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Today's News and Views

Competitive Enterprise Institute's Category 5 Gore bashing

Bill Berkowitz - WorkingForChange

06.08.06 - If former Vice President Al Gore eventually decides to mount another run for presidency, it may be that the bashing he received from the right during the run-up to and premiere of "An Inconvenient Truth," his new highly-acclaimed documentary film warning of the dangers of global warming, was a motivating factor.

According to New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, Gore's movie "suggests that there are three reasons it's hard to get action on global warming. The first is boiled-frog syndrome: Because the effects of greenhouse gases build up gradually, at any given moment it's easier to do nothing. The second is the perception, nurtured by a careful disinformation campaign, that there's still a lot of uncertainty about whether man-made global warming is a serious problem. The third is the belief, again fostered by disinformation, that trying to curb global warming would have devastating economic effects."

The release of the film has been accompanied by disinfomania from conservatives; an onslaught of anti-Gore and global warming denial commentary. The National Review ran a cover story with the self-explanatory title, "Scare of the Century." And on the May 23 edition of the Fox News Channel's "Dayside," Sterling Burnett, a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis cranked up the volume, calling the film "propaganda." Burnett added: "You don't go see Joseph Goebbels' films to see the truth about Nazi Germany. You don't want to go see Al Gore's film to see the truth about global warming."

Another longtime, and leading, purveyor of disinformation about global warming is the Washington, D.C.-based Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), which is attempting to discredit Gore's film, while continuing its campaign aimed at convincing the public that the jury "is still out" on the issue and there is no global warming crisis.

According to SourceWatch, a project of the Center for Media and Democracy, CEI's commentators and commentaries frequently appear in a broad assortment of media venues including ABC's 20/20, the American Spectator, Christian Science Monitor, Consumers' Research, CNN'S Crossfire, Forbes, Good Morning America, Larry King Live, PBS' The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, Moneyline, New York Times, PBS, Reader's Digest, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and the Washington Times.

CEI has apparently established a special relationship with John Stossel, a correspondent on ABC's 20/20, SourceWatch reported:

When Stossel came under fire in August 2000 for citing nonexistent scientific studies on a 20/20 segment bashing organic foods, CEI set up a "Save John Stossel" Web site to help him keep his job.

Stossel returned the favor the following year by working with Michael Sanera [the head of the Barry Goldwater Institute for Public Policy Research, a small Arizona-based conservative think tank] to put together a program titled "Tampering With Nature" that focused on attacking environmental education. In March 2001, a pesticide industry front group known as Responsible Industry for a Sound Environment (RISE) sent out an action alert memorandum to its members. "Mr. Sanera has been contacted by ABC News," the memo stated." A producer for John Stossel is working on a program on environmental education. He needs examples of kids who have been 'scared green' by schools teaching doomsday environmentalism in the classroom. ... He has some examples, but needs more. Would you send out a notice to your group and ask if they know of some examples. Then contact Mr. Sanera ... Let's try to help Mr. Stossel. He treats industry fairly in his programs."

Apparently neither Stossel nor CEI applied similar standards of fairness toward the schoolteachers and students they interviewed. Prior to the program's air date in July, several California parents of children interviewed by Stossel filed a complaint with ABC, stating that they had been misled about the nature of the program and the types of leading questions their kids would be asked. Seattle teacher John Borowski also being approached by ABC producer Ted Balaker, who attempted to trick him into appearing on camera by claiming that he was making a documentary about Earth Day, while denying that he was working with Stossel and Sanera.

On May 24, PBS' The News Hour with Jim Lehrer ran a segment on Gore's documentary. Anchor Gwen Ifill, who pointed out that "critics have called Gore 'alarmist,'" then ran a clip from a recent television advertisement produced by the CEI which she identified as a "Washington think tank."

According to Media Matters for America, Ifill neglected to "inform viewers that CEI is a conservative institution largely funded by the energy industry, which has a financial stake in opposing policies that seek to combat climate change. Moreover, Ifill ignored that, in the ads, which downplay the threat of global warming, CEI misrepresents several scientific studies."

Founded in 1984, CEI is a well-funded corporate- sponsored think tank that receives "substantial funding from the fossil fuel industry, including more than $2 million" from the Exxon Mobil Corporation between 1998 and 2005, Media Matters for America pointed out. On March 19, the Washington Post reported that CEI, "which widely publicizes its belief that the earth is not warming cataclysmically because of the burning of coal and oil," acknowledged that Exxon Mobil Corp. is a "major donor" largely due to the think tank's "effort to push that position."

A profile of CEI, posted at ExxonSecrets.org -- a Web site devoted to "documenting Exxon-Mobil's funding of climate change skeptics" -- pointed out that over the years, the think tank "has tackled" a number of "tough and contentious scientific issues" including "global warming, carbon dioxide and fuel-economy standards, [and has] most recently expanding into the politics of food." To CEI supporters, the think tank is a leader in the "fight against excessive federal government regulations." According to ExxxonSecrets, CEI is more than a low-profile dispenser of documents espousing free-market/anti-regulatory/anti-environmental positions; it "does not shy away from forcing action through the courts or the legislative process."

On its Web site CEI states that it "serves as both a think tank--creating intellectual ammunition to support free markets--and an advocacy organization--putting that ammunition to use in persuasive ways."

Despite its other corporate-driven interests, "denying the seriousness of global warming" has become its bread and butter issue over the past several years. CEI "has argued that climate change would create a 'milder, greener, more prosperous world' and that 'Kyoto was a power grab based on deception and fear.'"

While CEI would prefer that policy makers and the public pay little or no attention to global warming, it aims to "convince the public that global warming is uncertain." And Gore's film, represents a real threat to its institutional credibility. In a mid-May counter - strike to the film, CEI released two 60-second television advertisements -- as part of a $50,000 ad buy in 14 cities scheduled to take place from May 18th to May 28th -- that "focus[ed] on the alleged global warming crisis and the calls by some environmental groups and politicians for reduced energy use," Media Matters for America reported.

The first ad, titled "Energy," "suggests that environmentalists have falsely labeled carbon dioxide as a pollutant when, in fact, it is 'essential to life.' But, the ad ignores that it is not C02 itself that is inherently harmful, but it is excessive discharges of the gas that scientists argue is harmful to the atmosphere."

The second ad is called "Glaciers," and it "claims that recent scientific studies have proven that 'Greenland's glaciers are growing' and that the 'Antarctic ice sheet is getting thicker, not thinner.' But as the blog Think Progress noted, the Greenland study found increased snow accumulation only on the island's interior, while separate studies conducted during the same period found significant melting among the coastal glaciers."

