Sunday, December 30, 2007

The Free Market: A False Idol After All?

By Peter S. Goodman
The New York Times

For more than a quarter-century, the dominant idea guiding economic policy in the United States and much of the globe has been that the market is unfailingly wise. So wise that the proper role for government is to steer clear and not mess with the gusher of wealth that will flow, trickling down to the every level of society, if only the market is left to do its magic.

That notion has carried the day as industries have been unshackled from regulation, and as taxes have been rolled back, along with the oversight powers of government. Faith in markets has held sway as insurance companies have fended off calls for more government-financed health care, and as banks have engineered webs of finance that have turned houses from mere abodes into assets traded like dot-com stocks.

But lately, a striking unease with market forces has entered the conversation. The world confronts problems of staggering complexity and consequence, from a shortage of credit following the mortgage meltdown, to the threat of global warming. Regulation - nasty talk in some quarters, synonymous with pointy-headed bureaucrats choking the market - is suddenly being demanded from unexpected places.

The Bush administration and the Federal Reserve have in recent weeks put aside laissez-faire rhetoric to wade into real estate, wielding new rules and deals they say are necessary to protect Americans from predatory bankers - the same bankers who, only a year ago, were being lauded for creativity. Were the market left to its own devices, millions could lose their homes, the administration now says.

Central banks on both sides of the Atlantic are coordinating campaigns to flush cash through the global economy, lest frightened lenders hoard capital and suffocate growth. In Bali this month, world leaders gathered in the name of striking agreement to slow climate change.

Adam Smith used the metaphor of the invisible hand to describe how markets should function: With everyone at liberty to pursue self-interest, the market omnisciently distributes goods and capital to maximize the benefits for all. Since the Reagan administration, that idea has weighed in as a veritable holy commandment, with the economist Milton Friedman cast as Moses.

As the cold war ended and Communism retreated, the invisible hand seemed to monopolize economic thinking. Even China, controlled by a nominally Communist party, has blessed private entrepreneurs and foreign investment. In Latin America, the International Monetary Fund financed governments that embraced market forces while shunning those that were resistant.

But now the invisible hand is being asked to account for what it has wrought. In this country, many economic complaints - from the widening gap between rich and poor to the expense of higher education - are being dusted for its fingerprints.

After two decades of disappointing economic growth, several Latin American countries have spurned the I.M.F. while embracing the finance and thinking of Venezuela's avowedly Socialist leader, Hugo Chávez. China's leaders, though still devoted to "reform and opening," are keeping tight control on the value of the currency while steering capital to powerful state-owned companies, concerned that freer markets could throw millions of peasants out of work.

Throughout history, regulation has tended to gain favor on the heels of free enterprise run amok. The monopolistic excesses of the Robber Barons led to antitrust laws. Not by accident did strict new accounting rules follow the unmasking of fraud at Enron and WorldCom. Now, the subprime fiasco and a still unfolding wave of home foreclosures are prompting many to call for new rules.

"We're revisiting the question of market flows with a deservedly wary eye," said Jared Bernstein, senior economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute in Washington. "For decades, economists and political elites have argued that any time you regulate any aspect of the economy, you're slipping the handcuffs on the invisible hand. That's demonstrably wrong in lots of ways."

But if markets can inflict pain, the harm from trying to tame them is often worse, argue those who would let the invisible hand carry on. The new regulatory tilt threatens to tie up innovation in a straitjacket of bureaucratic nannying while slowing the global economy, they say.

"Every regulation reduces people's freedom," said David R. Henderson, a libertarian economist at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. "The more regulation we get, the worse we do."

Mr. Henderson is critical of the Bush administration's effort to freeze mortgage rates, and the new rules proposed by the Fed intended to curb nefarious lending. They undermine the sanctity of contracts, he said, while making mortgages harder to gain for everyone.

"The way they justify it is that you've got to protect the stupid people who can't read a contract," Mr. Henderson said. "But they're treating everyone as stupid."

But in Washington, and under the roofs of many homes now worth less than a year ago, there appears to be a shift in the nation's often-ambivalent attitude about regulation.

Back in the boom, banks made loans to homeowners who did not have to prove their ability to pay, then quickly sold the loans to other companies. By the time it emerged that a lot of homeowners could not pay, these loans had been pooled with other loans and chopped into strange new paper assets that were sold to unsuspecting buyers around the globe. The subsequent reckoning has forced major banks to write off vast sums of money.

"Here you had all these people who were supposed to be sophisticated investors, and it turns out they were buying billions of dollars worth of debt where they didn't even understand what they owned," said Dean Baker, co-director of the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research. "There is going to be a willingness to re-regulate financial markets."

Liberal critics have long asserted that dogmatic devotion to market forces has skewed American society toward those of greatest means. More wealth is being concentrated in fewer hands, with rich people capturing the best housing, private education and health care services, and, as the argument goes, only crumbs left for everyone else.

That critique informs proposals from Democrats vying for the presidency, as they debate how best to expand access to health care and ways to shift the tax burden to the rich. They are in essence calling for market intervention to redress imbalances. With the gap between the richest and poorest now greater than it has been since the 1920s, these pitches have emerged as central components of their campaigns

More notable, though, is how fervent proponents of unfettered market forces have lately come to embrace regulation.

The Bush administration, in seeking to freeze mortgage rates for some homeowners, put Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr. in charge of the campaign. Mr. Paulson not long ago ran the Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs. Now, he is demanding that banks accept smaller payments than promised, while describing the market as a fallible thing in need of supervision.

"The government acted to prevent a market failure and to try to avoid unnecessary harm," he said at a public meeting in California.

More than a decade ago, when Bill Clinton occupied the White House, he pushed through the landmark North American Free Trade Agreement, which linked the fortunes of Mexico and the United States. But if his wife or one of her Democratic rivals captures the White House next year, they promise a more skeptical look at trade deals.

Some argue that the push back against market forces is a momentary pause in a steady march toward unfettered capitalism. The libertarian Cato Institute recently issued a report in which it found that economic freedom - shorthand for smaller government and fewer regulations - has never been greater.

"Global economic growth significantly increases with the growth of the world's economic freedom," said Ian Vásquez, director of Cato's center for global liberty and prosperity.

Few policymakers have a beef with that characterization as a generality. But when things go wrong, demands grow for the government to step in and make them right.

"Untethered market forces lead to bad things," said Mr. Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute. "You simply can't run an economy as complicated as ours on ideology alone."

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/weekinreview/30goodman.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Tapes by C.I.A. Lived and Died to Save Image

By SCOTT SHANE and MARK MAZZETTI
WASHINGTON — If Abu Zubaydah, a senior operative of Al Qaeda, died in American hands, Central Intelligence Agency officers pursuing the terrorist group knew that much of the world would believe they had killed him.

So in the spring of 2002, even as the intelligence officers flew in a surgeon from Johns Hopkins Hospital to treat Abu Zubaydah, who had been shot three times during his capture in Pakistan, they set up video cameras to record his every moment: asleep in his cell, having his bandages changed, being interrogated.

In fact, current and former intelligence officials say, the agency’s every action in the prolonged drama of the interrogation videotapes was prompted in part by worry about how its conduct might be perceived — by Congress, by prosecutors, by the American public and by Muslims worldwide.

That worry drove the decision to begin taping interrogations — and to stop taping just months later, after the treatment of prisoners began to include waterboarding. And it fueled the nearly three-year campaign by the agency’s clandestine service for permission to destroy the tapes, culminating in a November 2005 destruction order from the service’s director, Jose A. Rodriguez Jr.

Now, the disclosure of the tapes and their destruction in 2005 have become just the public spectacle the agency had sought to avoid. To the already fierce controversy over whether the Bush administration authorized torture has been added the specter of a cover-up.

The Justice Department, the C.I.A.’s inspector general and Congress are investigating whether any official lied about the tapes or broke the law by destroying them. Still in dispute is whether any White House official encouraged their destruction and whether the C.I.A. deliberately hid them from the national Sept. 11 commission.

But interviews with two dozen current and former officials, most of whom would speak about the classified program only on the condition of anonymity, revealed new details about why the tapes were made and then eliminated. Their accounts show how political and legal considerations competed with intelligence concerns in the handling of the tapes.

The discussion about the tapes took place in Congressional briefings and secret deliberations among top White House lawyers, including a meeting in May 2004 just days after photographs of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq had reminded the administration of the power of such images. The debate stretched over the tenure of two C.I.A. chiefs and became entangled in a feud between the agency’s top lawyers and its inspector general. The tapes documented a program so closely guarded that President Bush himself had agreed with the advice of intelligence officials that he not be told the locations of the secret C.I.A. prisons. Had there been no political or security considerations, videotaping every interrogation and preserving the tapes would make sense, according to several intelligence officials.

“You couldn’t have more than one or two analysts in the room,” said A. B. Krongard, the C.I.A.’s No. 3 official at the time the interrogations were taped. “You want people with spectacular language skills to watch the tapes. You want your top Al Qaeda experts to watch the tapes. You want psychologists to watch the tapes. You want interrogators in training to watch the tapes.”

Given such advantages, why was the taping stopped by the end of 2002, less than a year after it started?

“By that time,” Mr. Krongard said, “paranoia was setting in.”

The Decision to Tape

By several accounts, the decision to begin taping Abu Zubaydah and another detainee suspected of being a Qaeda operative, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, was made in the field, with several goals in mind.

First, there was Abu Zubaydah’s precarious condition. “There was concern that we needed to have this all documented in case he should expire from his injuries,” recalled one former intelligence official.

Just as important was the fact that for many years the C.I.A. had rarely conducted even standard interrogations, let alone ones involving physical pressure, so officials wanted to track closely the use of legally fraught interrogation methods. And there was interest in capturing all the information to be gleaned from a rare resource — direct testimony from those who had attacked the United States.

