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Volume 1 Issue 214       Today’s News and Views    Sunday, July 30, 2006

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Goff has written extensively on these matters in the past. His published articles can be found at the online publication From the Wilderness.

His research included a detailed review of more than 2,500 pages of official briefings and documents from three investigations, in addition to extensive interviews with Tillman family members and some of the soldiers in Tillman’s unit.

The office of Defense Department public relations official Lawrence Di Rita should have purchased high-quality shredders for all commanders.  The documents pertaining to the first three of six investigations contain generous and often gratuitous redactions.  They were given to the Tillman family, and through them to CNN, to ESPN—oh yes, and to me.  They show that it was the impending redeployment of the 2nd Ranger Battalion, Pat Tillman’s unit, in which the real story of his death was general knowledge, that compelled the Department of Defense to come clean, sort of.

“When you die,” the Reverend Kauzlarich explained to ESPN’s Fish, “I mean, there is supposedly a better life, right?  Well, if you are an atheist and you don’t believe in anything, if you die, what is there to go to?  Nothing. You are worm dirt.”

A theological term perhaps.

I don’t doubt for a minute that Kauzlarich’s version of spirituality is a kind of quid pro quo—a simple exchange of belief for immortality would strike the hardest of bargainers as a pretty good deal.  It even trumps the dissonance of the Warrior Jesus, the Prince of Peace mounted on a Humvee, perhaps manning the .50-cal, in Mazar-i-Sharif or Fallujah.

If you can sustain that contradiction, it is not particularly remarkable to believe you are a Lamb of God at the same time you deploy religious belief as a disingenuous dodge in defense of your career.

“So for their son to die for nothing, and now he is no more,” continued Kauzlarich, “that is pretty hard to get your head around that. So I don’t know how an atheist thinks…. You know what? I don’t think anything will make them happy, quite honestly. I don’t know. Maybe they want to see somebody’s head on a platter. But will that really make them happy? No, because they can’t bring their son back.”

So we get to it at last.  Kauzlarich imagines himself as John the Baptist, and Mary Tillman as Salome.  Poor, poor man.  Wretched, wretched woman.

I imagine a fish decal on Kauzlarich’s car, one that has a double significance:  Jesus, of course, cloning fish for the starving masses, but also a red herring.

Kauzlarich is in a state of dread—not the existential variety, since he has already cut the deal to survive death.  His dread is more immediate and secular.

A Ranger captain was assigned to investigate the death of Pat Tillman—Richard Scott, then commander of Headquarters Company, 2/75 Rangers.  Scott carried out his task with integrity, and the Article 15-6 investigation was completed in two weeks.  That investigation determined two things:  (1) The fellow Rangers who shot Tillman (and an Afghan that the military has never credited with a human being’s name) violated their own rules of engagement and were possibly criminally negligent and (2) that the order that led to splitting the platoon—one vigorously and rightly opposed by the platoon leader on the ground—was responsible for setting up the communications breakdown that resulted in the incident. 

It is not legal in the military to dispose of investigations or to compel or allow witnesses to change statements, and then make the original statements disappear, but that is precisely what happened in the case of Pat Tillman.  When Kauzlarich took over the investigation from Scott, Kauzlarich’s role in the alleged coverup disappeared and criminal charge recommendations were transformed into wrist-slapping nonjudicial punishments.

Even before the first investigation was complete—nay, even before Tillman’s unit returned from the field to conduct an “after-action review” to determine what happened—everyone in Tillman’s chain of command, including Kauzlarich [http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/062306_tillman_files4.shtml], appears to have conspired to draft a recommendation for a Silver Star award as part of the intentional development of a fictional account to cover up the fratricide.

This was in April-May 2004. And for those who don’t remember, these months were a catastrophic cascade of setbacks, bad news and rank scandal, including the dual rebellion in Iraq and the first public release of the Abu Ghraib photos.  The death by fratricide of a famous young man (who was resisting the Department of Defense efforts to turn him into a jingo icon) ran headlong into the DoD public affairs narrative of precision and professionalism (in an elite unit).  That was very bad news.

But with every stick, there is a carrot.

If this story could be covered up, for just a while, it had spin capacity.  Pat could be turned into a martyr-jingo icon.  An account could be constructed that would map directly onto the television-stunned social imagination of the American public.  A tale worthy of the arrested development of a nation that believes in the fantasies of masculine adolescence.

And that is precisely what they did, Kauzlarich included.  They drafted a Silver Star and a docudrama lie about an intense encounter with a determined enemy in which the obedient patriot sets an example worthy of a recruiting poster.  A Tom Clancy joint.  The real Pat Tillman was not only of no use, he was a net negative.  Real people get in the way.

They never counted on his brother Kevin discovering that there was an initial investigation that vanished.  They never counted on a mother and father who were strong enough to demand the truth about what had happened, and determined enough to rescue the real person that was Pat Tillman from the spin machine into which the Pentagon tried to feed his body.

Pat himself, after seeing the Iraq war firsthand and declaring it to be “so fucking illegal,” quipped to his fellow soldiers that the military seemed to be so inept that it couldn’t even construct a credible lie.  How prescient was that?

Kauzlarich, like Boykin and all their ilk, has the spiritual depth of his own skin, which is what he is trying to save … whether in an exchange of faith for immortality or in deflecting the sorry truth onto a bereaved and angered family with cheap revival-tent accusations of “atheism.”

Mary Tillman, Pat’s mother, showed me a page from Pat’s journal when he was 16 years old.  It was Pat’s reflection on why he had decided, once and for all, that he didn’t need organized religion.  The entry was motivated by Pat’s grief at the death of an old family cat.  Pat wasn’t comfortable with the idea that one could love another creature that was being excluded from the bargain in the afterlife.  He and his brothers grew up between a river and the mountains, where they roamed countless miles and delighted in the ceaseless interplay of geography, climate, flora and fauna.  In his journal entry, Pat speculated about this singular universality, and made up his mind that one didn’t need some anti-material monarchy buzzing with angels to accommodate himself to mortality.

Pat never felt separate enough from the world to despise the worms. And so Kauzlarich’s expression of fear and loathing for the world would have amused Pat.

Pat’s ashes are adrift from where they were scattered along the Pacific Ocean, mixing back into the elements with which he was so at home; while Ralph Kauzlarich and the Pentagon fret about a five-foot-two-inch mother who refuses to make them an offering of her fear.  Surely Pat Tillman is laughing.

A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer. Publisher, Zuade Kaufman.
Copyright © 2006 Truthdig, L.L.C.

“When the church wins the culture wars, it inevitably loses,” Mr. Boyd preached. “When it conquers the world, it becomes the world. When you put your trust in the sword, you lose the cross.”

Mr. Boyd says he is no liberal. He is opposed to abortion and thinks homosexuality is not God’s ideal. The response from his congregation at Woodland Hills Church here in suburban St. Paul — packed mostly with politically and theologically conservative, middle-class evangelicals — was passionate. Some members walked out of a sermon and never returned. By the time the dust had settled, Woodland Hills, which Mr. Boyd founded in 1992, had lost about 1,000 of its 5,000 members.

But there were also congregants who thanked Mr. Boyd, telling him they were moved to tears to hear him voice concerns they had been too afraid to share.

Mr. Boyd said he had cleared his sermons with the church’s board, but his words left some in his congregation stunned. Some said that he was disrespecting President Bush and the military, that he was soft on abortion or telling them not to vote.

“When we joined years ago, Greg was a conservative speaker,” said William Berggren, a lawyer who joined the church with his wife six years ago. “But we totally disagreed with him on this. You can’t be a Christian and ignore actions that you feel are wrong. A case in point is the abortion issue. If the church were awake when abortion was passed in the 70’s, it wouldn’t have happened. But the church was asleep.”

Mr. Boyd, 49, who preaches in blue jeans and rumpled plaid shirts, leads a church that occupies a squat block-long building that was once a home improvement chain store.