On May 26, 2006, FactCheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania issued an analysis of the ads titled, "Scientist to CEI: You Used My Research To 'Confuse and Mislead.'" "These television ads are a deliberate effort to confuse and mislead the public about the global warming debate," said Curt Davis, director of the Center for Geospatial Intelligence at the University of Missouri-Columbia and author of the research in a May 19 news release. "They are selectively using only parts of my previous research to support their claims. They are not telling the entire story to the public."

FactCheck describes itself as "nonpartisan, nonprofit, "consumer advocate" for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics." (See here for the FactCheck critque, and to watch both ads.)

According to a ExxonSecrets fact sheet, over the years "CEI has weighed in on pesticide risk and endocrine disrupting chemicals - both of which CEI claims pose no threat to human health"; it "supports [the] eventual elimination of the Superfund and has advocated the complete privatization of the Endangered Species Act, arguing that species protection would meet the level of 'demand,' based on how much citizens are willing to pay for habitat preservation." CEI is a member of the State Policy Network and the Cooler Heads Coalition, and was "a sponsor" of the first Wise Use conference in 1988 -- it had membership in the Get Government Off Our Backs coalition, the wise use umbrella group.

Between 1985 and 2004, CEI received nearly $4.3 million in grants from conservative foundations. Heavy contributors include the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, and David H. Koch Charitable Foundation.

ExxonSecrets also noted that "With more than a $3 million annual budget, CEI is [also] supported by ... corporate fund[ers including] ... ExxonMobil ... the American Petroleum Institute, Cigna Corporation, Dow Chemical, EBCO Corp, General Motors, and IBM."

In his column, Paul Krugman pointed out that many people see Gore's film as being just as much about Gore as it is about global warming. And for some reason, from the outset of the 2000 presidential election campaign -- an election which saw Gore win the popular vote -- "some journalists" were dead set on playing up his stiffness, seeming lack of charisma and repeated gaffes, and "mak[ing[ him a figure of ridicule." Krugman asks, "Why were those journalists so determined to jeer Gore? Because of the very qualities that allowed him to realize the importance of global warming, many years before any other major political figure: his earnestness, and his genuine interest in facts, numbers and serious analysis."

While Krugman refuses to partake in "the sudden surge of speculation about whether 'An Inconvenient Truth' will make Gore a presidential contender ... the film does make a powerful case that Gore is the sort of person who ought to be running the country."

"...But can the sort of person who would act on global warming get elected? Are we -- by which I mean both the public and the press -- ready for political leaders who don't pander, who are willing to talk about complicated issues and call for responsible policies?"

The misleading ads produced by the CEI are not only being criticized for their lack of useful content, but some have called them satire worthy of a Saturday Night Live skit or a piece in The Onion. If Gore does decide to run for the presidency and manages to win the nomination, the man once dubbed "Ozone Man" by George H. W. Bush, should send a thank you note to the CEI for making him this century's first "Comeback Kid."

(c) 2006 Working Assets Online.

Not enlisted, and not employed

Finding a new mission as a civilian is becoming a bigger challenge for people returning to real life after stints in the service.

By BRADY DENNIS, Times Staff Writer
Published July 16, 2006

TAMPA - Not long ago, he was Army Spc. Kevin Mauga, a soldier in Iraq with clear-cut orders:

Drive a 5,000-gallon fuel truck back and forth between Ramadi and Habbaniya. Dodge roadside bombs. Skirt small arms fire. Collect more than $900 a week in combat pay.

These days, he's Kevin Mauga, Army veteran, bunk mate with his 14-year-old brother in their childhood home on Coolidge Avenue in Tampa.

He has half a tank of gas in his Chevy Impala, less than $50 in the bank and a stack of resumes few employers seem to want.

"They say that they're hiring," the 23-year-old says of his job search, which has stretched into its third month, "but they don't call you back."

He's not alone.

Thousands of young men have returned from Baghdad and Balad and Bagram, from Najaf and Nasiriyah, from Kabul and Kirkuk and Kandahar.

Like Mauga, they have found themselves back home, unemployed and unsure of their futures, more intimidated by the civilian world than they ever were by military life.

Last year, the unemployment rate for young veterans between 20 and 24 rose to 15.6 percent, nearly twice the rate for nonveterans in the same age range.

Mauga doesn't ponder the statistics.

All he knows is, he's broke. And the mail man keeps bringing bills - $239 for the car payment, $25 a month for his fiancee's engagement ring, another chunk for insurance and gas.

He goes to bed. He gets up.

Another bill to pay. Another jobless morning on Coolidge Avenue.

Souvenirs of his efforts surround him.

Help wanted ads, ripped from the newspaper and tacked to the refrigerator. The list of Internet job sites, which he visits night after night. The brochures from a recent job fair. His mother drove him there in her minivan so he could save gas. The stack of recent job applications - airport security screener, cashier for Hillsborough County, grocery store deli worker.

Add that to other applications he has filled out for Home Depot, Lowe's, Radio Shack, clothing retailers, dollar stores, video game stores, a dozen other disappointments come and gone.

Who's looking for an employee trained in hand-to-hand combat? Who needs a man talented at firing an M-16?

He landed one job interview, at a credit service company in St. Petersburg. He confused the interviewer with his military jargon.

"She kept asking me, 'What's that? What's that? What's that?' " said Mauga, a 2002 Robinson High School graduate. "Being in the military so long, you're just not used to the civilian talk."

He got an e-mail a few days later. The company didn't have a spot for him, it said.

His commander tried to tell him. Before Mauga left the Army, the two men had a talk. Re-enlist, the officer urged. It's hard out there in the civilian world.

"I told him, 'I'll take my chances,' " Mauga said.

And so he spends his days surfing Monster.com, filling out job applications that rarely get answered and making calls that rarely get returned.

The thought of going back to war scares him, but so does the idea of having his car repossessed and putting his wedding on hold indefinitely.

So the other night, after another day of waiting for calls that didn't come, he spilled out his frustrations to Jennifer, his fiancee.

"I told her, 'If I can't find a job anytime soon, I might have to go back in,' " he said.

Back in the military.

But not just yet.

First, he's going to check out a career in law enforcement. The Tampa Police Department seemed interested at that job fair. Maybe they'll pay as well as the Army.

Or maybe, he thinks, he'll call the Florida Highway Patrol. Maybe they're hiring.

Maybe.

Brady Dennis can be reached at 813-226-3386 or dennis@sptimes.com.

© Copyright, St. Petersburg Times.

Citing a 15-year study of exonerations by Samuel Gross, a law professor at the University of Michigan, Marquis argues as follows: ``Let's assume...that there were 4,000 people in prison who weren't involved in the crime in any way. During that same 15 years, there were more than 15 million felony convictions across the country. That would make the error rate 0.027 percent-or, to put it another way, a success rate of 99.973 percent."

