On Saturday, May 31st, Senator Boxer gave the Democratic Radio Address. She spoke about the urgent need for our nation to act on global warming before it's too late. Use the audio player below to listen to her address, or scroll down to read the full text
The text of the radio address, as delivered, is below:
"Good morning. I'm Senator Barbara Boxer from California and Chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee. Next week, the Senate will begin debate on one of the most important issues of our time -- global warming.
"Senators have come together across party lines to write a law that will not only enable us to avoid the ravages of unchecked global warming, but will create millions of new jobs and put us on the path to energy independence. Other benefits of our legislation will be cleaner air, energy efficiency, relief for consumers and the alternative energy choices that American families deserve. And, by acting wisely, America will regain the leadership we have lost these past seven years.
"There are some in the Senate who insist that global warming is nothing more than science fiction. These are the same kind of voices who said that the world was flat, cigarettes were safe and cars didn't need airbags - long after the rest of us knew the truth.
"The fact is that the overwhelming majority of scientists say that the earth is in peril if we don't act now. They've told us clearly that more than 40 percent of God's creatures could face extinction if we don't act now. They've told us of more intense weather events if we don't act now. Health experts have told us that infectious diseases will increase due to warmer waters. And military leaders have told us that unchecked global warming will lead to severe conflict and war as droughts, floods and rising sea levels create huge numbers of desperate refugees.
"I hope you will help us convince the negative voices that we must act now to avert these dangers. Tell the Bush administration to help us, not fight us. Tell your Senators that action now will have positive results for our families and our nation. Tell those skeptics who say 'wait for China and India to act' that the America we know and love doesn't hide from a challenge and wait for others to lead.
"Right now, many of our states, including my home state, are leading. They have the will. Our mayors are leading. They have the will. Religious leaders have urged us to act now as well. They reminded me of a wonderful quote that motivates me to work as hard as I can for as long as it takes to responsibly address global warming. These words stay with me: 'When God created the first man, he took him around to all the trees in the Garden of Eden and said to him "see my handiwork, how beautiful and choice they are. Be careful not to ruin and destroy my world, for if you do ruin it, there is no one to repair it after you."'
"I truly hope that you will support our efforts on the Senate floor. Please join our fight, and thanks for listening."
http://www.barbaraboxer.com/pages/radio
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I was so honored to be asked to deliver the Democratic Radio Address today on a topic that you and I know is one of the greatest challenges facing us: Global Warming.
In today's radio address, I tried to make the case that it is time to act... NOW.
If you didn't get a chance to listen to this morning's address broadcast nationwide on the radio, please click here to listen to it now. I hope you felt I made the case.
Stay tuned -- I'll be back to you in the coming days to ask for your help as I lead the climate bill through the Senate's treacherous tracks. Knowing you are behind me gives me the courage to fight hard.
Have a great weekend!
In Friendship,
Barbara Boxer
U.S. Senator
http://www.barbaraboxer.com/pages/radio
Listen to my Radio Address
Paid for by Friends of Barbara Boxer.
Contributions to Friends of Barbara Boxer are not tax-deductible for federal income tax purposes.
FEC #C00279315
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Saturday, May 31, 2008
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Pentagon reports Army suicides have reached two-decade high
Army suicides reported up again ? at 108 By PAULINE JELINEK, Associated Press Writer
The number of Army suicides increased again last year, amid the most violent year yet in both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Two defense officials said Thursday that 108 troops committed suicide in 2007, six more than the previous year. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the full report on the deaths wasn't being released until later Thursday.
About a quarter of the deaths occurred in Iraq.
The overall toll was the highest in many years, and it was unclear when, if ever, it was previously that high. Immediately available Army records go back only to 1990 and the figure then was lower ? at 102 ? for that year as well as 1991.
The 108 confirmed deaths in 2007 among active duty soldiers and National Guard and Reserve troops that had been activated was lower than previously feared. Preliminary figures released in January showed as many as 121 troops might have killed themselves, but a number of the deaths were still being investigated then and have since been attributed to other causes, the officials said.
Suicides have been rising during the five-year-old war in Iraq and nearly seven years of war in Afghanistan.
The 108 deaths last year followed 102 in 2006, 85 in 2005 and 67 in 2004.
More U.S. troops also died overall in hostilities in 2007 than in any of the previous years in Iraq and Afghanistan. Overall violence increased in Afghanistan with a Taliban resurgence and overall deaths increased in Iraq, even as violence there declined in the second half of the year.
Increasing the strain on the force last year was the extension of deployments to 15 months from 12 months, a practice ending this year.
The increases in suicides come despite a host of efforts to improve the mental health of a force stressed by the long and repeated tours of duty.
The efforts include more training and education programs, such as suicide prevention programs and a program last year that taught all troops how to recognize mental health problems in themselves and their buddies. Officials also approved the hiring of more than 300 additional psychiatrists, psychologists and other mental health professionals and have so far hired 180 of them. They also have added more screening to measure the mental health of troops.
Earlier this year, Lt. Gen. Michael Rochelle, the deputy chief of staff for personnel, directed a complete review of the Army's suicide prevention program, according to the Army's Web site. He called for a campaign that would make use of the best available science, and would raise awareness of the problem.
"Since the beginning of the global war on terror, the Army has lost over 580 soldiers to suicide, an equivalent of an entire infantry battalion task force," the Army said in a suicide prevention guide to installations and units that was posted in mid-March on the site.
"This ranks as the fourth leading manner of death for soldiers, exceeded only by hostile fire, accidents and illnesses," it said. "Even more startling is that during this same period, 10 to 20 times as many soldiers have thought to harm themselves or attempted suicide."
The numbers kept by the Army only show part of the picture because they don't include guard and reserve troops who have finished their active duty and returned home to their civilian jobs.
The Department of Veterans Affairs tracks the number of suicides among those who have left the military. It says there have been 144 suicides among the nearly 500,000 service members who left the military from 2002-2005 after fighting in at least one of the wars.
The true incidence of suicide among veterans is not known, according to a recent Congressional Research Service report. Based on numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the VA estimates that 18 veterans a day ? or 6,500 a year ? take their own lives, but that number includes vets from all wars.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080529/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/military_suicides&printer=1;_ylt=As7XxcUbmqma2UOnQbR4T_OWwvIE
Copyright © 2008 The Associated Press
The number of Army suicides increased again last year, amid the most violent year yet in both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Two defense officials said Thursday that 108 troops committed suicide in 2007, six more than the previous year. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the full report on the deaths wasn't being released until later Thursday.
About a quarter of the deaths occurred in Iraq.
The overall toll was the highest in many years, and it was unclear when, if ever, it was previously that high. Immediately available Army records go back only to 1990 and the figure then was lower ? at 102 ? for that year as well as 1991.
The 108 confirmed deaths in 2007 among active duty soldiers and National Guard and Reserve troops that had been activated was lower than previously feared. Preliminary figures released in January showed as many as 121 troops might have killed themselves, but a number of the deaths were still being investigated then and have since been attributed to other causes, the officials said.
Suicides have been rising during the five-year-old war in Iraq and nearly seven years of war in Afghanistan.
The 108 deaths last year followed 102 in 2006, 85 in 2005 and 67 in 2004.
More U.S. troops also died overall in hostilities in 2007 than in any of the previous years in Iraq and Afghanistan. Overall violence increased in Afghanistan with a Taliban resurgence and overall deaths increased in Iraq, even as violence there declined in the second half of the year.
Increasing the strain on the force last year was the extension of deployments to 15 months from 12 months, a practice ending this year.
The increases in suicides come despite a host of efforts to improve the mental health of a force stressed by the long and repeated tours of duty.
The efforts include more training and education programs, such as suicide prevention programs and a program last year that taught all troops how to recognize mental health problems in themselves and their buddies. Officials also approved the hiring of more than 300 additional psychiatrists, psychologists and other mental health professionals and have so far hired 180 of them. They also have added more screening to measure the mental health of troops.
Earlier this year, Lt. Gen. Michael Rochelle, the deputy chief of staff for personnel, directed a complete review of the Army's suicide prevention program, according to the Army's Web site. He called for a campaign that would make use of the best available science, and would raise awareness of the problem.
"Since the beginning of the global war on terror, the Army has lost over 580 soldiers to suicide, an equivalent of an entire infantry battalion task force," the Army said in a suicide prevention guide to installations and units that was posted in mid-March on the site.
"This ranks as the fourth leading manner of death for soldiers, exceeded only by hostile fire, accidents and illnesses," it said. "Even more startling is that during this same period, 10 to 20 times as many soldiers have thought to harm themselves or attempted suicide."
The numbers kept by the Army only show part of the picture because they don't include guard and reserve troops who have finished their active duty and returned home to their civilian jobs.
The Department of Veterans Affairs tracks the number of suicides among those who have left the military. It says there have been 144 suicides among the nearly 500,000 service members who left the military from 2002-2005 after fighting in at least one of the wars.
The true incidence of suicide among veterans is not known, according to a recent Congressional Research Service report. Based on numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the VA estimates that 18 veterans a day ? or 6,500 a year ? take their own lives, but that number includes vets from all wars.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080529/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/military_suicides&printer=1;_ylt=As7XxcUbmqma2UOnQbR4T_OWwvIE
Copyright © 2008 The Associated Press
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
http://themiddleclass.org/legislator/kenny-marchant-537
Kenny Marchant(R-TX)
Marchant's Middle-Class Grades
36% Score with 2008 Final grade to be released 03.2009
2007.2005 to 2008 Year to Date Score Voted on 11 of 12 bills considered.
http://themiddleclass.org/legislator/kenny-marchant-537
First took office: 2005 Term ends: 2009 indicates votes that count toward the final grade. See the Grade Release FAQ for more information. Voting Record on Bills Voting to Support of The Middle Class?
H.R. 6049
Renewable Energy and Job Creation Act of 2008
TOPICS: Child tax credit, Corporate taxes, Efficient technology, Energy & Environment, Energy conservation, Executive compensation, Global warming, Green buildings, Green jobs, Income taxes, Property taxes, Renewable fuels, Sales taxes, Tax Fairness NAY
H.R. 5818
Neighborhood Stabilization Act of 2008
TOPICS: Economic stimulus, Housing, Mortgage lending, Workplace & Job Creation NAY
H.R. 5715
Ensuring Continued Access to Student Loans Act of 2008
TOPICS: College tuition, Community college, Debt & Bankruptcy, Education, Saving for college, Student loans YEA
H.R. 5613
Protecting the Medicaid Safety Net Act of 2008
TOPICS: Health Care, Hospitals, Medicaid, Public health NAY
H.R. 5351
Renewable Energy and Energy Conservation Tax Act of 2008
TOPICS: Consumers, Corporate taxes, Efficient technology, Energy & Environment, Energy conservation, Global warming, Green buildings, Green jobs, Oil, Renewable fuels, Utilities NAY
H.R. 5140
Recovery Rebates and Economic Stimulus for the American People Act of 2008
TOPICS: Consumers, Corporate taxes, Economic stimulus, Mortgage lending, Tax cuts, Tax Fairness, Workplace & Job Creation YEA
H.R. 4137
College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2008
TOPICS: College tuition, Education, Energy conservation, Pell Grants, Student loans YEA
H.R. 3963
Children's Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act of 2007 [Revised bill]
TOPICS: Health Care, Medicaid, Sales taxes, SCHIP NAY
H.R. 3548
Plain Language in Government Communications Act of 2008
TOPICS: Drug safety, Government Accountability, Prescription drugs —N/A
—
H.R. 2642
Amendment to the Military Construction and Veterans Affairs and Related Agencies Appropriations Act of 2008 NAY
H.R. 1424
Paul Wellstone Mental Health and Addiction Equity Act of 2008
TOPICS: Employment discrimination, Health Care, Medical research NAY
H.R. 493
Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008
TOPICS: Civil Justice, Employment discrimination, Health Care, Job training YEA
2007
H.R. 4040
Consumer Product Safety Modernization Act of 2007
TOPICS: Capping damages, Consumers, Product liability YEA
H.R. 3996
Temporary Tax Relief Act of 2007
TOPICS: Alternative minimum tax, Child tax credit, College tuition, Corporate taxes, Income taxes, Mortgage lending, Pay-go, Tax cuts, Tax Fairness —N/A
—
H.R. 3688
United States-Peru Trade Promotion Agreement Implementation Act of 2007
TOPICS: Consumers, Food safety, Outsourcing, Trade agreement, Workplace & Job Creation YEA
H.R. 3580
FDA Amendments Act of 2007
TOPICS: Consumers, Corporate Accountability, Deceptive advertising and marketing, Drug safety, Food safety, Health Care, Prescription drugs YEA
H.R. 2895
Affordable Housing Trust Fund Act of 2007
TOPICS: Affordable Housing Trust Fund, Downpayment assistance, Housing, Mortgage lending NAY
H.R. 2831
Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2007
TOPICS: Civil Justice, Employment discrimination, Workplace & Job Creation NAY
H.R. 2669
College Cost Reduction Act of 2007
TOPICS: College tuition, Education, Pell Grants, Saving for college, Student loans NAY
H.R. 1429
Improving Head Start Act of 2007
TOPICS: Education, Head Start, Preschool YEA
H.R. 1362
Accountability in Contracting Act of 2007
TOPICS: Contracting, Government Accountability NAY
H.R. 1257
Shareholder Vote on Executive Compensation Act of 2007
TOPICS: Corporate Accountability, Executive compensation, Shareholder rights NAY
H.R. 976
Children's Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act of 2007
TOPICS: Health Care, Medicaid, Sales taxes, SCHIP NAY
H.R. 800
Employee Free Choice Act of 2007
TOPICS: Right to organize, Unions, Workplace & Job Creation NAY
H.R. 6
CLEAN Energy Act of 2007
TOPICS: Corporate taxes, Efficient technology, Energy & Environment, Global warming, Green buildings, Oil, Renewable fuels NAY
H.R. 6
Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007
TOPICS: Coal, Consumers, Corporate taxes, Efficient technology, Energy & Environment, Energy conservation, Global warming, Green buildings, Green jobs, Heating fuel, Job training, Oil, Pollution, Renewable fuels, Tax cuts, Utilities NAY
H.R. 4
Medicare Prescription Drug Price Negotiation Act of 2007
TOPICS: Health Care, HMOs and insurance companies, Medicare, Prescription drugs NAY
H.R. 2
Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007
TOPICS: Minimum wage, Workplace & Job Creation YEA
2005
H.RES. 653
Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 (House vote)
TOPICS: Medicaid, Medicare, Pension plans, Student loans, TANF YEA
H.R. 4437
Border Protection, Antiterrorism, And Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005
TOPICS: Border enforcement, Employer sanctions, Identification cards, Immigration, Mass deportation YEA
H.R. 3045
Dominican Republic-Central America-United States Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act of 2005
TOPICS: Outsourcing, Trade agreement, Workplace & Job Creation YEA
H.R. 6
Energy Policy Act of 2005
TOPICS: Coal, Corporate taxes, Efficient technology, Energy & Environment, Energy conservation, Global warming, Natural gas, Oil, Pollution, Public infrastructure, Renewable fuels YEA
H.R. 8
Death Tax Repeal Permanency Act of 2005
TOPICS: Estate tax, Tax Fairness YEA
H.R. 525
Small Business Health Fairness Act of 2005
TOPICS: Association health plans, Health Care, HMOs and insurance companies YEA
S. 256
Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention And Consumer Protection Act Of 2005
TOPICS: Debt & Bankruptcy, Personal bankruptcy YEA
S. 5
Class Action Fairness Act of 2005
TOPICS: Civil Justice, Class action lawsuits, Corporate Accountability, Product liability YEA
http://themiddleclass.org/legislator/kenny-marchant-537
Marchant's Middle-Class Grades
36% Score with 2008 Final grade to be released 03.2009
2007.2005 to 2008 Year to Date Score Voted on 11 of 12 bills considered.
http://themiddleclass.org/legislator/kenny-marchant-537
First took office: 2005 Term ends: 2009 indicates votes that count toward the final grade. See the Grade Release FAQ for more information. Voting Record on Bills Voting to Support of The Middle Class?