The church grew from 40 members in 12 years, based in no small part on Mr. Boyd’s draw as an electrifying preacher who stuck closely to Scripture. He has degrees from Yale Divinity School and Princeton Theological Seminary, and he taught theology at Bethel College in St. Paul, where he created a controversy a few years ago by questioning whether God fully knew the future. Some pastors in his own denomination, the Baptist General Conference, mounted an effort to evict Mr. Boyd from the denomination and his teaching post, but he won that battle.

He is known among evangelicals for a bestselling book, “Letters From a Skeptic,” based on correspondence with his father, a leftist union organizer and a lifelong agnostic — an exchange that eventually persuaded his father to embrace Christianity.

Mr. Boyd said he never intended his sermons to be taken as merely a critique of the Republican Party or the religious right. He refuses to share his party affiliation, or whether he has one, for that reason. He said there were Christians on both the left and the right who had turned politics and patriotism into “idolatry.”

He said he first became alarmed while visiting another megachurch’s worship service on a Fourth of July years ago. The service finished with the chorus singing “God Bless America” and a video of fighter jets flying over a hill silhouetted with crosses.

“I thought to myself, ‘What just happened? Fighter jets mixed up with the cross?’ ” he said in an interview.

Patriotic displays are still a mainstay in some evangelical churches. Across town from Mr. Boyd’s church, the sanctuary of North Heights Lutheran Church was draped in bunting on the Sunday before the Fourth of July this year for a “freedom celebration.” Military veterans and flag twirlers paraded into the sanctuary, an enormous American flag rose slowly behind the stage, and a Marine major who had served in Afghanistan preached that the military was spending “your hard-earned money” on good causes.

In his six sermons, Mr. Boyd laid out a broad argument that the role of Christians was not to seek “power over” others — by controlling governments, passing legislation or fighting wars. Christians should instead seek to have “power under” others — “winning people’s hearts” by sacrificing for those in need, as Jesus did, Mr. Boyd said.

“America wasn’t founded as a theocracy,” he said. “America was founded by people trying to escape theocracies. Never in history have we had a Christian theocracy where it wasn’t bloody and barbaric. That’s why our Constitution wisely put in a separation of church and state.

“I am sorry to tell you,” he continued, “that America is not the light of the world and the hope of the world. The light of the world and the hope of the world is Jesus Christ.”

Mr. Boyd lambasted the “hypocrisy and pettiness” of Christians who focus on “sexual issues” like homosexuality, abortion or Janet Jackson’s breast-revealing performance at the Super Bowl halftime show. He said Christians these days were constantly outraged about sex and perceived violations of their rights to display their faith in public.

“Those are the two buttons to push if you want to get Christians to act,” he said. “And those are the two buttons Jesus never pushed.”

Some Woodland Hills members said they applauded the sermons because they had resolved their conflicted feelings. David Churchill, a truck driver for U.P.S. and a Teamster for 26 years, said he had been “raised in a religious-right home” but was torn between the Republican expectations of faith and family and the Democratic expectations of his union.

When Mr. Boyd preached his sermons, “it was liberating to me,” Mr. Churchill said.

Mr. Boyd gave his sermons while his church was in the midst of a $7 million fund-raising campaign. But only $4 million came in, and 7 of the more than 50 staff members were laid off, he said.

Mary Van Sickle, the family pastor at Woodland Hills, said she lost 20 volunteers who had been the backbone of the church’s Sunday school.

“They said, ‘You’re not doing what the church is supposed to be doing, which is supporting the Republican way,’ ” she said. “It was some of my best volunteers.”

The Rev. Paul Eddy, a theology professor at Bethel College and the teaching pastor at Woodland Hills, said: “Greg is an anomaly in the megachurch world. He didn’t give a whit about church leadership, never read a book about church growth. His biggest fear is that people will think that all church is is a weekend carnival, with people liking the worship, the music, his speaking, and that’s it.”

In the end, those who left tended to be white, middle-class suburbanites, church staff members said. In their place, the church has added more members who live in the surrounding community — African-Americans, Hispanics and Hmong immigrants from Laos.

This suits Mr. Boyd. His vision for his church is an ethnically and economically diverse congregation that exemplifies Jesus’ teachings by its members’ actions. He, his wife and three other families from the church moved from the suburbs three years ago to a predominantly black neighborhood in St. Paul.

Mr. Boyd now says of the upheaval: “I don’t regret any aspect of it at all. It was a defining moment for us. We let go of something we were never called to be. We just didn’t know the price we were going to pay for doing it.”

His congregation of about 4,000 is still digesting his message. Mr. Boyd arranged a forum on a recent Wednesday night to allow members to sound off on his new book. The reception was warm, but many of the 56 questions submitted in writing were pointed: Isn’t abortion an evil that Christians should prevent? Are you saying Christians should not join the military? How can Christians possibly have “power under” Osama bin Laden? Didn’t the church play an enormously positive role in the civil rights movement?

One woman asked: “So why NOT us? If we contain the wisdom and grace and love and creativity of Jesus, why shouldn’t we be the ones involved in politics and setting laws?”

Mr. Boyd responded: “I don’t think there’s a particular angle we have on society that others lack. All good, decent people want good and order and justice. Just don’t slap the label ‘Christian’ on it.”

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

July 30, 2006

Audit Finds U.S. Hid Cost of Iraq Projects

By JAMES GLANZ

BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 29 — The State Department agency in charge of $1.4 billion in reconstruction money in Iraq used an accounting shell game to hide ballooning cost overruns on its projects there and knowingly withheld information on schedule delays from Congress, a federal audit released late Friday has found.

The agency hid construction overruns by listing them as overhead or administrative costs, according to the audit, written by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, an independent office that reports to Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department.

Called the United States Agency for International Development, or A.I.D., the agency administers foreign aid projects around the world. It has been working in Iraq on reconstruction since shortly after the 2003 invasion.

The report by the inspector general’s office does not give a full accounting of all projects financed by the agency’s $1.4 billion budget, but cites several examples.

The findings appeared in an audit of a children’s hospital in Basra, but they referred to the wider reconstruction activities of the development agency in Iraq. American and Iraqi officials reported this week that the State Department planned to drop Bechtel, its contractor on that project, as signs of budget and scheduling problems began to surface.

The United States Embassy in Baghdad referred questions about the audit to the State Department in Washington, where a spokesman, Justin Higgins, said Saturday, “We have not yet had a chance to fully review this report, but certainly will consider it carefully, as we do all the findings of the inspector general.”

Bechtel has said that because of the deteriorating security in Basra, the hospital project could not be completed as envisioned. But Mr. Higgins said: “Despite the challenges, we are committed to completing this project so that sick children in Basra can receive the medical help they need. The necessary funding is now in place to ensure that will happen.”

In March 2005, A.I.D. asked the Iraq Reconstruction and Management Office at the United States Embassy in Baghdad for permission to downsize some projects to ease widespread financing problems. In its request, it said that it had to “absorb greatly increased construction costs” at the Basra hospital and that it would make a modest shift of priorities and reduce “contractor overhead” on the project.

The embassy office approved the request. But the audit found that the agency interpreted the document as permission to change reporting of costs across its program.

Referring to the embassy office’s approval, the inspector general wrote, “The memorandum was not intended to give U.S.A.I.D. blanket permission to change the reporting of all indirect costs.”

The hospital’s construction budget was $50 million. By April of this year, Bechtel had told the aid agency that because of escalating costs for security and other problems, the project would actually cost $98 million to complete. But in an official report to Congress that month, the agency “was reporting the hospital project cost as $50 million,” the inspector general wrote in his report.

The rest was reclassified as overhead, or “indirect costs.” According to a contracting officer at the agency who was cited in the report, the agency “did not report these costs so it could stay within the $50 million authorization.”

“We find the entire agreement unclear,” the inspector general wrote of the A.I.D. request approved by the embassy. “The document states that hospital project cost increases would be offset by reducing contractor overhead allocated to the project, but project reports for the period show no effort to reduce overhead.”