Surely, Marquis suggests, when only a few out of every 10 thousand criminal defendants are innocent, and they have appeals and executive clemency to rely on, the criminal justice system is working as well as we could possibly hope. That argument, presaged in a law review article Marquis wrote in 2005, has driven the thinking and rhetoric of those who oppose criminal justice reform. With Justice Scalia's imprimatur, this flawed analysis is sure to take an even more prominent place in the criminal justice debate.

Unfortunately, Marquis has propounded a flawed analysis grounded in faulty, irresponsible arithmetic. Here's the problem: Comparing exonerations to felony convictions is like arguing that the Ford Pinto was safe because compared to the total number of automobiles sold in the United States, not many of them blew up. The proper way to determine the failure rate of the Pinto is not to use the total number of cars sold as the denominator, but rather the number of Pintos sold. Likewise, the denominator in Marquis's fraction shouldn't be the 15 million felony convictions over the past 15 years, but rather the number of similar cases in which innocence is actually disputed.

Marquis's most glaring error is his failure to acknowledge the fact that most felony arrests aren't contested. In fact, 95 percent of them are resolved by plea rather than trial. Thus in 19 out of every 20 felony cases, there is no contested issue of guilt and no real claim of error.

Only trials in which someone is convicted while maintaining his innocence should be considered in computing an error rate. Of Marquis's 15 million felony cases, 14.25 million were pleas. When the denominator in his fraction is changed from 15 million to 750,000, the error rate jumps from the arguably ignorable 3 in 10,000 to more like 50 in 10,000.

And Marquis's numbers become even more disturbing with further analysis. Because of the overwhelming demands involved in reinvestigating a crime with an eye toward exoneration, it is almost exclusively defendants sentenced for rapes and murders whose cases get scrutiny from groups like the Innocence Project, the nonprofit organization that helped free Alan Newton. The chances that a drug defendant is going to interest them are virtually nil. Thus the only people who have any meaningful access to the possibility of exoneration are a tiny subset of criminal defendants. Murders constitute only 0.8 percent of all felony cases, and rapes less than 2 percent. In other words, less than 450,000 of Marquis's 15 million felony convictions came in cases where the defendant has had a real shot at exoneration.

It is true that murder cases go to trial far more often than run-of-the-mill drug sales or check forgeries. In fact, some 44 percent of murder cases actually go to trial, with an average conviction rate of about 85 percent. But even taking this into account, of the 150,000 murder cases in Marquis's 15 million, only 66,000 homicide defendants maintained their innocence through a trial, of which just over 56,000 were convicted. Using similar trial and conviction rates for rapes yields somewhere south of 200,000 contested convictions in serious cases. In the final analysis, Marquis's error rate is off by orders of magnitude-his vision of a virtually error-proof system is simply unsupported by the numbers.

As Alan Newton's wasted years clearly demonstrate, imprisoning citizens for crimes they didn't commit is a tragic injustice whether it is freakishly improbable or terrifyingly commonplace. But as long as the opponents of change refuse to acknowledge the scope of the problem, much needed reforms will remain-like the exonerating evidence in Mr. Newton's case-unexamined. The tragedy here isn't merely questionable scholarship, it's the degree to which the prosecutorial lobby has latched on to what appears to be advocacy masquerading as statistical argument. That Justice Scalia has adopted this reasoning wholesale, seemingly without critical analysis, is merely further proof that when it comes to criminal justice reform, it is hardly the zealousness of the abolitionist movement we have to fear.

David Feige was a public defender in the Bronx and is the author of ``Indefensible: One Lawyer's Journey into the Inferno of American Justice," published last month by Little, Brown & Co.

© Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Forum: The ambiguities of 'cut and run'

Sometimes the smart thing for a commander to do is not stay in the field but leave to fight another day, Thomas Michael Holmes argues

Sunday, July 16, 2006

Karl Rove's recent "cut and run" accusations against the Bush administration's Democratic opponents ought to be answered. What one person sees as "cut and run" might be seen by another person as a responsible decision; it's all in the eye of the beholder. Let's examine some relevant recent history.

Did Dwight D. Eisenhower "cut and run" in Korea in 1953? It was Ike who told the nation that if he were elected he would go to Korea and, by implication, end the war. It is generally conceded that Eisenhower did the responsible thing when he quickly completed the truce negotiations that ended the fighting in the Korea.

Would Harry Truman have been accused of "cut and run" in September 1950, three months after the initial invasion of South Korea, had he accepted the status quo ante bellum following the rout of the overextended North Korean forces at the 38th parallel? Instead, Truman followed the advice of Gen. Douglas MacArthur and elected to "liberate" North Korea. As the U.N. forces approached the border of the People's Republic of China at the Yalu River, communist China entered the war and almost drove the U.N. forces off the southern tip of the Korean peninsula.

Had Truman been willing to "cut and run," tens of thousands of American lives might have been saved and North Korea might not have been condemned to the isolation it has experienced ever since. In the end, the war lasted for an additional three years. America sent 1.8 million of our own into the fray: 54,200 were killed, 103,300 were wounded and 8,200 were listed as missing in action. We ended up at the 38th parallel, right where we were in September 1950 -- and where we remain today.

Did Richard Nixon "cut and run" in Vietnam? Who can forget the television footage of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon being evacuated by helicopter in 1975 as we left those Vietnamese who had depended upon us to the tender mercies of the North Vietnamese communists? They might feel, with some justification, that America had "cut and run."

Yet in retrospect, it appears that the responsible thing for Nixon to have done in 1969, when he first entered the White House, would have been to follow the example of President Eisenhower and pull the plug on the Vietnam War. It is worth remembering that almost half the 58,000 Americans killed in Vietnam died during Nixon's presidency.

The real mistake during what we call the Vietnam War was Lyndon Johnson's, when he escalated the war after the bogus Tonkin Gulf Resolution. An even greater mistake, made at the end of World War II, was to have allowed the French to re-establish their colonial rule throughout Indochina after the Allied forces had liberated it from Japanese occupation. It was the fall of French colonial rule in 1954 that triggered America's disastrous involvement in Vietnam.

Did Ronald Reagan "cut and run" in 1983 after 241 American servicemen died in Beirut in the suicide bombing of the Marine barracks? Some would say that it wasn't the fact that Reagan pulled the American troops out of Lebanon that was the mistake; the real mistake was the fact that those Americans were put into an untenable position in the first place.

Did President George Herbert Walker Bush "cut and run" after the coalition's qualified victory in the First Gulf War in 1991? The Shiites of southern Iraq might say so. The elder Bush not only pulled out of Iraq, but on the way out he invited the Shiites to overthrow their repressive dictator, Saddam Hussein. Then, when they attempted to do so, American forces stood by and watched while Saddam's army ripped the Shiites to shreds.