H.R. 6049
Renewable Energy and Job Creation Act of 2008
TOPICS: Child tax credit, Corporate taxes, Efficient technology, Energy & Environment, Energy conservation, Executive compensation, Global warming, Green buildings, Green jobs, Income taxes, Property taxes, Renewable fuels, Sales taxes, Tax Fairness NAY
H.R. 5818
Neighborhood Stabilization Act of 2008
TOPICS: Economic stimulus, Housing, Mortgage lending, Workplace & Job Creation NAY
H.R. 5715
Ensuring Continued Access to Student Loans Act of 2008
TOPICS: College tuition, Community college, Debt & Bankruptcy, Education, Saving for college, Student loans YEA
H.R. 5613
Protecting the Medicaid Safety Net Act of 2008
TOPICS: Health Care, Hospitals, Medicaid, Public health NAY
H.R. 5351
Renewable Energy and Energy Conservation Tax Act of 2008
TOPICS: Consumers, Corporate taxes, Efficient technology, Energy & Environment, Energy conservation, Global warming, Green buildings, Green jobs, Oil, Renewable fuels, Utilities NAY
H.R. 5140
Recovery Rebates and Economic Stimulus for the American People Act of 2008
TOPICS: Consumers, Corporate taxes, Economic stimulus, Mortgage lending, Tax cuts, Tax Fairness, Workplace & Job Creation YEA
H.R. 4137
College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2008
TOPICS: College tuition, Education, Energy conservation, Pell Grants, Student loans YEA
H.R. 3963
Children's Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act of 2007 [Revised bill]
TOPICS: Health Care, Medicaid, Sales taxes, SCHIP NAY
H.R. 3548
Plain Language in Government Communications Act of 2008
TOPICS: Drug safety, Government Accountability, Prescription drugs —N/A
—
H.R. 2642
Amendment to the Military Construction and Veterans Affairs and Related Agencies Appropriations Act of 2008 NAY
H.R. 1424
Paul Wellstone Mental Health and Addiction Equity Act of 2008
TOPICS: Employment discrimination, Health Care, Medical research NAY
H.R. 493
Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008
TOPICS: Civil Justice, Employment discrimination, Health Care, Job training YEA
2007
H.R. 4040
Consumer Product Safety Modernization Act of 2007
TOPICS: Capping damages, Consumers, Product liability YEA
H.R. 3996
Temporary Tax Relief Act of 2007
TOPICS: Alternative minimum tax, Child tax credit, College tuition, Corporate taxes, Income taxes, Mortgage lending, Pay-go, Tax cuts, Tax Fairness —N/A
—
H.R. 3688
United States-Peru Trade Promotion Agreement Implementation Act of 2007
TOPICS: Consumers, Food safety, Outsourcing, Trade agreement, Workplace & Job Creation YEA
H.R. 3580
FDA Amendments Act of 2007
TOPICS: Consumers, Corporate Accountability, Deceptive advertising and marketing, Drug safety, Food safety, Health Care, Prescription drugs YEA
H.R. 2895
Affordable Housing Trust Fund Act of 2007
TOPICS: Affordable Housing Trust Fund, Downpayment assistance, Housing, Mortgage lending NAY
H.R. 2831
Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2007
TOPICS: Civil Justice, Employment discrimination, Workplace & Job Creation NAY
H.R. 2669
College Cost Reduction Act of 2007
TOPICS: College tuition, Education, Pell Grants, Saving for college, Student loans NAY
H.R. 1429
Improving Head Start Act of 2007
TOPICS: Education, Head Start, Preschool YEA
H.R. 1362
Accountability in Contracting Act of 2007
TOPICS: Contracting, Government Accountability NAY
H.R. 1257
Shareholder Vote on Executive Compensation Act of 2007
TOPICS: Corporate Accountability, Executive compensation, Shareholder rights NAY
H.R. 976
Children's Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act of 2007
TOPICS: Health Care, Medicaid, Sales taxes, SCHIP NAY
H.R. 800
Employee Free Choice Act of 2007
TOPICS: Right to organize, Unions, Workplace & Job Creation NAY
H.R. 6
CLEAN Energy Act of 2007
TOPICS: Corporate taxes, Efficient technology, Energy & Environment, Global warming, Green buildings, Oil, Renewable fuels NAY
H.R. 6
Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007
TOPICS: Coal, Consumers, Corporate taxes, Efficient technology, Energy & Environment, Energy conservation, Global warming, Green buildings, Green jobs, Heating fuel, Job training, Oil, Pollution, Renewable fuels, Tax cuts, Utilities NAY
H.R. 4
Medicare Prescription Drug Price Negotiation Act of 2007
TOPICS: Health Care, HMOs and insurance companies, Medicare, Prescription drugs NAY
H.R. 2
Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007
TOPICS: Minimum wage, Workplace & Job Creation YEA
2005
H.RES. 653
Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 (House vote)
TOPICS: Medicaid, Medicare, Pension plans, Student loans, TANF YEA
H.R. 4437
Border Protection, Antiterrorism, And Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005
TOPICS: Border enforcement, Employer sanctions, Identification cards, Immigration, Mass deportation YEA
H.R. 3045
Dominican Republic-Central America-United States Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act of 2005
TOPICS: Outsourcing, Trade agreement, Workplace & Job Creation YEA
H.R. 6
Energy Policy Act of 2005
TOPICS: Coal, Corporate taxes, Efficient technology, Energy & Environment, Energy conservation, Global warming, Natural gas, Oil, Pollution, Public infrastructure, Renewable fuels YEA
H.R. 8
Death Tax Repeal Permanency Act of 2005
TOPICS: Estate tax, Tax Fairness YEA
H.R. 525
Small Business Health Fairness Act of 2005
TOPICS: Association health plans, Health Care, HMOs and insurance companies YEA
S. 256
Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention And Consumer Protection Act Of 2005
TOPICS: Debt & Bankruptcy, Personal bankruptcy YEA
S. 5
Class Action Fairness Act of 2005
TOPICS: Civil Justice, Class action lawsuits, Corporate Accountability, Product liability YEA
http://themiddleclass.org/legislator/kenny-marchant-537
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
MegaVote for Texas' 24th Congressional District
May 27, 2008
In this MegaVote for Texas' 24th Congressional District:
Recent Congressional Votes -
Senate: Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2008
Senate: Overriding the Veto of the Food and Energy Security Act of 2007
House: Gas Price Relief for Consumers Act
House: Renewable Energy and Job Creation Act
House: Overriding the Veto of the Farm, Nutrition, and Bioenergy Act
House: To provide for the continuation of Department of Agriculture programs through FY2012
House: Duncan Hunter National Defense Authorization Act for FY2009
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Editor's Note: The Senate and House are in recess until June 2.
Recent Senate Votes
Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2008 - Vote Agreed to (75-22, 3 Not Voting)
With this vote, the Senate attached more than $10 billion in domestic spending to the $165 billion supplemental spending bill funding military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison voted YES......S
Sen. John Cornyn voted NO......
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Overriding the Veto of the Food and Energy Security Act of 2007 - Vote Passed (82-13, 1 Present, 4 Not Voting)
The Senate voted to override the President’s veto of the farm bill, but a clerical error will require the vote to be taken again.
Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison voted YES......
Sen. John Cornyn voted YES......
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Recent House Votes
Gas Price Relief for Consumers Act - Vote Passed (324-84, 26 Not Voting)
The House passed a measure authorizing the Justice Department to pursue energy antitrust and price-fixing cases against members of the OPEC oil cartel.
Rep. Kenny Marchant voted NO......
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Renewable Energy and Job Creation Act - Vote Passed (263-160, 12 Not Voting)
The House passed this bill to extend temporary tax provisions that expired at the end of 2007.
Rep. Kenny Marchant voted NO......
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Overriding the Veto of the Farm, Nutrition, and Bioenergy Act - Vote Passed (316-108, 11 Not Voting)
The House voted to override the President’s veto of the farm bill, but a clerical error required that the House vote on the bill again.
Rep. Kenny Marchant voted NO......
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To provide for the continuation of Department of Agriculture programs through FY2012 - Vote Passed (306-110, 19 Not Voting)
The House voted to suspend the rules and again pass the farm bill, after a clerical error invalidated a previous vote, the President’s veto, and a veto override.
Rep. Kenny Marchant voted NO......
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Duncan Hunter National Defense Authorization Act for FY2009 - Vote Passed (384-23, 27 Not Voting)
The House authorized $600 billion in defense appropriations for fiscal year 2009.
Rep. Kenny Marchant voted Not Voting......
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
megavote@mailmanager.net
MegaVote
c/o Capitol Advantage
2751 Prosperity Ave
Suite 600
Fairfax, VA 22031
MegaVote is powered by Capitol Advantage © 2008
In this MegaVote for Texas' 24th Congressional District:
Recent Congressional Votes -
Senate: Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2008
Senate: Overriding the Veto of the Food and Energy Security Act of 2007
House: Gas Price Relief for Consumers Act
House: Renewable Energy and Job Creation Act
House: Overriding the Veto of the Farm, Nutrition, and Bioenergy Act
House: To provide for the continuation of Department of Agriculture programs through FY2012
House: Duncan Hunter National Defense Authorization Act for FY2009
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Editor's Note: The Senate and House are in recess until June 2.
Recent Senate Votes
Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2008 - Vote Agreed to (75-22, 3 Not Voting)
With this vote, the Senate attached more than $10 billion in domestic spending to the $165 billion supplemental spending bill funding military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison voted YES......S
Sen. John Cornyn voted NO......
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Overriding the Veto of the Food and Energy Security Act of 2007 - Vote Passed (82-13, 1 Present, 4 Not Voting)
The Senate voted to override the President’s veto of the farm bill, but a clerical error will require the vote to be taken again.
Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison voted YES......
Sen. John Cornyn voted YES......
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Recent House Votes
Gas Price Relief for Consumers Act - Vote Passed (324-84, 26 Not Voting)
The House passed a measure authorizing the Justice Department to pursue energy antitrust and price-fixing cases against members of the OPEC oil cartel.
Rep. Kenny Marchant voted NO......
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Renewable Energy and Job Creation Act - Vote Passed (263-160, 12 Not Voting)
The House passed this bill to extend temporary tax provisions that expired at the end of 2007.
Rep. Kenny Marchant voted NO......
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Overriding the Veto of the Farm, Nutrition, and Bioenergy Act - Vote Passed (316-108, 11 Not Voting)
The House voted to override the President’s veto of the farm bill, but a clerical error required that the House vote on the bill again.
Rep. Kenny Marchant voted NO......
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To provide for the continuation of Department of Agriculture programs through FY2012 - Vote Passed (306-110, 19 Not Voting)
The House voted to suspend the rules and again pass the farm bill, after a clerical error invalidated a previous vote, the President’s veto, and a veto override.
Rep. Kenny Marchant voted NO......
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Duncan Hunter National Defense Authorization Act for FY2009 - Vote Passed (384-23, 27 Not Voting)
The House authorized $600 billion in defense appropriations for fiscal year 2009.
Rep. Kenny Marchant voted Not Voting......
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
megavote@mailmanager.net
MegaVote
c/o Capitol Advantage
2751 Prosperity Ave
Suite 600
Fairfax, VA 22031
MegaVote is powered by Capitol Advantage © 2008
Monday, May 26, 2008
Bush and the G.I. Bill
An Editorial by The New York Times
President Bush opposes a new G.I. Bill of Rights. He worries that if the traditional path to college for service members since World War II is improved and expanded for the post-9/11 generation, too many people will take it.
He is wrong, but at least he is consistent. Having saddled the military with a botched, unwinnable war, having squandered soldiers’ lives and failed them in so many ways, the commander in chief now resists giving the troops a chance at better futures out of uniform. He does this on the ground that the bill is too generous and may discourage re-enlistment, further weakening the military he has done so much to break.
So lavish with other people’s sacrifices, so reckless in pouring the national treasure into the sandy pit of Iraq, Mr. Bush remains as cheap as ever when it comes to helping people at home.
Thankfully, the new G.I. Bill has strong bipartisan support in Congress. The House passed it by a veto-proof margin this month, and last week the Senate followed suit, approving it as part of a military financing bill for Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Senate version was drafted by two Vietnam veterans, Jim Webb, Democrat of Virginia, and Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska. They argue that benefits paid under the existing G.I. Bill have fallen far behind the rising costs of college.
Their bill would pay full tuition and other expenses at a four-year public university for veterans who served in the military for at least three years since 9/11.
At that level, the new G.I. Bill would be as generous as the one enacted for the veterans of World War II, which soon became known as one of the most successful benefits programs — one of the soundest investments in human potential — in the nation’s history.
Mr. Bush — and, to his great discredit, Senator John McCain — have argued against a better G.I. Bill, for the worst reasons. They would prefer that college benefits for service members remain just mediocre enough that people in uniform are more likely to stay put.
They have seized on a prediction by the Congressional Budget Office that new, better benefits would decrease re-enlistments by 16 percent, which sounds ominous if you are trying — as Mr. Bush and Mr. McCain are — to defend a never-ending war at a time when extended tours of duty have sapped morale and strained recruiting to the breaking point.
Their reasoning is flawed since the C.B.O. has also predicted that the bill would offset the re-enlistment decline by increasing new recruits — by 16 percent. The chance of a real shot at a college education turns out to be as strong a lure as ever. This is good news for our punishingly overburdened volunteer army, which needs all the smart, ambitious strivers it can get.
This page strongly supports a larger, sturdier military. It opposes throwing ever more money at the Pentagon for defense programs that are wasteful and poorly conceived. But as a long-term investment in human capital, in education and job training, there is no good argument against an expanded, generous G.I. Bill.
By threatening to veto it, Mr. Bush is showing great consistency of misjudgment. Congress should forcefully show how wrong he is by overriding his opposition and spending the money — an estimated $52 billion over 10 years, a tiniest fraction of the ongoing cost of Mr. Bush’s Iraq misadventure.
As partial repayment for the sacrifice of soldiers in a time of war, a new, improved G.I. Bill is as wise now as it was in 1944.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/26/opinion/26mon1.html?em&ex=1211947200&en=7296d1e3bdb1231c&ei=5070
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
President Bush opposes a new G.I. Bill of Rights. He worries that if the traditional path to college for service members since World War II is improved and expanded for the post-9/11 generation, too many people will take it.
He is wrong, but at least he is consistent. Having saddled the military with a botched, unwinnable war, having squandered soldiers’ lives and failed them in so many ways, the commander in chief now resists giving the troops a chance at better futures out of uniform. He does this on the ground that the bill is too generous and may discourage re-enlistment, further weakening the military he has done so much to break.
So lavish with other people’s sacrifices, so reckless in pouring the national treasure into the sandy pit of Iraq, Mr. Bush remains as cheap as ever when it comes to helping people at home.
Thankfully, the new G.I. Bill has strong bipartisan support in Congress. The House passed it by a veto-proof margin this month, and last week the Senate followed suit, approving it as part of a military financing bill for Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Senate version was drafted by two Vietnam veterans, Jim Webb, Democrat of Virginia, and Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska. They argue that benefits paid under the existing G.I. Bill have fallen far behind the rising costs of college.
Their bill would pay full tuition and other expenses at a four-year public university for veterans who served in the military for at least three years since 9/11.
At that level, the new G.I. Bill would be as generous as the one enacted for the veterans of World War II, which soon became known as one of the most successful benefits programs — one of the soundest investments in human potential — in the nation’s history.
Mr. Bush — and, to his great discredit, Senator John McCain — have argued against a better G.I. Bill, for the worst reasons. They would prefer that college benefits for service members remain just mediocre enough that people in uniform are more likely to stay put.
They have seized on a prediction by the Congressional Budget Office that new, better benefits would decrease re-enlistments by 16 percent, which sounds ominous if you are trying — as Mr. Bush and Mr. McCain are — to defend a never-ending war at a time when extended tours of duty have sapped morale and strained recruiting to the breaking point.
Their reasoning is flawed since the C.B.O. has also predicted that the bill would offset the re-enlistment decline by increasing new recruits — by 16 percent. The chance of a real shot at a college education turns out to be as strong a lure as ever. This is good news for our punishingly overburdened volunteer army, which needs all the smart, ambitious strivers it can get.
This page strongly supports a larger, sturdier military. It opposes throwing ever more money at the Pentagon for defense programs that are wasteful and poorly conceived. But as a long-term investment in human capital, in education and job training, there is no good argument against an expanded, generous G.I. Bill.
By threatening to veto it, Mr. Bush is showing great consistency of misjudgment. Congress should forcefully show how wrong he is by overriding his opposition and spending the money — an estimated $52 billion over 10 years, a tiniest fraction of the ongoing cost of Mr. Bush’s Iraq misadventure.
As partial repayment for the sacrifice of soldiers in a time of war, a new, improved G.I. Bill is as wise now as it was in 1944.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/26/opinion/26mon1.html?em&ex=1211947200&en=7296d1e3bdb1231c&ei=5070
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
Lets Link the Metroplex
The high prices of gasoline and its impact on food costs and the economic problems in the credit and housing sector have led to increasing ridership on the public and mass transportation systems. Many travelers are pondering what to do this vacation season and with a weary eye toward the pocketbook; yet, they still wish an entertainment value for their dollars. Added to this mix are cries to increase mass transit systems in areas that have not had them before as more efficient delivery of people to areas they wish to visit.
I agree with the sentiment that we need to get mass transportation covering the Metroplex going. It is totally wrong not to have a way to link Dallas-Fort Worth to all tourist attractions in between. This would prevent gridlock and expand an Entertainment Zone where tickets could be offered as vacation packages along with the transportation to get there and avoid traffic gridlock. Instead of being stuck in traffic, one could dine out a restaurant or stay longer. Grand Prairie and Arlington now have multiple theme entertainment areas such as Arlington's Cowboy Stadium, Six Flags (both rides and water park), and the Rangers. Grand Prairie offers Lone Star Park, the AirHogs, and Nokia Theater with Traders Village also in the mix. By combining Dallas and Fort Worth's attractions like Fair Park, the Cotton Bowl, the Museums, The Stockyards, The State Fair, the Arts Centers, Myerson and Bass Halls, and Skylink no one in this state and very few locations in the country could approach the value and diversity of The Metroplex.
In this era of costly gasoline prices, the old Greyhound slogan of relax and leave the driving to us could be retooled and bring in major tourist dollars to the entire region. If fact this could open new opportunities for major hotel complexes, employment, and construction. There are many proposals on how to achieve this and light rail and monorail maglev* technology needs to be added to this mix.