The report said it suspected that other unreported costs on the hospital could drive the tab even higher. In another case cited in the report, a power station project in Musayyib, the direct construction cost cited by the development agency was $6.6 million, while the overhead cost was $27.6 million.

One result is that the project’s overhead, a figure that normally runs to a maximum of 30 percent, was a stunning 418 percent.

The figures were even adjusted in the opposite direction when that helped the agency balance its books, the inspector general found. On an electricity project at the Baghdad South power station, direct construction costs were reported by the agency as $164.3 million and indirect or overhead costs as $1.4 million.

That is just 0.8 percent overhead in a country where security costs are often staggering. A contracting officer told the inspector general that the agency adjusted the figures “to stay within the authorization for each project.”

The overall effect, the report said, was a “serious misstatement of hospital project costs.” The true cost could rise as high as $169.5 million, even after accounting for at least $30 million pledged for medical equipment by a charitable organization.

The inspector general also found that the agency had not reported known schedule delays to Congress. On March 26, 2006, Bechtel informed the agency that the hospital project was 273 days behind, the inspector general wrote. But in its April report to Congress on the status of all projects, “U.S.A.I.D. reported no problems with the project schedule.”

In a letter responding to the inspector general’s findings, Joseph A. Saloom, the newly appointed director of the reconstruction office at the United States Embassy, said he would take steps to improve the reporting of the costs of reconstruction projects in Iraq. Mr. Saloom took little exception to the main findings.

In the letter, Mr. Saloom said his office had been given new powers by the American ambassador in Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad, to request clear financing information on American reconstruction projects. Mr. Saloom wrote that he agreed with the inspector general’s conclusion that this shift would help “preclude surprises such as occurred on the Basra hospital project.”

“The U.S. Mission agrees that accurate monitoring of projects requires allocating indirect costs in a systematic way that reflects accurately the true indirect costs attributable to specific activities and projects, such as a Basra children’s hospital,” Mr. Saloom wrote.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

The White House’s top political advisers are advancing a strategy built around national security, arguing that Iraq is a central front in the battle against global terrorism and that opposition to the war is tantamount to “cutting and running” in a broader struggle to keep America safe.

After three years of conflict, Democrats argue that the Bush administration’s policies in Iraq should not be equated with a stronger, safer America. Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic leader, said recently, “Nearly everywhere you look — from the Middle East to Asia — America’s enemies have been emboldened by the administration’s mismanagement of Iraq.”

The voters, at times, are even more impassioned. Representative Henry J. Hyde, Republican of Illinois and chairman of the International Relations Committee, said that voters, pro or con, were treating the war the way they treated the mention of Richard M. Nixon in the 1974 post-Watergate midterm campaign. “Nobody is tepid on this issue,” said Mr. Hyde, who is planning to retire.

Many experts and members of both parties say they worry about the long-term consequences of such bitter partisan polarization and its effect on the longstanding tradition — although one often honored in the breach — that foreign policy is built on bipartisan trust and consensus.

“The old idea that politics stops at the water’s edge is no longer with us, and I think we’ve lost something as a result,” said John C. Danforth, a former senator and an ambassador to the United Nations under President Bush.

Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, said, “There used to be some unwritten rules when it came to foreign policy.”

These divisions do not run across foreign policy. The latest poll shows no comparable partisan gap, for example, in attitudes toward the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon. On Capitol Hill, even as lawmakers position themselves furiously over Iraq, they produce big bipartisan majorities on issues like this week’s nuclear deal with India or last week’s resolution expressing support for Israel.

But compared with past conflicts — from Vietnam to the war in the Persian Gulf to Afghanistan — the war in Iraq evoked strong partisan passions from the start.

“I’m a child of the 60’s and the Vietnam War,” Judy Smitko, a 63-year-old retired college professor and Democrat in San Diego, said in a follow-up interview to the New York Times/CBS poll. “It’s their country. It’s their own decision. Unfortunately, we’re in it, but I believe we should be out of it in 18 months.”

Bernard Thompson, a 72-year-old retiree from Corsicana, Tex., said Mr. Bush was “coming to grips with this worldwide threat, and we’ve got to stamp it out if we are going to survive.”

Mr. Thompson, a Republican, added: “The point is, we’re at war. Just think of what would have happened if the country had turned on Roosevelt.”

An analysis by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that the difference in the way Democrats and Republicans viewed the Vietnam War — specifically, whether sending American troops was a mistake — never exceeded 18 percentage points between 1966 and 1973. In the most recent Times/CBS poll on Iraq, the partisan gap on a similar question was 50 percentage points.

The poll was based on telephone interviews conducted July 21 through July 25 with 1,127 adults and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.

The overall shift in public opinion on the war largely depends on how independents fall — and lately, they have been agreeing more with the Democrats, said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center.

Christopher F. Gelpi, a political scientist at Duke, said the only partisan divide that came close to the division over Iraq occurred during President Ronald Reagan’s military action in Grenada, but it was much smaller.

Experts cited several reasons for the extent of this partisan divide: Mr. Bush is a polarizing president in an intensely partisan age, they say. Gary C. Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, said, “The divisions on the war exacerbate the divisions on Bush, and the divisions on Bush exacerbate the divisions on the war.”

Democrats are generally more skeptical about the use of force, especially without broad international support, and the course of the war has seemed to justify their doubts.

Republicans have been fiercely loyal to Mr. Bush for his handling of the fight against terrorism and see Democratic critiques as counterproductive to that effort.

Partisan passions have also been heightened, some analysts said, by the use of national security issues in the past two campaigns.

Democrats recall the 2002 campaign against Senator Max Cleland, Democrat of Georgia, as a turning point. Mr. Cleland, a triple amputee who was awarded a Silver Star in Vietnam, was defeated after an advertising campaign that accused him of being soft on national defense, at one point flashing images of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

Democrats say the Republicans repeatedly broke the old rules, treating national security as a wedge issue to make Democrats look weak and unacceptable, especially in 2004. “George Bush decided to make foreign policy partisan in a way that Ronald Reagan or the first George Bush never did,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said, “The divisions over Iraq and national security are the house that Karl Rove and George Bush built.”

But Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee, said the war and national security were entirely appropriate issues for election campaigns.

“I don’t think we’re politicizing the war,” Mr. Mehlman said. “I think the fact is that there are legitimate and important differences, and it is the job of a campaign to clarify between individual candidates on what is the central question our nation faces, which is, How do you win this global war on terror?”

Mr. Mehlman said presidents from both parties had used war as a campaign rallying point throughout history. But, he said, national security has been especially important to the Republican Party since the Reagan days, as Democrats in the post-Vietnam era have become increasingly antiwar.

He said it was Democratic leaders like Howard Dean, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, who had broken the old rules, embracing defeatism, “which I think is not only bad for American troops, but I think for their party.”

Three months before the midterm elections, the exchanges are already rough. In Ohio, Senator Mike DeWine, a Republican, recently ran an advertisement showing the World Trade Center towers and accusing his Democratic challenger, Representative Sherrod Brown, of “weakening America’s security” by a series of votes on issues like financing for intelligence programs.

Ohio Democrats responded with an advertisement that said Mr. DeWine “failed us on the intelligence committee before 9/11” and on “weapons of mass destruction.”

In independent interviews, two senior Republican strategists said that the war on terror — with Iraq as its central front — had been the single most effective motivator for base voters in internal party polls this year. Even so, some strategists said the continued violence in Iraq was a drag on many of their candidates, especially in moderate districts.

Among Republican voters in the latest Times/CBS poll, only 49 percent said they believed that the United States was winning the war, and 41 percent said neither side was winning.

Analysts in both parties say the intensity of Democratic feeling against the war will be a powerful motivator in this fall’s elections. The sentiment is perhaps most apparent in the Connecticut primary challenge to Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, a strong supporter of the war.

A variety of experts in both parties said they worried about the aftermath of intense partisanship.

