Donle’s Daily Dispatches

Volume 1 Issue 168            Today’s News and Views     Wednesday, June 14, 2006

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Update of US Casualties in Iraq: 2497

Update of US Casualties in Afghanistan: 300

Figures provided by

the Iraq Coalition Causality website

For Immediate Release                                                                                 June 13, 2006

2500 American Deaths in Iraq

We say, “Not one more.” Call for Peace Now.

Press Contacts:

Harold P. Donle, Veterans for Peace, Inc. #49, hdonle@insightbb.com 317/698-2450.

Heather Allen-Garde, Hoosiers for Peace, heather@hoosiersforpeace.org, 317/202-9302.

Jim Wolfe, Indianapolis Peace and Justice Center, jwolfe@butler.edu, 317/255-3857.

Members of Veterans for Peace, Chapter 49, Hoosiers for Peace and the Indianapolis Peace and Justice Center are asking Indiana citizens to assemble at the south side of Veterans Memorial Plaza in downtown Indianapolis to mark the  2500^th American killed in Iraq,  Wednesday, June 14^th at 6 PM.

This action is to honor the soldiers who have lost their lives in Iraq and their families, and to give our fellow Indiana citizens a visual representation of what 2500 looks like. We are against war because it kills our family members, wreaks havoc on our national treasury, makes the world a more dangerous place, and psychically damages our humanity. America has traditionally and historically has only gone to war as a last resort. The criminal Bush Administration has disregarded American and International law and has taken this great nation into a tragic quagmire that has now cost this proud country the lost of 2500 fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, nieces, nephews, aunts, uncles, friends and neighbors. Enough is enough. America is a criminal in the eyes of the world and America is no safer for this war.

Hundreds of Hoosiers have been invited to participate in this event that will combine an installation of 2500 flags to honor the dead and a memorial ceremony to call for an end to war. All those participating will gather at 6 P.M. at Veterans Memorial Plaza in downtown Indianapolis.(The Plaza is bounded by Michigan to the south, Meridian to the west, North Street to the north, and Pennsylvania to the west.) At that time, the assembled will create a field of flags on Veterans Memorial Plaza. There will be a period of brief remarks and a memorial ceremony in closing.

For more information contact Harold Donle at (317)698-2450.

Support Our Troops

IMPEACH Bush/Cheney

Hoosiers for Peace requests the honor of your presence…

What: Share Sunday Gravy with Local Progressives at Pasta for Peace. Good Food, Stimulating Conversation, Inspirational Music, Film, and Art and a Silent Auction. Did we mention the pasta was shaped like peace signs? To reserve your seat, call 202-9302 or e-mail heather@hoosiersforpeace.org. Seats are limited and going fast.

When: June 25, 2006 from 1 to 4 p.m. (with dinner at 2 p.m.)

Where: Indianapolis Peace and Learning Center (6040 DeLong Rd.) in Eagle Creek Park.

Why:  Now is the time to spread the word to mainstream America to unite and stand up for peace. Hoosiers for Peace is sponsoring a statewide advertising campaign, which is focused on uniting the community to call for peace. This campaign will cost $14,000. This money will be used to pay for a full-page ad in the Indianapolis Star to ask more than 700,000 Hoosiers to call for peace. To find out more visit www.hoosiersforpeace.org

Cost: Adults $20, Children 5-12 $7, Children under 5 eat free. All proceeds will go towards the advertising campaign. Seats are limited, contact Heather for tickets today: 202-9302 or e-mail heather@hoosiersforpeace.org.

Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal. 
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

May 7, 2006

Dear Peacemakers,

Will you help to spread and encourage peace? With a record number of American soldiers dying in April 2006 and possible military action against Iran becoming daily news, now is the time to spread the word to mainstream America to unite and stand up for peace.

Hoosiers for Peace is sponsoring a statewide advertising campaign, which is focused on uniting the community to call for peace. This campaign will cost $14,000. This money will be used to pay for a full-page ad in the Indianapolis Star to ask more than 700,000 Hoosiers to call for peace. We are contacting dozens of organizations to make a proposal to form a coalition to raise funds and send a collaborative message to Hoosiers to Call for Peace. The message is: Call your friends, your family, and your representatives and ask them to support the Call for Peace.

Like most Americans, we oppose war based on the following, which will be reflected in the advertisement:

A.    War Kills. More than 2,400 American Soldiers have died and nearly 1,000 Hoosier soldiers are in harms way.

B.    War depletes our resources. Billions of dollars are going to sustain war efforts while ordinary citizens struggle for social services.