But just months later, the taping was stopped. Some field officers had never liked the idea. “If you’re a case officer, the last thing you want is someone in Washington second-guessing everything you did,” said one former agency veteran.

More significant, interrogations of Abu Zubaydah had gotten rougher, with each new tactic approved by cable from headquarters. American officials have said that Abu Zubaydah was the first Qaeda prisoner to be waterboarded, a procedure during which water is poured over the prisoner’s mouth and nose to create a feeling of drowning. Officials said they felt they could not risk a public leak of a videotape showing Americans giving such harsh treatment to bound prisoners.

Heightening the worries about the tapes was word of the first deaths of prisoners in American custody. In November 2002, an Afghan man froze to death overnight while chained in a cell at a C.I.A. site in Afghanistan, north of Kabul, the capital. Two more prisoners died in December 2002 in American military custody at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.

By late 2002, interrogators were recycling videotapes, preserving only two days of tapes before recording over them, one C.I.A. officer said. Finally, senior agency officials decided that written summaries of prisoners’ answers would suffice.

Still, that decision left hundreds of hours of videotape of the two Qaeda figures locked in an overseas safe.

Clandestine service officers who had overseen the interrogations began pushing hard to destroy the tapes. But George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, was wary, in part because the agency’s top lawyer, Scott W. Muller, advised against it, current and former officials said.

Yet agency officials decided to float the idea of eliminating the tapes on Capitol Hill, hoping for political cover. In February 2003, Mr. Muller told members of the House and Senate oversight committees about the C.I.A’s interest in destroying the tapes for security reasons.

But both Porter J. Goss, then a Republican congressman from Florida and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and Representative Jane Harman of California, the ranking Democrat, thought destroying the tapes would be legally and politically risky. C.I.A. officials did not press the matter.

The Detention Program

Scrutiny of the C.I.A.’s secret detention program kept building. Later in 2003, the agency’s inspector general, John L. Helgerson, began investigating the program, and some insiders believed the inquiry might end with criminal charges for abusive interrogations.

Mr. Helgerson — now conducting the videotapes review with the Justice Department — had already rankled covert officers with an investigation into the 2001 shooting down of a missionary plane by Peruvian military officers advised by the C.I.A. The investigation set off widespread concern within the clandestine branch that a day of reckoning could be coming for officers involved in the agency’s secret prison program. The Peru investigation often pitted Mr. Helgerson against Mr. Muller, who vigorously defended members of the clandestine branch and even lobbied the Justice Department to head off criminal charges in the matter, according to former intelligence officials

“Muller wanted to show the clandestine branch that he was looking out for them,” said John Radsan, who served as an assistant general counsel for the C.I.A. from 2002 to 2004. “And his aggressiveness on Peru was meant to prove to the operations people that they were protected on a lot of other programs, too.”

Mr. Helgerson completed his investigation of interrogations in April 2004, according to one person briefed on the still-secret report, which concluded that some of the C.I.A.’s techniques appeared to constitute cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment under the international Convention Against Torture. Current and former officials said the report did not explicitly state that the methods were torture.

A month later, as the administration reeled from the Abu Ghraib disclosures, Mr. Muller, the agency general counsel, met to discuss the report with three senior lawyers at the White House: Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel; David S. Addington, legal adviser for Vice President Dick Cheney; and John B. Bellinger III, the top lawyer at the National Security Council.

The interrogation tapes were discussed at the meeting, and one Bush administration official said that, according to notes of the discussion, Mr. Bellinger advised the C.I.A. against destroying the tapes. The positions Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Addington took are unknown. One person familiar with the discussion said that in light of concerns raised in the inspector general’s report that agency officers could be legally liable for harsh interrogations, there was a view at the time among some administration lawyers that the tapes should be preserved.

Looking for Guidance

After Mr. Tenet and Mr. Muller left the C.I.A. in mid-2004, Mr. Rodriguez and other officials from the clandestine branch decided again to take up the tapes with the new chief at Langley, Mr. Goss, the former congressman.

Mr. Rodriguez had taken over the clandestine directorate in late 2004, and colleagues say Mr. Goss repeatedly emphasized to Mr. Rodriguez that he was expected to run operations without clearing every decision with superiors.

During a meeting in Mr. Goss’s office with Mr. Rodriguez, John A. Rizzo, who by then had replaced Mr. Muller as the agency’s top lawyer, told the new C.I.A. director that the clandestine branch wanted a firm decision about what to do with the tapes.

According to two people close to Mr. Goss, he advised against destroying the tapes, as he had in Congress, and told Mr. Rizzo and Mr. Rodriguez that he thought the tapes should be preserved at the overseas location. Apparently he did not explicitly prohibit the tapes’ destruction.

Yet in November 2005, Congress already was moving to outlaw “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment of prisoners, and The Washington Post reported that some C.I.A. prisoners were being held in Eastern Europe. As the agency scrambled to move the prisoners to new locations, Mr. Rodriguez and his aides decided to use their own authority to destroy the tapes, officials said.

One official who has spoken with Mr. Rodriguez said Mr. Rodriguez and his aides were concerned about protection of the C.I.A. officers on the tapes, from Al Qaeda, as the C.I.A. has stated, and from political pressure.

The tapes might visually identify as many as five or six people present for each interrogation — interrogators themselves, whom the agency now prefers to call “debriefers”; doctors or doctor’s assistants who monitored the prisoner’s medical state; and security officers, the official said. Some traveled regularly in and out of areas where Al Qaeda and other Islamist extremists are active, he said.

Apart from concerns about physical safety in the event of a leak, the official said, there was concern for the careers of officers shown on the tapes. “We didn’t want them to become political scapegoats,” he said.

According to several current and former officials, lawyers in the agency’s clandestine branch gave Mr. Rodriguez written guidance that he had the authority to destroy the tapes and that such a move would not be illegal.

One day in November 2005, Mr. Rodriguez sent a cable ordering the destruction of the recordings. Soon afterward, he notified both Mr. Goss and Mr. Rizzo, taking full responsibility for the decision.

Former intelligence officials said that Mr. Goss was unhappy about the news, in part because it was further evidence that as the C.I.A. director he was so weakened that his subordinates would directly reject his advice. Yet it appears that Mr. Rodriguez was never reprimanded. Nor is there evidence that Mr. Goss promptly notified Congress that the tapes were gone.

The investigations over the tapes frustrate some C.I.A. veterans, who say they believe that the agency is being unfairly blamed for policies of coercive interrogation approved at the top of the Bush administration and by some Congressional leaders. Intelligence officers are divided over the use of such methods as waterboarding. Some say the methods helped get information that prevented terrorist attacks. Others, like John C. Gannon, a former C.I.A. deputy director, say it was a tragic mistake for the administration to approve such methods.

Mr. Gannon said he thought the tapes became such an issue because they would have settled the legal debate over the harsh methods.

“To a spectator it would look like torture,” he said. “And torture is wrong.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/washington/30intel.html?pagewanted=3&_r=1&exprod=myyahoo

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Tuesday, December 25, 2007

Today I am Announcing My Candidacy for US House Texas District 24

My name is Tom Love and I am announcing my candidacy for US House Texas District 24. I speak today as a UT Alumni and a working man who loves his country and loves his God, who asks for your help as I know this will be a long difficult journey. I am under no illusion that I can take this path alone, so along with my wife of thirty two years, Marilyn, we take this journey together. I speak as a concerned parent, husband, and grandfather who has seen the American Dream slowly turning into the American Nightmare. I am a working man and I speak for all the hard working men and women of Texas, who try to earn a living, educate their children, and keep their jobs in an era of outsourcing and $3 per gallon gasoline.

We have become a nation that for too long has ignored its working peoples needs and rewarded powerful special interests that now threaten homeowners and Texans who pay their taxes while multimillionaires get special tax breaks. We cannot become a nation that builds bridges to nowhere, yet constructs no pathway to our children's future.

Over forty years ago John Kennedy said, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” Now the Republicans say, “It’s not my problem, what’s in it for me, and I’ve got mine, you go get yours.” The result has been a Culture of Corruption, a Crisis of Competence, and a Climate of Cronyism. I speak for the nurses, teachers, the electricians, truck drivers, mechanics, factory workers, office workers and all Texans who are not the tool of the rich and powerful.

I speak as a Democrat as we are the party of the past, present and future. We are the party of the Quality of Life and all variations of people seeking truth, justice, and the American Way. We are the party of the working men and women and of businessmen committed to fair practices and fair trade to help make America grow and prosper. We are the party of educators and the educated. We are the party for good solid public education for all our children and we will never leave anyone behind.

We are the party of the Founders of America. We have never claimed to be perfect but only to strive for a more perfect Union. We believe we are Endowed by our Creator with inalienable rights of life, liberty, and freedom of and from religion. We are the party of law and trial by jury and innocent till proven guilty, not guilty till proven innocent. We are the party of the rights of the accused and the rights of the victims. We are the party of the Statue of Liberty and the Symbol of Justice.

We are the party of the 40 hour work week, of Child Labors Laws, overtime pay, of Labor Unions, Rights of women, of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. We are the party of the uplifted and the downtrodden. Our strength is our diversity for we know and remember our roots while preparing for our future. We are the party with our hearts in the Past but with our eyes on the Future. We have died to give Americans Liberty, now we request your help to keep Americans Free.

We need Americans to register to vote and vote for America. Vote to end the politics of division, lies and deceit. Vote to end the politics of disrespect and humiliation. Vote for clean air and the right to breathe free. Vote for the right to have affordable and available heath care for a better and healthier America. Give us your vote and we will pledge to Serve, Protect, and Defend our Great Land.