“This era in general feels excessively partisan, and national security has been put right into the mix of intense partisan debate,” said Thomas E. Donilon, a lawyer and a former assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration. “And it’s a mistake in terms of the president developing support for his position on these tough issues.”

Richard N. Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, who until June 2003 served as director of policy planning for the State Department, said all nuance got lost in a campaign debate.

“You end up with very stark choices: quote, stay the course, versus, quote, cut and run,” Mr. Haass said. “And in reality, a lot of policy needs to be made between them.”

Many experts, though, said they were not sure what would change the current political climate. “It’s hard to repair the breach,” said John Podesta, former chief of staff for President Bill Clinton.

Megan Thee and Marina Stefan contributed reporting from New York for this article.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

The effort, conducted two weeks ago, was sponsored by three policy research groups with very different political views: the Brookings Institution, home to many centrist Democrats; the Heritage Foundation, a conservative stronghold that has staunchly supported President Bush’s tax cuts and pushed for much deeper cuts in government spending; and the Concord Coalition, a bipartisan group that advocates fiscal discipline but is essentially neutral on whether it should come from higher taxes or lower spending.

Participants in the session were given a whirlwind tour of the nation’s fiscal woes and then prodded to find out what solutions they could — and could not — agree on. The discussions here, along with two other sessions in Kansas City and San Diego, were run by Viewpoint Learning, a firm founded by the pollster Daniel Yankelovich.

The question for the researchers was this: do American voters, in their diversity and their focus on self-interest, share any consensus about making hard choices, or even on the need to make hard choices?

The researchers are still analyzing the results, to be published later this summer. But the session in Philadelphia left some strong impressions on a reporter permitted to observe it. Among them:

• The participants didn’t hate taxes nearly as much as many Republicans think.

• They seemed to treasure Social Security and Medicare in their current forms, but were more open to change than many Democrats think.

• None of the participants pushed for less defense spending, even if the war in Iraq were to wind down.

• Nobody could agree on a single government program that ought to be cut or eliminated altogether.

The good news was that people here appeared less polarized and more open to sharing burdens than do their elected leaders in Washington. The bad news was that the Philadelphia group thought the best solutions were to tax other people (smokers, drinkers, S.U.V. buyers, the rich) or to somehow “spend smarter.”

In that sense, participants were much like their elected representatives. The difference was that people were willing to contemplate higher taxes or other measures considered taboo in one party or the other.

Virtually no one needed to be persuaded that the federal budget is on an unsustainable path. Everyone accepted that federal spending has ballooned under President Bush, but that taxes have lagged far behind. The federal deficit is likely to be “only” about $300 billion this year, but deficits over the next 10 years could total more than $2 trillion if today’s policies remain unchanged.

The gravest fiscal problem begins at the end of this decade, when the nation’s 76 million baby boomers start to retire and claim old-age benefits. By 2050, according to the Congressional Budget Office, outlays for Medicare and Social Security alone would be higher than the government’s total spending today.

Participants were given four strategies for tackling the problem. The first was do nothing, but wait and hope that economic growth eliminated the need for big changes.

The second approach put a priority on “keeping our promises to the elderly” while raising taxes and cutting spending in other areas.

The third was to “increase personal responsibility and choice,” shifting Medicare and Social Security from government financing to individual investment-type accounts.

The last strategy was to “invest in the future,” putting more money into education and economic development, but raising taxes and trimming old-age programs.

Not surprisingly, many people appeared overwhelmed at first. But nobody needed to be persuaded about the magnitude of the problem, and no one endorsed “wait and hope,” the de facto strategy in Washington.

More surprising, virtually all the participants agreed on the need for higher taxes. Many supported a repeal of Mr. Bush’s tax cuts of 2001.

That contrasted sharply with the adamant opposition to tax increases among Republican leaders, especially President Bush. But the openness to at least talking about higher taxes appeared unanimous among those in the Philadelphia group, including those who described themselves as supporters of Mr. Bush.

“I was surprised that so many people were in favor of higher taxes, but I think it’s a good thing,” said Anthony Condo, a construction contractor in his 50’s and a strong Bush supporter. “If taxes went up to lower the deficit, and I knew they were being used for that, I would be in favor of it.”

This isn’t to say that tax increases amount to a winning election issue. “Focus groups and polls create a kind of laboratory with conditions that don’t always exist in the real world,” said Geoffrey D. Garin, president of Peter D. Hart Research, a polling company that does work for many Democratic candidates (and was not involved in the Philadelphia exercise).

“When you have a linear conversation with people, where they concentrate their attention on the idea of trade-offs, they very frequently end up at a place like this.” said Mr. Garin. “The problem is that, in the real world, these sorts of linear conversations don’t exist.”

WHEN the subject shifted to reducing government spending, the group seemed less successful. Few if any people thought military spending was too high — even if the United States withdrew from Iraq. Nor was there agreement on other programs to cut. Most wanted more money for education, and many wanted more money for prescription drugs. Budget cuts, such as they were, involved “smarter” spending and a crackdown on waste, fraud and abuse.

At times during the day, it was possible to sympathize with lawmakers who throw up their arms and shift the debate to flag-burning.

Still, people seemed willing to accept change. Despite intense support for Social Security, for example, many said that workers should be encouraged to postpone retirement. And despite support for Medicare, there was approval for reducing “heroic” high-technology measures that might keep very old and very ill people alive for a few weeks or months.

So if there was a message, it was not that people wanted to dodge tough choices. It was that they wanted good ideas from their leaders.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Bills Soar As Many Hit Gap in Drug Plan
Medicare Provision Jolts Some Seniors

By Susan Levine
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 30, 2006; C01

The calls are starting to come in from shocked or angry seniors. They have just learned that their Medicare drug plans are maxing out on early coverage and that they must now spend $2,850 from their own pockets before coverage will resume.

"I can't pay for my medications," one man told Howard Houghton of the Fairfax Area Agency on Aging the other day. "What do I do?"

Over the next five months, several million Americans with high medicine costs could find themselves in a similar bind. The gap in insurance, popularly called the doughnut hole, is an unusual provision in most of the private plans offered in Medicare's new Part D prescription drug program. Advocates for the elderly say it is misunderstood and problematic.

"There's nothing sweet about the doughnut hole," said Deene Beebe, spokeswoman for the New York-based Medicare Rights Center.

The program was designed to give all participants a certain level of insurance and to protect elderly and disabled recipients with chronic or catastrophic illnesses from huge prescription expenses. To afford those two goals, Part D's designers built in an annual period during which individuals have to pay for medicines themselves.

Under a standard plan this first year, Medicare handles 75 percent of drug costs after a deductible until the bill reaches $2,250. It does not kick in again until those costs total $5,100. After that, prescriptions are almost completely paid for. The very poor can get special subsidies.

Officials consider the formulation sufficient for the vast majority of recipients and a tremendous boon to those with the largest bills.

"That's a peace of mind . . . they never had before," said Mark McClellan, administrator of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

As of mid-June, federal officials said, 22.5 million people were enrolled in the program, about half of those eligible. The agency's estimates of how many will hit the $2,250 threshold are below projections from the Congressional Budget Office and others, partly because of lower-than-expected monthly premiums and greater use of generic drugs.

Even recipients who fall into the gap will benefit overall, McClellan emphasized. "We've made a lot of progress this year," he said.

Advocacy groups and some independent health analysts have warned of serious health consequences for older and disabled Americans living on low or moderate fixed incomes. Their resources, though minimal, often are too much to qualify for extra help. They face difficult choices, advocates fear: buy medicines or food and other necessities?

"It's a tough thing," said Houghton, who works with seniors as Fairfax County's coordinator of the Virginia Insurance Counseling and Assistance Program. The distressed retiree who appealed to him is 66 years old and takes five generic drugs and three "very expensive" brand-name pills.

"He doesn't have a whole lot of recourse," Houghton said.