C.    War will not make us secure. Studies have shown that the U.S. is no more secure today than it was before 911.

Hoosiers for Peace, a website sponsored by Progressive Indiana, requests your support to make this advertisement a success. We will use the advertisement to call for peace. Each group in the coalition  working on this project will be listed in the ad. Each group will be asked to raise $1000 by October 1, 2006. Below are some suggestions for fundraising:

1.                Letter Writing Campaign: Contact your family and friends and ask them to support this call for peace. Tell them how many people we can reach and ask them to make a generous donation and spread the word. You may collect the money through your organization or you may refer them to Progressive Indiana. Donations may be sent through our secure online giving by going to www.progressiveindiana.org and click on donate now or log onto www.hoosiersforpeace and click on donate now. Checks may also be made payable to Progressive Indiana and mailed to:

                Progressive Indiana

                P.O. Box 55253

                Indianapolis, Indiana 46205-0253

2.                Host a house party. Go grassroots and organize a pasta dinner or backyard barbecue and ask for a donation from each guest. Play poker and donate half of each pot to the campaign for peace. Have a bake sale through your church or place of employment.

3.                Plan a small event.  Invite your community to an event and ask for donations for the ad. Small concerts, speakers, and socials are some ideas for these events. Get creative and network!

We need at least 14 groups to join the coalition and many more people to join the campaign to help fill in possible gaps. If we join together we can make this happen and we can bring Hoosiers together through this ad. As we Honor the Dead, Heal the Wounded, and call for an End to the War we can stand united for peace. We can make a difference by showing ordinary Hoosiers that there are many people like them working for peace. Please contact us as soon as possible if you would like to participate in this campaign. With a little work and collaboration we can make a large impact on our community.

In Peace,

Heather Allen-Garde

Director, Hoosiers For Peace

heather@hooisersforpeace.org

heatherreneeallen@yahoo.com

317/202-9302

It isn't enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn't enough to believe in it. One must work at it – Eleanor Roosevelt

David Korten

Butler University

June 26, 2006

7pm

Reilley Room

Atherton Hall

Suggested Donation is $5.00

For more information

Click here

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Today's News and Views

Why Pretend That Hillary Is Progressive?

By Norman Solomon, AlterNet
Posted on June 12, 2006, Printed on June 13, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/37479/

The scheduled speech by Sen. Hillary Clinton at the "Take Back America 2006" conference in Washington on June 13 is likely to intensify discussion about her relationship with the progressive grassroots of the Democratic Party.

Many weeks ago the conference sponsor, the Campaign for America's Future, sent out an email telling prospective attendees: "As in years past, we expect America's most prominent progressive leaders to attend and address the conference. Invited speakers include..." On the list was Hillary Clinton.

In response, I wrote to Campaign for America's Future co-director Roger Hickey and asked what Clinton's name was doing on a list of "progressive leaders." He responded by saying that "I don't think of ALL of our speakers as 'America's most prominent progressive leaders.' In fact, I have been quoted saying very critical things about Hillary -- in the Washington Post and elsewhere. We do, however, want to ask possible presidential candidates to attempt publicly to justify their candidacy to the progressive activists."

Hickey also commented that "some people do consider Hillary progressive."

But the people who "do consider Hillary progressive" could mostly be divided into two categories -- those who are Fox-News-attuned enough to believe any non-Republican is a far leftist, and those who are left-leaning but don't realize how viciously opportunistic Sen. Clinton has been. Today, in keeping with her political character, she welcomes the fund-raising support of reactionary media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

Unfortunately, the kind of confusion that sees Hillary Clinton as progressive is apt to get a boost from her appearance at a conference with avowedly progressive sponsorship -- particularly because the person in the best position to dispel such confusion is not on the program. The "Take Back America" schedule set aside half an hour for a speech from Clinton but not a minute for any words from Jonathan Tasini, the longtime union activist who's running -- on an antiwar and all-around progressive platform -- against Clinton in this year's Democratic primary for senator from New York.

It's sad to see that the progressive conference has excluded from the podium the vigorous primary challenger Tasini while featuring a speaker who has stood against the progressive agenda consistently for more than a decade on issues ranging from NAFTA to the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Tasini points out that Hillary Clinton remains for the war in Iraq, for so-called "free trade" agreements and for the death penalty. She supported the notorious 2001 bankruptcy bill, "has never been for single-payer health insurance" and has worked hard to undermine a host of other progressive positions.

In the interests of truth-in-labeling, shouldn't Hillary Clinton be described as anti-progressive?

Norman Solomon is the author of the new book, "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death."

© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/37479/

During the past 15 months, Elizabeth Cheney has met with and bolstered a gaggle of Syrian exiles, often in tandem with John Hannah and David Wurmser, top officials in the Office of the Vice President (OVP); has pressed hard for money to accelerate the administration's ever more overt campaign for forced regime change in both Damascus and Teheran; and has overseen an increasingly discredited push for American-inspired democratic reform from Morocco to Iran.

With the unspoken support of her father, Cheney has kept a hawk's eye on Iraq policy within the department, intimidating opponents of the neoconservative axis within the administration. And, less visibly, according to former officials who've worked with her, she has made her influence felt in choosing officials, selecting (or blocking) the appointment of ambassadors and other foreign service officers, and weighing in on other bureaucratic battles at the department.

Now, according to the Financial Times of London, Cheney is coordinating the work of a new entity called the Iran-Syria Operations Group. The unit was established "to plot a more aggressive democracy promotion strategy for those two 'rogue' states," reported the Times. In February, the State Department announced that Cheney would oversee a $5 million program to "accelerate the work of reformers in Syria," providing grants of up to $1 million each to Syrian dissidents.