It's ironic that the elder Bush, the current president's father, would later explain that he didn't intervene because he didn't want the United States to become bogged down in an Iraqi civil war. He didn't have to. American air power, deployed outside of Iraq, could have destroyed Saddam's army, just as American planes, deployed outside of Iraq, recently killed the insurgent leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

This reminds us of another part of Karl Rove's recent statement, that if the United States had "cut and run" in Iraq, Zarqawi would still be there plotting against us. But it was Jordanian and Iraqi intelligence that tracked and located Zarqawi, allowing for the successful American strike, with aircraft based outside of Iraq.

One might also argue that the decision of the Bush administration to re-deploy American forces from Afghanistan to Iraq constituted a "cut and run" decision that has seriously jeopardized the chances for the success of that mission.

Charges of "cut and run" have been leveled over the years by politicians on both sides of the aisle. Upon closer examination, it turns out to be a blunt rhetorical instrument that tends to obscure, rather than illuminate, difficult decisions in complex situations.

Copyright © PG Publishing Co., Inc.

JOHN W. DEAN

Triumph of the authoritarians

By John W. Dean  |  July 14, 2006

CONTEMPORARY CONSERVATISM and its influence on the Republican Party was, until recently, a mystery to me. The practitioners' bludgeoning style of politics, their self-serving manipulation of the political processes, and their policies that focus narrowly on perceived self-interest -- none of this struck me as based on anything related to traditional conservatism. Rather, truth be told, today's so-called conservatives are quite radical.

For more than 40 years I have considered myself a ``Goldwater conservative," and am thoroughly familiar with the movement's canon. But I can find nothing conservative about the Bush/Cheney White House, which has created a Nixon ``imperial presidency" on steroids, while acting as if being tutored by the best and brightest of the Cosa Nostra.

What true conservative calls for packing the courts to politicize the federal judiciary to the degree that it is now possible to determine the outcome of cases by looking at the prior politics of judges? Where is the conservative precedent for the monocratic leadership style that conservative Republicans imposed on the US House when they took control in 1994, a style that seeks primarily to perfect fund-raising skills while outsourcing the writing of legislation to special interests and freezing Democrats out of the legislative process?

How can those who claim themselves conservatives seek to destroy the deliberative nature of the US Senate by eliminating its extended-debate tradition, which has been the institution's distinctive contribution to our democracy? Yet that is precisely what Republican Senate leaders want to do by eliminating the filibuster when dealing with executive business (namely judicial appointments).

Today's Republican policies are antithetical to bedrock conservative fundamentals. There is nothing conservative about preemptive wars or disregarding international law by condoning torture. Abandoning fiscal responsibility is now standard operating procedure. Bible-thumping, finger-pointing, tongue-lashing attacks on homosexuals are not found in Russell Krik's classic conservative canons, nor in James Burham's guides to conservative governing. Conservatives in the tradition of former senator Barry Goldwater and President Ronald Reagan believed in ``conserving" this planet, not relaxing environmental laws to make life easier for big business. And neither man would have considered employing Christian evangelical criteria in federal programs, ranging from restricting stem cell research to fighting AIDs through abstinence.

Candid and knowledgeable Republicans on the far right concede -- usually only when not speaking for attribution -- that they are not truly conservative. They do not like to talk about why they behave as they do, or even to reflect on it. Nonetheless, their leaders admit they like being in charge, and their followers grant they find comfort in strong leaders who make them feel safe. This is what I gleaned from discussions with countless conservative leaders and followers, over a decade of questioning.

I started my inquiry in the mid-1990s, after a series of conversations with Goldwater, whom I had known for more than 40 years. Goldwater was also mystified (when not miffed) by the direction of today's professed conservatives -- their growing incivility, pugnacious attitudes, and arrogant and antagonistic style, along with a narrow outlook intolerant of those who challenge their thinking. He worried that the Republican Party had sold its soul to Christian fundamentalists, whose divisive social values would polarize the nation. From those conversations, Goldwater and I planned to study why these people behave as they do, and to author a book laying out what we found. Sadly, the senator's declining health soon precluded his continuing on the project, so I put it on the shelf. But I kept digging until I found some answers, and here are my thoughts.

For almost half a century, social scientists have been exploring authoritarianism. We do not typically associate authoritarianism with our democracy, but as I discovered while examining decades of empirical research, we ignore some findings at our risk. Unfortunately, the social scientists who have studied these issues report their findings in monographs and professional journals written for their peers, not for general readers. With the help of a leading researcher and others, I waded into this massive body of work.

What I found provided a personal epiphany. Authoritarian conservatives are, as a researcher told me, ``enemies of freedom, antidemocratic, antiequality, highly prejudiced, mean-spirited, power hungry, Machiavellian and amoral." And that's not just his view. To the contrary, this is how these people have consistently described themselves when being anonymously tested, by the tens of thousands over the past several decades.

Authoritarianism's impact on contemporary conservatism is beyond question. Because this impact is still growing and has troubling (if not actually evil) implications, I hope that social scientists will begin to write about this issue for general readers. It is long past time to bring the telling results of their empirical work into the public square and to the attention of American voters. No less than the health of our democracy may depend on this being done. We need to stop thinking we are dealing with traditional conservatives on the modern stage, and instead recognize that they've often been supplanted by authoritarians.

John W. Dean, former Nixon White House counsel, just published his seventh nonfiction book, ``Conservatives Without Conscience."  

© Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Article Launched: 07/16/2006 01:00:00 AM MDT

cindy rodríguez | staff columnist

Medically retired soldier concludes: "We are pawns" in Iraq

By Cindy Rodríguez
Denver Post Staff Columnist
DenverPost.com

At what price would you take a job that included scraping human flesh off ambushed Humvees?

What if it also meant working 16 to 20 hours nearly every day in 120-degree temperatures?

As an enlisted soldier, Army Staff Sgt. Jeffrey Peskoff of Fountain took on such a job, overseeing 29 soldiers at a military installation in Mosul, Iraq.

Of course, he didn't know what he was getting himself into.

Taking into account the number of hours he worked each week, his $43,000 salary during his year in Iraq came out to less than $7 an hour.

Meanwhile, the soldiers in his unit had to transport and protect workers of U.S. corporations who earned salaries three to five times higher working on engineering projects, such as building (and rebuilding) oil pipelines.

For the first seven months of the year he was there, starting in April 2003, they had no armor for their vehicles.

"If you don't think about being security for these massive corporations making big bucks being there, you're OK, but if you do, then you realize the entire military is being used and abused," Peskoff, a married 33-year-old father of two girls, told me.

"This is not a Michael Moore conspiracy. It's not just Halliburton. Many U.S. companies are there to get the oil that's there."

(Halliburton, a U.S. corporation that Vice President Dick Cheney once led, has the majority of contracts to build oil pumps and pipelines in Iraq. It also exports crude oil at top dollar.)