What we need is a Master Plan to serve the entire area of The Metroplex and incorporate all existing components within its scope and development.
We need nothing less on a national scale of the Manhattan Project to develop, implement, and create tax breaks to sustain a new green technology and bring it to all America. We should explore hydrogen, biodiesel cyanobacteria farming, solar, wind and geothermal energy as alternate sources to remove our dependence on carbon-based technology with its dwindling, increasing expensive costs, and environmentally negative impact.
And the most lasting result will be a real community that stretches from Garland to Texas Motor Speedway. Instead of separate geographic areas that shares a similar space.
Links and footnotes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maglev_train#Emsland.2C_Germany
NB. A maglev, or magnetically levitating train is a form of transportation that suspends, guides and propels vehicles (predominantly trains) using electromagnetic force. This method has the potential to be fast and quiet when compared to wheeled mass transit systems, potentially reaching velocities comparable to turboprop and jet aircraft (900 km/h, 600 mph). The highest recorded speed of a maglev train is 581 km/h (361 mph), achieved in Japan in 2003, 6 km/h higher than the conventional TGV speed record.
• Existing maglev systems
o 8.1 Emsland, Germany
o 8.2 JR-Maglev, Japan
o 8.3 Linimo (Tobu Kyuryo Line, Japan)
o 8.4 FTA's UMTD program
o 8.5 Southwest Jiaotong University, China
o 8.6 Shanghai Maglev Train
http://www.unimodal.net/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_car
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanobacteria
http://tomlovetexas.blogspot.com/2008/05/ut-scientists-discover-key-to-alternate_24.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_energy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_for_the_Study_of_Peak_Oil_and_Gas
http://www.fortworth.com/
http://www.thedallaspage.com/
http://www.tourtexas.com/grandprairie/
http://www.tourtexas.com/arlington/index.html
http://www.tourtexas.com/irving/index.html
I agree with the sentiment that we need to get mass transportation covering the Metroplex going. It is totally wrong not to have a way to link Dallas-Fort Worth to all tourist attractions in between. This would prevent gridlock and expand an Entertainment Zone where tickets could be offered as vacation packages along with the transportation to get there and avoid traffic gridlock. Instead of being stuck in traffic, one could dine out a restaurant or stay longer. Grand Prairie and Arlington now have multiple theme entertainment areas such as Arlington's Cowboy Stadium, Six Flags (both rides and water park), and the Rangers. Grand Prairie offers Lone Star Park, the AirHogs, and Nokia Theater with Traders Village also in the mix. By combining Dallas and Fort Worth's attractions like Fair Park, the Cotton Bowl, the Museums, The Stockyards, The State Fair, the Arts Centers, Myerson and Bass Halls, and Skylink no one in this state and very few locations in the country could approach the value and diversity of The Metroplex.
In this era of costly gasoline prices, the old Greyhound slogan of relax and leave the driving to us could be retooled and bring in major tourist dollars to the entire region. If fact this could open new opportunities for major hotel complexes, employment, and construction. There are many proposals on how to achieve this and light rail and monorail maglev* technology needs to be added to this mix.
What we need is a Master Plan to serve the entire area of The Metroplex and incorporate all existing components within its scope and development.
We need nothing less on a national scale of the Manhattan Project to develop, implement, and create tax breaks to sustain a new green technology and bring it to all America. We should explore hydrogen, biodiesel cyanobacteria farming, solar, wind and geothermal energy as alternate sources to remove our dependence on carbon-based technology with its dwindling, increasing expensive costs, and environmentally negative impact.
And the most lasting result will be a real community that stretches from Garland to Texas Motor Speedway. Instead of separate geographic areas that shares a similar space.
Links and footnotes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maglev_train#Emsland.2C_Germany
NB. A maglev, or magnetically levitating train is a form of transportation that suspends, guides and propels vehicles (predominantly trains) using electromagnetic force. This method has the potential to be fast and quiet when compared to wheeled mass transit systems, potentially reaching velocities comparable to turboprop and jet aircraft (900 km/h, 600 mph). The highest recorded speed of a maglev train is 581 km/h (361 mph), achieved in Japan in 2003, 6 km/h higher than the conventional TGV speed record.
• Existing maglev systems
o 8.1 Emsland, Germany
o 8.2 JR-Maglev, Japan
o 8.3 Linimo (Tobu Kyuryo Line, Japan)
o 8.4 FTA's UMTD program
o 8.5 Southwest Jiaotong University, China
o 8.6 Shanghai Maglev Train
http://www.unimodal.net/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_car
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanobacteria
http://tomlovetexas.blogspot.com/2008/05/ut-scientists-discover-key-to-alternate_24.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_energy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_for_the_Study_of_Peak_Oil_and_Gas
http://www.fortworth.com/
http://www.thedallaspage.com/
http://www.tourtexas.com/grandprairie/
http://www.tourtexas.com/arlington/index.html
http://www.tourtexas.com/irving/index.html
Saturday, May 24, 2008
Cornyn: Support The Troops
Yesterday, the Senate voted 75-22 in favor of the bipartisan New GI Bill, to cover full in-state tuition at public universities for veterans. This is fantastic news for our men and women in uniform, whose service should be honored with the education benefits they were promised.
Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison voted for the bill. Unfortunately, our junior Senator from Texas, John Cornyn, was one of just 22 Senators to oppose the New GI Bill that passed the House of Representatives and the Senate, and is supported by most leading veterans organizations.
But that's not all. George Bush has threatened to veto the bill, and yesterday Cornyn signaled his support for a veto that would block expanded benefits for veterans.
Senator Cornyn's vote is an insult to our troops who have sacrificed so much to serve our country. Click here to sign our petition. Urge Cornyn to override President Bush's veto now!
Supporting our troops is about more than photo opportunities and speeches. Our brave men and women give their all on the battlefield and they deserve our full support when they return home. We have an obligation to our veterans to ensure that they receive the same sort of education benefits that their grandparents received after World War II. As a Texas State Representative, I have fought for our veterans and I will continue to fight to make sure our troops and veterans get the support they deserve in the U.S. Senate.
We're so close to passing the New GI Bill into law, and Texas needs two U.S. Senators to vote the right way. Cornyn still has a chance to do the right thing -- provide our veterans with the tools they need to succeed in civilian life after serving our nation.
Join me and sign our petition. Tell John Cornyn to override President Bush's veto now!
Sincerely,
Rick Noriega
Democrat for U.S. Senate
http://ga6.org/campaign/supportthetroops/id76n5drf773b8dw?
Disclaimer: Rick Noriega is a member of the Army National Guard. Use of his military rank, job titles, and photographs in uniform does not imply endorsement by the Department of the Army or the Department of Defense.
Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison voted for the bill. Unfortunately, our junior Senator from Texas, John Cornyn, was one of just 22 Senators to oppose the New GI Bill that passed the House of Representatives and the Senate, and is supported by most leading veterans organizations.
But that's not all. George Bush has threatened to veto the bill, and yesterday Cornyn signaled his support for a veto that would block expanded benefits for veterans.
Senator Cornyn's vote is an insult to our troops who have sacrificed so much to serve our country. Click here to sign our petition. Urge Cornyn to override President Bush's veto now!
Supporting our troops is about more than photo opportunities and speeches. Our brave men and women give their all on the battlefield and they deserve our full support when they return home. We have an obligation to our veterans to ensure that they receive the same sort of education benefits that their grandparents received after World War II. As a Texas State Representative, I have fought for our veterans and I will continue to fight to make sure our troops and veterans get the support they deserve in the U.S. Senate.
We're so close to passing the New GI Bill into law, and Texas needs two U.S. Senators to vote the right way. Cornyn still has a chance to do the right thing -- provide our veterans with the tools they need to succeed in civilian life after serving our nation.
Join me and sign our petition. Tell John Cornyn to override President Bush's veto now!
Sincerely,
Rick Noriega
Democrat for U.S. Senate
http://ga6.org/campaign/supportthetroops/id76n5drf773b8dw?
Disclaimer: Rick Noriega is a member of the Army National Guard. Use of his military rank, job titles, and photographs in uniform does not imply endorsement by the Department of the Army or the Department of Defense.
McCain Finally Rejects Hagee Endorsement
posted by John Nichols on 05/22/2008 @ 4:46pm
The news that the Rev. John Hagee, one of John McCain's most prominent backers, once suggested that Hitler and the Holocaust were God's will has finally caused the candidate and his controversial backer to part company.
The Huffington Post report that Hagee had suggested that the Nazis implemented God's will as part of a grand scheme to drive Jews from Europe to Palestine -- "Because," in Hagee's words, "God said my top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel" -- blew up on McCain Thursday.
And McCain blew up his relationship with Hagee.
Changing his tune after months of saying that "very honored" to have the powerful televangelist's backing, the candidate is now refusing that support.
After refusing to reject the pastor's endorsement even after Hagee's anti-Catholic, anti-Muslim and anti-gay sentiments had been revealed, the Arizona senator released an email statement that read, "Obviously, I find these remarks and others deeply offensive and indefensible, and I repudiate them. I did not know of them before Reverend Hagee's endorsement, and I feel I must reject his endorsement as well."
The candidate's rejection of his evangelical supporter's endorsement came after the Interfaith Alliance, a religious group claiming nearly 200,000 members, released a statement suggesting that, "Senator McCain needs to tell the American people that he refutes these absurd and offensive comments that breed hate and send the wrong signal about America to the international community. There is no place in public discourse for religious or political leaders to espouse this narrow-minded thinking and hatred."
Around the same time that McCain rejected Hagee's endorsement, Hagee withdrew it.
"Ever since I endorsed John McCain for president, people seeking to attack Senator McCain have combed my records for statements they can use for political gain. They have had no qualms about grossly misrepresenting my position on issues most near and dear to my heart if it serves their political ambitions," said Hagee in a statement released Thursday afternoon. "I am tired of these baseless attacks and fear that they have become a distraction in what should be a national debate about important issues. I have therefore decided to withdraw my endorsement of Senator McCain for President effective today, and to remove myself from any active role in the 2008 campaign.
The pastor concluded, "I hope that the Senator McCain will accept this withdrawal so that he may focus on the issues that are most important to America and the world."
That won't be a problem.
McCain needs to put distance between himself and Hagee.
But how distant are they?
Hagee did not suggest that the candidate had said or done anything to offend him. The preacher objected to being a "distraction," not to John McCain.
Presumably, despite the withdrawal of his formal endorsement, Hagee still supports McCain as the candidate most in line with his religious and political views.
This, ultimately, is what should trouble Americans most about the McCain-Hagee connection.
The relationship between the pastor and his candidate may have changed, at least formally. But the inclinations that brought them together in an unsettling linkage of politics and religion have not changed.
Comments
Important questions still to be asked are:
Why did McCain actively seek his, and Parsley's endorsements?
Why did he wait so long to reject Hagee's?
Why has he not rejected Parsley's?
Why do these people have "any active role in the 2008 campaign"? Are there apocalyptic views representative of his own, vis a vis, Mideast policy?
Posted by jmusolino at 05/22/2008
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/campaignmatters/322911/print
The news that the Rev. John Hagee, one of John McCain's most prominent backers, once suggested that Hitler and the Holocaust were God's will has finally caused the candidate and his controversial backer to part company.
The Huffington Post report that Hagee had suggested that the Nazis implemented God's will as part of a grand scheme to drive Jews from Europe to Palestine -- "Because," in Hagee's words, "God said my top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel" -- blew up on McCain Thursday.
And McCain blew up his relationship with Hagee.
Changing his tune after months of saying that "very honored" to have the powerful televangelist's backing, the candidate is now refusing that support.
After refusing to reject the pastor's endorsement even after Hagee's anti-Catholic, anti-Muslim and anti-gay sentiments had been revealed, the Arizona senator released an email statement that read, "Obviously, I find these remarks and others deeply offensive and indefensible, and I repudiate them. I did not know of them before Reverend Hagee's endorsement, and I feel I must reject his endorsement as well."
The candidate's rejection of his evangelical supporter's endorsement came after the Interfaith Alliance, a religious group claiming nearly 200,000 members, released a statement suggesting that, "Senator McCain needs to tell the American people that he refutes these absurd and offensive comments that breed hate and send the wrong signal about America to the international community. There is no place in public discourse for religious or political leaders to espouse this narrow-minded thinking and hatred."
Around the same time that McCain rejected Hagee's endorsement, Hagee withdrew it.
"Ever since I endorsed John McCain for president, people seeking to attack Senator McCain have combed my records for statements they can use for political gain. They have had no qualms about grossly misrepresenting my position on issues most near and dear to my heart if it serves their political ambitions," said Hagee in a statement released Thursday afternoon. "I am tired of these baseless attacks and fear that they have become a distraction in what should be a national debate about important issues. I have therefore decided to withdraw my endorsement of Senator McCain for President effective today, and to remove myself from any active role in the 2008 campaign.
The pastor concluded, "I hope that the Senator McCain will accept this withdrawal so that he may focus on the issues that are most important to America and the world."
That won't be a problem.
McCain needs to put distance between himself and Hagee.
But how distant are they?
Hagee did not suggest that the candidate had said or done anything to offend him. The preacher objected to being a "distraction," not to John McCain.
Presumably, despite the withdrawal of his formal endorsement, Hagee still supports McCain as the candidate most in line with his religious and political views.
This, ultimately, is what should trouble Americans most about the McCain-Hagee connection.
The relationship between the pastor and his candidate may have changed, at least formally. But the inclinations that brought them together in an unsettling linkage of politics and religion have not changed.
Comments
Important questions still to be asked are:
Why did McCain actively seek his, and Parsley's endorsements?
Why did he wait so long to reject Hagee's?
Why has he not rejected Parsley's?
Why do these people have "any active role in the 2008 campaign"? Are there apocalyptic views representative of his own, vis a vis, Mideast policy?
Posted by jmusolino at 05/22/2008
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/campaignmatters/322911/print
UT scientists discover key to an alternate fuel source
Cyanobacteria could replace current crops for ethanol farming
By: Lauren Winchester
Posted: 4/30/08
UT researchers have developed a way to make the production of ethanol more sustainable, less expensive and less laborious.
The University scientists discovered how to use photosynthetic organisms, known as cyanobacteria, to make ethanol, which is a type of alternative fuel.
Ethanol is made by fermenting sugars, such as glucose or sucrose. Most ethanol comes from corn starch, but other sources for the alternative fuel are wood, switchgrass and sugarcane.
Corn-based ethanol has caused problems regarding the overuse of agricultural land and rising crop prices, while extracting sugars from other sources is labor-intensive and costly. The production of sugarcane has also caused a depletion of Brazil's rainforests, said David Nobles Jr., a molecular genetics and microbiology research associate.
The cyanobacteria that the researchers have studied produce cellulose, glucose and sucrose using the energy of the sun. The sugars can be extracted from the
bacteria relatively easily and inexpensively. The cyanobacteria can also grow in deserts using salt water and thus would not take up agricultural land, the researchers said.
"Some cyanobacteria makes sugar directly," said R. Malcom Brown Jr., a molecular genetics and microbiology professor. "Why in the world would we use sugarcane when we can grow sugar in the desert?"
Cyanobacteria are a photosynthetic bacteria, which means they get energy from the sun and use the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to convert it into organic components. On a large scale, the researchers said this could help reduce global warming.
"Cyanobacteria have been around for some 3.5 billion years and are responsible for all of the oxygen in the atmosphere," Nobles said. "Cyanobacteria changed the Earth once, and we're looking to make it change the Earth again."
The researchers said it would take about 820,000 square miles of land to produce all of the corn-based ethanol needed to fuel U.S. transportation. They hope the cyanobacteria will replace the ethanol from corn, wood, switchgrass and
sugarcane.
"Using food crops is going to stop at some point," Nobles said. "I think we will discontinue using food crops five to 10 years down the road."
The researchers would like to create an energy farm to grow the cyanobacteria on about 5,000 square miles of land in either West Texas, Nevada or Utah, which would sustain the U.S. need for transportation fuel.
Brown said he would love to see an undertaking similar to the scale of the Manhattan Project in the 1940s that would employ millions of Americans to start up the energy farms to produce ethanol.
"It would be a fantastic project," Brown said. "After Kennedy sent a man to the moon, U.S. high school kids became future engineers. We need a revitalization of that for the biofuels area."
Brown said the green revolution started in the U.S. and that the energy revolution will start in the U.S. as well.
"We have a unique opportunity here," he said. "We need to help make it go forward."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
© Copyright 2008 The Daily Texan
http://www.dailytexanonline.com/home/index.cfm?event=displayArticlePrinterFriendly&uStory_id=fd1faf66-7c50-4a1c-8c48-bea43f904e84
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Researchers Malcolm Brown and David Nobles show off a flask of cyanobacteria in a liquid culture in the growing room Tuesday. The UT professors have developed a way for cyanobacteria to be used to produce ethanol.
By: Lauren Winchester
Posted: 4/30/08
UT researchers have developed a way to make the production of ethanol more sustainable, less expensive and less laborious.
The University scientists discovered how to use photosynthetic organisms, known as cyanobacteria, to make ethanol, which is a type of alternative fuel.
Ethanol is made by fermenting sugars, such as glucose or sucrose. Most ethanol comes from corn starch, but other sources for the alternative fuel are wood, switchgrass and sugarcane.