And in the current fiscal year, she will oversee a similar, $7 million regime-change grant program for Iran, though funding for that effort is expected to grow to at least $85 million soon, to include both a propaganda program and support to Iranian opposition groups. "She came in knowing very little about the Middle East," says Marina S. Ottaway, senior associate and co-director of the Democracy and Rule of Law Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who has worked with Liz Cheney on democratic reform issues. "She had a mandate to do democracy promotion, but she had very little familiarity with the subject. ... They deliberately picked a person who was not a Middle East specialist, so that the conventional wisdom, well, let me rephrase, so that real, actual knowledge of the issues in the region wouldn't interfere with policy."

Liz Cheney catapulted into her current job after a rather undistinguished career that leapfrogged from public to private life and back again. In her early 20s, she did a stint at the State Department while her father was secretary of defense in the first Bush administration, and then headed to law school at the University of Chicago and worked for Armitage Associates, a firm run by Richard Armitage. As an attorney, she worked for the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank, and served briefly as a U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) officer in Hungary and Poland. Her Middle East experience was, well, limited.

Asked about Liz's familiarity with the Middle East, a former staffer at the Middle East Institute, a Washington D.C., think tank, says that she dabbled in the Institute's Arabic language classes. "And she'd come to our annual conference," she said. That's it. That was, however, apparently enough to get her named deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs (NEA) in 2002.

A quick climb up the ranks

In an administration in which policy toward Iraq and the Middle East was mostly guided by know-nothings and the inexperienced, perhaps it isn't surprising that Liz Cheney got herself named to a top position at Near Eastern Affairs. How, exactly, she ended up at NEA in the first place is something of a mystery, although no one interviewed doubted that it was at the behest of the vice president.

One former deputy assistant secretary at NEA said that the bureau was offered the choice of either Liz Cheney or Danielle Pletka, a neoconservative hard-liner who is the vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Pletka, a sharp-elbowed insider who helped write the Iraq Liberation Act in the 1990s, was reportedly seen by Secretary of State Colin Powell and NEA as the greater of two evils, and so Cheney got the job.

During the preparations for the Iraq War, Cheney had a back seat at NEA, with a portfolio covering Middle East economic issues, including oil. However, according to insiders, her real importance was to serve as an ace-in-the-hole at the State Department for the vice president's office. Her presence had a sobering effect on many of the department's Arabists, most of whom were known as opponents of the war and were considered suspect by neoconservatives. "All during that year, you had the vice president's daughter sitting there at State Department meetings," says Chas Freeman, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Says another former U.S. ambassador to several key Middle East countries otherwise known for his tough-minded ability to stand up to Arab strong-men: "I would find it confining, if not intimidating."

In 2003, she left the State Department to take a role in the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign and to give birth to her fourth child. (Her husband is Philip Perry, general counsel for the Department of Homeland Security.) But after the election, in 2005, she was back -- this time with an important, and telling, promotion to the far more senior post of principal deputy assistant secretary, making her the No. 2 official on Middle East policy. Known by its acronym, PDAS (pronounced "pee-dass"), it is a bureaucratic post known for its power inside NEA. It was an appointment that certainly got the attention of the State Department's Middle East hands.

"There has always been a political appointee in every bureau at State," says Ambassador Philip Wilcox, a former assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs. But usually the political appointee, who serves as a sort of commissar, would be placed in a low rank within NEA, he says. "The idea that the PDAS would be that political appointee is just unprecedented, since she serves as the alter ego of the assistant secretary."

Wayne White, who served as deputy director of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research and who headed that unit's Iraq team during the war, left the State Department in 2005. "The thing we all said among us, in chit chat, when she moved up to be PDAS after being the deputy assistant secretary, was, 'Ah, now we see the plan,'" he says. "First, she gets her training wheels as deputy assistant secretary ... where she'd get softer assignments, sort of training, which happens to people in that position who don't have a Middle East background, and she doesn't -- and then boom! right up to PDAS. She is in a position to stop anything from going forward -- as in the form of a memo, a recommendation -- that she pretty much wants."

In her job as PDAS, Cheney is responsible for nearly all of the management and administration of the bureau, says White. "In one way, the PDAS is like Stalin in the early 1920s communist party, controlling personnel, able to promote, not promote, put people in key positions. This is an extremely powerful position."

David Welch, the assistant secretary of state for NEA, is nominally Liz Cheney's boss. But her connection to her father, plus her pipelines directly up to more senior State Department officials such as Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, make it easy for her to eclipse Welch. (Like Armitage, who also served as a top State Department official for George W. Bush, Zoellick is a signatory to the statements of the Project for a New American Century in the 1990s, which charted the administration's bellicose course.) "David Welch is in an impossible position on anything she takes an interest in," says a former top NEA official. "And she takes an interest in the big issues -- Iraq, Iran, and so on. They have to be very careful, if they want to do anything that protects the national interest, because it has to coincide with what Liz Cheney thinks is in the national interest."