According to a report by the Campaign for America's Future, a Washington-based advocacy organization, seniors enrolled in the program at the start of the year will, on average, reach the doughnut hole Sept. 22. As the calls to agencies on aging and senior centers attest, many already have.

Retired teacher Elise Cain walked into her Silver Spring pharmacy last week for a pill she takes for diabetes, one of her dozen daily medicines. The 77-year-old woman had paid $20 in June. Her charge now is $175.24.

"I nearly passed out," Cain said.

Although the Medicare handbook clearly describes the coverage break, critics say most Medicare recipients, bombarded with advertising from private prescription plans, focused on deductibles and premiums and the drugs included.

"There was a lot of emphasis on signing up seniors. It was a crusade almost," said Stuart Guterman, a Medicare expert with the nonpartisan Commonwealth Fund. He doubts that many companies highlighted the doughnut hole in their marketing push. "That's not a selling point," he said.

Columbia resident Mary Ann Anderson, 81, was caught by surprise even though she had carefully reviewed the plans. She knew she had to choose wisely given the long list of medications she is taking after having double bypass surgery in December.

"It was a huge success," she said of the operation. "But not having the drugs could kill me."

This month, Anderson went to the store to pick up three refills. With her coverage, the bill had been about $125 a month. Suddenly, it had more than doubled.

"You hit the limit," the pharmacist told her.

"What do you mean?" she asked, bewildered.

She quickly learned. She also learned that the $14,952 she nets from Social Security annually made her ineligible for many assistance programs, including those offered by pharmaceutical companies. She spent five days on the phone trying to find alternatives, taking detailed notes of each conversation. She contacted elected officials, federal and state, and Howard County's Office on Aging. She asked her cardiologist for samples.

Anderson is managing for the moment, thanks in part to two drug vouchers her doctor supplied and a discount card she obtained through the county. Yet she worries. Unless she can switch to a plan without a gap -- and afford its higher premiums -- she'll face the same math all over again Jan. 1.

"I'm just one of many," she said.

Exactly how many remains a contentious question. Before the program's start, the Congressional Budget Office and the Kaiser Family Foundation both projected that about 7 million recipients would be affected this year.

Then last month, a report for the national Health Leadership Council, a coalition of health care executives, pegged the number at 3.4 million. This month the Campaign for America's Future report put the estimate back at 7 million.

Democrats on Capitol Hill have called for change. One proposal would have Medicare, not the drug plans, negotiate directly with the pharmaceutical companies; supporters say the savings could help eliminate the gap. Another measure, introduced by Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.) and three colleagues, would waive the premium for any month when a senior lacks coverage.

Tave Kaufman, 74, of Bethesda calculates that he's better off regardless. Although he and his wife quickly spent their way past the first threshold, their total cost should be less by year's end than in 2005. "It better be," he said, "or else we took the wrong plan."

But his equanimity is being tested. With a brother, he's paying for the prescriptions of his 88-year-old aunt. Her priciest medication runs $450 a month.

Kaufman can only laugh. "You're looking at a trio of doughnut-holers," he said.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

The strain shows. At campaign events, Lieberman at times appears subdued and weary. He projects little of the cheerful enthusiasm that marked his long-shot presidential bid two years ago. "It's difficult personally," Lieberman said last week of the defections by party veterans such as Stolberg. "I am competing in the most difficult part of the Connecticut electorate for me."

In an editorial published today, the New York Times endorsed Lamont over Lieberman, arguing that the senator had offered the nation a "warped version of bipartisanship" by supporting Bush on national security.

Lieberman is accustomed to the rough and tumble of politics, and can be combative in his own defense, as he showed during a recent debate. But he said he has been jarred by the intensity of Democratic anger toward Bush -- and, by extension, toward him. Liberal bloggers have called Lieberman a "liar" and a "weasel."

"It's not just opposition to Bush," he said. "The hatred is so deep."

That Democratic ire "raises larger questions about our politics," Lieberman added. He thinks it ultimately undermines the effectiveness of government. But he makes no apology for his position on the war, having resolved long ago that he would not "be part of a partisan response."

Other Democrats, including Stolberg, considered challenging Lieberman this year, but Lamont had a crucial advantage. The great-grandson of a JP Morgan chairman, who founded a successful cable-television business, he has already spent $1.5 million of his own money and had raised an additional $1.3 million through June 30.

"I felt all along I would have a challenge," Lieberman quipped. "But I was hoping God would send me a poor one." The senator, however, has raised $7 .2 million for his campaign.

In Washington, Lieberman carved a niche in foreign policy and gained a national reputation as a collegial, moderate Democrat with a strong moral streak. Back home, though, his Democratic base narrowed. Traditional left-leaning voters were turned off by Lieberman's support for school vouchers, his criticism of affirmative action and his hawkish foreign policy views. They also resented his conciliatory style in the highly partisan, elbows-out environment of Capitol Hill in recent years.

As the Iraq war unfolded and controversies flared over intelligence failures and the commitment of U.S. forces, Democrats such as Stolberg longed for their senator to take a more combative approach with the White House. Bush's embrace of Lieberman the night of the president's 2005 State of the Union address -- a moment that has come to be called "the Kiss" -- is one of the most vivid images of the Connecticut campaign. In a speech last December, Lieberman warned Democrats that "in matters of war, we undermine presidential credibility at our nation's peril."

"You can want to be liked by some people, but there are a few you have to write off," Stolberg said. "Joe wants to be loved by the devil, too."

Voters express a similar anguish. While Lieberman was working the crowd at a Norwalk Italian festival, he was greeted by Mike Vano Jr., an 80-year-old Navy World War II veteran. After shaking the senator's hand, Vano conceded that he could not decide which Democrat will get his vote. "I like the man. I like what he's done," Vano said of Lieberman. "But I don't like that war."

At a campaign stop last Monday at Sweet Rexie's, a candy store in South Norwalk, Conn., Sen. Barbara Boxer, a liberal California Democrat, vouched for Lieberman's Democratic bona fides before a group of local businesswomen. Boxer's visit was part of an effort by the Lieberman camp to convince Connecticut Democrats that he is still one of them.

"This is what I know," Boxer said. "You've got a good Democrat here." At a rally later that day in Waterbury, former president Bill Clinton assured 2,000 Lieberman supporters: "He is a good Democrat, he is a good man, and he'll do you proud."

A July 20 Quinnipiac University survey showed likely Democratic primary voters favoring Lamont 51 percent to 47 percent over Lieberman, a lead that is statistically insignificant because it falls within the margin of error. Lieberman trails among voters making over $30,000 per year, those with college degrees, and all age groups except senior citizens. Lieberman had held substantial leads in previous polls.

Some political observers think the seeds of Lieberman's problems with Connecticut voters were planted in 2000, when Al Gore picked him as his vice presidential running mate and as a precaution Lieberman refused to give up his bid for a third Senate term. "It's called covering your bases, rather than being a loyal party guy," said John M. Orman, a Fairfield University politics professor who briefly challenged Lieberman before Lamont entered the picture.

While laying the foundation for his own presidential bid in 2004, Lieberman criticized Gore for mishandling their 2000 campaign by sounding a populist tone instead of appealing more to centrists. He showed interest in the Republicans' plan for overhauling Social Security, he voted for a Republican energy bill that Democrats decried, he supported federal intervention in the Terri Schiavo right-to-die case, and he helped clear the path for a vote on Samuel A. Alito Jr.'s Supreme Court confirmation -- although he voted against Alito.

But Lieberman has helped his party on many issues. He is a strong supporter of abortion rights, opposed the Bush tax cuts, and is considered a friend to environmental, gay and lesbian, and labor causes. Much to his frustration, critics have pushed all that into the background.

"The partisanship and the war have created a different situation, one [Lieberman] hasn't seen before," said Scott L. McLean, political science chairman at Quinnipiac. "Prior to the Iraq war, you couldn't pin him down."