Corn-based ethanol has caused problems regarding the overuse of agricultural land and rising crop prices, while extracting sugars from other sources is labor-intensive and costly. The production of sugarcane has also caused a depletion of Brazil's rainforests, said David Nobles Jr., a molecular genetics and microbiology research associate.
The cyanobacteria that the researchers have studied produce cellulose, glucose and sucrose using the energy of the sun. The sugars can be extracted from the
bacteria relatively easily and inexpensively. The cyanobacteria can also grow in deserts using salt water and thus would not take up agricultural land, the researchers said.
"Some cyanobacteria makes sugar directly," said R. Malcom Brown Jr., a molecular genetics and microbiology professor. "Why in the world would we use sugarcane when we can grow sugar in the desert?"
Cyanobacteria are a photosynthetic bacteria, which means they get energy from the sun and use the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to convert it into organic components. On a large scale, the researchers said this could help reduce global warming.
"Cyanobacteria have been around for some 3.5 billion years and are responsible for all of the oxygen in the atmosphere," Nobles said. "Cyanobacteria changed the Earth once, and we're looking to make it change the Earth again."
The researchers said it would take about 820,000 square miles of land to produce all of the corn-based ethanol needed to fuel U.S. transportation. They hope the cyanobacteria will replace the ethanol from corn, wood, switchgrass and
sugarcane.
"Using food crops is going to stop at some point," Nobles said. "I think we will discontinue using food crops five to 10 years down the road."
The researchers would like to create an energy farm to grow the cyanobacteria on about 5,000 square miles of land in either West Texas, Nevada or Utah, which would sustain the U.S. need for transportation fuel.
Brown said he would love to see an undertaking similar to the scale of the Manhattan Project in the 1940s that would employ millions of Americans to start up the energy farms to produce ethanol.
"It would be a fantastic project," Brown said. "After Kennedy sent a man to the moon, U.S. high school kids became future engineers. We need a revitalization of that for the biofuels area."
Brown said the green revolution started in the U.S. and that the energy revolution will start in the U.S. as well.
"We have a unique opportunity here," he said. "We need to help make it go forward."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
© Copyright 2008 The Daily Texan
http://www.dailytexanonline.com/home/index.cfm?event=displayArticlePrinterFriendly&uStory_id=fd1faf66-7c50-4a1c-8c48-bea43f904e84
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Researchers Malcolm Brown and David Nobles show off a flask of cyanobacteria in a liquid culture in the growing room Tuesday. The UT professors have developed a way for cyanobacteria to be used to produce ethanol.
Thursday, May 22, 2008
Ethanol From Switch Grass Deemed Feasible
Large-scale study indicates production from farmed prairie grass can surpass energy, environmental, and economic hurdles
Stephen K. Ritter
Switch grass can produce more than enough cellulosic ethanol on a per-acre basis to offset the amount of energy needed to grow and convert the perennial prairie grass into biofuel, according to the first switch grass modeling study based on large-scale field-trial data (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 2008, 105, 464). The study provides a clearer picture of the potential of switch grass as a biofuel feedstock that can be grown on marginal cropland, the researchers say, where it can provide environmental benefits in addition to energy. What's more, its use will help prevent corn and other food crops from being diverted into fuel making.
One key concern in converting the cellulose in switch grass, corn, and other crops to ethanol is the net energy value of the conversion. Previous feasibility studies have hinted at switch grass's potential, but they have been limited because they were based on small research plots, simulated biomass yields, and estimated farming and processing energy inputs.
Kenneth P. Vogel of the Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service office at the University of Nebraska and coworkers now report having collected data over a five-year period from 10 farm sites in Nebraska and North and South Dakota. Farmers grew switch grass in fields up to 23 acres in size, tracking how much diesel fuel, seed, fertilizer, and pesticides they used, as well as the dry weight of switch grass harvested each year.
The researchers used the data to calculate the "embodied energy" of each of the inputs that contribute to the total energy cost of producing ethanol. As part of the calculations, they included energy costs of farm labor as well as ethanol product packaging and transportation costs.
The analyzed fields produced on average the biomass equivalent of 320 gal of ethanol per acre, a number the researchers estimated by using a reference conversion factor of 0.38 L of ethanol per kg of switch grass. Cellulosic ethanol will likely be produced by acid hydrolysis or steam separation of the cellulose, followed by additional enzymatic degradation to sugars and then fermentation of the sugars into ethanol. Several cellulosic ethanol pilot plants are currently operating, but the first commercial-scale cellulosic ethanol plant is not expected to start running until late 2009 (C&EN, Feb. 19, 2007
The switch grass grown as a bioenergy crop produced 540% more renewable energy than the nonrenewable energy needed to produce it and convert it to ethanol, the researchers state. The study showed that switch grass ethanol production and use has the environmental benefits of near-zero net greenhouse gas emissions and aids soil conservation relative to typical agricultural crops. And compared with corn, "switch grass managed as a bioenergy crop in these field trials had estimated ethanol yields similar to those for corn grain grown in the same states in the same years," the researchers write. Advances in plant genetics and agricultural practices "may further enhance energy sustainability and biofuel yields of switch grass," they add.
The large amount of actual field data presented for switch grass production systems is a real advance, comments Michigan State University's Bruce E. Dale, a biomass conversion expert. "The study is a carefully done and carefully reported piece of work," Dale says. "It is valuable because the various efficiency metrics are well-defined and the underlying data are disaggregated in such a way as to allow someone to check or compare the data with other assumptions and studies."
But the science of biofuel conversion still has a long way to go, counters Cornell University's David Pimentel, a biofuels expert who believes biofuels' economic and environmental costs outweigh their potential benefits. Pimentel has several concerns about the validity of the Nebraska study's conclusions because the researchers make some assumptions that are not yet verified in practice, such as the conversion rate of switch grass to ethanol, he says.
There's no easy solution to meeting future energy needs, Pimentel adds. Scientists need to investigate all potential renewable energy technologies and not assume that cellulosic biomass is the only answer, because it realistically can supply only a small fraction of total fuel demand, he says. "A truly thorough examination of biomass and its environmental relationship to water, land, and solar energy is still needed."
Dale and Pimentel squared off in a C&EN Point-Counterpoint feature on the costs of biofuels last month (C&EN, Dec. 17, 2007, page 12). Although they don't see eye to eye on the practicality or benefits of biomass conversion to ethanol, they do agree that the type of detailed study by Vogel and coworkers is needed to advance cellulosic biomass conversion research.
pubs.acs.org/cen/news/86/i02/8602news3.html
Switch Grass: Fuel for the Future?
NPR has a good, quick introduction to switch grass, which snuck its way into this week's State of the Union address as an example of a new energy technology available to help replace oil imports. Thus far, it has been far enough under the radar that TreeHugger hasn't covered it; so what is it, and how does it work? David Bransby, a Professor of Energy Crops at Auburn University, enlighted us. Here are the highlights: it grows eight or nine feet tall, native to the US. Generally, it's very hearty and will grow in nearly any climatic variation, from the Gulf Coast into Canada. As a crop, it has a very high yield per acre (five to tens tons) with little use of pesticides, and a low production cost, which are two keys for economical production of alternative fuels. Switch grass can net up to 100 gallons of ethanol per ton, which is more efficient than corn, it's better-known counterpart, and switch grass also uses the whole plant for making fuel, whereas corn uses just the grain. Sounds almost too good to be true, but we like what we're hearing so far. More details to be had by listening here. via ::NPR
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/02/switch_grass_fu.php
Stephen K. Ritter
Switch grass can produce more than enough cellulosic ethanol on a per-acre basis to offset the amount of energy needed to grow and convert the perennial prairie grass into biofuel, according to the first switch grass modeling study based on large-scale field-trial data (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 2008, 105, 464). The study provides a clearer picture of the potential of switch grass as a biofuel feedstock that can be grown on marginal cropland, the researchers say, where it can provide environmental benefits in addition to energy. What's more, its use will help prevent corn and other food crops from being diverted into fuel making.
One key concern in converting the cellulose in switch grass, corn, and other crops to ethanol is the net energy value of the conversion. Previous feasibility studies have hinted at switch grass's potential, but they have been limited because they were based on small research plots, simulated biomass yields, and estimated farming and processing energy inputs.
Kenneth P. Vogel of the Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service office at the University of Nebraska and coworkers now report having collected data over a five-year period from 10 farm sites in Nebraska and North and South Dakota. Farmers grew switch grass in fields up to 23 acres in size, tracking how much diesel fuel, seed, fertilizer, and pesticides they used, as well as the dry weight of switch grass harvested each year.
The researchers used the data to calculate the "embodied energy" of each of the inputs that contribute to the total energy cost of producing ethanol. As part of the calculations, they included energy costs of farm labor as well as ethanol product packaging and transportation costs.
The analyzed fields produced on average the biomass equivalent of 320 gal of ethanol per acre, a number the researchers estimated by using a reference conversion factor of 0.38 L of ethanol per kg of switch grass. Cellulosic ethanol will likely be produced by acid hydrolysis or steam separation of the cellulose, followed by additional enzymatic degradation to sugars and then fermentation of the sugars into ethanol. Several cellulosic ethanol pilot plants are currently operating, but the first commercial-scale cellulosic ethanol plant is not expected to start running until late 2009 (C&EN, Feb. 19, 2007
The switch grass grown as a bioenergy crop produced 540% more renewable energy than the nonrenewable energy needed to produce it and convert it to ethanol, the researchers state. The study showed that switch grass ethanol production and use has the environmental benefits of near-zero net greenhouse gas emissions and aids soil conservation relative to typical agricultural crops. And compared with corn, "switch grass managed as a bioenergy crop in these field trials had estimated ethanol yields similar to those for corn grain grown in the same states in the same years," the researchers write. Advances in plant genetics and agricultural practices "may further enhance energy sustainability and biofuel yields of switch grass," they add.
The large amount of actual field data presented for switch grass production systems is a real advance, comments Michigan State University's Bruce E. Dale, a biomass conversion expert. "The study is a carefully done and carefully reported piece of work," Dale says. "It is valuable because the various efficiency metrics are well-defined and the underlying data are disaggregated in such a way as to allow someone to check or compare the data with other assumptions and studies."
But the science of biofuel conversion still has a long way to go, counters Cornell University's David Pimentel, a biofuels expert who believes biofuels' economic and environmental costs outweigh their potential benefits. Pimentel has several concerns about the validity of the Nebraska study's conclusions because the researchers make some assumptions that are not yet verified in practice, such as the conversion rate of switch grass to ethanol, he says.
There's no easy solution to meeting future energy needs, Pimentel adds. Scientists need to investigate all potential renewable energy technologies and not assume that cellulosic biomass is the only answer, because it realistically can supply only a small fraction of total fuel demand, he says. "A truly thorough examination of biomass and its environmental relationship to water, land, and solar energy is still needed."
Dale and Pimentel squared off in a C&EN Point-Counterpoint feature on the costs of biofuels last month (C&EN, Dec. 17, 2007, page 12). Although they don't see eye to eye on the practicality or benefits of biomass conversion to ethanol, they do agree that the type of detailed study by Vogel and coworkers is needed to advance cellulosic biomass conversion research.
pubs.acs.org/cen/news/86/i02/8602news3.html
Switch Grass: Fuel for the Future?
NPR has a good, quick introduction to switch grass, which snuck its way into this week's State of the Union address as an example of a new energy technology available to help replace oil imports. Thus far, it has been far enough under the radar that TreeHugger hasn't covered it; so what is it, and how does it work? David Bransby, a Professor of Energy Crops at Auburn University, enlighted us. Here are the highlights: it grows eight or nine feet tall, native to the US. Generally, it's very hearty and will grow in nearly any climatic variation, from the Gulf Coast into Canada. As a crop, it has a very high yield per acre (five to tens tons) with little use of pesticides, and a low production cost, which are two keys for economical production of alternative fuels. Switch grass can net up to 100 gallons of ethanol per ton, which is more efficient than corn, it's better-known counterpart, and switch grass also uses the whole plant for making fuel, whereas corn uses just the grain. Sounds almost too good to be true, but we like what we're hearing so far. More details to be had by listening here. via ::NPR
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/02/switch_grass_fu.php
Oil surpasses $135 a barrel on new supply concerns
By PABLO GORONDI, Associated Press Writer
25 minutes ago
Oil prices rose above $135 a barrel for the first time Thursday, with supply worries, global demand and an ever weakening U.S dollar driving crude futures up.
Also on Thursday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the world's top energy watchdog is preparing a sharp downward revision of its oil-supply forecast.
Light, sweet crude for July delivery rose as high as $135.09 before falling back. By the afternoon in Europe, the contract stood at $133.35 a barrel in electronic trade on the New York Mercantile Exchange, up 18 cents on Wednesday's close of $133.17.
That settlement price, up $4.19 on Tuesday's close, marked NYMEX crude's largest one-day price advance since March 26.
Meanwhile, July Brent crude on the ICE Futures exchange in London also reached a new record of $135.14 a barrel Thursday. It retreated to $132.68 by the afternoon in Europe, a loss of 2 cents on its Wednesday close.
"Simply put, this is a market you cannot afford to be short in," said U.S. analyst and trader Stephen Schork about Brent futures in his Schork Report.
With gas and oil prices setting new records nearly every day, analysts have begun to wonder what might stop prices from rising. There are technical signals in the futures market, including price differences between near-term and longer-term contracts, that crude may soon fall. But with demand for oil growing in the developing world, and little end in sight to supply problems in producing countries such as Nigeria, few analysts are willing to call an end to crude's rally.
"The sentiment in the market is very bullish at the moment," said David Moore, commodity strategist with the Commonwealth Bank of Australia in Sydney. "The U.S. dollar was weaker last night, and also the U.S. EIA report showed an unexpected decline in U.S. commercial crude oil inventories, so there's a combination of factors pushing the oil prices higher."
Crude prices breezed past $130 early Wednesday, then accelerated when the U.S. Energy Department's Energy Information Administration said U.S. crude inventories fell by more than 5 million barrels last week. Analysts had expected a modest increase.
Investment bank Goldman Sachs last week revised its oil price forecast for the second half of 2008 from $107 to $141 a barrel. But some analysts saw the new target becoming a reality much sooner.
"Futures are moving so fast that under the current volatility that goal could already be reached within the end of the week," said a report by Olivier Jakob of Petromatrix in Switzerland.
Some analysts say crude has been boosted in recent days by especially strong demand for diesel in China, where power plants in some areas are running desperately short of coal.
The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that the Paris-based International Energy Agency is in the middle of its first attempt to comprehensively assess the condition of the world's top 400 oil fields.
For years the IEA has predicted that supplies of crude and other liquid fuels will arc gently upward to keep pace with rising demand, topping 116 million barrels a day by 2030, up from around 87 million barrels a day currently.
The agency is now concerned that aging oil fields and diminished investment mean that companies could struggle to surpass 100 million barrels a day in production over the next two decades, the paper reported.
That view has been echoed by many analysts.
"The market is really structurally tight ... oil demand is not growing that fast but supply is constrained," said Victor Shum, an energy analyst with Purvin & Gertz in Singapore.
In the U.S. Energy Information Administration report, gasoline inventories also fell, which took the market by surprise. Inventories of distillates, which include heating oil and diesel fuel, rose less than analysts surveyed by Platts had expected.
While the dollar gained slightly against the euro and the Japanese yen from overnight levels, it fell against the British pound and showed a new downward momentum.
The 15-nation euro bought $1.5765 in morning European trading, down from $1.5780 in late New York trading Wednesday.
The British pound bought $1.9786, up from $1.9689 late Wednesday. The dollar declined to 103.25 Japanese yen from 104.17 yen.
Investors see hard commodities such as oil as a hedge against inflation and a weak dollar and pour into the crude futures market when the greenback falls. A weak dollar also makes oil less expensive to buyers dealing in other currencies.
Many investors believe the dollar's protracted decline over the past year has been the most significant factor behind oil's rise from about $66 a barrel a year ago.
In other Nymex trading, heating oil futures rose 9.80 cents to $4.0064 a gallon while gasoline prices added 2.85 cents to $3.4250 a gallon. Natural gas futures rose 7 cents to $11.710 per 1,000 cubic feet.
AP Business Writer Thomas Hogue in Bangkok, Thailand, contributed to this report.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080522/ap_on_bi_ge/oil_prices&printer=1;_ylt=AkvIqatNJOeM0S4K3rkvaptv24cA
Copyright © 2008 The Associated Press
25 minutes ago
Oil prices rose above $135 a barrel for the first time Thursday, with supply worries, global demand and an ever weakening U.S dollar driving crude futures up.
Also on Thursday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the world's top energy watchdog is preparing a sharp downward revision of its oil-supply forecast.
Light, sweet crude for July delivery rose as high as $135.09 before falling back. By the afternoon in Europe, the contract stood at $133.35 a barrel in electronic trade on the New York Mercantile Exchange, up 18 cents on Wednesday's close of $133.17.
That settlement price, up $4.19 on Tuesday's close, marked NYMEX crude's largest one-day price advance since March 26.
Meanwhile, July Brent crude on the ICE Futures exchange in London also reached a new record of $135.14 a barrel Thursday. It retreated to $132.68 by the afternoon in Europe, a loss of 2 cents on its Wednesday close.