One of the few reporters in Washington to look into Liz Cheney's role at the State Department, Timothy Phelps of Long Island's Newsday, reported in April that she operates what is essentially a "shadow Middle East policy" against the more mainstream policy promoted by Welch, typical of the neoconservative versus realist divisions that have plagued the Bush administration since 2001.

Cheney has not shied away from throwing her weight around. During her frequent trips to the Middle East, she often operates independently of the department and of the U.S. ambassador in whatever country she is visiting. She has been known to insist on seeing a head of state without inviting the American ambassador to accompany her, in violation of protocol, often threatening the ambassador with the power of her contacts.

On at least one occasion, however, an ambassador called her bluff. "Liz Cheney comes out to this country, and she tells the ambassador -- and she doesn't outrank him -- she tells the ambassador, 'You're not going in the meeting with me,'" recalls Larry Wilkerson, who served as Colin Powell's assistant during his tenure as secretary of state. "And he says, 'I'm sorry, I'm going in the meeting with you. You're not going into a meeting with the head of state without me.' And she says, 'Nope -- would you like a telephone call?'"

In this case, says Wilkerson, the department's bosses backed up their ambassador, who accompanied a chastened Cheney into the meeting. But that has not always been the case. "It's not just that she is imperious in dealing with our ambassadors," notes a corporate lobbyist who is deeply involved in Middle East policy. "She's got her own foreign policy, her own agenda, and so of course she wouldn't want the ambassador to know what she is talking about when she meets a head of state."

Hobnobbing with the new Chalabi

Soon after her return to the state department in March 2005, Liz Cheney made news when she convened a controversial meeting with a handful of exiled Syrian activists to talk about regime change in Damascus. Leading the pack at the time was Farid al-Ghadry, a paradoxically pro-Israeli Syrian who's maintained ties to neoconservatives in Washington and who is close to Wurmser and his wife, Meyrav Wurmser, the director of Middle East affairs for the Hudson Institute. According to Arab sources, it was Meyrav Wurmser who helped to arrange al-Ghadry's tête-à-tête with Liz Cheney, Hannah, and other Bush administration officials.

Al-Ghadry, a Virginia businessman who founded the Reform Party of Syria, is widely seen in Arab circles as a lightweight with no credibility inside Syria. Mourhaf Jouejati, a professor of political science at George Washington University and an expert on Syrian politics, calls al-Ghadry a "mini-me of Ahmed Chalabi," adding that Liz Cheney, Hannah, and the Wurmsers "are the backbone for Farid Ghadry's movement. The question is, are they just seeking leverage with Syria, or is it a serious option? If it is the latter, I would be scared, because that means that they don't know what they are doing."

One of the Syrians who took part in the meeting with Cheney and Hannah is Najib Ghadbian, an activist, author, and professor at the University of Arkansas. "Ghadry doesn't have much following inside Syria," Ghadbian admits. "Why are they behind him so much? Maybe they are following the Iraqi model, but al-Ghadry doesn't even have the clout of Chalabi."

Perhaps another reason that al-Ghadry had the inside track with Cheney, Hannah, and Wurmser is that he is a member of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee who has spoken at meetings of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, a think tank whose board of advisers includes Richard Perle, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and James Woolsey. (Since the meeting with Cheney a year ago, al-Ghadry has lost favor even in Syrian exile circles. A new group, calling itself the Syrian National Council, has emerged, elbowing al-Ghadry out of a leading role.)

Since then, and with the emergence of the reported Iran-Syria Operations Group, Liz Cheney has taken a leading role in the Bush administration's campaign for regime change in both countries. While continuing to press Syria, the State Department has launched a campaign against Iran, separately from any military confrontation being worked on at the Pentagon.

"It looks so déjà vu," says Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, who compares the effort to America's actions before war in Iraq. In addition to pressing the United Nations to impose tough new sanctions against Iran, Liz Cheney is coordinating an effort to rouse Iranian exiles to spark revolution inside the country. Besides seeking $75 million in additional funds for anti-Tehran activities, the State Department has created a brand new Office of Iranian Affairs, which sounds suspiciously like the Defense Department's Offce of Special Plans that was set up to coordinate pre-war planning for Iraq.

And, according to a recent State Department planning document, the United States is setting up anti-Iranian intelligence and mobilization centers in Dubai, Istanbul, Ankara, Adana, Tel Aviv, Frankfurt, London, and Baku to work with "Iranian expatriate communities." Having set into motion much of this activity, Liz Cheney's role in once again up in the air. Many at the State Department may breathe a sigh of relief this summer, when Cheney will once again likely take a leave of absence for the birth of her fifth child, expected in July. Even so, she will remain part of her father's inner circle.

And as the United States lurches toward a confrontation with Iran -- October Surprise anyone? -- Liz and Dick will be hand in hand.

Copyright © 2006 by The American Prospect, Inc. This article may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission from the author. Direct questions about permissions to permissions@prospect.org.

Robert Dreyfuss is a Prospect senior correspondent.

© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/37490/

Krauthammer on icky gays …

By Joshua Holland
Posted on June 12, 2006, Printed on June 13, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/joshua/37447/

Witness, as Krauthammer argues, simultaneously, that we don't need to amend the Constitution to keep them dirty homos from getting married -- yet -- while also asserting that every specious, wing-nutty argument the homophobes employ in the marriage debate is spot-on*.

It's what makes him the best.

On Wednesday the Senate fell 18 votes short of the two-thirds majority that would have been required to pass a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. The mainstream media joined Sen. Edward Kennedy in calling the entire debate a distraction from the nation's business and a wedge with which to divide Americans.

Since the main business of Congress is to devise ever more ingenious ways (earmarked and non-earmarked) to waste taxpayers' money, any distraction from the main business is welcome.

Well, yeah, I guess it's better for the Congress to debate pointless Constitutional amendments than wasting taxpayers' money. On the other hand, they could be dealing with, I dunno, the 45 million Americans without healthcare or any of a dozen other real problems we face. But, either way.

As for dividing Americans, who came up with the idea of radically altering the most ancient of all social institutions in the first place?

Hmmm, tough question. The idea that women had rights within marriage -- that marriage was more than a contract for human chattel -- originated in ancient Egypt, at least in theory. "The most ancient of all social institutions" was widely polygynous until ancient Greece -- although concubines were the norm for fashionable Athenians. The idea that marriage requires a formal ceremony, with a cleric and witnesses and stuff like that only dates back -- in the West -- to the 16th century, so maybe the guilty party is the Council of Trent, which decreed in 1563 that marriages should be celebrated in the presence of a priest and at least two witnesses.

The institution of marriage has been so fluid, and has been 'radically altered' so many times in so many fundamental ways that it's almost impossible to pinpoint who came up with the idea "in the first place."

You get the picture, but let's see where the Krauthammer's going with it:

Until the past few years, every civilization known to man has defined marriage as between people of opposite sex.

That stands in stark opposition to all those civilizations not known to man -- the pixies, leprechauns, hobbits and those folks from Atlantis. They marry willy-nilly -- hooking up with sirens, mermaids and wood nymphs of varying genders -- and their moral relativism has put them on a slippery slope; they're destined to destroy themselves in hedonistic orgies of bloody cannibalism.

To charge with "divisiveness" those who would do nothing more than resist a radical overturning of that norm is a sign of either gross partisanship or serious dimwittedness.

I would have said "dimwittitude," but I'm grossly partisan.

And that partisanship and dimwittedness obscured the rather interesting substance of the recent Senate debate. It revolved around the two possible grounds for the so-called Marriage Protection Amendment: federalism and popular sovereignty.

More accurately, the Senate debate revolved around whether banning same-sex marriage would preserve Western Civilization As We Know It, or was just more Republican pre-election pandering.

But I'll give Charles a bit of credit here: he makes quick work of the states' rights argument, pointing out that the Defense of Marriage Act --DOMA -- prevents same-sex marriage from jumping from state to state, and there's no reason to think it'll be overturned anytime soon, especially with the Supreme constituted as it is today.

Which brings us to the crisp cookie of lucidity in the middle of Krauthammer's reactionary nougat:

Once the constitutional amendment is passed, should the current ethos about gay marriage change, no people in any state could ever permit gay marriage.

That's exactly right, and CK knows that in 20 or 30 years those arguing against gay marriage today are going to regret it as much as those who argued against interracial marriage a few decades ago.

Anyway, it's not long before Charles breaks the spell, ruining the moment of clarity completely:

Gay marriage is a legitimate social issue to be decided democratically. The problem is that imperial judges are legislating their personal preferences, striking down popular will and calling it constitutional law.

Most notoriously, in Massachusetts a total of four judges out of seven decided that the time had come for gay marriage….

That's right, Massachusetts' highest court has seven judges, and rules by majority. Creepy.

This argument is a perfect example of why a highly-educated populace is so dangerous to conservatives; constitutional scholars and historians studying the Supreme Court have argued, correctly, that the judiciary is the branch of government that is most conservative and the least likely to 'legislate their personal preferences.'

That's because judges, like legislators (and presidents), are influenced by popular and political culture; their views change along with the social mores of society at large. But, because of the reliance on past precedents, members of the judiciary are bound much more tightly to tradition than legislators. So while members of Congress have wide leeway to legislate according to their "personal preferences" -- and the preferences of their constituents that day -- the courts tend to lag behind popular opinion rather than getting out in front of it.

If you look hard at the things conservatives cite as examples of the courts forcing bitter medicine down Americans' throats, you'll find that those cases result from the other characteristic of the judiciary: it's the most consistent branch of government by far.

Gay marriage is a perfect example. The Krauthammers of the world will tell you that the Massachusetts Justices imposed their views on the state against the will of the public, because polls show clearly that (a small and declining) majority oppose same-sex marriage.

But the real story is that the courts decided, about twenty years after the rest of America (or at least 90 percent of it), that consenting adults shouldn't be prosecuted for things they do in their bedrooms. So, in Lawrence V. Texas, the Supreme overturned sodomy laws.