And if you give us your vote, my heart will be your heart, my hand will be your hand, our voice will be your voice, and your dream will be our reality. I speak today as a working man who loves his country and loves his God, who asks for your vote, requests your help, and thanks you for listening.

Thomas P. Love

http://www.tomlovetexas.blogspot.com/

http://www.tomlovefortexas.com/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jrHPjm4qKM

Christian Democratic Progressives

In response to those who would argue one can delve too much into religious matters, I totally disagree. I feel we should present a positive prospective. The Republican have already clothed themselves in "Fundamentalist Christianity" and presented it as the only true prospective. There are many Christians that disagree with many of the Republican Fundamentalist views, but think that Bush and company must be sincere since they use religious trappings when nothing is further from the truth. Presenting arguments from the Christian Democratic Progressives are valid points of discussion. For faith to have true meaning, it must be internal, not merely external. I believe Dr. Martin Luther King has successfully presented the Christian view that Jesus was a Progressive.

I grew up in the Christian faith and my commitment in no less strong today, but I believe that others such as Buddha, Mohammad, and many Jewish Rabbis and Priests believe in Progressive view points as well. Most of the world’s religions express tolerance and universal brotherhood as core principals, we simple have to agree to disagree on some areas and build on what unites us together. The problem here is intolerance of another's religious views not the expression of religion's positive functions. Religion can be the instrument of evil or good depending on how it is applied. I personally believe deeply in Universalism and that there are points of value in all positive religions and the inherent worth and dignity of all human beings, but it is clear there are judgemnents and consequences to not atone for ones transgressions.

There are other prospectives and many of these deserve expression. The problem I have is when Republican Fundamentalists say in the Republican Platform that they want to dispel the myth about Separation of Church and State. As I pointed out in previous newsletters, the real myth here is that there was never intended to be Separation of Church and State. It is quite clear from Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and George Washington that they recognized the problem when one religion or religious view "uses governmental power in support of themselves and force their views on persons of other faiths or no faith, undermines our civil rights."

Where are the Christian Democrats you may ask? John Wesley, Martin Luther King, Pope John XXIII, Jesse Jackson, Billy Graham, Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, Jim Wallis, Al Gore, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton I reply. They all held Democratic values and positive religious view points.

http://www.sojo.net/
http://normanvincentpeale.wwwhubs.com/


Thomas Jefferson & Myths about the Separation of Church and State


The phrase comes from a letter, which Jefferson wrote to the Danbury Baptist Church in Connecticut. Jefferson was President when the Danbury Baptist Association wrote him on October 7, 1801. They expressed their concern about their religious freedoms. They felt they were being persecuted because they did not belong to the Congregationalist establishment in Connecticut. Jefferson responded to reassure them that he also believed in religious liberty and said:

"
Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God; that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship; that the legislative powers of the government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between church and State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore man to all of his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.
"


This phrase appears again in a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to Virginia Baptists in 1808:

"
Because religious belief, or non-belief, is such an important part of every person's life, freedom of religion affects every individual. State churches that use government power to support themselves and force their views on persons of other faiths or no faith, undermine all our civil rights. Moreover, state support of the church tends to make the clergy unresponsive to the people and leads to corruption within religion. Erecting the "wall of separation between church and state," therefore, is absolutely essential in a free society.
"


There is a far greater power in Universal Brotherhood and Positive thought that frees us from hate, bigotry, and intolerance.

-Thomas P Love

The Quality Of Life

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” -The Declaration of Independence-July 4, 1776.

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” -The Preamble of The Constitution of the United States of America.

Much has been made of a slogan the Republican Fundamentalists are fond of using, The Right to Life. Yet, the Republicans seem to believe that they have the right to also decide when it can end. The Death Penalty under their criteria can be instituted to those who somehow lose their Right. It is also acceptable to launch preemptive strikes against other countries that do not pose a real threat against the sovereignty of The United States, if one imagines a threat such as that in Iraq.

We hold that the mere existence of Life without Quality of Living is an empty shell. We hold that the Quality of Life is an unalienable Right that must and should include Liberty and its Blessings as defined in our Constitution; adequate minimum wages; affordable healthcare; guarantees of due process of law; the separation of Church and State to better enable Freedom of Religion; access to quality education, guarantees that if we fight a war our troops will have adequate armor and our veterans will get the respect and benefits that they deserve; respect and healthcare for our disabled and aged in Social Security; the guarantees of rights and responsibilities to all our citizens. We further believe that the Death Penalty is something that should be decided by the legal process and a judge and jury in court and based on special circumstances, not a political slogan or exercise.

We hold as inviolate the relationship between a patient and their doctor, not between an insurance company and a drug manufacturer, just as we hold as inviolate the relationship between the clergy and their ministry, and between an attorney and their client. They are all an essential part of the free and just exercises of Life, Liberty, and The Pursuit of Happiness as contained in The Constitution.

We realize this is asking for some strong opinions, but we personally feel that the merging of diverse cultures has been the inspiration and strength that has kept America strong and vibrant. Our diversity has made the whole far greater and richer than its individual parts. That is why our Statue of Liberty has the following inscription: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuses of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempt-tost to me; I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

-Thomas P Love

I Don’t Have a Skinny Bible

"I Don't Have A Skinny Bible. Show me where in the Bible, Jesus is pro rich and pro war, "Dr. Joel Gregory has stated. My knowledge certainly does not match his, but I do not find these seemingly central testaments of the Religious Right in my Bible as well. Perhaps, they are not there and the Christ who gave the Sermon on the Mount would not appreciate a false characterization of his word and his message. For those that can’t remember what is listed as a direct quote that information is below!

Sermon on the Mount (A Real Christian Message)--------------------------------------------------------------
Both versions of the Beatitudes
Source: New American Bible

Matthew 5:2-12
He began to teach them, saying:
Matthew 5:3 - "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the
Kingdom of heaven.
Matthew 5:4 - Blessed are they who mourn, for they will be
Comforted.
Matthew 5:5 - Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the land.
Matthew 5:6 - Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for
Righteousness, for they will be satisfied.
Matthew 5:7 - Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown
Mercy.
Matthew 5:8 - Blessed are the clean of heart, for they will see God.
Matthew 5:9 - Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called
Children of God.
Matthew 5:10 - Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of
Righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Matthew 5:11-12 - Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute
you and utter every kind of evil against you (falsely) because of
me. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven."
-----------------------------------------------------------
Luke 6:20-26

And raising his eyes toward his disciples he said:
"Blessed are you who are poor, for the kingdom of God is yours.
Blessed are you who are now hungry, for you will be satisfied.
Blessed are you who are now weeping, for you will laugh.
Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude and
insult you, and denounce your name as evil on account of the Son of
Man. Rejoice and leap for joy on that day! Behold, your reward will
be great in heaven. For their ancestors treated the prophets in the
same way.
But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.
But woe to you who are filled now, for you will be hungry.
Woe to you who laugh now, for you will grieve and weep.
Woe to you when all speak well of you, for their ancestors treated
the false prophets in this way."

Catholic Encyclopedia Entry:
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02371a.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatitudes


Beatitudes


The Beatitudes (from Latin, beatitudo, happiness) is the name given to a well-known, definitive and central, portion of the Sermon on the Mount, recorded in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. In this section, Jesus describes the qualities of the citizens of the Kingdom of heaven (It refers to the reign or sovereignty of God over all things, as opposed to the reign of earthly or satanic powers), showing how each is/will be blessed. The Beatitudes do not describe many separate individuals, but rather the characteristics of those who are deemed blessed by God. Kodjak believes that this opening of the sermon was meant to shock the audience, as a deliberate inversion of standard values, but that today this shock value has been lost owing to the commonness of the text.
Each of the blessed individuals are generally not considered blessed according to worldly standards, but with a heavenly perspective, they truly are blessed. The word traditionally translated into English as "blessed" or "happy" is in the Greek original μακαριος; a more literal translation into contemporary English would be "possessing an inward contentedness and joy that is not affected by the physical circumstances." Each of the Beatitudes presents a situation in which the person described would not be described by the world as "blessed," yet Jesus declares that they truly are blessed, and they are blessed with a blessing that outlasts any type of blessing this world has to offer.
These verses are quoted early in the Divine Liturgy of John Chrysostom, which continues to be the liturgy most often used in the Eastern Orthodox Church. Similar sayings are also recorded in a few of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and are found in Jewish sources that pre-date the Christian era. Four of the beatitudes are found also in Luke's Sermon on the Plain, which many scholars feel is the same event as the Sermon on the Mount. In textual criticism, these beatitudes are seen as originating in the Q document, and the large Sermon they appear within as Matthew and Luke to provide an reason for quoting them. Luke's Sermon has four woes in addition to the four beatitudes, and Matthew uses the woes elsewhere for use against the Pharisees, so some scholars, such as Gundry, see Matthew as having wanted to keep the eightfold structure and consequently having to create four additional sayings.

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02371a.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatitudes

Saturday, December 22, 2007

The American Covenant

Ten score and 30 years ago our forefathers brought forth an American Covenant upon this Continent. It was a completely new government fueled by an American Dream of all men created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. These rights are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. It was said that this nation can not endure without those rights and without this Dream. Our forefathers founded the Democratic Republican Party on these principals and they by their actions created the American Dream of Freedom and Representation within the law.

It is a Dream founded in law and nourished by economic freedom, a gift of the Backbone of Democracy, the small businessman and the Guilds. It is a gift of innocent till proven guilty, the right to face ones accuser, and to have a fair trial with an impartial jury of ones peers. It is a gift ensured by the availability of jobs and business opportunity. It maintained by fair trade to create enterprise and the jobs that go with them, not the sending of jobs overseas to the highest bidder, because men cannot be free when they are economically chained to poverty, illness, disease, and need.

