven other Florida newspapers, including the St. Petersburg Times, the Palm Beach Post, the Bradenton Herald, the Miami Herald, Florida Today, the Daytona Beach News-Journal, and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel all endorsed Kerry. In a state destined to remain in play until November 2, with a hostile and equally close Senate contest, the editorial endorsement's suggest some important momentum for the Kerry campaign, one it hopes will last for two more weeks.
The Bradenton Herald, which argued for Bush's election in 2000, put this all into the easiest language imaginable in its Sunday editorial:
It comes down to this simple question famously asked by Ronald Reagan in 1980: Are you better off today than you were four years ago?
The answer, clearly, is no. Ultimately, that is why we recommend John Kerry as president of the United States in the Nov. 2 election.
If Florida voters ask the same question as they head to the polls, it will prove extremely difficult for Bush to withstand the mounting strength of the challenger in the Orange state, which is beginning to look blue.
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11:47 AM
Why are we turning down foreign troops in Iraq?
This Newsday story deserves a lot more press. Apparently President Bush turned down an offer from Saudi Arabia to finance a Muslim peacekeeping force (with soldiers drawn from non-neighboring countries) to handle security for elections in Iraq. Why was the offer turned down? Because the force would only fight under a UN command structure:
Saudi leaders, including Crown Prince Abdullah, personally lobbied Bush in July to sign off on the plan to establish a contingent of several hundred troops from Arab and Muslim nations. Abdullah discussed the plan in a 10-minute phone conversation with Bush on July 28 after meeting with Secretary of State Colin Powell, according to Saudi officials familiar with the negotiations.
Diplomats said Annan accepted the plan. But the Bush administration objected because the special force would have been controlled by the UN instead of by U.S. military officers who run the Multi-National Force in Iraq. Muslim and Arab countries refused to work under U.S. command, and the initiative died in early September.
"Muslim countries that were willing to provide troops were not willing to put them under the command of the U.S.-led coalition," said a senior Iraqi security official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "In many of these nations, there was too much domestic pressure for the governments to justify putting their troops under U.S. control."
Now, I can somewhat understand why the Pentagon shot down this proposal. Having a UN command structure and a US command structure in Iraq would get very messy very quickly -- especially given that the US hasn't even negotiated a Status of Forces agreement with the Iraqi National Guard. At the same time, soldiers from Pakistan, Egypt, Algeria, Indonesia, and the Philippines all have a lot of experience in counterinsurgency, and could have provided a valuable service to Iraq.
So what gives? We would hope that the White House looked at everything rationally and decided that the drawbacks of a UN command outweighed the benefits of more soldiers. But given everything we know about the Bush administration, that doesn't seem likely. Colin Powell was very big on this idea for awhile; was he undercut yet again? Why?
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11:03 AM
The virtues of planning
Over the weekend, KnightRidder examined pre-war planning for the occupation of Iraq and found -- shock of shocks -- that postwar planning was virtually non-existent in the Pentagon. (James Fallows offered a different version in the Atlantic: Both the State Department and the Army War College drew up perfectly sound plans for occupying Iraq; the Pentagon simply ignored them.)
The most persuasive defenders of Bush (see Greg Djerejian's long account) tend to acknowledge these mistakes, but then argue that they've since righted the course. In a sense, that's true. Much of what Kerry has proposed for Iraq is not much different from what Bush has started doing in the last few months. But the larger point is that, over the next four years, no one knows what sorts of situations will emerge, in Iraq or elsewhere. If another crisis breaks out, do we really want a president who refuses to plan, goes with his 'instincts', and then a year later says "oops" and tries to patch things up? (See North Korea for more examples.)
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