Then came the part about being consistent. The argument that had prevented gays from being granted the same rights as everyone else, historically, was that they were breaking the law when they hit the sack. Once gay and lesbian sex was decriminalized, the courts had no reason not to give them equal treatment under the law -- it's the whole 14th Amendment thing.

Krauthammer, I suspect, understands this. But who knows?

Before I wrap up this annoyingly long post, let's look at an unfortunate but revealing slip CK made down the home stretch:

The solution to judicial overreaching is to change the judiciary, not to undo every act of judicial arrogance with a policy-specific constitutional amendment. Where does it end? Yesterday it was school busing and abortion. Today it is flag burning and gay marriage.

Which one doesn't fit? Flag burning. There've been no recent court decisions that invited a rash of flag burning; In the 1930s, a former Republican presidential candidate wrote the majority decision in Stromberg V. California that gave First Amendment protection to "symbolic speech," and two decades ago the Court logically applied that to flag-burning.

By including that in his litany of today's "judicial arrogance," Krauthammer proves what many of us have long understood: "judicial activism" means any legal decision that pisses off conservatives, or any legal issue that they care to beat around election time.

*To be fair, The Hammer never says that gay marriage threatens straight couples' marriages. I gues he's got to leave something for the good folks at WorldNetDaily.

Joshua Holland is a staff writer at Alternet and a regular contributor to The Gadflyer.

© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/joshua/37447/

Bush makes surprise visit to Baghdad

By TERENCE HUNT, AP White House Correspondent

2 hours, 8 minutes ago

President Bush made a surprise visit to Iraq on Tuesday to meet newly named Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and discuss the next steps in the troubled, three-year-old war.

It was a dramatic move by Bush, traveling to violence-rattled Baghdad less than a week after the death of terror chief Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in a bombing attack. The president was expected to be in Baghdad a little more than five hours.

The trip was known only to a handful of aides and a small number of reporters sworn to secrecy because of obvious security threats for Bush and members of his entourage.

Landing at Baghdad airport, Bush transferred to a helicopter for a six-minute ride into the heavily fortified Green Zone. White House officials said the helicopter ride posed the greatest risk for the president.

Bush was greeted by another day of violence in Iraq — dozens of people were killed or wounded Tuesday in explosions in the northern oil city of Kirkuk, and eight bodies were found in western Baghdad. Al-Maliki pledged "no mercy" in a crackdown against insurgents.

It was Bush's second trip to Baghdad in less than three years. He visited American troops at Thanksgiving, 2003, in a visit confined to the airport and limited to several hours. That trip also was kept secret.

Bush flew here secretly from talks at Camp David, Md., with senior national security advisers who gathered Monday to review how to bolster Iraq's fledgling government and its capacity to handle the country's defense.

In Baghdad, Bush was to meet with al-Maliki and senior members of his Cabinet. White House officials said the president wanted to meet face-to-face with the prime minister to size him up and assure him of U.S. support.

He said the message that he wants to send to the Iraqi government is "we stand with you. What you're doing is important."

Maliki has won U.S. admiration by promising to crack down on militias and sectarian violence, promote national reconciliation and accelerate reconstruction efforts and restore essential services such as electricity.

After a day of meetings at Camp David, Bush had dinner with his aides and Cabinet members and then returned to his cabin. After darkness, he boarded his helicopter and slipped away, flying to Andrews Air Force Base outside of Washington for the 11-hour flight to Baghdad.

Bush's aides had expected the president to be with them on Tuesday for a video conference between Baghdad and Camp David of al-Maliki and his cabinet members and Bush and his team.

Instead, Bush was in Iraq for the video conference.

Tuesday's trip came as Bush struggled for solid footing for his presidency, rocked by the Iraq war and other problems. About 2,500 members of the military have died since the war began in March, 2003.

Anxiety about the war has been the driving force behind Bush's plunge in the polls and a cause of Republican anxiety about holding control of Congress in the November elections. Approval of Bush's handling of Iraq has dipped to 33 percent, a new low, and his overall job approval at 35 percent in a new AP-Ipsos poll.

The poll, taken last week before the announcement of the death of terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, found that 59 percent of adults said the United States made a mistake in going to war in Iraq — the highest level yet in AP-Ipsos polling. It also found that more than half — 54 percent — said it's unlikely that a stable, democratic government will be established in Iraq, also a new high.

Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press.

Copyright © 2006 Yahoo! Inc.

Associate Publisher: Public interest in news topics beyond control of mainstream media

Friday, June 9, 2006

By KENNETH F. BUNTING
P-I ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER

The blogosphere has been abuzz. But in the days since Rolling Stone magazine published a long piece that accused Republicans of widespread and intentional cheating that affected the outcome of the last presidential election, the silence in America's establishment media has been deafening.

In terms of bad news judgment, this could turn out to be the 2006 equivalent of the infamous "Downing Street memo," the London Times story that was initially greeted by the U.S. media with a collective yawn.

Robert Kennedy Jr.'s Rolling Stone mega-essay is titled "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?" It focuses on widespread voting irregularities, questionable tallies and disenfranchising practices, particularly in Ohio, which President Bush won by more than 100,000 votes.