It is a Vision inscribed upon the Statue of Liberty that said “send us men, women, and children from all lands yearning to be free.” It is the hope and was the foundation of a Nation of Immigrants to create this great new world. It was echoed in "give me Liberty or give me death,'' and it is tied to economic independence and the creation of jobs and free enterprise. Now we have two visions competing for this nation, one who wants tax breaks for ultra millionaires and hides scandalous behavior behind closed doors, and one who wants to create millions of new American jobs that give economic vitality to our hard working men and women and give our children back their future.

Over forty years ago, Martin Luther King also saw this Dream and spoke of it so eloquently. His I Have a Dream speech echoes even now as The American Vision of fair play and rights of all individuals with our society. Lyndon Johnson called for a Great Society, FDR a New Deal, John Kennedy a New Frontier; perhaps it is now time for a Fair Deal that grants the Working Class its rightful place at the economic table and affordable healthcare. Statistics show that under Republican leadership the gap between the Middle Class and the Wealthy has grown by leaps and bounds since the dawn of our 21st Century.

A clear choice is now available of what America has been and should be. There remains one real vision verses an alternative vision that has failed. It is time to now denounce with the righteous indignation that is building over the Scandals of Corruption, Crisis of Competence and a Climate of Cronyism, and the nightmare of a Moral Lack of Leadership that ignores legality and refuses the decency of resignation within the Republican Party. Perhaps the party that claimed personal responsibility and family values as their motto, needs to take the advice they are so willing to give, but in conduct so willing to ignore, and go quietly and quickly into that good night with what principals they do possess. They need to exit a failed direction of hype and failure that now threatens our economic and moral livelihood at its very roots. Certainly the choice is clear: the American Dream or the American Nightmare.

I urge you to choose the American Covenant that was and is the Democratic Party.

Thomas P. Love


The Constitution of the United States of America


We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

The First 10 Amendments to the
Constitution as Ratified by the States
December 15, 1791

Congress OF THE United States
begun and held at the City of New York, on Wednesday
the Fourth of March, one thousand seven hundred and eighty nine.

THE Conventions of a number of the States having at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added: And as extending the ground of public confidence in the Government, will best insure the beneficent ends of its institution

RESOLVED by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, two thirds of both Houses concurring, that the following Articles be proposed to the Legislatures of the several States, as Amendments to the Constitution of the United States, all or any of which Articles, when ratified by three fourths of the said Legislatures, to be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of the said Constitution; viz.:

ARTICLES in addition to, and Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, proposed by Congress, and ratified by the Legislatures of the several States, pursuant to the fifth Article of the original Constitution.

Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Amendment II
A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.

Amendment III
No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Amendment V
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Amendment VI
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

Amendment VII
In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise reexamined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

Amendment VIII
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Amendment X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Friday, December 21, 2007

Scientists Weigh Stem Cells’ Role as Cancer Cause

By GINA KOLATA
Within the next few months, researchers at three medical centers expect to start the first test in patients of one of the most promising — and contentious — ideas about the cause and treatment of cancer.

The idea is to take aim at what some scientists say are cancerous stem cells — aberrant cells that maintain and propagate malignant tumors.

Although many scientists have assumed that cancer cells are immortal — that they divide and grow indefinitely — most can only divide a certain number of times before dying. The stem-cell hypothesis says that cancers themselves may not die because they are fed by cancerous stem cells, a small and particularly dangerous kind of cell that can renew by dividing even as it spews out more cells that form the bulk of a tumor. Worse, stem cells may be impervious to most standard cancer therapies.

Not everyone accepts the hypothesis of cancerous stem cells. Skeptics say proponents are so in love with the idea that they dismiss or ignore evidence against it. Dr. Scott E. Kern, for instance, a leading pancreatic cancer researcher at Johns Hopkins University, said the hypothesis was more akin to religion than to science.

At stake in the debate is the direction of cancer research. If proponents of the stem-cell hypothesis are correct, it will usher in an era of hope for curing once-incurable cancers.

If the critics are right, the stem-cell enthusiasts are heading down a blind alley that will serve as just another cautionary tale in the history of medical research.

In the meantime, though, proponents are looking for ways to kill the stem cells, and say that certain new drugs may be the solution.

“Within the next year, we will see medical centers targeting stem cells in almost every cancer,” said Dr. Max S. Wicha, director of the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center, one of the sites for the preliminary study that begins in the next few months (the other participating institutions are Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston).

“We are so excited about this,” Dr. Wicha said. “It has become a major thrust of our cancer center.”

At the National Cancer Institute, administrators seem excited, too.

“If this is real, it could have almost immediate impact,” said Dr. R. Allan Mufson, chief of the institute’s Cancer Immunology and Hematology Branch.

The cancer institute is financing the research, he said, and has authorized Dr. Mufson to put out a request for proposals, soliciting investigators to apply for cancer institute money to study cancer stem cells and ways to bring the research to cancer patients. The institute has agreed to contribute $5.4 million.

“Given the current fiscal situation, which is terrible, it’s a surprising amount,” Dr. Mufson said. “We actually asked for less,” he added, but the cancer institute’s executive committee asked that the amount be increased.

Proponents of the hypothesis like to use the analogy of a lawn dotted with dandelions: Mowing the lawn makes it look like the weeds are gone, but the roots are intact and the dandelions come back.

So it is with cancer, they say. Chemotherapy and radiation often destroy most of a tumor, but if they do not kill the stem cells, which are the cancer’s roots, it can grow back.

Cancerous stem cells are not the same as embryonic stem cells, the cells present early in development that can turn into any cell of the body. Cancerous stem cells are different. They can turn into tumor cells, and they are characterized by distinctive molecular markers.

The stem-cell hypothesis answered a longstanding question: does each cell in a tumor have the same ability to keep a cancer going? By one test the answer was no. When researchers transplanted tumor cells into a mouse that had no immune system, they found that not all of the cells could form tumors.

To take the work to the next step, researchers needed a good way to isolate the cancer-forming cells. Until recently, “the whole thing languished,” said Dr. John E. Dick, director of the stem cell biology program at the University of Toronto, because scientists did not have the molecular tools to investigate.

But when those tools emerged in the early 1990s, Dr. Dick found stem cells in acute myelogenous leukemia, a blood cancer. He reported that such cells made up just 1 percent of the leukemia cells and that those were the only ones that could form tumors in mice.

Yet Dr. Dick’s research, Dr. Wicha said, “was pretty much ignored.” Cancer researchers, he said, were not persuaded — and even if they had accepted the research — doubted that the results would hold for solid tumors, like those of the breast, colon, prostate or brain.

That changed in 1994, when Dr. Wicha and a colleague, Dr. Michael Clarke, who is now at Stanford, reported finding cancerous stem cells in breast cancer patients.

“The paper hit me like a bombshell,” said Robert Weinberg, a professor of biology at M.I.T. and a leader in cancer research. “To my mind, that is conceptually the most important paper in cancer over the past decade.”

Dr. Weinberg and others began pursuing the stem-cell hypothesis, and researchers now say they have found cancerous stem cells in cancers of the colon, head and neck, lung, prostate, brain, and pancreas.

Symposiums were held. Leading journals published paper after paper.

But difficult questions persisted. One problem, critics say, is that the math does not add up. The hypothesis only makes sense if a tiny fraction of cells in a tumor are stem cells, said Dr. Bert Vogelstein, a colon cancer researcher at Johns Hopkins who said he had not made up his mind on the validity of the hypothesis.

But some studies suggest that stem cells make up 10 percent or even 40 percent or 50 percent of tumor cells, at least by the molecular-marker criterion. If a treatment shrinks a tumor by 99 percent, as is often the case, and 10 percent of the tumor was stem cells, then the stem cells too must have been susceptible, Dr. Vogelstein says.

Critics also question the research on mice. The same cells that can give rise to a tumor if transplanted into one part of a mouse may not form a tumor elsewhere.

“A lot of things affect transplants,” Dr. Kern, the Johns Hopkins researcher, said, explaining that transplanting tumors into mice did not necessarily reveal whether there were stem cells.

Other doubts have been raised by Dr. Kornelia Polyak, a researcher at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Dr. Polyak asked whether breast cancer cells remain true to type, that is, whether stem cells remain stem cells and whether others remain non-stem cells? The answer, she has found, is “not necessarily.”

Cancer cells instead appear to be moving targets, changing from stem cells to non-stem cells and back again. The discovery was unexpected because it had been thought that cell development went one way — from stem cell to tumor cell — and there was no going back.

“You want to kill all the cells in a tumor,” Dr. Polyak said. “Everyone assumes that currently-used drugs are not targeting stem cell populations, but that has not been proven.”

“To say you just have to kill the cancer stem cell is oversimplified,” she added. “It’s giving false hope.”

The criticisms make sense, Dr. Weinberg said. But he said he remained swayed by the stem cell hypothesis.

“There are a lot of unanswered questions, mind you,” he said. “Most believe cancer stem cells exist, but that doesn’t mean they exist. We believe it on the basis of rather fragmentary evidence, which I happen to believe in the aggregate is rather convincing.”

Dr. Wicha said he was convinced that the hypothesis was correct, and said it explained better than any other hypothesis what doctors and patients already know.

“Not only are some of the approaches we are using not getting us anywhere, but even the way we approve drugs is a bad model,” he said. Anti-cancer drugs, he noted, are approved if they shrink tumors even if they do not prolong life. It is the medical equivalent, he said, of mowing a dandelion field.

He said the moment of truth would come soon, with studies like the one planned for women with breast cancer.

The drug to be tested was developed by Merck to treat Alzheimer’s disease. It did not work on Alzheimer’s but it kills breast cancer stem cells in laboratory studies, Dr. Wicha says.

The study will start with a safety test on 30 women who have advanced breast cancer. Hopes are that it will be expanded to find out if the drug can prolong lives.