"Simply put, this is a market you cannot afford to be short in," said U.S. analyst and trader Stephen Schork about Brent futures in his Schork Report.
With gas and oil prices setting new records nearly every day, analysts have begun to wonder what might stop prices from rising. There are technical signals in the futures market, including price differences between near-term and longer-term contracts, that crude may soon fall. But with demand for oil growing in the developing world, and little end in sight to supply problems in producing countries such as Nigeria, few analysts are willing to call an end to crude's rally.
"The sentiment in the market is very bullish at the moment," said David Moore, commodity strategist with the Commonwealth Bank of Australia in Sydney. "The U.S. dollar was weaker last night, and also the U.S. EIA report showed an unexpected decline in U.S. commercial crude oil inventories, so there's a combination of factors pushing the oil prices higher."
Crude prices breezed past $130 early Wednesday, then accelerated when the U.S. Energy Department's Energy Information Administration said U.S. crude inventories fell by more than 5 million barrels last week. Analysts had expected a modest increase.
Investment bank Goldman Sachs last week revised its oil price forecast for the second half of 2008 from $107 to $141 a barrel. But some analysts saw the new target becoming a reality much sooner.
"Futures are moving so fast that under the current volatility that goal could already be reached within the end of the week," said a report by Olivier Jakob of Petromatrix in Switzerland.
Some analysts say crude has been boosted in recent days by especially strong demand for diesel in China, where power plants in some areas are running desperately short of coal.
The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that the Paris-based International Energy Agency is in the middle of its first attempt to comprehensively assess the condition of the world's top 400 oil fields.
For years the IEA has predicted that supplies of crude and other liquid fuels will arc gently upward to keep pace with rising demand, topping 116 million barrels a day by 2030, up from around 87 million barrels a day currently.
The agency is now concerned that aging oil fields and diminished investment mean that companies could struggle to surpass 100 million barrels a day in production over the next two decades, the paper reported.
That view has been echoed by many analysts.
"The market is really structurally tight ... oil demand is not growing that fast but supply is constrained," said Victor Shum, an energy analyst with Purvin & Gertz in Singapore.
In the U.S. Energy Information Administration report, gasoline inventories also fell, which took the market by surprise. Inventories of distillates, which include heating oil and diesel fuel, rose less than analysts surveyed by Platts had expected.
While the dollar gained slightly against the euro and the Japanese yen from overnight levels, it fell against the British pound and showed a new downward momentum.
The 15-nation euro bought $1.5765 in morning European trading, down from $1.5780 in late New York trading Wednesday.
The British pound bought $1.9786, up from $1.9689 late Wednesday. The dollar declined to 103.25 Japanese yen from 104.17 yen.
Investors see hard commodities such as oil as a hedge against inflation and a weak dollar and pour into the crude futures market when the greenback falls. A weak dollar also makes oil less expensive to buyers dealing in other currencies.
Many investors believe the dollar's protracted decline over the past year has been the most significant factor behind oil's rise from about $66 a barrel a year ago.
In other Nymex trading, heating oil futures rose 9.80 cents to $4.0064 a gallon while gasoline prices added 2.85 cents to $3.4250 a gallon. Natural gas futures rose 7 cents to $11.710 per 1,000 cubic feet.
AP Business Writer Thomas Hogue in Bangkok, Thailand, contributed to this report.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080522/ap_on_bi_ge/oil_prices&printer=1;_ylt=AkvIqatNJOeM0S4K3rkvaptv24cA
Copyright © 2008 The Associated Press
Monday, May 19, 2008
The Case for Universal Healthcare
The current American health care system with its obscene profit incentives and increasingly impersonal nature undermines the essential point of all prior medical knowledge, namely an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. It gives essentially the promise of medical care without the substance of quality care. It is increased nurse patient ratios stretched by ever expanding workloads and less individualized attention to patient needs. It is the substitution of doctor's orders and prescriptions by cost care analysts and accountants not health care professionals.
While HMO's and insurance companies decided how much care and at what price working families lucky enough to afford its premiums are doled out, a vastly expanding number of as many as 47 million Americans have no coverage at all and there are 50 million more who are under insured and are plagued by chronic illnesses. This is almost one in three of all Americans who are affected by a broken healthcare system.
The economic downturn has increased the numbers of people without health insurance and also threatens millions of people who have insurance but find that the coverage is inadequate or that they cannot afford their rising medical costs. Many of the 160 million people covered by employer health insurance are struggling to meet medical expenses that are much higher than they used to be — often because of some combination of higher premiums, less extensive coverage, and bigger out-of-pocket deductibles and co-payments. With medical costs rising, the coverage many people have may not adequately protect them from the financial pain of an emergency room visit or a major surgery. For some, even routine doctor visits might now be postponed for basic expenses like food and gasoline.
Our American Quality of Life is a Right that must and should include access to affordable and quality health care. It should guarantee the respect and dignity for our disabled and aged as well as our children and lower our infant mortality, which has become one of the worst rates in the industrialized world. Health care for all should be one of the guarantees, rights, and responsibilities to all our citizens and based on special circumstances, not political slogans.
Compared with the residents of other countries, Americans pay much more for brand-name prescription drugs, less for generic and over-the-counter drugs, and roughly the same prices for biologics. I believe it would be beneficial to allow Medicare to negotiate with manufacturers for lower prescription drug prices and to allow cheaper drugs to be imported from abroad as long as they maintain standards of quality.
Less than half of all medical care in the United States is supported by good evidence that it works, according to estimates cited by the Congressional Budget Office.
If doctors had better information on which treatments work best for which patients, and whether the benefits were commensurate with the costs, needless treatment could be junked, the savings could be substantial, and patient care would surely improve. It could take a decade, or several, to conduct comparative-effectiveness studies, modify relevant laws, and change doctors’ behavior.
A classic experiment by Rand researchers from 1974 to 1982 found that people who had to pay almost all of their own medical bills spent 30 percent less on health care than those whose insurance covered all their costs, with little or no difference in health outcomes. The one exception was low-income people in poor health, which went without care they needed. Any cost-sharing scheme would have to protect those unable to bear the burden.
If the entire nation could bring its costs down to match the lower-spending regions of the US that are more cost efficient, the country could cut perhaps 20 to 30 percent off its health care bill, a tremendous saving. That would require changing the long- ingrained practices of the medical profession. Public and private insurers might need to revise coverage for high-cost care that adds little value.
The American health care system lags well behind other sectors of the economy — and behind foreign medical systems — in adopting computers, electronic health records and information-sharing technologies that can greatly boost productivity. There is little doubt that widespread computerization could greatly reduce the paperwork burden on doctors and hospitals, head off medication errors, and reduce the costly repetition of diagnostic tests as patients move from one doctor to another. Without an infusion of capital, the transition from paper records is not apt to happen very quickly.
In pockets of the United States, rural and urban, a confluence of market and medical forces has been widening the gap between the supply of primary care physicians and the demand for their services. Modest pay, medical school debt, an aging population and the prevalence of chronic disease have each played a role.
But there is little dispute that the general practice of medicine is under strain at a time when there is bipartisan consensus that better prevention and chronic disease management would not only improve health but also help control costs. With its population aging, the country will need 40 percent more primary care doctors by 2020, according to the American College of Physicians, which represents 125,000 internists, and the 94,000-member American Academy of Family Physicians. Community health centers, bolstered by increases in federal financing during the Bush years, are having particular difficulty finding doctors.
There have been slight increases in the number of doctors training in internal medicine, which focuses on the nonsurgical treatment of adults. But the share of those residents who then establish a general practice has plummeted, to 24 percent in 2006 from 54 percent in 1998, according to the American College of Physicians. While fewer American-trained doctors are pursuing primary care, foreign medical school graduates and osteopathic doctors are replacing them in droves. There also has been rapid growth in the ranks of physician assistants and nurse practitioners.
Numerous studies, in this country and others, have shown that primary care improves health and saves money by encouraging prevention and early diagnosis of chronic conditions like high blood pressure and diabetes. Presidential candidates in both parties stress its importance. Officials with several large health systems said their primary care practices often lose money, but generate revenue for their companies by referring patients to profit centers like surgery and laboratories.
There is a growing political consensus among Democrats that universal health care can be achieved by subsidizing coverage for low-income people, establishing new purchasing pools to help others buy affordable insurance, and requiring most businesses to offer health plans to their workers or pay a fee.
Most proposals contain these elements, as well as the option to buy into a public plan. There are striking difference is on whether to require everyone to get a policy or have a universal mandate. Backers say the lack of a mandate would doom any universal coverage system. Critics of the individual mandate say forcing people to obtain insurance is unfair and ineffective, but without one only the sick and those most likely to need care buy in, insurers would need to charge higher premiums. That, in turn, would make policies harder to afford and increase pressure on the government to further subsidize the plans, driving up the overall cost.
Governmental budgets will face the crisis even sooner. States are already complaining that they have to crimp other vital activities, like education, to meet soaring Medicaid costs. And federal spending on Medicare and Medicaid is surging upward at rates that will cause the deficit to soar. That means politicians will have to raise taxes, severely cut a wide range of other governmental programs, or chop back the health programs themselves.
We need only to revisit the recent tragedies at one of our major Universities to also explore the failure in the mental health sector. We have failure by a system beset with guidelines that require a direct emergency to provide and sustain help to many Americans. We also have failure by a system that turns away many Americans and allows insurance companies to cap lifetime benefits without regard to personal needs or safety.
We should hold as inviolate the relationship between a patient and their health care professional, 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 all need be an essential part of the free and just exercises of Life, Liberty, and The Pursuit of Happiness in any future America.
-Thomas P Love
While HMO's and insurance companies decided how much care and at what price working families lucky enough to afford its premiums are doled out, a vastly expanding number of as many as 47 million Americans have no coverage at all and there are 50 million more who are under insured and are plagued by chronic illnesses. This is almost one in three of all Americans who are affected by a broken healthcare system.
The economic downturn has increased the numbers of people without health insurance and also threatens millions of people who have insurance but find that the coverage is inadequate or that they cannot afford their rising medical costs. Many of the 160 million people covered by employer health insurance are struggling to meet medical expenses that are much higher than they used to be — often because of some combination of higher premiums, less extensive coverage, and bigger out-of-pocket deductibles and co-payments. With medical costs rising, the coverage many people have may not adequately protect them from the financial pain of an emergency room visit or a major surgery. For some, even routine doctor visits might now be postponed for basic expenses like food and gasoline.
Our American Quality of Life is a Right that must and should include access to affordable and quality health care. It should guarantee the respect and dignity for our disabled and aged as well as our children and lower our infant mortality, which has become one of the worst rates in the industrialized world. Health care for all should be one of the guarantees, rights, and responsibilities to all our citizens and based on special circumstances, not political slogans.
Compared with the residents of other countries, Americans pay much more for brand-name prescription drugs, less for generic and over-the-counter drugs, and roughly the same prices for biologics. I believe it would be beneficial to allow Medicare to negotiate with manufacturers for lower prescription drug prices and to allow cheaper drugs to be imported from abroad as long as they maintain standards of quality.
Less than half of all medical care in the United States is supported by good evidence that it works, according to estimates cited by the Congressional Budget Office.
If doctors had better information on which treatments work best for which patients, and whether the benefits were commensurate with the costs, needless treatment could be junked, the savings could be substantial, and patient care would surely improve. It could take a decade, or several, to conduct comparative-effectiveness studies, modify relevant laws, and change doctors’ behavior.
A classic experiment by Rand researchers from 1974 to 1982 found that people who had to pay almost all of their own medical bills spent 30 percent less on health care than those whose insurance covered all their costs, with little or no difference in health outcomes. The one exception was low-income people in poor health, which went without care they needed. Any cost-sharing scheme would have to protect those unable to bear the burden.
If the entire nation could bring its costs down to match the lower-spending regions of the US that are more cost efficient, the country could cut perhaps 20 to 30 percent off its health care bill, a tremendous saving. That would require changing the long- ingrained practices of the medical profession. Public and private insurers might need to revise coverage for high-cost care that adds little value.
The American health care system lags well behind other sectors of the economy — and behind foreign medical systems — in adopting computers, electronic health records and information-sharing technologies that can greatly boost productivity. There is little doubt that widespread computerization could greatly reduce the paperwork burden on doctors and hospitals, head off medication errors, and reduce the costly repetition of diagnostic tests as patients move from one doctor to another. Without an infusion of capital, the transition from paper records is not apt to happen very quickly.
In pockets of the United States, rural and urban, a confluence of market and medical forces has been widening the gap between the supply of primary care physicians and the demand for their services. Modest pay, medical school debt, an aging population and the prevalence of chronic disease have each played a role.
But there is little dispute that the general practice of medicine is under strain at a time when there is bipartisan consensus that better prevention and chronic disease management would not only improve health but also help control costs. With its population aging, the country will need 40 percent more primary care doctors by 2020, according to the American College of Physicians, which represents 125,000 internists, and the 94,000-member American Academy of Family Physicians. Community health centers, bolstered by increases in federal financing during the Bush years, are having particular difficulty finding doctors.
There have been slight increases in the number of doctors training in internal medicine, which focuses on the nonsurgical treatment of adults. But the share of those residents who then establish a general practice has plummeted, to 24 percent in 2006 from 54 percent in 1998, according to the American College of Physicians. While fewer American-trained doctors are pursuing primary care, foreign medical school graduates and osteopathic doctors are replacing them in droves. There also has been rapid growth in the ranks of physician assistants and nurse practitioners.
Numerous studies, in this country and others, have shown that primary care improves health and saves money by encouraging prevention and early diagnosis of chronic conditions like high blood pressure and diabetes. Presidential candidates in both parties stress its importance. Officials with several large health systems said their primary care practices often lose money, but generate revenue for their companies by referring patients to profit centers like surgery and laboratories.
There is a growing political consensus among Democrats that universal health care can be achieved by subsidizing coverage for low-income people, establishing new purchasing pools to help others buy affordable insurance, and requiring most businesses to offer health plans to their workers or pay a fee.
Most proposals contain these elements, as well as the option to buy into a public plan. There are striking difference is on whether to require everyone to get a policy or have a universal mandate. Backers say the lack of a mandate would doom any universal coverage system. Critics of the individual mandate say forcing people to obtain insurance is unfair and ineffective, but without one only the sick and those most likely to need care buy in, insurers would need to charge higher premiums. That, in turn, would make policies harder to afford and increase pressure on the government to further subsidize the plans, driving up the overall cost.
Governmental budgets will face the crisis even sooner. States are already complaining that they have to crimp other vital activities, like education, to meet soaring Medicaid costs. And federal spending on Medicare and Medicaid is surging upward at rates that will cause the deficit to soar. That means politicians will have to raise taxes, severely cut a wide range of other governmental programs, or chop back the health programs themselves.
We need only to revisit the recent tragedies at one of our major Universities to also explore the failure in the mental health sector. We have failure by a system beset with guidelines that require a direct emergency to provide and sustain help to many Americans. We also have failure by a system that turns away many Americans and allows insurance companies to cap lifetime benefits without regard to personal needs or safety.
We should hold as inviolate the relationship between a patient and their health care professional, 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 all need be an essential part of the free and just exercises of Life, Liberty, and The Pursuit of Happiness in any future America.
-Thomas P Love
Monday, May 12, 2008
The Oil Nonbubble
By PAUL KRUGMAN
“The Oil Bubble: Set to Burst?” That was the headline of an October 2004 article in National Review, which argued that oil prices, then $50 a barrel, would soon collapse.
Ten months later, oil was selling for $70 a barrel. “It’s a huge bubble,” declared Steve Forbes, the publisher, who warned that the coming crash in oil prices would make the popping of the technology bubble “look like a picnic.”
All through oil’s five-year price surge, which has taken it from $25 a barrel to last week’s close above $125, there have been many voices declaring that it’s all a bubble, unsupported by the fundamentals of supply and demand.
So here are two questions: Are speculators mainly, or even largely, responsible for high oil prices? And if they aren’t, why have so many commentators insisted, year after year, that there’s an oil bubble?
Now, speculators do sometimes push commodity prices far above the level justified by fundamentals. But when that happens, there are telltale signs that just aren’t there in today’s oil market.
Imagine what would happen if the oil market were humming along, with supply and demand balanced at a price of $25 a barrel, and a bunch of speculators came in and drove the price up to $100.
Even if this were purely a financial play on the part of the speculators, it would have major consequences in the material world. Faced with higher prices, drivers would cut back on their driving; homeowners would turn down their thermostats; owners of marginal oil wells would put them back into production.
As a result, the initial balance between supply and demand would be broken, replaced with a situation in which supply exceeded demand. This excess supply would, in turn, drive prices back down again — unless someone were willing to buy up the excess and take it off the market.
The only way speculation can have a persistent effect on oil prices, then, is if it leads to physical hoarding — an increase in private inventories of black gunk. This actually happened in the late 1970s, when the effects of disrupted Iranian supply were amplified by widespread panic stockpiling.
But it hasn’t happened this time: all through the period of the alleged bubble, inventories have remained at more or less normal levels. This tells us that the rise in oil prices isn’t the result of runaway speculation; it’s the result of fundamental factors, mainly the growing difficulty of finding oil and the rapid growth of emerging economies like China. The rise in oil prices these past few years had to happen to keep demand growth from exceeding supply growth.