Singling out Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell for much of the blame, Kennedy writes persuasively that enough was awry in that state alone to raise serious questions as to whether Bush really defeated John Kerry in 2004. Blackwell, now a Republican candidate for governor, headed Bush's state re-election campaign at the same time he was constitutionally in charge of the state's voting machinery.

While Kennedy's article perhaps gives far too much weight to suspicious discrepancies between exit polls and the final election outcome, it meticulously asserts and documents questionable methods of purging voter rolls, intentionally created long lines at Democratic polling places, court-defying practices regarding registrations and provisional ballots, a phony terrorist alert on Election Day and final tallies in some counties and precincts that, to Kennedy's way of seeing it, simply don't make sense. Already, it notes, three Cleveland-area election officials have been indicted for illegally rigging the recount.

Kennedy's 11,000-word article was Rolling Stone's cover story, published on Thursday of last week.

But if you were looking in the five or six days afterward for follow-up stories, investigations or even a mention in the P-I, its cross-town competitor or just about any other major U.S. newspaper, you were almost certainly disappointed.

To his credit, CNN's Wolf Blitzer aired a brief and not-very-illuminating interview with Kennedy late the next day after the Rolling Stone issue hit the newsstands. There was a brief mention on the Lou Dobbs report later that same evening and MSNBC got around to mentioning the article's assertions several days later.

But for the most part, national and regional newspapers, the major networks and news services have behaved as if the article was never published, that it broke no new ground and there was nothing of interest or significance in it.

Understandably, some readers are asking why. One Whidbey Island resident e-mailed the news editors of the P-I and The Seattle Times simultaneously, asking "Which one of you has the honesty and guts to investigate and report about the charges that Robert Kennedy Jr. has written about in regards to stolen 2004 presidential election?

"That someone could claim that our American electoral process was criminally thwarted should be BIG news."

P-I News Editor Gil Aegerter answered courteously, telling the reader he would pass his concerns along to our political coverage team. "In the meantime," Aegerter wrote, "I'll direct you to online coverage that the P-I has been doing on this issue, about the original Rolling Stone report and about reaction to it."

Despite the critical tone in his note to Aegerter and his Times counterpart, our reader, and others who have similarly complained, are right.

Aegerter and other P-I editors who have taken time to respond to complaining readers are to be commended. While there is no pretense here that it is adequate, I'm also proud that, having seen no wire-service accounts, political team Assigning Editor Chris Grygiel was smart enough to write and start a blog about it on our Web site.

It is news. It certainly deserves mention, at the very least in stories about the story, reaction to it or even ones debunking it. Any of those choices would be better judgment than simply ignoring it.

Those of us in what bloggers and Internet journalists derisively call "mainstream media" should have learned that lesson last year, when Internet-fueled curiosity about the "Downing Street memo" made us pay attention to a story we were too quick to dismiss as old news. Badly undervaluing the significance and the public's interest in the new disclosures, we thought former Bush administration officials, including ex-Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and White House counterterrorism aide Richard Clarke, had told us a year earlier that the administration had a predisposition for war with Iraq long before the attack, and long before diplomatic pressures had been exhausted. On hindsight, some of us realize now we should have recognized the newsworthiness of the secret memo and the 2002 meeting it chronicled, even if the report only provided corroboration of something we'd already heard.

The P-I's editorial pages noted the secret British memo in columns before news of it was finally published on the news pages of ours and most other U.S. newspapers. But even so, that was nearly two weeks after Times of London's initial report.

The parallels to the Kennedy article are hard to escape.

Like most newspapers our size, the P-I relies on news services for most of its national and international news. Managing Editor David McCumber did what good editors at regional and midsized newspapers often do. He called The Associated Press and asked if a report would be forthcoming. He got back the predictable and disappointing response that the news cooperative's Washington and national editors had looked at Kennedy's report and determined there was "nothing new."

It is true that there have been reports about voting problems in Ohio since election night. But Kennedy's article is not just old news rehashed. Its 11,000 words, not counting the 208 footnotes, most of which contain Web addresses for links to source information, are certainly overreaching at times. For those with mistrust or partisan fervor against Bush, Kennedy's reporting will sound like evidence of fraud and election tampering that rivals the shenanigans of the worst Third World dictators.

For those who read it with a more balanced view, there is plenty to fuel outrage about imperfections and potential for manipulation of the electoral system.

It's too early to tell whether it will become big news in the same delayed manner the British intelligence memo did. But the titans of the news industry still have things to learn about how news becomes news in the present-day media landscape. Editors will always have responsibility for filtering, and helping readers understand the importance and credibility of news reports.

But nowadays, the American discourse is rightfully in hands other than ours.

Kenneth F. Bunting is associate publisher. E-mail: kenbunting@seattlepi.com

© 1998-2006 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

And now, FEMA fixes marriage

Charles M. Madigan
June 13, 2006

A brilliant idea came to me as the Senate Republicans pushed their hopeless proposal for a constitutional amendment to protect marriage from amorous gay people. I agree with all of the arguments about marriage being a foundation in our culture and the best way to raise a family and nourish values.