As debates swirl over the outsourcing of white-collar jobs, how U.S. corporations abuse workers in developing countries and whether Congress should raise the federal minimum wage, it's perplexing why, during a time of war, we aren't talking more about the exploitation of our soldiers.

Considering the conditions most of them work under, the pay and benefits of our military are woefully low. New recruits can earn less than $20,000 a year, according to statistics provided by the U.S. Army.

And that is not factoring an untold cost: the psychological toll it has taken on soldiers, especially those who have done two or three tours in a war that seems to know no end.

After 10 years of service, Peskoff became medically retired after he was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

He scrubs everything in sight and washes his hands repeatedly. He has nightmares when he sleeps. To avoid the painful dreams, he stays up all night, hoping he'll be too exhausted to wake up during a nightmare.

Still, he has them, about four times a week - just like a countless number of Iraq war veterans. And the dreams they are vivid.

"I am always in a Humvee, always driving down a busy road; we're getting attacked by Iraqis hiding in the hills, firing RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades) and shooting (AK-47s). I see bodies get ripped in half ... I don't even like talking about it," he said, his voice trailing off.

"I came back a totally different person. You may call us mentally weak, but there are a lot of us out there."

Peskoff speaks at a rapid-fire pace. Ask him one question, and he'll go in different directions, but he always comes back to this: He is now an irritable man, not the upbeat person he used to be.

His wife, Lisa, feels the change. Peskoff tries to hide it from his daughters, 6-year-old Hannah and 4-year-old Lillian.

He's angry that the CIA last year closed a unit whose mission was to hunt for Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants. He wonders if the average American has any clue about what's really going on in Iraq.

"The politicians, not just the Republicans but the Democrats, too, could care less about spreading democracy," he said. "We are pawns. The soldiers are being used."

Cindy Rodríguez's column appears Tuesdays in Scene and Sundays in Style. Contact her at 303-820-1211 or crodriguez@denverpost.com.

All contents Copyright 2006 The Denver Post or other copyright holders.

The bankers, the big deal and the taint of scandal

The Enron affair should be over by now. But in its explosive final act - the extradition of the NatWest Three to America - one witness has died, and a political storm has arisen over the state of British-US relations since 9/11. Jamie Doward and Paul Harris in Houston report

Sunday July 16, 2006
The Observer

On 6 August 1999, David Bermingham sent an email to his boss. Bermingham, part of a team working for a US division of NatWest bank, was disgusted. 'I would describe it as three hours at a Leonard Cohen concert' was his summation.

He was talking about a complex financial transaction involving NatWest and the now-disgraced energy trader Enron - a deal that, seven years later, would come back to haunt him and two of his colleagues in spectacular fashion.

The deal would open up the sepulchral world of high finance and cause a bitter legal rift stretching across the Atlantic. The characters involved would be immortalised in a novel and become causes celebres for an unlikely union of human rights groups and City slickers. It would paint a vivid, ugly picture of the underside of corporate banking - a high-octane world of lapdancing, bumper bonuses and cut-throat rivalry stretching from Houston to the Square Mile.

And in the beginning, when the deal was first mooted, Bermingham didn't want to do it.

Essentially, he argued, everyone would get rich from the deal but NatWest. It had 'enormous attraction' for Enron 'and a whole lot of nothing for us'.

It was not the first time Bermingham, 44, had questioned his bank's relationship with Enron and, in particular, Andrew Fastow, the energy trader's chief financial officer. In May 1999, he had sent another email to a senior colleague, Kevin Howard, raising concerns over the fact that their employer, Greenwich NatWest, was looking to help Fastow create a complex investment vehicle, codenamed 'Martin', which was to be based in the Cayman Islands for tax purposes.

There was nothing illegal about the deal, but Bermingham told Howard he was worried about 'Fastow's insistence on total secrecy' surrounding the project and recommended they should 'exercise extreme diligence'. In a return email, indicative of NatWest's desire to believe in Enron's astonishing boasts, Howard maintained the deal would send the energy trader's shares 'to the next level'.

After the deal had been restructured to a bewilderingly complex degree, Bermingham boasted that he and his colleagues in the bank's structured finance department - headed by a combative Glaswegian, Gary Mulgrew - had pulled off an audacious coup.

Bermingham claimed the team (which also included an energy transaction specialist, Giles Darby) had extracted most of the value out of the deal 'after Fastow put his grubby little fingers in the till'. He concluded: 'For emphasis, what we have executed was not Enron's idea, or Fastow's idea... it was OUR idea.'

The previously undisclosed email was sent on 1 December 1999, just as NatWest was considering how much money to dole out to staff in the form of its spectacular annual bonuses.

Bermingham's desire for a bumper payout was understandable. The nine-page indictment that led to last week's extradition of Bermingham, Darby and Mulgrew, the so-called 'NatWest Three', notes their employer was being subjected to a hostile takeover by the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) at the time. The trio's department, which specialised in creating sophisticated financial products to protect clients against fluctuations in the stock market, looked like being jettisoned. And so, according to the indictment filed in a southern Texas district court, the three conspired with Fastow to come up with a new plan for 'Martin' - one that would make them rich. It could also see them spend the next 20 years in jail.

It was the repellent smell that first alerted a dog walker in an Essex park last Tuesday morning. Powerful to the point of overpowering, it presaged death. Neil Coulbeck's body was discovered underneath a tree from which he had apparently hanged himself. The park, near Woodford Green, was a place the former NatWest banker knew well; the father of two would jog there regularly, according to neighbours.

Up until the autumn of 2001 it had been Coulbeck's job to focus on NatWest's American balance sheet. 'He was on the credit side,' says someone who knew him. 'It was his job to approve things. It was a very senior role.' Coulbeck had been reported missing by his wife, Susan, five days before his body was discovered. It is understood he left a suicide note and had made a previous attempt on his life.

Shortly before he apparently hanged himself, Coulbeck, who was 53 and retired from banking in 2004, was captured on CCTV dumping rubbish sacks at a tip in east London. There is speculation the bags contained documents relating to the Enron affair, which friends have suggested rested heavy on his mind although these claims have not been confirmed.

What is known is that Coulbeck was interviewed by the FBI in November 2003 and signed a short, anodyne statement saying he was unaware that Bermingham, Mulgrew and Darby had been involved in any alleged illegality. Suggestions that the FBI's questioning of Coulbeck was unnecessarily 'aggressive' have been played down by several of those interviewed in connection with the case.

However, it is not difficult to see why Enron's collapse might have troubled him. A 102-page appendix at the back of the official narrative into its implosion is devoted solely to RBS's relationship with Enron and raises questions about why the bank's bosses failed to rein in their exposure to the energy trader.