Saying that high-priced oil isn’t a bubble doesn’t mean that oil prices will never decline. I wouldn’t be shocked if a pullback in demand, driven by delayed effects of high prices, sends the price of crude back below $100 for a while. But it does mean that speculators aren’t at the heart of the story.
Why, then, do we keep hearing assertions that they are?
Part of the answer may be the undoubted fact that many people are now investing in oil futures — which feeds suspicion that speculators are running the show, even though there’s no good evidence that prices have gotten out of line.
But there’s also a political component.
Traditionally, denunciations of speculators come from the left of the political spectrum. In the case of oil prices, however, the most vociferous proponents of the view that it’s all the speculators’ fault have been conservatives — people whom you wouldn’t normally expect to see warning about the nefarious activities of investment banks and hedge funds.
The explanation of this seeming paradox is that wishful thinking has trumped pro-market ideology.
After all, a realistic view of what’s happened over the past few years suggests that we’re heading into an era of increasingly scarce, costly oil.
The consequences of that scarcity probably won’t be apocalyptic: France consumes only half as much oil per capita as America, yet the last time I looked, Paris wasn’t a howling wasteland. But the odds are that we’re looking at a future in which energy conservation becomes increasingly important, in which many people may even — gasp — take public transit to work.
I don’t find that vision particularly abhorrent, but a lot of people, especially on the right, do. And so they want to believe that if only Goldman Sachs would stop having such a negative attitude, we’d quickly return to the good old days of abundant oil.
Again, I wouldn’t be shocked if oil prices dip in the near future — although I also take seriously Goldman’s recent warning that the price could go to $200. But let’s drop all the talk about an oil bubble.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/12/opinion/12krugman.html?em&ex=1210737600&en=4c285a3b0ff54893&ei=5087%0A
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
“The Oil Bubble: Set to Burst?” That was the headline of an October 2004 article in National Review, which argued that oil prices, then $50 a barrel, would soon collapse.
Ten months later, oil was selling for $70 a barrel. “It’s a huge bubble,” declared Steve Forbes, the publisher, who warned that the coming crash in oil prices would make the popping of the technology bubble “look like a picnic.”
All through oil’s five-year price surge, which has taken it from $25 a barrel to last week’s close above $125, there have been many voices declaring that it’s all a bubble, unsupported by the fundamentals of supply and demand.
So here are two questions: Are speculators mainly, or even largely, responsible for high oil prices? And if they aren’t, why have so many commentators insisted, year after year, that there’s an oil bubble?
Now, speculators do sometimes push commodity prices far above the level justified by fundamentals. But when that happens, there are telltale signs that just aren’t there in today’s oil market.
Imagine what would happen if the oil market were humming along, with supply and demand balanced at a price of $25 a barrel, and a bunch of speculators came in and drove the price up to $100.
Even if this were purely a financial play on the part of the speculators, it would have major consequences in the material world. Faced with higher prices, drivers would cut back on their driving; homeowners would turn down their thermostats; owners of marginal oil wells would put them back into production.
As a result, the initial balance between supply and demand would be broken, replaced with a situation in which supply exceeded demand. This excess supply would, in turn, drive prices back down again — unless someone were willing to buy up the excess and take it off the market.
The only way speculation can have a persistent effect on oil prices, then, is if it leads to physical hoarding — an increase in private inventories of black gunk. This actually happened in the late 1970s, when the effects of disrupted Iranian supply were amplified by widespread panic stockpiling.
But it hasn’t happened this time: all through the period of the alleged bubble, inventories have remained at more or less normal levels. This tells us that the rise in oil prices isn’t the result of runaway speculation; it’s the result of fundamental factors, mainly the growing difficulty of finding oil and the rapid growth of emerging economies like China. The rise in oil prices these past few years had to happen to keep demand growth from exceeding supply growth.
Saying that high-priced oil isn’t a bubble doesn’t mean that oil prices will never decline. I wouldn’t be shocked if a pullback in demand, driven by delayed effects of high prices, sends the price of crude back below $100 for a while. But it does mean that speculators aren’t at the heart of the story.
Why, then, do we keep hearing assertions that they are?
Part of the answer may be the undoubted fact that many people are now investing in oil futures — which feeds suspicion that speculators are running the show, even though there’s no good evidence that prices have gotten out of line.
But there’s also a political component.
Traditionally, denunciations of speculators come from the left of the political spectrum. In the case of oil prices, however, the most vociferous proponents of the view that it’s all the speculators’ fault have been conservatives — people whom you wouldn’t normally expect to see warning about the nefarious activities of investment banks and hedge funds.
The explanation of this seeming paradox is that wishful thinking has trumped pro-market ideology.
After all, a realistic view of what’s happened over the past few years suggests that we’re heading into an era of increasingly scarce, costly oil.
The consequences of that scarcity probably won’t be apocalyptic: France consumes only half as much oil per capita as America, yet the last time I looked, Paris wasn’t a howling wasteland. But the odds are that we’re looking at a future in which energy conservation becomes increasingly important, in which many people may even — gasp — take public transit to work.
I don’t find that vision particularly abhorrent, but a lot of people, especially on the right, do. And so they want to believe that if only Goldman Sachs would stop having such a negative attitude, we’d quickly return to the good old days of abundant oil.
Again, I wouldn’t be shocked if oil prices dip in the near future — although I also take seriously Goldman’s recent warning that the price could go to $200. But let’s drop all the talk about an oil bubble.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/12/opinion/12krugman.html?em&ex=1210737600&en=4c285a3b0ff54893&ei=5087%0A
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Iraq: Will We Ever Get Out?
By Thomas Powers
The New York Review of Books
Thursday 29 May 2008 Issue
The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict
By Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes
Norton, 311 pp., $22.95
Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy
By Andrew Cockburn
Scribner, 247 pp., $25.00
Still Broken: A Recruit's Inside Account of Intelligence Failures, from Baghdad to the Pentagon
By A.J. Rossmiller
Ballantine, 236 pp., $25.00
The Soviet-Afghan War: How a Superpower Fought and Lost
By the Russian General Staff, translated from the Russian and edited by Lester W. Grau and Michael A. Gress
University Press of Kansas,364 pp., $17.95 (paper)
The Bear Went Over the Mountain: Soviet Combat Tactics in Afghanistan
Translated from the Russian and edited by Lester W. Grau
National Defense University Press, 223 pp., $35.00 (paper)
The Other Side of the Mountain: Mujahideen Tactics in the Soviet-Afghan War
By Ali Ahmad Jalali and Lester W. Grau
US Marine Corps Studies, 419 pp. (1995)
The Fateful Pebble: Afghanistan's Role in the Fall of the Soviet Empire
By Anthony Arnold
Presidio, 225 pp. (1993)
Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001
By Steve Coll
Penguin, 712 pp., $16.00 (paper)
The Nuclear Sphinx of Tehran: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the State of Iran
By Yossi Melman and Meir Javedanfar
Carroll and Graf, 285 pp., $16.95 (paper)
The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America
By Kenneth M. Pollack
Random House, 539 pp., $15.95 (paper)
1.
There is a working assumption among the American people that a new president enters the White House free of responsibility for the errors of the past, free to set a new course in any program or policy, and therefore free - at the very least in constitutional theory, and perhaps even really and truly free - to call off a war begun by a predecessor. No one would expect something so dramatic on the first day of a new administration but it remains a fact that the president is the commander in chief of the armed forces, and the power that allowed one president to invade Iraq would allow another to bring the troops home.
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the current presidential campaign have promised to do just that - not precipitously, not recklessly, not without care to give the shaky government in Baghdad time and the wherewithal to pick up the slack. But Obama and Clinton have both promised that the course would be changed on the first day; ending the American involvement in the Iraqi fighting would be the new goal, troop numbers would be down significantly by the middle of the first year, and within a reasonable time (not long) the residual American force would be so diminished in size that any fair observer might say the war was over, for the Americans at least, and the troops had been brought home.
The presumptive Republican candidate, John McCain, has pledged to do exactly the opposite - to "win" the war, whatever that means, and whatever that takes. Politicians often differ by shades of nuance. Not this time. The contrast of McCain and his opponents on this question is stark, and if they can be taken at their word, Americans must expect either continuing war for an indefinite period with McCain or the anxieties and open questions of turning the war over to the Iraqi government for better or worse with Obama or Clinton. Which is it going to be?
It is not just lives, theories about national security, and American pride that are at stake. Money is also involved. The two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have already cost about $700 billion, and the economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes estimate that costs such as continuing medical care will add another $2 trillion even if the Iraq war ends now. But the true cost of the Iraq war ought to include something else as well - some fraction of the rise in the price of oil which we might call the Iraq war oil surcharge. If we blame the war for only $10 of the $80-$90 rise in the price of a barrel of oil since 2003, that would still come to $200 million a day.
At some point the government will have to begin paying for these wars - if it can. What looks increasingly like a serious recession, complicated by an expensive federal bailout of financial institutions, may combine to convince even John McCain that the time has come to declare a victory and head for home. It's possible. But the United States did not acquire a $9 trillion national debt by caution with money. A decision to back out of the war is going to require something else - resolve backed by a combination of arguments that withdrawal won't be a victory for al-Qaeda or Iran, that it isn't prompted by fear, that it doesn't represent defeat, that it's going to make us stronger, that it's going to win the applause of the world, that the people left behind have been helped, and that whatever mess remains is somebody else's fault and responsibility.
Missing from this list is victory - the one thing that could make withdrawal automatic and easy. Its absence makes the decision an easy one for McCain - no victory, no withdrawal. But everybody else needs to think this matter through the hard way, trying to understand the real consequences of easing away from a bloody, inconclusive war. After six and a half years of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Democratic candidates for president and the public weighing a choice between them have a moment of relative quiet, right now, with the primaries nearly over and the nominating conventions still ahead, to consider where we are before deciding, to the extent that presidents or publics ever do decide, what to do.
The state of play in what some writers call the Greater Middle East is roughly this: 190,000 American troops are at the moment engaged in two unresolved hot wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The magnitude of this endeavor is hard to exaggerate - two wars thousands of miles from home, covering a total area roughly as big as California and Texas, with a combined population of almost 60 million, speaking half a dozen major languages few Americans know. In addition, both wars are insurgencies, and in both the "enemy" is not a well-defined political, social, or military entity under central command, but something much more fluid. The difficulty of defining the "enemy" helps to explain why success, not to mention "victory," is so elusive. In Iraq and Afghanistan alike the Americans have been trying to establish a government of convenience - friendly to the West, moderate in politics, predictable in business, open to peace with Israel, hostile to Islamic fundamentalists. The United States has been trying to establish such governments in the Middle East for sixty years.
What is new is that since 2001 we have abandoned talk for force. Our means are now military: the United States has sent its army to remake the social and political landscape of Iraq and Afghanistan, and perhaps of their neighbors as well. A long-simmering political struggle for hegemony in the Middle East has been abruptly transformed into a military conflict. The invasion of Afghanistan is easily justified by the Taliban's complicity in the terrorist attacks of September 11, but we must look for different explanations for the invasion of Iraq. That was a "war of choice" and it seems to have been prompted by two factors - sheer frustration with the long defiance of Saddam Hussein and American itchiness to use a military machine so superior to all others that some Army officers thought allies would only slow us down.
One big reason President Bush invaded Iraq was that he thought it would be easy, and in a sense it was. The occupation of Baghdad took only three weeks. But the formidable American military machine proved to be a clumsy instrument for conducting the political struggle to remake Iraq, and it has been powerless to prevent the growing presence and influence of Iran throughout most of the country. The fighting in Afghanistan has been less intense - five hundred American dead in six years, versus four thousand in Iraq - but equally erratic and frustrating. It is this shapeless military undertaking to remake the Greater Middle East - not simply "the war in Iraq" - that McCain promises to push through to victory, and that Obama and Clinton promise at the very least to limit and reduce if not to end. Let us look at these arenas of conflict and consider how things are going.
As soon as Baghdad was occupied five years ago things began to go wrong in a serious way. Responsibility for this failure can largely be traced to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld personally. He did not simply run an organization that failed; he personally made many of the key decisions that led to failure. As described by Andrew Cockburn in a useful new biography, and supported by a five-foot shelf of other books and articles, Rumsfeld is a blustering, bullying executive with one idea at a time who dominated "planning" for the war. The one idea was to go in "light" with about a third of the forces the generals at first suggested, counting on a thundering opening bombardment - "shock and awe" - to cow the Iraqis while highly mobile US forces would dash for Baghdad. Once there, the army waited for further instruction, but the secretary of defense was flummoxed. He had no idea what to do next.
In particular Rumsfeld had no idea what to do about the storm of looting which began almost immediately after the Iraqi military disappeared and continued without letup until private businesses and government offices - the Iraqi oil ministry alone excepted - had been stripped of every movable item with a street value, from desktop computers and air conditioners to eighteen-wheelers. The US Army, ordered to stand aside, watched as the national infrastructure was carried away, a turn of events shrugged off by Rumsfeld with the explanation "Freedom's untidy.... Stuff happens."
While the Army was watching the looters it was not watching the vast Iraqi arms depots established by Saddam Hussein - munitions dumps covering literally hundreds of square miles containing among other things unimaginable numbers of artillery shells. It was these shells, lying unguarded and free for the taking for many months, that were soon being assembled by phantom opponents into deadly roadside bombs called Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). Rumsfeld dismissed the phantom opponents as "Saddam loyalists" and Sunni "dead enders," refusing to recognize the growing insurgency for a year.
When efforts to write an Iraqi constitution and create an Iraqi government elevated Shiites to power for the first time in many centuries, infuriated Sunnis responded with a program of sectarian murder. Shiite militias and their allies in the Iraqi military and national police in turn responded with an all-out killing spree that approached genocide - a campaign to push Sunnis out of mixed neighborhoods in Baghdad, and even out of the city altogether. At the height of the killing a hundred bodies a day were dumped onto Baghdad's streets, many showing signs of grisly torture. A million Iraqis left the country and another million left their homes for safer neighborhoods inside Iraq. By now there are two million refugees outside the country and two million displaced people inside. The man who had denied the insurgency now denied the danger of open civil war.
Rumsfeld was not merely wrong; he was self-replicating. The pattern of denial he established in the Office of the Secretary of Defense spread out and down, eventually reaching into the most remote crevices of the Office of Iraq Analysis of the Defense Intelligence Agency, where the young analyst Alex Rossmiller watched the DOD try to get what it wanted in Iraq by hoping, wishing, and predicting that it would happen. Rossmiller's memoir, Still Broken, describes denial triumphant in both Iraq and the halls of the Pentagon. During his six months with the Combined Intelligence Operations Center (CIOC) based at the Baghdad International Airport, Rossmiller's job was to produce "actionable intelligence" on "bad guys" to be picked up by the Army. The job was frequently interrupted by spasms of bureaucratic reorganization and by VIP visits from congressmen who nodded through long briefings.
Those who worked at the CIOC - the FBI, DIA, and OGA (meaning Other Government Agency, which designated the CIA) - referred to it as "a self-licking ice-cream cone." By this they meant that the reports they wrote were read mainly by people down the hall, who sent back reports of their own. But eventually Rossmiller found himself in a Direct Action Cell putting together target packages which led to operations ending with detentions - actual bad guys taken off the streets. "Going after the bad guys," Rossmiller writes, "was at least doing more good than harm, I thought. But my optimism was misplaced; I was wrong."
The lightbulb went on one night in the field when Rossmiller accompanied US and Iraqi special forces to help process detainees seized during an operation. Few details are provided of time, place, or occasion, but Rossmiller relates a harrowing, sixteen-page narrative of bullying incomprehension. The S-2, an Army officer in charge of intelligence for a brigade, explained the drill:
Okay, we're going to bring in these shitheads on that pad over there, and then walk them over to this field. We'll put them on the ground and tag them, take pictures, and do a field debrief. Then they're off to Abu G where they belong.
Off to Abu Ghraib prison? At that point Rossmiller began to understand that all his care as an intelligence analyst to separate the good guys from the bad guys was academic. The debrief was a barrage of shouted accusations. What Rossmiller saw among the detainees was confusion, fear, despair, anger, humiliation, and tears. It gradually became apparent that one of the detainees, shouted at repeatedly, was a retarded deaf mute. His brothers tried to explain this but were loudly accused of being insurgents and told they were "going away...for a long time." It was simply a question of paperwork. Two affidavits were enough to put a detainee in prison - one saying he was armed, a second saying he resisted detention. "They get an initial three-month stay," the S-2 explained, "and the debriefers there figure out what happens after that." Rossmiller got the point. There were no good guys. "Anybody who's picked up gets sent to prison."
That was Lesson Number One. Lesson Number Two emerged that autumn back at the Pentagon, where Rossmiller was a rising member of the Office of Iraq Analysis. In the months running up to the Iraqi elections in December 2005, Rossmiller and other DIA analysts all predicted that Iraqis were going to "vote identity" and the winners would be Shiite Islamists, who were already running the government. President Bush and the US ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, publicly predicted the opposite - secularists were gaining, the Sunnis were going to vote this time, a genuine "national unity government" would end sectarian strife, the corner would be turned as the war entered its fourth year.