That being the case, let's focus on the real threat.

It's time to arrest and imprison everyone who has ever been divorced, make it illegal to have serious marital problems and set up a federal agency to enforce it.

It's just that simple.

I know, the prisons are already crowded. But Congress can just pass a law to pardon, maybe, all the pot-pushers to make room for the guys and gals who decided to put asunder what no man was supposed to be able to put asunder, if I remember the vows correctly.

As I understand it, three things generally bust up marriages--sex, money or "issues" relating to children.

First we get a constitutional amendment making divorce as unpatriotic as flag burning. Then we get the government into a big "Marriage Security and Enhancement" program that would be run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, because those people are so astute at handling disasters.

We could have the Marriage Police who would show up at a moment's notice, fully armed with federal authority to dictate solutions to problems. You would have to do what they say or face felony charges that would land you in prison along with all the divorced felons already serving time.

Say your problem is sex. (You can admit it here. The government will keep it quiet.)

You were both all hot and kissy when the marriage began, spent most of your time bouncing around the condo, wore out the "Bolero" CD and simply could not keep your hands off one another. You shared Bing cherries, slurped oysters from navels, toasted with real champagne, got all googly-eyed and promised an eternity of perpetual, undying, inventive passion.

Then, in the second week of the marriage, something went completely off track and you both just sat around watching TV or reading books.

And so you decided, "Call the lawyers."

The Marriage Police would show up just in time with a new CD, ED pills and copies of my exciting new books, "The Loving Wife," "Just say: Yes!" and "Loving, Listening and More and More Listening and More Listening: Being a Functional Husband."

(I haven't actually written them yet but all they need is a publisher, an advance check and some typing.)

"You have one week to get back at it," the marriage cops would say. You could achieve this in a nice air-conditioned FEMA disaster trailer. There are lots of them available in Arkansas, romance capital of America. Kids? The Federal Kid Police would come in and order you to agree on how to raise the kids. No one has ever figured this out, there is no proper book yet, but maybe a good pamphlet would do the trick.

Money? The Money Police would come and make you work harder to bring in more money so you could have more stuff, which, of course, is the solution to everything. We all need more stuff.

Having solved those problems, the government could force all of those divorced people to remarry once they get out of the can. This would cause more divorces as an unintended consequence among those who had remarried, but that would be handled by changing the laws so people could have more than one spouse, just to keep things legal, like in Utah in the old days.

Within a decade the whole problem would go away. No one would ever get divorced again and the institution of marriage would be saved.

We would need bigger houses, of course, for all of those expanded families. People who have discovered they actually hate one another might be a problem. By why focus on the negative?

We could finally rest easy knowing that the menace of divorce had been eliminated and marriage, that institution we so deeply respect, had been saved.

These are the stupidest ideas I have had in my years of column writing, which is why I am presenting them.

But they aren't as stupid as the thought that government should step between two people who love one another and want to stand as a couple. We are obliged to recognize and honor love where we find it.

It is rare and powerful in its beauty, a product not of politics, but of the soul.

www.chicagotribune.com/gleaner

Copyright © 2006, Chicago Tribune

Liberal Activists Boo Clinton
Rejection of Iraq Timetable Gets Cool Reception at Conference

By Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 14, 2006; A10

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) drew boos and hisses from an audience of liberal activists yesterday as she defended her opposition to a timetable for withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq, and later she received an implicit rebuke from Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) for failing to acknowledge that her support for the war was a mistake.

Clinton's and Kerry's appearances at the Take Back America conference at the Washington Hilton put on vivid display the Democratic Party's divisions over the foreign policy issue that dominates this year's midterm elections, and the two possible 2008 presidential candidates offered a preview of the debate that could dominate the battle for the party's nomination.

Clinton and Kerry supported the 2002 congressional resolution authorizing the Iraq war. Kerry recently renounced that vote, but Clinton has never done so. She finds herself in opposition to a majority of Democratic activists and is the target of passionate criticism from some of them.

Clinton won repeated applause through most of her speech, which dealt at length with domestic issues but also sharply criticized President Bush's handling of the war. But the audience turned against her when, in what she called a difficult conversation, she restated her long-standing position about timetables for withdrawing U.S forces.

"I have to just say it," she began. "I do not think it is a smart strategy either for the president to continue with his open-ended commitment, which I think does not put enough pressure on the new Iraqi government, nor do I think it is smart strategy to set a date certain. I do not agree that that is in the best interest of our troops or our country."

Clinton finished on a more positive note, with an exhortation about winning the November elections that brought audience members to their feet cheering. But within minutes, as she worked the rope line on her way out of the hotel ballroom, she was the target of protesters, who chanted "Bring the troops home" and "Stop the war."

Later, after Clinton's departure, Kerry delivered a fiery denunciation of the war that was continually interrupted with cheers and applause, and he repeated his call for "a hard and fast deadline" for withdrawing troops. At one point, Kerry, the Democrats' 2004 presidential nominee, appeared to be directing his comments at the woman who leads early national Democratic polls for 2008.

"Let me say it plainly," Kerry said. "It's not enough to argue with