“Patient survival,” Dr. Wicha said, “is the ultimate endpoint.”



Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/21/science/21stem.html?ei=5087&em=&en=6f03772b16f50333&ex=1198386000&exprod=myyahoo&pagewanted=print

Sunday, December 16, 2007

After the Money’s Gone

By PAUL KRUGMAN
On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve announced plans to lend $40 billion to banks. By my count, it’s the fourth high-profile attempt to rescue the financial system since things started falling apart about five months ago. Maybe this one will do the trick, but I wouldn’t count on it.

In past financial crises — the stock market crash of 1987, the aftermath of Russia’s default in 1998 — the Fed has been able to wave its magic wand and make market turmoil disappear. But this time the magic isn’t working.

Why not? Because the problem with the markets isn’t just a lack of liquidity — there’s also a fundamental problem of solvency.

Let me explain the difference with a hypothetical example.

Suppose that there’s a nasty rumor about the First Bank of Pottersville: people say that the bank made a huge loan to the president’s brother-in-law, who squandered the money on a failed business venture.

Even if the rumor is false, it can break the bank. If everyone, believing that the bank is about to go bust, demands their money out at the same time, the bank would have to raise cash by selling off assets at fire-sale prices — and it may indeed go bust even though it didn’t really make that bum loan.

And because loss of confidence can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, even depositors who don’t believe the rumor would join in the bank run, trying to get their money out while they can.

But the Fed can come to the rescue. If the rumor is false, the bank has enough assets to cover its debts; all it lacks is liquidity — the ability to raise cash on short notice. And the Fed can solve that problem by giving the bank a temporary loan, tiding it over until things calm down.

Matters are very different, however, if the rumor is true: the bank really did make a big bad loan. Then the problem isn’t how to restore confidence; it’s how to deal with the fact that the bank is really, truly insolvent, that is, busted.

My story about a basically sound bank beset by a crisis of confidence, which can be rescued with a temporary loan from the Fed, is more or less what happened to the financial system as a whole in 1998. Russia’s default led to the collapse of the giant hedge fund Long Term Capital Management, and for a few weeks there was panic in the markets.

But when all was said and done, not that much money had been lost; a temporary expansion of credit by the Fed gave everyone time to regain their nerve, and the crisis soon passed.

In August, the Fed tried again to do what it did in 1998, and at first it seemed to work. But then the crisis of confidence came back, worse than ever. And the reason is that this time the financial system — both banks and, probably even more important, nonbank financial institutions — made a lot of loans that are likely to go very, very bad.

It’s easy to get lost in the details of subprime mortgages, resets, collateralized debt obligations, and so on. But there are two important facts that may give you a sense of just how big the problem is.

First, we had an enormous housing bubble in the middle of this decade. To restore a historically normal ratio of housing prices to rents or incomes, average home prices would have to fall about 30 percent from their current levels.

Second, there was a tremendous amount of borrowing into the bubble, as new home buyers purchased houses with little or no money down, and as people who already owned houses refinanced their mortgages as a way of converting rising home prices into cash.

As home prices come back down to earth, many of these borrowers will find themselves with negative equity — owing more than their houses are worth. Negative equity, in turn, often leads to foreclosures and big losses for lenders.

And the numbers are huge. The financial blog Calculated Risk, using data from First American CoreLogic, estimates that if home prices fall 20 percent there will be 13.7 million homeowners with negative equity. If prices fall 30 percent, that number would rise to more than 20 million.

That translates into a lot of losses, and explains why liquidity has dried up. What’s going on in the markets isn’t an irrational panic. It’s a wholly rational panic, because there’s a lot of bad debt out there, and you don’t know how much of that bad debt is held by the guy who wants to borrow your money.

How will it all end? Markets won’t start functioning normally until investors are reasonably sure that they know where the bodies — I mean, the bad debts — are buried. And that probably won’t happen until house prices have finished falling and financial institutions have come clean about all their losses. All of this will probably take years.

Meanwhile, anyone who expects the Fed or anyone else to come up with a plan that makes this financial crisis just go away will be sorely disappointed.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
www.nytimes.com/2007/12/14/opinion/14krugman.html?ei=5087&em=&en=33438c4be71b8992&ex=1197954000&pagewanted

President Bush Vetoes Childrens Health Care..Again

Dear Concerned Parent or Grand Parent:

This week, President Bush vetoed health care for 10 million children for the second time. Speaker Pelosi responded: Let it be clear that Democrats will not rest until 10 million children in America have access to health care, and that it is paid for. Let it be clear that we will persist with this effort. We will try to continue the negotiations with our Republican colleagues, but we will introduce legislation immediately that will cover the shortfall between now and the end of the fiscal year, September 30, and at the same time we will be working for the bigger bill. We want to protect the health care of the children who are on SCHIP now, and we are working to expand that to 10 million children.

Our childrens health is of the highest priority for this Congress. This holiday season, when parents should be thinking about presents for their children, instead they must be concerned about whether their children will have access to health care. This is simply not right. Democrats will not rest until 10 million children in America have access to health care.

Pelosi on Bush Veto of SCHIP: ˜Democrats Will Not Rest Until 10 Million Children Have Access to Health Care>>

The Gavel: President Bush; Second Veto of Childrens Health Care (SCHIP)>>

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Banning Torture and Improving Our Intelligence Programs


This week, the House passed the final Intelligence Authorization legislation, which provides the largest amount for intelligence programs ever authorized. It contains numerous provisions to improve the effectiveness of intelligence programs and agencies, and extends the prohibition against torture in the current Army Field Manual to all U.S. intelligence agencies and personnel. The legislation accountability measures include provisions to enhance oversight of the intelligence community as ell as provisions to improve accountability on the use of contractors.

This bill prohibits torture by requiring that the military and intelligence community only use interrogation techniques that fall within the Army Field Manual. (Currently, the Army Field Manual only applies to interrogations by the military.) It is necessary to have clear guidelines on what interrogation techniques are allowed, and what are not allowed. That is precisely what the Army Field Manual does. It specifically authorizes 19 interrogation techniques and specifically prohibits 8 techniques “ including waterboarding, forced nudity, denial of food and water, and beatings.

The Gavel: House Debates Intelligence Authorization Conference Report Extending Army Field Manual
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Tax Relief for Millions of Middle-Class Families

House Democrats are providing millions of middle-class families with tax cuts to grow our economy without increasing the national debt. This week, the House passed legislation to provide $50 billion in alternative minimum tax (AMT) relief to 23 million families, and expands the child tax credit to help 12 million children.

The AMT was established to ensure that the wealthiest families did not escape paying taxes altogether. It has grown to be such a problem that it now threatens teachers and firefighters “ a far cry from its original intent. For example, the bill would provide for a married couple with two kids making $80,000 with tax savings of $1,500, or a married couple with three kids making $70,000 with tax savings of more than $900. The bill also helps 12 million children, by making more families eligible for the refundable child tax credit“ covering working families making at least $8,500 in 2008, instead of requiring them to make $11,000 as under current law.

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Improving Benefits and Health Care for Troops and Veterans

The Defense Authorization legislation the House approved this week will make America safer “ addressing our military readiness crisis, investing in the equipment that will make our troops safer in the field, and improving benefits for military personnel and their families.

This bill supports our troops by giving the military a 3.5 percent pay raise, and upgrades military health care by prohibiting cuts in services and ensuring there are no increases in TRICARE fees for service members and retirees. It provides better benefits for reservists, and provides family medical leave for families of soldiers wounded in combat. It also makes progress in ending the Military Families Tax, which unfairly penalizes the survivors of those who have died as a result of their service-connected injuries.

The Defense Authorization also includes the Wounded Warrior Act, a provision that improves care for injured soldiers, particularly those returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. This provision of the bill responds to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center scandal. The service of our returning veterans can never be fully repaid, but we can honor their service by ensuring they receive only the highest quality medical care when they return home.

Read Speaker Pelosis statement on House Passage of the Defense Authorization



"Speaker Nancy Pelosi"
www.speaker.gov/blog/?p=999

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

AL GORE: THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

I wanted to share with you my speech from the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo. Check AlGore.com for video of the event later today.

Thank you,

Al Gore


SPEECH BY AL GORE ON THE ACCEPTANCE
OF THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE
DECEMBER 10, 2007
OSLO, NORWAY

Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Honorable members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Excellencies, Ladies and gentlemen.

I have a purpose here today. It is a purpose I have tried to serve for many years. I have prayed that God would show me a way to accomplish it.

Sometimes, without warning, the future knocks on our door with a precious and painful vision of what might be. One hundred and nineteen years ago, a wealthy inventor read his own obituary, mistakenly published years before his death. Wrongly believing the inventor had just died, a newspaper printed a harsh judgment of his life�s work, unfairly labeling him �The Merchant of Death� because of his invention � dynamite. Shaken by this condemnation, the inventor made a fateful choice to serve the cause of peace.

Seven years later, Alfred Nobel created this prize and the others that bear his name.

Seven years ago tomorrow, I read my own political obituary in a judgment that seemed to me harsh and mistaken � if not premature. But that unwelcome verdict also brought a precious if painful gift: an opportunity to search for fresh new ways to serve my purpose.

Unexpectedly, that quest has brought me here. Even though I fear my words cannot match this moment, I pray what I am feeling in my heart will be communicated clearly enough that those who hear me will say, �We must act.�

The distinguished scientists with whom it is the greatest honor of my life to share this award have laid before us a choice between two different futures � a choice that to my ears echoes the words of an ancient prophet: �Life or death, blessings or curses. Therefore, choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.�

We, the human species, are confronting a planetary emergency � a threat to the survival of our civilization that is gathering ominous and destructive potential even as we gather here. But there is hopeful news as well: we have the ability to solve this crisis and avoid the worst � though not all � of its consequences, if we act boldly, decisively and quickly.