The document makes a number of highly critical allegations, not least that Enron's bankers were in thrall to Fastow. In an email to Bermingham, dated 27 July 1999 and quoted in the document, a colleague raises concerns that Fastow appeared to be structuring deals that would benefit him more than his employer. 'It is not too difficult to construct some form of legal action by Enron shareholders claiming that they have been short-changed, that Andy Fastow has "cherry picked" assets etc and, in isolation, the position does not look good,' the email says. Despite these concerns, the document highlights how NatWest - and later its new owner, RBS - cosied up to Enron, even though the banks' internal assessments warned the strategy was risky.

Just how much risk was confirmed in a private assessment by an RBS credit manager, written in March 2000, the month the bank bought NatWest. 'The scale of financial period manipulation [by Enron] is exceedingly worrying,' the credit manager writes. 'I don't yet understand it, nor am I sure that anyone in the bank does.'

It was to prove a prescient observation. Dazzled by Enron's pyrotechnic promises of risk-free returns, many involved with the energy company suspended their critical faculties until it was far too late.

The strippers in 'Treasures' on Houston's Westheimer Road don't do such a good trade these days. Rewind six years, though, and business was booming. It was at Treasures that Enron bosses and their bankers would go to live it up after days spent inventing ever more complex ways of moving money around.

The hard-partying ethos was attractive to the British bankers working for Greenwich NatWest, which enjoyed an exceptionally close relationship with Enron. Their employer was considered by the energy trader to be a 'Tier 1' bank - one of a small group given preferential status because of the amount of business it did with the firm.

'The three weren't lawyers or accountants, the people who understood complex transactions,' says one RBS employee. 'They were deal-makers. They divided their time between Houston and London. It was their job to manage the relationship with Enron.'

That chiefly meant keeping Fastow onside. He was particularly close to the 44-year-old Mulgrew, who once worked as a bouncer and is the son of Labour MSP Trish Godman. Darby, on the other hand, is remembered by colleagues as an easygoing sort who once persuaded his employer to send him on an art appreciation course. 'He's a nice guy and the sort who is most likely to be emotionally disturbed from all this,' says one person familiar with the three.

Their days at Greenwich NatWest were immortalised in the novel The Pursuit of Happiness, a roman à clef written by a former colleague, Robert Kelsey. Mulgrew is renamed 'Braveheart', a competitive five-a-side football player; Darby is the 'Energizer Bunny', apparently because of his limitless dynamism; the Bermingham figure is the one who wades through the small print.

The novel explains how the fictitious department specialised in taking simple banking deals and making them complicated. Kelsey describes the complex charts that bankers would draw up as part of the deal process. '[The guys] would spend many happy hours drawing these charts - to the point where a simple and trusting client would look in wonder at his funding plans as they sprawled across a whiteboard looking like a map of the London Underground. By the time [they'd] finished explaining it he wasn't sure whether to repay his loan or change on to the Piccadilly Line.'

A popular theory among the banking cognoscenti is that in order to secure the convictions of Enron's chief executive Jeffrey Skilling and chairman Ken Lay, prosecutors had to cut a deal with Fastow - because Fastow was the only person who understood how the firm functioned. And the only way of pressuring Fastow into talking was to investigate the numerous off-balance-sheet deals he structured as a means of hiding Enron's mounting debts.

As prosecutors unpicked the byzantine structures Fastow had created, the net closed in on the man credited by his bosses as being a modern-day alchemist. In January 2004, he pleaded guilty to two conspiracy charges and offered to help with the investigation - a decision that will land him a minimum eight-year jail sentence. He also handed over $24m in cash and assets, including the keys to two luxury homes.

Lay died of a heart attack earlier this month. On 25 May this year, Skilling was found guilty of 19 of the 28 charges against him and faces the rest of his life in prison. Other Enron executives, notably Ben Glisan, the energy company's treasurer, are already behind bars.

The NatWest Three, it seems, are little more than a postscript to the Enron affair. Nobody disputes they did deals with Fastow that were on the borderline of what would be considered conventional banking practice. The question for the Houston jury, though, is whether they did anything illegal.

Ironically, prosecutors are focusing on the three men's role in selling off assets belonging to 'Martin' - the same Cayman Islands investment vehicle (that, early in 1999, Bermingham had suggested offered 'a whole lot of nothing for us'.

That the three have secured an unprecedented outpouring of media anger over their extradition surprises some who have known them. They are not the sort who would normally be happy to be considered pawns, according to ex-colleagues. The fact that they have enjoyed something of a makeover, with even the human rights group Liberty, not known for its defence of alleged white-collar criminals, campaigning for their trial to be held in the UK, owes much to a confluence of several factors.

But anger at a perceived 'lopsided' extradition policy that makes it easier for the US to extradite Britons than vice versa has created a sense of injustice. Under the 2003 Extradition Act, the US no longer has to make a prima facie case when asking British courts to extradite a suspect. Instead it must show only that there is a 'likelihood of guilt'. The government has tried to correct the perceived imbalance - dispatching Baroness Scotland to press Washington into ratifying its side of the extradition treaty - while at the same time orchestrating a botched PR campaign to push the case for the trio's extradition.

Last week the shadow Attorney-General, Dominic Grieve, produced a leaked email written by Steve Bates, the political adviser to Home Secretary John Reid, discussing ways of pushing the argument for the trio's extradition. Bates suggested ministers brand the trio the 'Enron Three' to emphasise the link with the disgraced energy trader. The Solicitor-General, Mike O'Brien, repeatedly used the phrase in a Commons debate on Wednesday until forced to drop it amid criticism from MPs.

The NatWest Three, however, know a thing or two about spin too. They are represented on a pro bono basis by Bell Yard, a PR company specialising in 'crisis communications'. Also helping push their case is Adrian Flook, a former Tory MP and now a PR executive. The spin doctors were responsible for whipping up support from City executives, angry that alleged white-collar crimes involving British companies are being prosecuted in foreign countries.

'Whatever the guilt or innocence of the NatWest Three, the current extradition arrangements are an affront to natural justice,' says Richard Lambert, director-general of the CBI. 'If the government does nothing to correct the current imbalance it risks damaging the UK's position as a leading financial capital market.'

The willingness of the trio's families to speak out has also helped bolster public support and the prospect of the men being separated from their children for an indefinite period before their trial appears cruel; Mulgrew has brought his 10-year-old son, Calum, up on his own.

For now the Natwest Three are free men, having posted bail. They are staying in a pleasant Houston hotel and the only outward signs of their plight are the satellite tracking bracelets clasped around their ankles: an unwanted fashion accessory courtesy of Texas law that is easily hidden by the men's stylish clothes.

They will spend this week in feverish consultation with their lawyers as they await a full bail hearing on Friday. It is then that their immediate fate will be decided: will they await their September trial in Texas or in Britain? Also at that time full bail conditions, likely to involve a lot more financial surety, will be set. That the choice has come to this represents a defeat for the three men. Their highly public campaign to get their trial held in Britain has failed.