Rossmiller soon realized that this was not simply a difference of opinion. Nobody dared to tell the President he was wrong, either to his face or in an official report. This timidity ran right down the chain of command from the White House to Rumsfeld to the director of the DIA, ever downward level by level until it reached the analysts actually working the data. "You're being too pessimistic," they were told. "We can't pass this up the chain.... We need to make sure we're not too far off message with this." Some analysts protested and watched their careers sputter; most retreated into bitter humor. Reports were rewritten to support official hope. On the very eve of the Iraqi election a briefing was concocted to "report" that Islamists were worrying about a late surge by some administration favorite, as if a roomful of nodding heads at a briefing in the Pentagon were somehow going to carry the election in Iraq. Watching this exercise in magical thinking and self-delusion convinced Rossmiller that under Rumsfeld intelligence itself was "still broken" nearly three years into the war - an expensive charade to find or predict whatever the White House wanted.
But despite Rumsfeld's history of strategic and military failure, and the failure of the secularists as predicted by ground-level DIA analysts, President George Bush announced in April 2006, "I'm the decider, and I decide what's best. And what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as secretary of defense." In November, following loss of control of both houses of Congress in the 2006 midterm elections, the President changed his mind, replaced Rumsfeld with Robert Gates, a former director of the CIA, and pushed through a new plan to stave off outright civil war in Iraq with a short-term increase of US forces by 30,000 referred to as "the surge." Now the surge is a year old and General David Petraeus is pleased by the reduction in violence. But he recommends a pause in troop withdrawals next summer after the 30,000 have been pulled back. Has the surge achieved anything enduring? President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney say they think so but the new president taking office next January ought to take a careful look at the rearrangement of forces on the ground in Iraq.
At the height of the sectarian killing in late 2006 it appeared that Iraq was spinning out of control. Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic majority leader, said the war was lost. Before the White House settled on the surge as a solution, national security advisers floated a number of radical ideas - dividing Iraq into three parts; dropping the democracy idea and backing the Shiites, who were in any event the majority; and leveling the playing field and bringing the Sunnis back into the government. In the event it was the third of these ideas that emerged during the course of the surge, beginning in the Sunni province of Anbar in western Iraq where the insurgency had reached its greatest intensity. There Sunnis who resented the Islamist fundamentalists of al-Qaeda in Iraq sought American help to drive out AQI. Modest pay of ten dollars a day, weapons, and a promise of eventual employment in the army or national police attracted thousands of former insurgents to join "awakening councils," now totaling perhaps 90,000 members.
Killing has been reduced, but the decline is the result of what amounts to American intervention in the Iraqi civil war. This new strategy was apparently adopted on the fly by the American military; it is working for the moment but it has dangers of its own. The councils, also called "sons of Iraq," are overwhelmingly Sunni in character. At the beginning of the occupation a key goal of the Americans was to disband the militias. In creating the awakening councils, the United States has armed, paid, and in effect sponsored the largest Iraqi militia of them all. But control of the councils is tenuous and they are now reported to be increasingly impatient with the Shiite government's refusal to enroll them in the army or national police as promised. The surge, therefore, has not so much ended the sectarian strife as it has set the stage for a renewal of civil war at a higher level of violence.
2.
Iraq after the surge might be described as the same bomb, still waiting to explode, but with a longer fuse. What about Afghanistan? There the new president may find an even more intractable problem. In Iraq the United States is fighting an array of forces who live in the shadow of the Iranian sphere of influence, are mainly trying to kill each other, and are of two minds about American departure - some are reluctant to lose American protection, others want us to clear out so they can settle with local opponents once and for all. But in Afghanistan the United States and its reluctant NATO allies face a revived Taliban with the simplest of war aims - they want the foreigners to go. What is remarkable about the situation in Afghanistan - even astonishing - is that the Americans, after watching 100,000 Russians fight Afghans at great expense with no success for nine years, have signed on for a dose of the same. Lester Grau, a retired Army colonel, has edited three books on the Russian war using Russian materials, ranging from a general staff history of the war to small-unit combat reports.
The implication of these books is not ambiguous. After their invasion in December 1979, the Russians walked into Kabul with ease, as invaders of Afghanistan invariably do, but after that it was mounting trouble all the way. The Russians paid a substantial price for thinking they could "win" if they stuck to it - a still-hidden number of dead soldiers, probably exceeding 20,000, and perhaps five times that number of seriously wounded; loss of nearly 500 aircraft including 350 helicopters; huge quantities of other equipment destroyed; hundreds of thousands of disaffected soldiers returned to civilian life back home, not to mention the opprobrium of the world.
The CIA officer Anthony Arnold, who was stationed in Kabul before the Russian invasion, thinks the penalty of failure went beyond immediate losses and humiliation to include the actual collapse of the Soviet state itself. They were weaker than they knew, Arnold thinks, but the Russians did not give in easily: they killed more than a million Afghans, bombed villages to rubble, machine-gunned herds of sheep from the air, and drove as many as a fifth of all Afghans out of the country, across the border into the safe haven of Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas. Nothing worked and the war ended when the last Russian troops and trucks drove back across the Friendship Bridge into Tajikistan in 1989. It is true that the mujahideen got plenty of material help from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United States, but it was the Afghans who fought the Russians to exhausted frustration, and have gone right on fighting among themselves ever since.
Shrugging off the lessons of history is the preface to disaster in Afghanistan. The Afghans seem so weak - an impoverished people living in mudbrick houses making a hardscrabble living; shepherds, farmers, and nomads answering to feudal lords ruling tiny villages connected by dirt tracks over rocky mountain passes. How tough can it be to defeat these skinny men in rags and occupy their country?
The Russians should not have been surprised by the answer. The British had already learned it the hard way before them - twice: in 1839-1842 and 1878-1880. Both efforts followed the standard pattern - easy occupation of Kabul at the outset, followed by rumbles from below and then open resistance leading to bitter fighting ending in disaster. It was the first of the British invasions that established just how bad a defeat in Afghanistan could be - an expeditionary force of 4,500, trying to escape Kabul, was attacked relentlessly on its way south to Jalalabad. Only one man survived - the Army surgeon William Brydon. It is such object lessons that were ignored by the Russians and are now being ignored by the Americans.
The American economy, not the war, is the big issue in the presidential campaign as I write. The candidates have issued position papers on the war - both wars - and have adopted policies that can be summed up in a sentence or two. McCain wants to soldier on in both theaters. "Those who argue that our goals in Iraq are unachievable are wrong, just as they were wrong a year ago when they declared the war in Iraq already lost," he said in Los Angeles on March 26. "Those who claim we should withdraw from Iraq in order to fight al-Qaeda more effectively elsewhere are making a dangerous mistake." There's not a lot of detail here but there's not much ambiguity either: it's a tough fight but we can win it.
Obama and Clinton want to wind down the war in Iraq but focus new attention on Afghanistan - an approach that allows both candidates to draw on popular dislike of the war in Iraq while escaping charges of being irresponsible on national security. "We did not finish the job against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan," said Obama last August. "The first step must be getting off the wrong battlefield in Iraq, and taking the fight to the terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan." Clinton calls Afghan-istan "the forgotten front line." Recently she added ballast to her own "plan to win the war in Afghanistan" with a nine-point strategy of sensible steps to invite more help from NATO allies and international donors while helping the Afghans to help themselves.
To walk away from the Afghans seems unconscionable; the country, poor to begin with, has suffered dreadfully with little respite since the mid-1970s. The Americans helped the Afghans fight the Russians and then turned away after the Russians left. The best account of the long Afghan ordeal leading to the terrorist attacks of September 11 is to be found in Steve Coll's Ghost Wars. The focus is narrow - how the CIA managed the American part of a long, semiclandestine war and political struggle - but it captures the breathtaking seesaw range of the American way of meddling - ready with hundreds of millions of dollars to fight to the last Afghan one day, counting pennies the next, washing our hands of the whole bloody mess on the third.
It's not a pretty picture, but the CIA described by Coll was the one cold war presidents used instead of sending in the Marines; it made the same point, it was cheaper, and it could be called off without public humiliation. Now we're back in Afghanistan with an army and strong words about unshakable resolution, while the Pentagon cites worrying statistics about the enemy of the kind used to take the temperature of military conflicts. It's the usual stuff - a steady rise in small actions, ambushes, suicide bombers, attacks on convoys, clandestine traffic over the mountains into Pakistan.
The operative word is "more." The numbers are always inching up. NATO commanders have formally asked for three thousand additional troops. It's a modest number and suggests that the problem is manageable. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, has remarked - casual words, not an announcement - that some troops withdrawn from Iraq might be sent to the "under resourced" war in Afghanistan. The presidential candidates disagree significantly about Iraq, not about Afghanistan. Nobody is talking about bringing the troops home from Afghanistan. We're committed.
George W. Bush is unique among presidents for his tin ear for trouble or danger. On his own he cannot distinguish between a notional or imaginary threat and one that is genuine, and his choice of advisers is no help. The big problem Bush saw on taking office was a threat by rogue nations to attack the United States with nuclear weapons delivered on missiles. His solution was to redouble efforts to develop and build an antiballistic missile system. Rumsfeld and Cheney shared this priority 100 percent. Distracted by this technological chimera, which has eluded success despite huge expense for twenty-five years, Bush failed to heed clear warnings about al-Qaeda terrorist attacks. Later he was unprepared for Hurricane Katrina ("You're doing a great job, Brownie!"), for the immense challenges of climate change caused by greenhouse gases, and for the full-fledged financial crisis precipitated by the lending practices of a runaway, unregulated banking system.
3.
But these dangers were all at least new in some sense, harder to see in prospect than retrospect. This cannot be said for the President's decision to send American expeditionary armies to occupy two countries in the Greater Middle East. A better-read, more reflective man might have seen what was coming. Regretting adventures in the Middle East is one of the constants of history. The Greeks, the Romans, the Crusaders, the French, the British, and the Russians all sent armies and were forced in the end to bring them home again.
Invading the Middle East is the kind of imperial overreach that breaks the spine of great powers. Secretary of State Colin Powell tried to warn Bush against the magnitude of the undertaking with reference to the homespun "Pottery Barn rule" - if you break it, you own it. Did anyone go further and attempt to explain that Iraq was a seething cockpit of warring religions, political movements, social classes, and ethnic groups, many influenced by Iran? Did the President worry about the difficulty of occupying and rebuilding a country of nearly 30 million people with ancient scores to settle?
It appears that he did not. Going to war in Afghanistan and then Iraq was what the President wanted to do and he let nothing stand in his way. Afghanistan was not a hard sell but Iraq took real resolution. The arguments for war were weak to begin with and got weaker with time. The UN inspectors found none of the Iraqi weapons cited to justify war and asked only for some months to verify disarmament; the Security Council refused to pass a resolution for war; only Britain among America's most important allies joined the coalition of the willing to fight the war. But no setback cracked Bush's resolution and he went ahead. John McCain is content with the wars he will inherit if fate touches him with its finger, but Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama do not like the situation as they expect to find it. The war in Iraq promises only expense and failure, and the mix includes other daunting troubles - a Turkish military hovering just across the border from Iraq's quasi-autonomous Kurdish region, with one Turkish eye on the oil of Kirkuk; deepening connections between the Shiite government in Baghdad and Shiite Iran, which continues to ignore American threats of military action if it does not believably abandon its nuclear program; a safe haven for the Taliban in the Pakistani provinces bordering on Afghanistan; and loss of Pakistani support for Ameri-can desire to take the war into the tribal areas. That safe haven made it impossible for the Russians to win, and it will soon obsess the Americans as well.
But set Afghanistan aside. Iraq is the big war. Getting out of Iraq will require just as much resolution as it took to get in - and the same kind of resolution: a willingness to ignore the consequences. The consequence hardest to ignore will be the growing power and influence of Iran, which Bush has described as one of the two great security threats to the US. Israel shares this view of Iran. No new president will want to run the risk of being thought soft on Iran. This is where the military error exacts a terrible price. A political conflict transformed into a military conflict requires a military resolution, and those, famously, come in two forms - victory or defeat. Getting out means admitting defeat.
Is it possible that the new president will have that kind of resolution? I think not; to my ear Clinton and Obama don't sound drained of hope or bright ideas, determined to cut losses and end the agony. Why should they? They're coming in fresh from the sidelines. Getting out, giving up, admitting defeat are not what we expect from the psychology of newly elected presidents who have just overcome all odds and battled through to personal victory. They've managed the impossible once; why not again? Planning for withdrawals might begin on Day One, but the plans will be hostage to events.
At first, perhaps, all runs smoothly. Then things begin to happen. The situation on the first day has altered by the tenth. Some faction of Iraqis joins or drops out of the fight. A troublesome law is passed, or left standing. A helicopter goes down with casualties in two digits. The Green Zone is hit by a new wave of rockets or mortars from Sadr City in Baghdad. The US Army protests that the rockets or mortars were provided by Iran. The new president warns Iran to stay out of the fight. The government in Tehran dismisses the warning. This is already a long-established pattern. Why should we expect it to change? So it goes. At an unmarked moment somewhere between the third and the sixth month a sea change occurs: Bush's war becomes the new president's war, and getting out means failure, means defeat, means rising opposition at home, means no second term. It's not hard to see where this is going.
We are committed in Afghanistan. We are not ready to leave Iraq. In both countries our friends are in trouble. The pride of American arms is at stake. The world is watching. To me the logic of events seems inescapable. Unless something quite unexpected happens, four years from now the presidential candidates will be arguing about two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, one going into its ninth year, the other into its eleventh. The choice will be the one Americans hate most - get out or fight on.
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The New York Review of Books
Thursday 29 May 2008 Issue
The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict
By Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes
Norton, 311 pp., $22.95
Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy
By Andrew Cockburn
Scribner, 247 pp., $25.00
Still Broken: A Recruit's Inside Account of Intelligence Failures, from Baghdad to the Pentagon
By A.J. Rossmiller
Ballantine, 236 pp., $25.00
The Soviet-Afghan War: How a Superpower Fought and Lost
By the Russian General Staff, translated from the Russian and edited by Lester W. Grau and Michael A. Gress
University Press of Kansas,364 pp., $17.95 (paper)
The Bear Went Over the Mountain: Soviet Combat Tactics in Afghanistan
Translated from the Russian and edited by Lester W. Grau
National Defense University Press, 223 pp., $35.00 (paper)
The Other Side of the Mountain: Mujahideen Tactics in the Soviet-Afghan War
By Ali Ahmad Jalali and Lester W. Grau
US Marine Corps Studies, 419 pp. (1995)
The Fateful Pebble: Afghanistan's Role in the Fall of the Soviet Empire
By Anthony Arnold
Presidio, 225 pp. (1993)
Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001
By Steve Coll
Penguin, 712 pp., $16.00 (paper)
The Nuclear Sphinx of Tehran: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the State of Iran
By Yossi Melman and Meir Javedanfar
Carroll and Graf, 285 pp., $16.95 (paper)
The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America
By Kenneth M. Pollack
Random House, 539 pp., $15.95 (paper)
1.
There is a working assumption among the American people that a new president enters the White House free of responsibility for the errors of the past, free to set a new course in any program or policy, and therefore free - at the very least in constitutional theory, and perhaps even really and truly free - to call off a war begun by a predecessor. No one would expect something so dramatic on the first day of a new administration but it remains a fact that the president is the commander in chief of the armed forces, and the power that allowed one president to invade Iraq would allow another to bring the troops home.
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the current presidential campaign have promised to do just that - not precipitously, not recklessly, not without care to give the shaky government in Baghdad time and the wherewithal to pick up the slack. But Obama and Clinton have both promised that the course would be changed on the first day; ending the American involvement in the Iraqi fighting would be the new goal, troop numbers would be down significantly by the middle of the first year, and within a reasonable time (not long) the residual American force would be so diminished in size that any fair observer might say the war was over, for the Americans at least, and the troops had been brought home.
The presumptive Republican candidate, John McCain, has pledged to do exactly the opposite - to "win" the war, whatever that means, and whatever that takes. Politicians often differ by shades of nuance. Not this time. The contrast of McCain and his opponents on this question is stark, and if they can be taken at their word, Americans must expect either continuing war for an indefinite period with McCain or the anxieties and open questions of turning the war over to the Iraqi government for better or worse with Obama or Clinton. Which is it going to be?
It is not just lives, theories about national security, and American pride that are at stake. Money is also involved. The two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have already cost about $700 billion, and the economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes estimate that costs such as continuing medical care will add another $2 trillion even if the Iraq war ends now. But the true cost of the Iraq war ought to include something else as well - some fraction of the rise in the price of oil which we might call the Iraq war oil surcharge. If we blame the war for only $10 of the $80-$90 rise in the price of a barrel of oil since 2003, that would still come to $200 million a day.
At some point the government will have to begin paying for these wars - if it can. What looks increasingly like a serious recession, complicated by an expensive federal bailout of financial institutions, may combine to convince even John McCain that the time has come to declare a victory and head for home. It's possible. But the United States did not acquire a $9 trillion national debt by caution with money. A decision to back out of the war is going to require something else - resolve backed by a combination of arguments that withdrawal won't be a victory for al-Qaeda or Iran, that it isn't prompted by fear, that it doesn't represent defeat, that it's going to make us stronger, that it's going to win the applause of the world, that the people left behind have been helped, and that whatever mess remains is somebody else's fault and responsibility.