However, despite a growing number of honorable exceptions, too many of the world�s leaders are still best described in the words Winston Churchill applied to those who ignored Adolf Hitler�s threat: �They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent.�

So today, we dumped another 70 million tons of global-warming pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet, as if it were an open sewer. And tomorrow, we will dump a slightly larger amount, with the cumulative concentrations now trapping more and more heat from the sun.

As a result, the earth has a fever. And the fever is rising. The experts have told us it is not a passing affliction that will heal by itself. We asked for a second opinion. And a third. And a fourth. And the consistent conclusion, restated with increasing alarm, is that something basic is wrong.

We are what is wrong, and we must make it right.

Last September 21, as the Northern Hemisphere tilted away from the sun, scientists reported with unprecedented distress that the North Polar ice cap is �falling off a cliff.� One study estimated that it could be completely gone during summer in less than 22 years. Another new study, to be presented by U.S. Navy researchers later this week, warns it could happen in as little as 7 years.

Seven years from now.

In the last few months, it has been harder and harder to misinterpret the signs that our world is spinning out of kilter. Major cities in North and South America, Asia and Australia are nearly out of water due to massive droughts and melting glaciers. Desperate farmers are losing their livelihoods. Peoples in the frozen Arctic and on low-lying Pacific islands are planning evacuations of places they have long called home. Unprecedented wildfires have forced a half million people from their homes in one country and caused a national emergency that almost brought down the government in another. Climate refugees have migrated into areas already inhabited by people with different cultures, religions, and traditions, increasing the potential for conflict. Stronger storms in the Pacific and Atlantic have threatened whole cities. Millions have been displaced by massive flooding in South Asia, Mexico, and 18 countries in Africa. As temperature extremes have increased, tens of thousands have lost their lives. We are recklessly burning and clearing our forests and driving more and more species into extinction. The very web of life on which we depend is being ripped and frayed.

We never intended to cause all this destruction, just as Alfred Nobel never intended that dynamite be used for waging war. He had hoped his invention would promote human progress. We shared that same worthy goal when we began burning massive quantities of coal, then oil and methane.

Even in Nobel�s time, there were a few warnings of the likely consequences. One of the very first winners of the Prize in chemistry worried that, �We are evaporating our coal mines into the air.� After performing 10,000 equations by hand, Svante Arrhenius calculated that the earth�s average temperature would increase by many degrees if we doubled the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Seventy years later, my teacher, Roger Revelle, and his colleague, Dave Keeling, began to precisely document the increasing CO2 levels day by day.

But unlike most other forms of pollution, CO2 is invisible, tasteless, and odorless -- which has helped keep the truth about what it is doing to our climate out of sight and out of mind. Moreover, the catastrophe now threatening us is unprecedented � and we often confuse the unprecedented with the improbable.

We also find it hard to imagine making the massive changes that are now necessary to solve the crisis. And when large truths are genuinely inconvenient, whole societies can, at least for a time, ignore them. Yet as George Orwell reminds us: �Sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.�

In the years since this prize was first awarded, the entire relationship between humankind and the earth has been radically transformed. And still, we have remained largely oblivious to the impact of our cumulative actions.

Indeed, without realizing it, we have begun to wage war on the earth itself. Now, we and the earth's climate are locked in a relationship familiar to war planners: "Mutually assured destruction."

More than two decades ago, scientists calculated that nuclear war could throw so much debris and smoke into the air that it would block life-giving sunlight from our atmosphere, causing a "nuclear winter." Their eloquent warnings here in Oslo helped galvanize the world�s resolve to halt the nuclear arms race.

Now science is warning us that if we do not quickly reduce the global warming pollution that is trapping so much of the heat our planet normally radiates back out of the atmosphere, we are in danger of creating a permanent �carbon summer.�

As the American poet Robert Frost wrote, �Some say the world will end in fire; some say in ice.� Either, he notes, �would suffice.�

But neither need be our fate. It is time to make peace with the planet.

We must quickly mobilize our civilization with the urgency and resolve that has previously been seen only when nations mobilized for war. These prior struggles for survival were won when leaders found words at the 11th hour that released a mighty surge of courage, hope and readiness to sacrifice for a protracted and mortal challenge.

These were not comforting and misleading assurances that the threat was not real or imminent; that it would affect others but not ourselves; that ordinary life might be lived even in the presence of extraordinary threat; that Providence could be trusted to do for us what we would not do for ourselves.

No, these were calls to come to the defense of the common future. They were calls upon the courage, generosity and strength of entire peoples, citizens of every class and condition who were ready to stand against the threat once asked to do so. Our enemies in those times calculated that free people would not rise to the challenge; they were, of course, catastrophically wrong.

Now comes the threat of climate crisis � a threat that is real, rising, imminent, and universal. Once again, it is the 11th hour. The penalties for ignoring this challenge are immense and growing, and at some near point would be unsustainable and unrecoverable. For now we still have the power to choose our fate, and the remaining question is only this: Have we the will to act vigorously and in time, or will we remain imprisoned by a dangerous illusion?

Mahatma Gandhi awakened the largest democracy on earth and forged a shared resolve with what he called �Satyagraha� � or �truth force.�

In every land, the truth � once known � has the power to set us free.

Truth also has the power to unite us and bridge the distance between �me� and �we,� creating the basis for common effort and shared responsibility.

There is an African proverb that says, �If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.� We need to go far, quickly.

We must abandon the conceit that individual, isolated, private actions are the answer. They can and do help. But they will not take us far enough without collective action. At the same time, we must ensure that in mobilizing globally, we do not invite the establishment of ideological conformity and a new lock-step �ism.�

That means adopting principles, values, laws, and treaties that release creativity and initiative at every level of society in multifold responses originating concurrently and spontaneously.

This new consciousness requires expanding the possibilities inherent in all humanity. The innovators who will devise a new way to harness the sun�s energy for pennies or invent an engine that�s carbon negative may live in Lagos or Mumbai or Montevideo. We must ensure that entrepreneurs and inventors everywhere on the globe have the chance to change the world.

When we unite for a moral purpose that is manifestly good and true, the spiritual energy unleashed can transform us. The generation that defeated fascism throughout the world in the 1940s found, in rising to meet their awesome challenge, that they had gained the moral authority and long-term vision to launch the Marshall Plan, the United Nations, and a new level of global cooperation and foresight that unified Europe and facilitated the emergence of democracy and prosperity in Germany, Japan, Italy and much of the world. One of their visionary leaders said, �It is time we steered by the stars and not by the lights of every passing ship.�

In the last year of that war, you gave the Peace Prize to a man from my hometown of 2000 people, Carthage, Tennessee. Cordell Hull was described by Franklin Roosevelt as the �Father of the United Nations.� He was an inspiration and hero to my own father, who followed Hull in the Congress and the U.S. Senate and in his commitment to world peace and global cooperation.

My parents spoke often of Hull, always in tones of reverence and admiration. Eight weeks ago, when you announced this prize, the deepest emotion I felt was when I saw the headline in my hometown paper that simply noted I had won the same prize that Cordell Hull had won. In that moment, I knew what my father and mother would have felt were they alive.

Just as Hull�s generation found moral authority in rising to solve the world crisis caused by fascism, so too can we find our greatest opportunity in rising to solve the climate crisis. In the Kanji characters used in both Chinese and Japanese, �crisis� is written with two symbols, the first meaning �danger,� the second �opportunity.� By facing and removing the danger of the climate crisis, we have the opportunity to gain the moral authority and vision to vastly increase our own capacity to solve other crises that have been too long ignored.

We must understand the connections between the climate crisis and the afflictions of poverty, hunger, HIV-Aids and other pandemics. As these problems are linked, so too must be their solutions. We must begin by making the common rescue of the global environment the central organizing principle of the world community.

Fifteen years ago, I made that case at the �Earth Summit� in Rio de Janeiro. Ten years ago, I presented it in Kyoto. This week, I will urge the delegates in Bali to adopt a bold mandate for a treaty that establishes a universal global cap on emissions and uses the market in emissions trading to efficiently allocate resources to the most effective opportunities for speedy reductions.

This treaty should be ratified and brought into effect everywhere in the world by the beginning of 2010 � two years sooner than presently contemplated. The pace of our response must be accelerated to match the accelerating pace of the crisis itself.

Heads of state should meet early next year to review what was accomplished in Bali and take personal responsibility for addressing this crisis. It is not unreasonable to ask, given the gravity of our circumstances, that these heads of state meet every three months until the treaty is completed.

We also need a moratorium on the construction of any new generating facility that burns coal without the capacity to safely trap and store carbon dioxide.

And most important of all, we need to put a price on carbon -- with a CO2 tax that is then rebated back to the people, progressively, according to the laws of each nation, in ways that shift the burden of taxation from employment to pollution. This is by far the most effective and simplest way to accelerate solutions to this crisis.

The world needs an alliance � especially of those nations that weigh heaviest in the scales where earth is in the balance. I salute Europe and Japan for the steps they�ve taken in recent years to meet the challenge, and the new government in Australia, which has made solving the climate crisis its first priority.

But the outcome will be decisively influenced by two nations that are now failing to do enough: the United States and China. While India is also growing fast in importance, it should be absolutely clear that it is the two largest CO2 emitters � most of all, my own country �� that will need to make the boldest moves, or stand accountable before history for their failure to act.

Both countries should stop using the other�s behavior as an excuse for stalemate and instead develop an agenda for mutual survival in a shared global environment.

These are the last few years of decision, but they can be the first years of a bright and hopeful future if we do what we must. No one should believe a solution will be found without effort, without cost, without change. Let us acknowledge that if we wish to redeem squandered time and speak again with moral authority, then these are the hard truths:

The way ahead is difficult. The outer boundary of what we currently believe is feasible is still far short of what we actually must do. Moreover, between here and there, across the unknown, falls the shadow.