As the three entered court on Friday their tension was obvious. They sipped water and chatted quietly with their counsel, avoiding jokes or laughter. Occasionally they would glance over at the packed press gallery. When they stood up before Judge Stephen Smith they formed a line, each one flanked by his lawyer. One by one they answered questions, hands folded in front of them, like schoolboys. In turn each of them entered a plea: 'Not guilty, sir.' .

On the way into the chamber, the three men had passed under huge portraits of President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney staring down above the security lines in a way that looked strangely Orwellian. It was a strong reminder they were a long way from British justice.

Whatever the Texas jury decides, this weekend the NatWest Three must be ruing the day that they got involved with Fastow.

Perhaps they should have talked to his colleagues, who viewed him with suspicion. They had a name for him: the human cactus.

The case explained ...

The case against the NatWest Three centres on their involvement in a deal involving a Cayman Islands-based company. Between early 1999 and March 2000, their attitudes towards the deal change remarkably, according to emails obtained by The Observer and allegations by US prosecutors. The emails give a fascinating insight into the trio's motivation and their shifting relationship with Andrew Fastow, Enron's chief financial officer, whose financial engineering was to bring Enron down. Over a year, it is alleged, the three went from not wanting to do the legitimate deal to working out ways it could help them defraud their bank.

In May 1999, David Bermingham emails a colleague saying they should 'exercise extreme diligence' over the deal. In August 1999 he tells another colleague that the deal, as proposed by Fastow, offered 'a lot of nothing for us'.

On 20 August, Bermingham discusses ways of restructuring the deal and by December he is boasting how he has restructured it in NatWest's favour: 'I have... stripped out 94 per cent of the value remaining after Fastow put his grubby little fingers in the till.'

In early 2000 the NatWest Three seem to have experienced an epiphany. Instead of conspiring against Fastow, it is alleged they conspire with him to sell the assets of the Cayman Islands company to another company in which they own stakes at a knockdown price.

In February 2000 Giles Darby tells a NatWest colleague in Houston not to attend a meeting with Fastow but not to worry because they 'are going to get rich'. It is alleged that at this meeting Fastow and the three discuss converting Enron stock held by the Cayman Islands company, which Fastow was barred from holding, to another form of 'property' from which he could benefit.

Bermingham emails colleagues, apparently discussing the need to keep the deal under wraps. A further alleged email, a month before NatWest sells its stake, predicts the company part-owned by the trio is set to make a '$7m minimum profit' from the deal, which prosecutors allege was illegal.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

Feingold bolsters anti-war Democrats in Iowa

Dubuque, Ia. — Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold worked today to fan anti-war sentiment among northeast Iowa Democrats today, saying members of his party have been intimidated into avoiding controversy.

Feingold, who has visited Iowa once already this year as he explores seeking the Democratic nomination for president, addressed 50 people at the party headquarters in Dubuque.

He implored fellow Democrats to stand up for their political beliefs to help solidify the party, after hearing concerns from several audience members about a lack of unity.

The senator, voted against authorizing military action in Iraq, expressed disappointment in his fellow Democrats who he said were “intimidated” by their peers into voting for the conflict.

“(Democrats) have been made to feel as though they cannot propose anything controversial,” Feingold said, sparking cheers and applause.

“People ask me all the time, ‘When is the Democratic party going to finally stand up?’ ”

His stand against the war separates him from some other potential Democratic candidates for president, including New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, who has refused to set a timetable withdrawal of troops.

A self-professed “progressive patriot,” Feingold said Democrats can regain the White House if they rally together.

“We absolutely have a shot to win the White House in the next election,” he said. “We have to.”

Feingold said he would not make a final decision about running for president until after the 2006 elections.

Walt Pregler, former mayor of Dubuque and secretary for the county’s Democratic party, said Feingold is a “genuine politician.”

“He’s a mover and a shaker,” Pregler said. “He speaks his mind.”

Martha Avelleyra-Powers echoed Pregler’s sentiments.

“I have always admired Russ because he is a politician who says the things that need to be said,” Avelleyra-Powers, a music teacher in Dubuque, said. Her sisters in Wisconsin encouraged her to attend the event.

Feingold will be in Maquoketa, Clinton, and Davenport Sunday to meet with Democratic activists and local elected officials.
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Copyright © 2005, The Des Moines Register

David Postman has covered politics and government for The Seattle Times since 1994. He's a frequent guest on radio and television, and previously covered politics for The News Tribune in Tacoma, the Anchorage Daily News and Alaska Public Radio Network. He also writes a column every Friday.

Gingrich says it's World War III

Posted by David Postman at 12:54 PM

Former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich says America is in World War III and President Bush should say so. In an interview in Bellevue this morning Gingrich said Bush should call a joint session of Congress the first week of September and talk about global military conflicts in much starker terms than have been heard from the president.

"We need to have the militancy that says 'We're not going to lose a city,' " Gingrich said. He talks about the need to recognize World War III as important for military strategy and political strategy.

Gingrich said he is "very worried" about Republican's facing fall elections and says the party must have the "nerve" to nationalize the elections and make the 2006 campaigns about a liberal Democratic agenda rather than about President Bush's record.

Gingrich says that as of now Republicans "are sailing into the wind" in congressional campaigns. He said that's in part because of the Iraq war, adding, "Iraq is hard and painful and we do not explain it very well."

But some of it is due to Republicans' congressional agenda. He said House and Senate Republicans "forgot the core principle" of the party and embraced Congressional pork. "Some of the guys," he said, have come down with a case of "incumbentitis."

Gingrich said in the coming days he plans to speak out publicly, and to the Administration, about the need to recognize that America is in World War III.

He lists wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, this week's bomb attacks in India, North Korean nuclear threats, terrorist arrests and investigations in Florida, Canada and Britain, and violence in Israel and Lebanon as evidence of World War III. He said Bush needs to deliver a speech to Congress and "connect all the dots" for Americans.

He said the reluctance to put those pieces together and see one global conflict is hurting America's interests. He said people, including some in the Bush Administration, who urge a restrained response from Israel are wrong "because they haven't crossed the bridge of realizing this is a war."

"This is World War III," Gingrich said. And once that's accepted, he said calls for restraint would fall away:

"Israel wouldn't leave southern Lebanon as long as there was a single missile there. I would go in and clean them all out and I would announce that any Iranian airplane trying to bring missiles to re-supply them would be shot down. This idea that we have this one-sided war where the other team gets to plan how to kill us and we get to talk, is nuts."

There is a public relations value, too. Gingrich said that public opinion can change "the minute you use the language" of World War III. The message then, he said, is "'OK, if we're in the third world war, which side do you think should win?"