Lieberman, the son of a Stamford liquor-store owner, began his career as an ambitious progressive. But he shed his liberal image after losing a 1980 House race, emerging as a law-and-order moderate during a stint as Connecticut attorney general. Lieberman took on phony charities, blocked an off-track betting parlor, and criticized "ladies' night" bar specials for discriminating against men. When he took on Sen. Lowell P. Weicker Jr. in 1988, he ran so far to the right of the moderate Republican that conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr. pitched in as a Lieberman fundraiser.

In the final days before the Aug. 8 primary, Lieberman is summing up his message to voters this way: "Mr. and Mrs. Connecticut, I hope you'll respect me, even if you don't agree with me."

His supporters cite the senator's breadth of experience and character as the main reasons they are sticking with him. Patricia Mulhall, who attended the Clinton rally, said she forgives Lieberman's perceived transgressions for the sake of his decency and gravitas. "I was disappointed with some of his votes, but I understand," said Mulhall, Waterbury's Democratic registrar.

The silver lining for Lieberman is that he remains popular with unaffiliated moderates and GOP voters, a large slice of the Connecticut electorate. The July Quinnipiac poll indicated he would easily win a three-way race in November, against Lamont and the Republican nominee, Alan Schlesinger.

Then again, the primary also looked like a cakewalk for Lieberman until recently. As Lieberman was leaving Sweet Rexie's with Boxer, he bumped into Richard Stowe, who was walking by the store. "Time to go from Iraq," Stowe told the senator politely. Stowe is a Republican, but he is supporting Lamont.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

©MMVI, The Associated Press.

©MMVI, CBS Broadcasting Inc.

July 30, 2006

Editorial

A Senate Race in Connecticut

Earlier this year, Senator Joseph Lieberman’s seat seemed so secure that — legend has it — some people at the Republican nominating convention in Connecticut started making bleating noises when the party picked a presumed sacrificial lamb to run against the three-term senator, who has been a fixture in Connecticut politics for more than 35 years.

But Mr. Lieberman is now in a tough Democratic primary against a little-known challenger, Ned Lamont. The race has taken on a national character. Mr. Lieberman’s friends see it as an attempt by hysterical antiwar bloggers to oust a giant of the Senate for the crime of bipartisanship. Lamont backers — most of whom seem more passionate about being Lieberman opponents — say that as one of the staunchest supporters of the Iraq war, Mr. Lieberman has betrayed his party by cozying up to President Bush.

This primary would never have happened absent Iraq. It’s true that Mr. Lieberman has fallen in love with his image as the nation’s moral compass. But if pomposity were a disqualification, the Senate would never be able to call a quorum. He has voted with his party in opposing the destructive Bush tax cuts, and despite some unappealing rhetoric in the Terri Schiavo case, he has strongly supported a woman’s right to choose. He has been one of the Senate’s most creative thinkers about the environment and energy conservation.

But this race is not about résumés. The United States is at a critical point in its history, and Mr. Lieberman has chosen a controversial role to play. The voters in Connecticut will have to judge whether it is the right one.

As Mr. Lieberman sees it, this is a fight for the soul of the Democratic Party — his moderate fair-mindedness against a partisan radicalism that alienates most Americans. “What kind of Democratic Party are we going to have?” he asked in an interview with New York magazine. “You’ve got to agree 100 percent, or you’re not a good Democrat?”

That’s far from the issue. Mr. Lieberman is not just a senator who works well with members of the other party. And there is a reason that while other Democrats supported the war, he has become the only target. In his effort to appear above the partisan fray, he has become one of the Bush administration’s most useful allies as the president tries to turn the war on terror into an excuse for radical changes in how this country operates.

Citing national security, Mr. Bush continually tries to undermine restraints on the executive branch: the system of checks and balances, international accords on the treatment of prisoners, the nation’s longtime principles of justice. His administration has depicted any questions or criticism of his policies as giving aid and comfort to the terrorists. And Mr. Lieberman has helped that effort. He once denounced Democrats who were “more focused on how President Bush took America into the war in Iraq” than on supporting the war’s progress.

At this moment, with a Republican president intent on drastically expanding his powers with the support of the Republican House and Senate, it is critical that the minority party serve as a responsible, but vigorous, watchdog. That does not require shrillness or absolutism. But this is no time for a man with Mr. Lieberman’s ability to command Republicans’ attention to become their enabler, and embrace a role as the president’s defender.

On the Armed Services Committee, Mr. Lieberman has left it to Republicans like Lindsey Graham of South Carolina to investigate the administration’s actions. In 2004, Mr. Lieberman praised Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for expressing regret about Abu Ghraib, then added: “I cannot help but say, however, that those who were responsible for killing 3,000 Americans on September 11th, 2001, never apologized.” To suggest even rhetorically that the American military could be held to the same standard of behavior as terrorists is outrageous, and a good example of how avidly the senator has adopted the Bush spin and helped the administration avoid accounting for Abu Ghraib.

Mr. Lieberman prides himself on being a legal thinker and a champion of civil liberties. But he appointed himself defender of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and the administration’s policy of holding hundreds of foreign citizens in prison without any due process. He seconded Mr. Gonzales’s sneering reference to the “quaint” provisions of the Geneva Conventions. He has shown no interest in prodding his Republican friends into investigating how the administration misled the nation about Iraq’s weapons. There is no use having a senator famous for getting along with Republicans if he never challenges them on issues of profound importance.

If Mr. Lieberman had once stood up and taken the lead in saying that there were some places a president had no right to take his country even during a time of war, neither he nor this page would be where we are today. But by suggesting that there is no principled space for that kind of opposition, he has forfeited his role as a conscience of his party, and has forfeited our support.

Mr. Lamont, a wealthy businessman from Greenwich, seems smart and moderate, and he showed spine in challenging the senator while other Democrats groused privately. He does not have his opponent’s grasp of policy yet. But this primary is not about Mr. Lieberman’s legislative record. Instead it has become a referendum on his warped version of bipartisanship, in which the never-ending war on terror becomes an excuse for silence and inaction. We endorse Ned Lamont in the Democratic primary for Senate in Connecticut.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Hillary Clinton appears to be a more polarizing figure. An ABC News/Washington Post poll in May found that 54 percent of those surveyed had a favorable impression of her while 42 percent found her unfavorable. Among Republicans, 73 percent had an unfavorable impression.

To many conservatives, she remains a feminist liberal who tolerated her husband's philandering and blamed the president's troubles on a "vast right-wing conspiracy."

"For Republicans, Hillary is the new Ted Kennedy — the person in the Senate who typifies the most liberal of liberal Democrats," Republican pollster Neil Newhouse said.

Using divisive political figures to energize voters is a long-standing strategy. Former House Majority leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, is a popular feature in Democratic advertising. But the Clintons stand out as a couple used to light a fire at both ends of the political spectrum.

Still, how politicians depict the Clintons depends on the region of the country and the race at stake.

In Tennessee, two Republicans in a three-way primary contest for Senate, competed to establish their anti-Clinton credentials.

Ed Bryant, a former member of the House, used one recent ad to help remind voters of President Clinton's 1999 impeachment trial, which Bryant helped prosecute as a member of the House Judiciary Committee. The ad displayed a headline from the Chattanooga Times Free Press: "Clinton's Multiplied Lies."

Van Hilleary, also a former House member, tried to gain a leg up by citing both Clintons in his appeal to conservative voters.

"In Washington, I voted against Bill Clinton more than any other member of Congress," he says in a television ad. "America needs senators who will cut spending, secure our borders and fight Hillary Clinton every step of the way."

President Clinton's overall appeal makes attacks on him exclusively a primary election tactic, Newhouse said. "That does not have legs in most general election races," he said.

That would be specially true in Arkansas. Former Republican Rep. Asa Hutchinson, who is running for governor, avoids any mention that he, like Bryant, was an impeachment manager. Conversely, Bill Halter, a Democratic candidate for Arkansas lieutenant governor and a former Clinton administration official, has an ad that displays a photograph of him with Clinton.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee concluded a recent Web ad titled "America needs a new direction" with a photograph of a triumphant Bill Clinton. "There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America," Clinton intoned.