That is just another way of saying that we have to expand the boundaries of what is possible. In the words of the Spanish poet, Antonio Machado, �Pathwalker, there is no path. You must make the path as you walk.�

We are standing at the most fateful fork in that path. So I want to end as I began, with a vision of two futures � each a palpable possibility � and with a prayer that we will see with vivid clarity the necessity of choosing between those two futures, and the urgency of making the right choice now.

The great Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen, wrote, �One of these days, the younger generation will come knocking at my door.�

The future is knocking at our door right now. Make no mistake, the next generation will ask us one of two questions. Either they will ask: �What were you thinking; why didn�t you act?�

Or they will ask instead: �How did you find the moral courage to rise and successfully resolve a crisis that so many said was impossible to solve?�

We have everything we need to get started, save perhaps political will, but political will is a renewable resource.

So let us renew it, and say together: �We have a purpose. We are many. For this purpose we will rise, and we will act.�

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Saturday, December 8, 2007

Parole Case and ’90s AIDS View Trail Huckabee

By MICHAEL LUO
As new polls highlight Mike Huckabee’s ascent in the Republican presidential field, he is drawing new scrutiny of his record in Arkansas, particularly his actions in the release of a convicted rapist who went on to murder a woman and his response to a questionnaire in which he said people with AIDS should be quarantined.

Two former parole board members in Arkansas said yesterday that as governor, Mr. Huckabee met with the board in 1996 to lobby them to release the convicted rapist, Wayne DuMond, whose case was championed by evangelical Christians.

“He expressed his concerns about DuMond’s guilt,” said Deborah Suttlar, a former parole board member. “He felt he deserved to be released.”

Mr. DuMond later went on to murder a Missouri woman after his parole. He died in prison of natural causes in 2005.

Mr. Huckabee, a former Southern Baptist pastor, has denied that he had any involvement in Mr. DuMond’s release, pointing out that he had refused to commute the sentence and that the parole board freed him. But The Los Angeles Times reported yesterday that three of the seven members of the parole board said Mr. Huckabee had pressured them, echoing earlier reporting by The Arkansas Times and other local news media.

A Newsweek survey released Friday showed for the first time that Mr. Huckabee had a clear lead over Mitt Romney among likely caucus-goers in Iowa, 39 percent to 17 percent, a rise from near the back of the Republican pack that has been fueled by evangelical Christians.

The surge in support in the highly fluid Republican field has drawn new attention to Mr. Huckabee’s time in Arkansas. On the campaign trail yesterday, Mr. Huckabee did not address questions about the case, but said he was expecting attacks from his rivals because of his newfound status as a legitimate contender.

“Over the next few weeks, I’m sure you’re going to see a whole lot of things,” he told about 400 people gathered in a restaurant in Columbia, S.C. “Already some of the other campaigns are getting desperate. They never imagined they’d have to contend with me.”

Highlighting the new scrutiny of Mr. Huckabee’s record, The Associated Press revealed yesterday that as a candidate for the United States Senate in 1992, Mr. Huckabee said in a response in a 229-question survey that he believed that AIDS patients should be isolated from the public and that homosexuality was an “aberrant, unnatural and sinful lifestyle” that posed a “dangerous public risk.”

Fears of AIDS spreading widely in the United States were common in the mid-1980s, as doctors struggled to learn about how the virus that causes the disease was transmitted. But by the time Mr. Huckabee answered the A.P. survey, it was well established that the virus could not be spread through casual contact.

Mr. Huckabee has been popular among Christian conservatives, who appreciate his stands on social issues and his unabashed professions of faith on the trail.

Mr. Huckabee’s detractors, however, have sought to turn his pastoral background against him, saying his spirituality has made him too soft. As evidence, they point to the DuMond case and his push for a bill that would have made illegal immigrants eligible for college tuition breaks, a stance that has drawn considerable ire from hard-liners on immigration.

Mr. DuMond was convicted in the 1984 rape of a teenager who was a distant cousin of Bill Clinton, then the governor of Arkansas. While he was out on bail awaiting trial, Mr. DuMond said men forced his way into his home and castrated him, but the authorities said they thought he might have castrated himself in a play for sympathy. He was sentenced to life in prison.

Mr. Clinton’s successor, Jim Guy Tucker, found the sentence excessive and cut it to 39 ½ years, making Mr. DuMond eligible for parole.

While Mr. DuMond was in prison, the Rev. Jay D. Cole, a Baptist pastor and friend of Mr. Huckabee’s, ministered to him, and the inmate later said he had found God.

Mr. Cole said yesterday that he asked Mr. Huckabee to look into the case. “I think Mike was very torn about the whole thing,” Mr. Cole said. “I feel he felt an innocent man was in prison, or if not, he had been in prison too long. But he didn’t come out and say that.”

Nevertheless, soon after taking office, Mr. Huckabee met in October 1996 with members of the parole board, all of whom had been appointed by his Democratic predecessors. Mr. DuMond’s case, with its twists and turns — including a $110,000 judgment against a sheriff who kept Mr. DuMond’s testicles in a jar on his desk — had become something of a celebrated cause among conservative activists, who charged that Mr. Clinton’s relation to the victim had led to Mr. DuMond’s being railroaded.

The parole board meetings are public, but after Mr. Huckabee arrived, the board chairman closed the meeting to everyone except board members. What happened next is in dispute.

A request for a pardon was being considered at that point by Mr. Huckabee, who came out in favor of it. That caused an outcry among some, including the rape victim, who went to his office to ask him to change his mind.

Mr. Huckabee later denied Mr. DuMond clemency, but wrote a letter to him: “Dear Wayne, My desire is that you be released from prison. I feel that parole is the best way for your reintroduction to society to take place.”

When Mr. Huckabee met with the parole board, according to Ms. Suttlar and Charles Chastain, another board member, he said he wanted to talk to them about a specific case and raised the issue of Mr. DuMond unprompted.

“I’ve looked into this a good bit,” Mr. Chastain recalled Mr. Huckabee saying to them. “I feel he may just be a fellow from the wrong side of the tracks and gotten a raw deal.”

Ms. Suttlar yesterday accused Mr. Huckabee of compromising “the integrity of the parole board.” She was somewhat more lenient in an interview with The Associated Press in 2001, when she said the pressure from Mr. Huckabee “was not coercion, it was an implied thing.”

Olan W. Reeves, who served as Mr. Huckabee’s chief counsel and attended the meeting, said that it was meant only to introduce the new governor to the board and that Mr. DuMond’s case came up when a board member challenged him on his support for clemency.

“He didn’t go over there to talk to them about that,” Mr. Reeves said yesterday. “The governor in Arkansas has nothing to do with parole.”

The board voted 4 to 1 several months later to parole Mr. DuMond, with Mr. Chastain casting the lone dissenting vote, after having denied his freedom repeatedly in previous years. Two board members, including Ms. Suttlar, abstained. She said yesterday she chose not to vote because she was disgusted by what she described as behind-the-scenes lobbying by Mr. Huckabee to have Mr. DuMond released.

But she previously told The Associated Press that she did not vote because Mr. DuMond had accused her of racial bias. She is black, and Mr. DuMond is white.

Mr. Huckabee said at a news conference in Des Moines last week that he regretted the entire incident, adding again that he did not pressure the board to “do anything.”

“I can’t fix it,” he said of the episode. “I can only tell the truth and let the truth be my judge.”

Steve Barnes, Adam Nossiter and Katharine Q. Seelye contributed reporting.


Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Personal side: Candidates' worst jobs By CALVIN WOODWARD, AP Writer

All these years later, Mike Huckabee still avoids touching the glass when he opens a door. He remembers a thankless task at Penney's as a teenager, scrubbing away fingerprints only to have customers smudge the glass all over again.

Mitt Romney worked in a sewage pipe on an Idaho ranch when the effluent was still flowing. In Alaska as a post-grad, Hillary Rodham Clinton spooned the guts out of fish.

Let it not be said of the presidential candidates that they've never done an honest day's work.

Today they are officeholders past or present, governors, members of Congress, a mayor, and for the most part they are rich to very rich.

Once they were a haberdasher, a landscaper, a bouncer at a drag strip, a gofer at a textile mill. Whether children of privilege, the burbs or tiny towns, they've worked hard at crummy jobs, in a distant past remembered as if it were yesterday.

The Associated Press asked them to talk about their worst jobs in a series of interviews exploring their personal side. They also named foods they hate, cracked favorite jokes on cue, spoke of keepsakes, reflected on what they do on a rare lazy day, and more.

They answered with relish — sometimes spoiled relish long past its best-before date — when asked about lousy jobs.

"Backbreaking work," Democrat Bill Richardson said of his summer of laying sod on Cape Cod. A banker's son and Tufts University sophomore, he worked for a meager wage to cover room and board while pitching in the Cape Cod Baseball League in 1967. "The pay was terrible," said Richardson, now New Mexico governor. "And I think the minimum wage at the time was under two dollars." (It was $1.40 or less, depending on the work.)

Republican Fred Thompson, son of a used-car salesman, remembers his years before law offices, Hollywood and the Senate. "Well, let's see," he said. "I've worked in a factory, I was a bouncer at my uncle's drag strip, I worked at the post office, I sold children's shoes, I sold ladies', I sold men's clothing, I was a night clerk at a motel.

"I can't think of a job that I had that I wasn't thankful for at the time."

Romney never went begging for dollars — his dad was head of American Motors and governor of Michigan. But the Republican presidential candidate got up close and personal with sewage while spending time at his uncle's spread, doing chores at age 15. He said he spent a week on his assigned task of cutting the sewage pipe.