An historian, Gingrich said he has been studying recently how Abraham Lincoln talked to Americans about the Civil War, and what turned out to be a much longer and deadlier war than Lincoln expected.

Gingrich is here for fund raisers for Congressman Dave Reichert, 2nd District GOP challenger Doug Roulstone, and the state party. I talked to him in a hotel suite with a few of his and Reichert's staff.

Any time his name comes up here it's said that he once called Washington state "ground zero for the Republican revolution." Republicans saw huge gains in Washington in the 1994 mid-term elections, though they have largely decayed away.

"I think there is a reform oriented populism that is a key a component of Washington State's, if you will, culture or personality," he said. Voters here also got caught up in the national, anti-incumbent, anti-Democratic wave. The other thing that was different here, he said, was "that there was no place in America where talk radio was more enthusiastically favorable to the idea that it was time to try something new."

(Speaking of talk radio, waiting to go in to see Gingrich as I was leaving were KVI's John Carlson and Kirby Wilbur and William Maurer, an attorney with the Institute for Justice who has been backing the talk show hosts in the legal challenge against their on-air championing of an anti-tax initiative.)

With Republicans in control of Washington, D.C., it's Democrats who this year are hoping for a reform wave to sweep them into office. Democrats want to nationalize the election and make each congressional race about Bush, the Iraq war and the Republican agenda. Republicans have been trying to localize each race, as in Reichert's challenge from political newcomer Darcy Burner, and make the race about the qualifications and personalities of the candidates, not about a national agenda.

Gingrich says that's a mistake. Republicans, he says, should nationalize the contest, too. He said that yesterday he saw polling that gave him some optimism for the first time about this year's elections. He didn't say what state it was from, but it showed that Democratic incumbents' poll numbers crashed when tagged with the record of House Democrats.

He said that as Democrats make the elections about George Bush, Republicans should make it about House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco. He said voters need to be told "how weirdly San Francisco these guys are voting" and Democrats will "collapse in defeat."

"The line I think every Republican should use is, 'X knows their record, they just hope you don't,' which is actually the line I used in my winning race in '78. I'm a historian. I don't do anything new. I just imitate. I guarantee you there are 60 or 70 Democrats, if their districts thoroughly understood their record, they'd lose this year even though people aren't happy with Bush. Because people aren't suicidal. ..."

"While people understand that while they may be irritated with Republicans, we at least broadly share their values and visions and the left is just out of touch with reality. I think then you have a totally different debate by October, if we have the nerve to do it. ... There's going to be a national conversation in October. The only question is whether it's the Republicans defining it or whether we have some nutty idea that we can run local races, and so the entire definition is on the left."

UPDATE: I tried to get a comment today from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee but no one ever got back to me. This evening, Kelly Steele, spokesman for the state party, did respond and sent this e-mail:

This is classic - that Gingrich's solution to Bush's failed leadership is a different "marketing strategy" shows the true extent to which Republicans cannot be trusted to win the war on terror. Democrats believe we need a "tough and smart" strategy that makes 2006 a year of transition in Iraq and aggressively takes the fight to the terrorists, while Gingrich and Bush seek to elect a new crop of loyal rubberstamps - McGavick, Reichert, and Roulstone included - to blindly support and extend their monopoly on their "tough and dumb" conduct of the war in Iraq and the larger battle against global terrorism.

That victory has yet to be certified by the Federal Electoral Tribunal as it weighs a legal challenge from Mr. López Obrador. In the meantime, he seems determined to keep up pressure on the tribunal to grant his demand for a recount.

Mr. López Obrador and supporters who helped organize the rally urged his followers to conduct nonviolent acts of civil disobedience, including boycotts of products made by Mexican companies that opposed his candidacy as well as those of some American companies, without explaining why.

He also asked them to stage sit-ins starting Sunday at the 300 district election offices across the country. The purpose, he said, was to prevent any tampering with ballot boxes.

At one point during his speech, Mr. López Obrador smiled as the crowd chanted, “You are not alone.” He told them that the movement he was leading was about more than one man or one political party. He said it was about the future of this country’s fragile democracy.

“I have the deep conviction that despite all the machinery of the state, and all the money of a privileged group, they will not be able to stop the free will of millions of Mexicans,” he said. “That is the greatest force of a democracy.”

Mr. Calderón and his supporters say that their victory is legitimate and that a recount will do more harm than good to an electoral system that was meticulously engineered to move Mexico toward democracy after decades of autocratic, one-party rule.

They have described Mr. López Obrador as so obsessed with power that he will stop at nothing to win, even using mass marches to try to bully his way to power over the decisions of the democratic institutions it has taken Mexico more than a decade to build.

Arturo Sarukhan, a leading adviser to Mr. Calderón, said his candidate would accept a recount if one was ordered by the electoral tribunal. But he said his candidate did not believe a recount was legally necessary, since the votes were counted on election night by citizens recruited at random to be poll workers.

“They are seeking to pressure the tribunal to say this is too complicated, let’s annul the whole thing,” Mr. Sarukhan said. “We are convinced this is not about a recount. This is about annulment.”

In a voluminous complaint before the electoral tribunal, Mr. López Obrador charged that the voting was riddled with mistakes and rigged against him by President Vicente Fox, who openly supported Mr. Calderón, who is from the same party.

He also accused business leaders of meddling in the election by conducting a campaign that depicted Mr. López Obrador as a danger to the political and economic stability Mexico has enjoyed over the last six years.

At 1:30 p.m. Sunday, Mr. López Obrador led about 200,000 supporters down one of the city’s main thoroughfares and into the Zócalo, as the city’s main plaza is known. About 200,000 more were already waiting there.

Rossana Fuentes Berain, a political analyst at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico, looked out on the crowd from the terrace of a hotel adjacent to the plaza and wondered whether Mr. López Obrador could keep a rein on the outrage he had unleashed.

“I am very worried,” she said. “If he can convince so many people that the democratic system isn’t working, then we are going to throw away 20 years of building trust and confidence.”

People interviewed at the rally said their distrust of the system had compelled them to come from as far north as Mexico’s border with the United States and as far south as the state of Chiapas.

Like the crowd of people who came out last week to support Mr. López Obrador, this gathering also seemed to be a broad cross section of people with different levels of education and incomes.

Many of those interviewed brought up the 1988 election, considered a pivotal moment in this country’s long history of electoral fraud. Some said that although there had been progress since then, it had not been enough to stop the entrenched oligarchies from using their powers to stand in the way of the will of the people.

Others said that although they supported Mr. López Obrador, they worried that his language had become increasingly volatile and could push the country into violence.

“People are tired of so much injustice,” said Pablo Huitrón Neguis, 44, an elementary school teacher. “We have fought years to have our votes respected, and now they are using