But those ads reached small audiences and amounted to what strategists call "micro-targeting." Lieberman's ad this week turned Bill Clinton from a small-bore advertising weapon to a potent gun.

Bill Clinton is particularly effective for a candidate like Lieberman, who needs to burnish his Democratic credentials. But some Democratic consultants wonder whether the former president would work as well in a general election campaign.

"If you want to telegraph a symbol that you are true blue Democrat and that you want an economy and peace and prosperity like we had under that president, he is a convenient symbol to show a difference with Bush," said Jenny Backus, a Democratic consultant. "I'm not sure if Clinton yet has reached the iconic status like Reagan did for Republicans in red states."

Hillary Clinton, however, is destined to become a popular bugbear for Republicans. Ricketts, the Republican candidate seeking to unseat Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson (news, bio, voting record), has mentioned the New York senator in recent radio and television ads and includes her image among those of Kennedy and Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., in a current ad airing in the state.

"When you have individuals who are polarizing politically, it makes it much easier for voters to make a political judgment about ideology and approach to issues," said Doug McAuliffe, a Republican media consultant who wrote the Ricketts' ads and is working with other GOP candidates in this year's campaigns.

"With base voters, it gets the blood boiling," he said.

Registered Republicans outnumber Democrats by nearly 3-to-2 in Nebraska, and McAuliffe said races for federal office are far more ideological than state races.

But Nelson, the Democrat in the Senate who votes most often with Republicans, dismissed the effectiveness of the Rickett's strategy.

"Nebraska is essentially a populist state, not a partisan state," he said. "People just don't buy it."

Associated Press Writers Andrew DeMillo in Little Rock, Ark., and Susan Haigh in Hartford, Conn., contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press.

Copyright © 2006 Yahoo! Inc.

BLOG | Posted 07/28/2006 @ 2:08pm

The GOP's Sleaziest Attack Campaign

How low will Republicans go to try and hang onto control of Ohio, the swing state where their machinations secured the presidency for George W. Bush in 2004?

Lower than reasonable Americans, no matter what their partisanship, no matter what their ideology, could imagine.

Gary Lankford, the Ohio Republican Party's recently hired "social conservative coordinator" this week dispatched a mass e-mail to so-called "pro-family friends" that featured his 10-point introduction to U.S. Rep. Ted Strickland, the Democratic nominee for governor.

Strickland, an ordained Methodist minister who has thrown Republicans for a loop by speaking about his faith during the campaign, is running far ahead of scandal-plagued Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, the Republican nominee who gained national fame in 2004 when he was broadly accused of manipulating election processes and vote counting to favor Bush in the presidential race.

What's the GOP strategy for getting Blackwell back into the running? Imply that Strickland is gay.

What are Republican staffers pointing to as evidence? Reports that the Democratic congressman and his wife of 20 years reside in different locations when he is in Washington.

In his email, Lankford, the GOP "social conservative coordinator," links to an Internet posting by a conservative operative that is headlined: "Article Adds Fire to Strickland Gay Rumors." The posting suggests that a mid-June Toledo Blade newspaper article implies "the Stricklands are both gay."

The article turns out to be a wide-ranging Father's Day feature on Strickland and Blackwell, in which mention was made of the fact that Strickland and his wife have no children. Blackwell was quoted as saying that it would be absurd to try and make an issue of whether the Democrat was a father or not. "Some of my most adored, most respected leaders are not parents," said the Republican. "Pope John Paul II was not a parent."

But Strickland, who is supported by gay and lesbian groups in the state and has criticized legislative assaults on gay rights, noted the frustration of Republicans with the Democrat's ability to match them on moral values issues and suggested that he might well be attacked. "The most effective way to campaign now is to identify your opponent's strengths and try to destroy those strengths," Strickland warned.

It looks like the Republican Party in Ohio has decided to jettison the "some of my most adored, most respected leaders are not parents" line in favor of an aggressive "Strickland's gay" assault on the Democrat's "moral values" appeal.

Indeed, Lankford's email, which highlighted his Republican Party role, urged recipients to: "Pass this information along."

When the "information" got passed along to the media, Ohio Republican Party political director Jason Mauk said the party repudiated the email. "We do not engage in rumor or innuendo," said Mauk, "especially rumors that are not relevant to this election."

Sure.

Copyright © 2006 The Nation

Senior Republican lawmakers have said they were briefed on the general discussions and have some concerns but are awaiting a final proposal before commenting on specifics.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England are expected to discuss the proposal in an open hearing next Wednesday before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Military lawyers also are scheduled to testify Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The legislation is the administration's response to a June 29 Supreme Court decision, which concluded the Pentagon could not prosecute military detainees using secret tribunals established soon after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The court ruled the tribunals were not authorized by law and violated treaty obligations under the Geneva Conventions, which established many international laws for warfare.

The landmark court decision countered long-held assertions by the Bush administration that the president did not need permission from Congress to prosecute "enemy combatants" captured in the war on terror and that al Qaeda members were not subject to Geneva Convention protections because of their unconventional status.

"In a time of ongoing armed conflict, it is neither practicable nor appropriate for enemy combatants like al Qaeda terrorists to be tried like American citizens in federal courts or courts-martial," the proposal states.

The draft proposal contends that an existing law -- passed by the Senate last year after exhaustive negotiations between the White House and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. -- that bans cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment should "fully satisfy" the nation's obligations under the Geneva Conventions.

Sen. John W. Warner, R-Va., chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said Friday he expects to take up the detainee legislation in September.

© Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

July 28, 2006

McGovern Creates Council Of Elders

Moving on the Gannett News Service...

McGovern organizes elders' council to offer advice

By CHUCK RAASCH GNS Political Writer WASHINGTON - Saying Americans should listen more to their elders, former South Dakota Sen. George McGovern is forming a bipartisan council of seniors to offer advice on issues facing the country.

McGovern, 84, said his ``Council of Elders'' includes ex-senators and members of Congress, as well as professors, activists, ex-diplomats and former union officials. As of Friday, about three dozen people had signed on, and they span the ideological spectrum - from conservatives Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill., who is retiring from Congress, and ex-Sen. Alan Simpson of Wyoming to liberal ex-Sens. Thomas Eagleton of Missouri and John Culver of Iowa. Eagleton was briefly McGovern's vice presidential running mate in 1972 before it was disclosed Eagleton had undergone treatment for depression and exhaustion.

McGovern's Council of Elders will also include former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who served during the Vietnam War, and former Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, who served under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.

Civil rights activist and current Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., has also agreed to join, McGovern said, as has feminist Gloria Steinem; retired Springfield, Mo., banker and author Todd Parnell; former United Autoworkers President Douglas Fraser; and Children's Defense Fund President Marian Wright Edelman.

Posted at 03:21 PM

Copyright 2006 by National Journal Group Inc.

Republican Says We Need A Dem Congress

READ MORE: 2006, Iraq, Jack Abramoff, Supreme Court, Investigations, Tom DeLay, George W. Bush

The following is a letter from former Republican Congressman and Presidential candidate Pete McCloskey.

THE NEED FOR A DEMOCRAT MAJORITY IN THE U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES IN 2007

I have found it difficult in the past several weeks to reach a conclusion as to what a citizen should do with respect to this fall's forthcoming congressional elections.

I am a Republican, intend to remain a Republican, and am descended from three generations of California Republicans, active in Merced and San Bernardino Counties as well as in the San Francisco Bay Area. I have just engaged in an unsuccessful effort to defeat the Republican Chairman of the House Resources Committee, Richard Pombo, in the 11th Congressional District Republican primary, obtaining just over 32% of the Republican vote against Pombo's 62%.

The observation of Mr. Pombo's political consultant, Wayne Johnson, that I have been mired in the obsolete values of the 1970s, honesty, good ethics and balanced budgets, all rejected by today's modern Republicans, is only too accurate.