Middle class in her youth, Hillary Rodham was already on a promising track when she spent the summer of 1969 working her way across Alaska. The year before, her commencement speech at Wellesley College in defense of war protesters was such a hit she was featured in Life magazine.

In Alaska, she washed dishes in Mount McKinley National Park, the better of two brief menial jobs that financed her travels. "My worst job was sliming fish in a fish cannery in Valdez," she said without hesitation.

The Democratic New York senator elaborated on this in her memoirs: standing in bloody water in knee-high boots on a pier removing salmon guts with a spoon; supervisors yelling when she didn't slime fast enough; switching to the packing line where she reported spoiled fish to the boss, who soon fired her.

In her husband Bill's hometown of Hope, Ark., another presidential aspirant worked two jobs at age 14. Huckabee remembers his gig at a radio station with fondness; his department store stint, not so much.

"When I worked for JCPenney it was a great job and it was a great company but they worked me hard," Huckabee told AP's Online Video Network while campaigning at a college tailgate party in Columbia, S.C. "Just as I'd get all the fingerprints wiped off the door, somebody would come and they'd put their hands all over the glass.

"To this day, I'm still very sensitive about never touching the glass, but touching the handles, because I had to wipe those windows so many times."

Democrat John Edwards, who made his own wealth as a trial attorney, had awful cleaning duties earlier at the textile mill where he worked summers and part time during school.

"I cleaned out overhead in the weave room, which is where all the crap goes," he said, his eyes raised skyward and arms clawing the air. "And I'd be up there climbing around, knocking the stuff down. And it would go down on the looms. The weavers would be, uh, not happy with me for that.

"And the other part of that job was mopping out from under the looms — the grease."

Republican John McCain, son of an admiral, had post-grad employment unlike most — war. The Navy pilot landed in a vicious Hanoi prison and has no complaints about other circumstances of his youth: "I've never really had a bad job."

Democrat Barack Obama cleared a construction site for a summer on Manhattan's Upper West Side while attending Columbia University. But he says his worst job was scooping ice cream at a Baskin-Robbins because he ate too much of it. Republican Rudy Giuliani weighed the priesthood and medicine before pursuing law.

Democrat Chris Dodd did construction work for the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic. He counts his job selling clothes in a haberdashery as his worst job.

"It was boring," he said. And the boss? "We used to call him the good thief."

___

AP writers Ann Sanner in Washington and Mike Glover in Iowa contributed to this story.



Copyright © 2007 Yahoo! Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Friday, December 7, 2007

Wary of Risk, Bankers Sold Shaky Mortgage Debt

By JENNY ANDERSON and VIKAS BAJAJ

As the subprime loan crisis deepens, Wall Street firms are increasingly coming under scrutiny for their role in selling risky mortgage-related securities to investors.

Many of the home loans tied to these investments quickly defaulted, resulting in billions of dollars of losses for investors. At the same time, many of the companies that sold these securities, concerned about a looming meltdown in the housing market, protected themselves from losses.

One big bank that saw the trouble coming, Goldman Sachs, began reducing its inventory of mortgages and mortgage securities late last year. Even so, Goldman went on to package and sell more than $6 billion of new securities backed by subprime mortgages during the first nine months of this year.

Of the loans backing the Goldman deals for which data is available, nearly 15 percent are already delinquent by more than 60 days, are in foreclosure or have resulted in the repossession of a home, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The average default rate for subprime loans packaged in 2007 is 11 percent.

"There is a maxim that comes to mind: `If you work in the kitchen, you don't eat the food,'" said Josh Rosner, a managing director of Graham Fisher, an independent consulting firm in New York.

The New York attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo, has subpoenaed major Wall Street banks, including Deutsche Bank, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley, seeking information about the packaging and selling of subprime mortgages. And the Securities and Exchange Commission is examining how Wall Street companies valued their own holdings of these complex investments.

The Wall Street banks that foresaw problems say they hedged their mortgage positions as part of their fiduciary duty to shareholders. Indeed, some other companies, particularly Citigroup, Merrill Lynch and UBS, apparently did not foresee the housing market collapse and lost billions of dollars, leading to forced resignations of their chief executives.

In any case, the bankers argue, buyers of such securities — institutional investors like pension funds, banks and hedge funds — are sophisticated and understand the risks.

Wall Street officials maintain that the system worked as it was supposed to. Underwriters, they say, did not pressure colleagues on trading desks or in research departments to promote securities blindly.

Nevertheless, the loans that many banks packaged are proving to be increasingly toxic. Almost a quarter of the subprime loans that were transformed into securities by Deutsche Bank, Barclays and Morgan Stanley last year are already in default, according to Bloomberg. About a fifth of the loans backing securities underwritten by Merrill Lynch are in trouble.

Data from another firm that tracks mortgage securities, Lewtan Technologies, shows similar trends. The banks declined to comment on the default rates.

The data raises questions about how closely Wall Street banks scrutinized these loans, many of them made at low teaser rates that will reset next year to higher levels.

The Bush administration is close to a plan to freeze mortgage rates temporarily for some homeowners who are threatened with foreclosure.

In recent years, Wall Street aggressively pushed into the complex, high-margin business of packaging mortgages. At the same time, banks expanded their roles to selling investments to clients while trying to make money on their own holdings. Now, with the collapse of the credit bubble, Wall Street's risk management, as well as the multiple and often conflicting roles it plays, has been laid bare.

As early as January 2006, Greg Lippmann, Deutsche Bank's global head of trading for asset-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations, and his team began advising hedge funds and other institutional investors to protect themselves from a coming decline in the housing market.

"He was really pounding the pavement," said one hedge fund trader, who asked not to be identified because it could jeopardize his relationship with Wall Street banks.

Mr. Lippmann's trade ideas — documented in a January 2006 presentation obtained by The New York Times — were not always popular inside Deutsche Bank, where the origination desk was busy selling mortgage securities. In the fall of 2006, Mr. Lippmann pitched bearish trades to the bank's sales force at the same time the origination desk was bringing them mortgage deals to sell to clients.

Last year, Deutsche Bank underwrote $28.6 billion of subprime mortgage securities, according to Inside Mortgage Finance, an industry publication. In the first nine months of this year, the bank underwrote $12 billion.

Goldman Sachs also moved early to insulate itself from potential losses. Almost a year ago, on Dec. 14, 2006, David A. Viniar, Goldman's chief financial officer, called a "mortgage risk" meeting. The investment bank's mortgage desk was losing money, and Mr. Viniar, with various officials, reviewed every position in the bank's portfolio.

The bank decided to reduce its stockpile of mortgages and mortgage-related securities and to buy expensive insurance as protection against further losses, said a person briefed on the meeting who was not authorized to speak about the situation publicly.

Goldman, however, did not stop selling subprime mortgage securities. The bank, like other firms, retains a piece of the securities it sells. A Goldman spokesman said the firm was not betting against the mortgage securities it underwrote in 2007.

Like Goldman, Lehman Brothers also started to hedge its huge inventory of home loans in the second quarter of this year, concerned about poor underwriting standards. But Lehman also continued to sell mortgage securities packed with shaky loans, underwriting $16.5 billion of new securities in the first nine months of 2007. About 15 percent of the loans backing these securities have defaulted.

At the center of the boom in mortgages for borrowers with weak credit was Wall Street's once-lucrative partnership with subprime lenders. This relationship was a driving force behind the soaring home prices and the spread of exotic loans that are now defaulting in growing numbers. By buying and packaging mortgages, Wall Street enabled the lenders to extend credit even as the dangers grew in the housing market.

"There was fierce competition for these loans," said Ronald F. Greenspan, a senior managing director at FTI Consulting, which has worked on the bankruptcies of many mortgage lenders. "They were a major source of revenues and perceived profits for both the originators and investment banks."

The battle over these loans intensified in 2005 and 2006, as home prices approached their zenith. (Home sales peaked in mid-2005.) At the same time, buyers of these securities, which carry relatively high interest rates, were fueling demand. Lehman Brothers, the dominant Wall Street player in this field, underwrote $51.8 billion of subprime mortgage securities in 2006, followed by RBS Greenwich Capital, which arranged $47.6 billion of sales.

Not all banks continued to expand their subprime business. Credit Suisse, which had been a major player in 2005, pulled back aggressively, with its underwriting down 22 percent in 2006, compared with 2004.

But other Wall Street banks, pushing to catch these market leaders, reached out to subprime lenders. Morgan Stanley, which expanded its subprime underwriting business by 25 percent from 2004 to 2006, cultivated a relationship with New Century Financial, one of the largest subprime lenders. The firm agreed to pay above-market prices for loans in return for a steady supply of mortgages, according to a former New Century executive.

"Morgan would be aggressive and say, `We want to lock you in for $2 billion a month,'" said the executive, who asked not to be identified because he still works with Wall Street banks.

Loans made by New Century, which filed for bankruptcy protection in March, have some of the highest default rates in the industry — almost twice those of competitors like Wells Fargo and Ameriquest, according to data from Moody's Investors Service.

Fremont General and ResMae, which also had high default rates, were big suppliers of loans to Deutsche Bank. Merrill Lynch had a close relationship with Ownit Mortgage Solutions, which filed for bankruptcy in December. Merrill also acquired another lender, First Franklin, for $1.7 billion in late 2006.

"The easiest way to grab market share was by paying more than your competitors," said Jeffrey Kirsch, president of American Residential Equities, which buys home loans.

What is clear is that home loans were highly lucrative to Wall Street and its bankers. The average total compensation for managing directors in the mortgage divisions of investment banks was $2.52 million in 2006, compared with $1.75 million for managing directors in other areas, according to Johnson Associates, a compensation consulting firm. This year, mortgage officials will probably earn $1.01 million, while other managing directors are expected to earn $1.75 million.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
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