It has been difficult, nevertheless, to conclude as I have, that the Republican House leadership has been so unalterably corrupted by power and money that reasonable Republicans should support Democrats against DeLay-type Republican incumbents in 2006. Let me try to explain why.

I have decided to endorse Jerry McNerney and every other honorable Democrat now challenging those Republican incumbents who have acted to protect former Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who have flatly reneged on their Contract With America promise in 1994 to restore high standards of ethical behavior in the House and who have combined to prevent investigation of the Cunningham and Abramoff/Pombo/DeLay scandals. These Republican incumbents have brought shame on the House, and have created a wide-spread view in the public at large that Republicans are more interested in obtaining campaign contributions from corporate lobbyists than they are in legislating in the public interest.

At the outset, let me say that in four months of campaigning I have learned that Jerry McNerney is an honorable man and that Richard Pombo is not. Mr. Pombo has used his position and power to shamelessly enrich his wife and family from campaign funds, has interfered with the federal investigation of men like Michael Hurwitz, he of the Savings & Loan frauds and ruthless clear-cutting of old growth California redwoods. Mr. Pombo has taken more money from Indian gaming lobbyist Jack Abramoff, his associates and Indian tribes interested in gaming than any other Member of Congress, in excess of $500,000. With his stated intent to gut the Endangered Species and Environmental Protection Acts, to privatize for development millions of acres of public land, including a number of National Parks, to give veto power to the Congress over constitutional decisions of the Supreme Court, his substantial contributions to DeLay's legal defense fund, and most particularly his refusal to investigate the Abramoff involvement in Indian gaming and the exploitation of women labor in the Marianas, both matters within the jurisdiction of his committee, Mr. Pombo in my view represents all that is wrong with the national government in Washington today.

It is clear that the forthcoming campaign will be a vicious one, with Mr. Pombo willing to stretch the truth as he has in the past with respect to the elderberry beetle, levee breaks, his steadfast opposition to veterans' health care, including prosthetics research for amputees from Iraq and other wars, the impact on Marine lives of endangered species protection at Camp Pendleton and other issues. That Mr. Pombo lied in testimony to the Senate in 1994 is an accepted fact. He testified that the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service had designated his farm near Tracy as habitat for the endangered California kit fox. This was untrue, and Pombo admitted to the untruthfulness a few months later when questioned over public television, an agency for which he recently voted to cut federal funds.
Such a man should not be allowed to be in charge of the nation's public lands and waterways, a position to which he was elevated by the now-departed Tom DeLay.

Some 18 months ago, my former law partner, Lewis Butler, an Assistant Secretary of HEW in the Nixon Administration and subsequently the distinguished Chair of California Tomorrow and the Plowshares Foundation, and I initiated an effort we called The Revolt of the Elders. All of us were retired and in the latter years of Social Security entitlement. Most of us were Republicans who had served in the Congress or in former Republican administrations with men like Gerry Ford, John Rhodes, Bob Michel, Elliot Richardson, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and the president's father, George H. W. Bush, all men of impeccable integrity and ethics.

We had become appalled at the House Republican leadership's decision in early 2005 to effectively emasculate the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct by changing the rules to protect Majority Leader Tom DeLay. DeLay had been admonished three times by the Committee for abuse of power and unethical conduct. It was our hope to persuade Speaker Hastert and the Republican leadership, of which Northern California Congressman Richard Pombo and John Doolittle were prominent members, to rescind the rules changes and to act in accord with the promise of high ethical standards contained in Speaker Gingrich's Contract With America which brought the Republicans majority control in 1994. We failed. Letters to the Speaker from an increasing number of former Republican Members were ignored and remained unanswered. Then, only a few weeks ago, the House leadership refused to allow even a vote on what could have become an effective independent ethics monitor. Instead of repudiating the infamous “Pay to Play� program put in place by DeLay to extract maximum corporate campaign contributions to “Retain Our Majority Party� (ROMP), DeLay's successor as Majority Leader called for a continuance of the free luxury airline trips, mammoth campaign contributions to the so-called “Leadership PACs� and the continuing stalemate on the Ethics Committee. Strangely, even after the guilty pleas of Abramoff, Duke Cunningham and a number of former House staffers who had been sent to work for Abramoff and other lobbyists. The Republican House leaders don't see this as corruption worthy of investigation or change. That their former staff members and Abramoff were granted preference in access to the legislative process is not seen as a problem if it helps Republicans retain control of the House. It reminds one of the contentions of Haldeman and Ehrlichman long ago that the national security justified wire-tapping and burglary of Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office and the Democratic National Headquarters at the Watergate. Republicans are happy with this new corporate lobby/House complex, which is far more dangerous that the Industry/Defense complex we were long ago warned about by President Eisenhower.

I have therefore reluctantly concluded that party loyalty should be set aside, and that it is in the best interests of the nation, and indeed the future of the Republican Party itself, to return control of the House to temporary Democrat control, if only to return the House for a time to the kind of ethics standards practiced by Republicans in former years. I say reluctantly, having no great illusion that Democrats or any other kind of politician will long resist the allure of campaign funds and benefits offered by the richest and most profitable of the Halliburtons, oil companies, tobacco companies, developers and Indian gaming tribes whose contributions so heavily dominate the contributions to Congressmen Pombo and Doolittle.

As an aside, it seems to me that the Abramoff and Cunningham scandals make it timely for the Congress to consider public matching funds for small contributions to congressional candidates, the same type of system we adopted some time ago for presidential elections. It may be cheaper for the taxpayer to fund congressional elections than to bear the cost of lobbyist-controlled legislation like the recent Medicaid/Medicare drug bill.

There is another strong reason, I believe, for Republicans to work this fall for Democrat challengers against the DeLay-type Republicans like Pombo and Doolittle. That is the clear abdication by the House over the past five years of the Congress' constitutional power and duty to exercise oversight over abuses of power, cronyism, incompetence and excessive secrecy on the part of the Executive Branch. When does anyone remember House Committee hearings to examine into the patent failures of the Bush Administration to adhere to laws like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, or to the arrogant refusal of the President to accept the congressionally-enacted limits on torture of prisoners? When can anyone remember the House's use of the subpoena power to compel answers from Administration officials? Why have there been no oversight hearings into the Cunningham bribery affair or Abramoff's Indian gaming and exploitation of women labor in the Marianas?

When three former congressional staff aides join Abramoff in pleading guilty to attempting to bribe Congressmen, and a fourth takes the 5th Amendment rather than answer Senator McCain's questions about his relationship with Abramoff and Indian gaming, with all five having given substantial campaign contributions to Mr. Pombo, with Indian tribes alone having given more than $500,000 to Pombo, would it not seem reasonable to ask him to conduct an appropriate oversight committee
Hearing into these matters, as long demanded by members of both parties, notably including his neighbor, George Miller?

For all of these reasons, I believe and hope that the Republicans who voted for me on June 6 will vote for Mr. McNerney and against Mr. Pombo in November.

The checks and balances of our Constitution are an essential part of our system of government, as is the public faith that can be obtained only by good ethical conduct on the part of our elected leaders.

If the Republicans in the House won't honor these principles, then the Democrats should be challenged to do so. And if they decline to exercise that privilege, we can turn them out too. I appreciate that I had serious deficiencies as a candidate, and that four months of campaigning and the expenditure of $500,000 of the funds contributed by old friends and supporters were unsuccessful in convincing Republicans of the 11th District to end the continuing corruption in Washington. I hope, however, to partially redeem my electoral failure by working, as a simple private citizen, to rekindle a Republican sense of civic duty to participate in the electoral process this fall. The goal of The Revolt of the Elders was and is to educate voters to the need for a return of ethics and honesty in Washington. That goal was right 18 months ago, and seems even more worthwhile today.

Pete McCloskey, Dublin, California. July 26, 2006
[emphasis and link added]

(Originally posted at Seeing the Forest.)

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