Missing from this list is victory - the one thing that could make withdrawal automatic and easy. Its absence makes the decision an easy one for McCain - no victory, no withdrawal. But everybody else needs to think this matter through the hard way, trying to understand the real consequences of easing away from a bloody, inconclusive war. After six and a half years of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Democratic candidates for president and the public weighing a choice between them have a moment of relative quiet, right now, with the primaries nearly over and the nominating conventions still ahead, to consider where we are before deciding, to the extent that presidents or publics ever do decide, what to do.
The state of play in what some writers call the Greater Middle East is roughly this: 190,000 American troops are at the moment engaged in two unresolved hot wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The magnitude of this endeavor is hard to exaggerate - two wars thousands of miles from home, covering a total area roughly as big as California and Texas, with a combined population of almost 60 million, speaking half a dozen major languages few Americans know. In addition, both wars are insurgencies, and in both the "enemy" is not a well-defined political, social, or military entity under central command, but something much more fluid. The difficulty of defining the "enemy" helps to explain why success, not to mention "victory," is so elusive. In Iraq and Afghanistan alike the Americans have been trying to establish a government of convenience - friendly to the West, moderate in politics, predictable in business, open to peace with Israel, hostile to Islamic fundamentalists. The United States has been trying to establish such governments in the Middle East for sixty years.
What is new is that since 2001 we have abandoned talk for force. Our means are now military: the United States has sent its army to remake the social and political landscape of Iraq and Afghanistan, and perhaps of their neighbors as well. A long-simmering political struggle for hegemony in the Middle East has been abruptly transformed into a military conflict. The invasion of Afghanistan is easily justified by the Taliban's complicity in the terrorist attacks of September 11, but we must look for different explanations for the invasion of Iraq. That was a "war of choice" and it seems to have been prompted by two factors - sheer frustration with the long defiance of Saddam Hussein and American itchiness to use a military machine so superior to all others that some Army officers thought allies would only slow us down.
One big reason President Bush invaded Iraq was that he thought it would be easy, and in a sense it was. The occupation of Baghdad took only three weeks. But the formidable American military machine proved to be a clumsy instrument for conducting the political struggle to remake Iraq, and it has been powerless to prevent the growing presence and influence of Iran throughout most of the country. The fighting in Afghanistan has been less intense - five hundred American dead in six years, versus four thousand in Iraq - but equally erratic and frustrating. It is this shapeless military undertaking to remake the Greater Middle East - not simply "the war in Iraq" - that McCain promises to push through to victory, and that Obama and Clinton promise at the very least to limit and reduce if not to end. Let us look at these arenas of conflict and consider how things are going.
As soon as Baghdad was occupied five years ago things began to go wrong in a serious way. Responsibility for this failure can largely be traced to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld personally. He did not simply run an organization that failed; he personally made many of the key decisions that led to failure. As described by Andrew Cockburn in a useful new biography, and supported by a five-foot shelf of other books and articles, Rumsfeld is a blustering, bullying executive with one idea at a time who dominated "planning" for the war. The one idea was to go in "light" with about a third of the forces the generals at first suggested, counting on a thundering opening bombardment - "shock and awe" - to cow the Iraqis while highly mobile US forces would dash for Baghdad. Once there, the army waited for further instruction, but the secretary of defense was flummoxed. He had no idea what to do next.
In particular Rumsfeld had no idea what to do about the storm of looting which began almost immediately after the Iraqi military disappeared and continued without letup until private businesses and government offices - the Iraqi oil ministry alone excepted - had been stripped of every movable item with a street value, from desktop computers and air conditioners to eighteen-wheelers. The US Army, ordered to stand aside, watched as the national infrastructure was carried away, a turn of events shrugged off by Rumsfeld with the explanation "Freedom's untidy.... Stuff happens."
While the Army was watching the looters it was not watching the vast Iraqi arms depots established by Saddam Hussein - munitions dumps covering literally hundreds of square miles containing among other things unimaginable numbers of artillery shells. It was these shells, lying unguarded and free for the taking for many months, that were soon being assembled by phantom opponents into deadly roadside bombs called Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). Rumsfeld dismissed the phantom opponents as "Saddam loyalists" and Sunni "dead enders," refusing to recognize the growing insurgency for a year.
When efforts to write an Iraqi constitution and create an Iraqi government elevated Shiites to power for the first time in many centuries, infuriated Sunnis responded with a program of sectarian murder. Shiite militias and their allies in the Iraqi military and national police in turn responded with an all-out killing spree that approached genocide - a campaign to push Sunnis out of mixed neighborhoods in Baghdad, and even out of the city altogether. At the height of the killing a hundred bodies a day were dumped onto Baghdad's streets, many showing signs of grisly torture. A million Iraqis left the country and another million left their homes for safer neighborhoods inside Iraq. By now there are two million refugees outside the country and two million displaced people inside. The man who had denied the insurgency now denied the danger of open civil war.
Rumsfeld was not merely wrong; he was self-replicating. The pattern of denial he established in the Office of the Secretary of Defense spread out and down, eventually reaching into the most remote crevices of the Office of Iraq Analysis of the Defense Intelligence Agency, where the young analyst Alex Rossmiller watched the DOD try to get what it wanted in Iraq by hoping, wishing, and predicting that it would happen. Rossmiller's memoir, Still Broken, describes denial triumphant in both Iraq and the halls of the Pentagon. During his six months with the Combined Intelligence Operations Center (CIOC) based at the Baghdad International Airport, Rossmiller's job was to produce "actionable intelligence" on "bad guys" to be picked up by the Army. The job was frequently interrupted by spasms of bureaucratic reorganization and by VIP visits from congressmen who nodded through long briefings.
Those who worked at the CIOC - the FBI, DIA, and OGA (meaning Other Government Agency, which designated the CIA) - referred to it as "a self-licking ice-cream cone." By this they meant that the reports they wrote were read mainly by people down the hall, who sent back reports of their own. But eventually Rossmiller found himself in a Direct Action Cell putting together target packages which led to operations ending with detentions - actual bad guys taken off the streets. "Going after the bad guys," Rossmiller writes, "was at least doing more good than harm, I thought. But my optimism was misplaced; I was wrong."
The lightbulb went on one night in the field when Rossmiller accompanied US and Iraqi special forces to help process detainees seized during an operation. Few details are provided of time, place, or occasion, but Rossmiller relates a harrowing, sixteen-page narrative of bullying incomprehension. The S-2, an Army officer in charge of intelligence for a brigade, explained the drill:
Okay, we're going to bring in these shitheads on that pad over there, and then walk them over to this field. We'll put them on the ground and tag them, take pictures, and do a field debrief. Then they're off to Abu G where they belong.
Off to Abu Ghraib prison? At that point Rossmiller began to understand that all his care as an intelligence analyst to separate the good guys from the bad guys was academic. The debrief was a barrage of shouted accusations. What Rossmiller saw among the detainees was confusion, fear, despair, anger, humiliation, and tears. It gradually became apparent that one of the detainees, shouted at repeatedly, was a retarded deaf mute. His brothers tried to explain this but were loudly accused of being insurgents and told they were "going away...for a long time." It was simply a question of paperwork. Two affidavits were enough to put a detainee in prison - one saying he was armed, a second saying he resisted detention. "They get an initial three-month stay," the S-2 explained, "and the debriefers there figure out what happens after that." Rossmiller got the point. There were no good guys. "Anybody who's picked up gets sent to prison."
That was Lesson Number One. Lesson Number Two emerged that autumn back at the Pentagon, where Rossmiller was a rising member of the Office of Iraq Analysis. In the months running up to the Iraqi elections in December 2005, Rossmiller and other DIA analysts all predicted that Iraqis were going to "vote identity" and the winners would be Shiite Islamists, who were already running the government. President Bush and the US ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, publicly predicted the opposite - secularists were gaining, the Sunnis were going to vote this time, a genuine "national unity government" would end sectarian strife, the corner would be turned as the war entered its fourth year.
Rossmiller soon realized that this was not simply a difference of opinion. Nobody dared to tell the President he was wrong, either to his face or in an official report. This timidity ran right down the chain of command from the White House to Rumsfeld to the director of the DIA, ever downward level by level until it reached the analysts actually working the data. "You're being too pessimistic," they were told. "We can't pass this up the chain.... We need to make sure we're not too far off message with this." Some analysts protested and watched their careers sputter; most retreated into bitter humor. Reports were rewritten to support official hope. On the very eve of the Iraqi election a briefing was concocted to "report" that Islamists were worrying about a late surge by some administration favorite, as if a roomful of nodding heads at a briefing in the Pentagon were somehow going to carry the election in Iraq. Watching this exercise in magical thinking and self-delusion convinced Rossmiller that under Rumsfeld intelligence itself was "still broken" nearly three years into the war - an expensive charade to find or predict whatever the White House wanted.
But despite Rumsfeld's history of strategic and military failure, and the failure of the secularists as predicted by ground-level DIA analysts, President George Bush announced in April 2006, "I'm the decider, and I decide what's best. And what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as secretary of defense." In November, following loss of control of both houses of Congress in the 2006 midterm elections, the President changed his mind, replaced Rumsfeld with Robert Gates, a former director of the CIA, and pushed through a new plan to stave off outright civil war in Iraq with a short-term increase of US forces by 30,000 referred to as "the surge." Now the surge is a year old and General David Petraeus is pleased by the reduction in violence. But he recommends a pause in troop withdrawals next summer after the 30,000 have been pulled back. Has the surge achieved anything enduring? President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney say they think so but the new president taking office next January ought to take a careful look at the rearrangement of forces on the ground in Iraq.
At the height of the sectarian killing in late 2006 it appeared that Iraq was spinning out of control. Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic majority leader, said the war was lost. Before the White House settled on the surge as a solution, national security advisers floated a number of radical ideas - dividing Iraq into three parts; dropping the democracy idea and backing the Shiites, who were in any event the majority; and leveling the playing field and bringing the Sunnis back into the government. In the event it was the third of these ideas that emerged during the course of the surge, beginning in the Sunni province of Anbar in western Iraq where the insurgency had reached its greatest intensity. There Sunnis who resented the Islamist fundamentalists of al-Qaeda in Iraq sought American help to drive out AQI. Modest pay of ten dollars a day, weapons, and a promise of eventual employment in the army or national police attracted thousands of former insurgents to join "awakening councils," now totaling perhaps 90,000 members.
Killing has been reduced, but the decline is the result of what amounts to American intervention in the Iraqi civil war. This new strategy was apparently adopted on the fly by the American military; it is working for the moment but it has dangers of its own. The councils, also called "sons of Iraq," are overwhelmingly Sunni in character. At the beginning of the occupation a key goal of the Americans was to disband the militias. In creating the awakening councils, the United States has armed, paid, and in effect sponsored the largest Iraqi militia of them all. But control of the councils is tenuous and they are now reported to be increasingly impatient with the Shiite government's refusal to enroll them in the army or national police as promised. The surge, therefore, has not so much ended the sectarian strife as it has set the stage for a renewal of civil war at a higher level of violence.
2.
Iraq after the surge might be described as the same bomb, still waiting to explode, but with a longer fuse. What about Afghanistan? There the new president may find an even more intractable problem. In Iraq the United States is fighting an array of forces who live in the shadow of the Iranian sphere of influence, are mainly trying to kill each other, and are of two minds about American departure - some are reluctant to lose American protection, others want us to clear out so they can settle with local opponents once and for all. But in Afghanistan the United States and its reluctant NATO allies face a revived Taliban with the simplest of war aims - they want the foreigners to go. What is remarkable about the situation in Afghanistan - even astonishing - is that the Americans, after watching 100,000 Russians fight Afghans at great expense with no success for nine years, have signed on for a dose of the same. Lester Grau, a retired Army colonel, has edited three books on the Russian war using Russian materials, ranging from a general staff history of the war to small-unit combat reports.
The implication of these books is not ambiguous. After their invasion in December 1979, the Russians walked into Kabul with ease, as invaders of Afghanistan invariably do, but after that it was mounting trouble all the way. The Russians paid a substantial price for thinking they could "win" if they stuck to it - a still-hidden number of dead soldiers, probably exceeding 20,000, and perhaps five times that number of seriously wounded; loss of nearly 500 aircraft including 350 helicopters; huge quantities of other equipment destroyed; hundreds of thousands of disaffected soldiers returned to civilian life back home, not to mention the opprobrium of the world.
The CIA officer Anthony Arnold, who was stationed in Kabul before the Russian invasion, thinks the penalty of failure went beyond immediate losses and humiliation to include the actual collapse of the Soviet state itself. They were weaker than they knew, Arnold thinks, but the Russians did not give in easily: they killed more than a million Afghans, bombed villages to rubble, machine-gunned herds of sheep from the air, and drove as many as a fifth of all Afghans out of the country, across the border into the safe haven of Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas. Nothing worked and the war ended when the last Russian troops and trucks drove back across the Friendship Bridge into Tajikistan in 1989. It is true that the mujahideen got plenty of material help from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United States, but it was the Afghans who fought the Russians to exhausted frustration, and have gone right on fighting among themselves ever since.
Shrugging off the lessons of history is the preface to disaster in Afghanistan. The Afghans seem so weak - an impoverished people living in mudbrick houses making a hardscrabble living; shepherds, farmers, and nomads answering to feudal lords ruling tiny villages connected by dirt tracks over rocky mountain passes. How tough can it be to defeat these skinny men in rags and occupy their country?
The Russians should not have been surprised by the answer. The British had already learned it the hard way before them - twice: in 1839-1842 and 1878-1880. Both efforts followed the standard pattern - easy occupation of Kabul at the outset, followed by rumbles from below and then open resistance leading to bitter fighting ending in disaster. It was the first of the British invasions that established just how bad a defeat in Afghanistan could be - an expeditionary force of 4,500, trying to escape Kabul, was attacked relentlessly on its way south to Jalalabad. Only one man survived - the Army surgeon William Brydon. It is such object lessons that were ignored by the Russians and are now being ignored by the Americans.
The American economy, not the war, is the big issue in the presidential campaign as I write. The candidates have issued position papers on the war - both wars - and have adopted policies that can be summed up in a sentence or two. McCain wants to soldier on in both theaters. "Those who argue that our goals in Iraq are unachievable are wrong, just as they were wrong a year ago when they declared the war in Iraq already lost," he said in Los Angeles on March 26. "Those who claim we should withdraw from Iraq in order to fight al-Qaeda more effectively elsewhere are making a dangerous mistake." There's not a lot of detail here but there's not much ambiguity either: it's a tough fight but we can win it.
Obama and Clinton want to wind down the war in Iraq but focus new attention on Afghanistan - an approach that allows both candidates to draw on popular dislike of the war in Iraq while escaping charges of being irresponsible on national security. "We did not finish the job against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan," said Obama last August. "The first step must be getting off the wrong battlefield in Iraq, and taking the fight to the terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan." Clinton calls Afghan-istan "the forgotten front line." Recently she added ballast to her own "plan to win the war in Afghanistan" with a nine-point strategy of sensible steps to invite more help from NATO allies and international donors while helping the Afghans to help themselves.
To walk away from the Afghans seems unconscionable; the country, poor to begin with, has suffered dreadfully with little respite since the mid-1970s. The Americans helped the Afghans fight the Russians and then turned away after the Russians left. The best account of the long Afghan ordeal leading to the terrorist attacks of September 11 is to be found in Steve Coll's Ghost Wars. The focus is narrow - how the CIA managed the American part of a long, semiclandestine war and political struggle - but it captures the breathtaking seesaw range of the American way of meddling - ready with hundreds of millions of dollars to fight to the last Afghan one day, counting pennies the next, washing our hands of the whole bloody mess on the third.
It's not a pretty picture, but the CIA described by Coll was the one cold war presidents used instead of sending in the Marines; it made the same point, it was cheaper, and it could be called off without public humiliation. Now we're back in Afghanistan with an army and strong words about unshakable resolution, while the Pentagon cites worrying statistics about the enemy of the kind used to take the temperature of military conflicts. It's the usual stuff - a steady rise in small actions, ambushes, suicide bombers, attacks on convoys, clandestine traffic over the mountains into Pakistan.
The operative word is "more." The numbers are always inching up. NATO commanders have formally asked for three thousand additional troops. It's a modest number and suggests that the problem is manageable. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, has remarked - casual words, not an announcement - that some troops withdrawn from Iraq might be sent to the "under resourced" war in Afghanistan. The presidential candidates disagree significantly about Iraq, not about Afghanistan. Nobody is talking about bringing the troops home from Afghanistan. We're committed.
George W. Bush is unique among presidents for his tin ear for trouble or danger. On his own he cannot distinguish between a notional or imaginary threat and one that is genuine, and his choice of advisers is no help. The big problem Bush saw on taking office was a threat by rogue nations to attack the United States with nuclear weapons delivered on missiles. His solution was to redouble efforts to develop and build an antiballistic missile system. Rumsfeld and Cheney shared this priority 100 percent. Distracted by this technological chimera, which has eluded success despite huge expense for twenty-five years, Bush failed to heed clear warnings about al-Qaeda terrorist attacks. Later he was unprepared for Hurricane Katrina ("You're doing a great job, Brownie!"), for the immense challenges of climate change caused by greenhouse gases, and for the full-fledged financial crisis precipitated by the lending practices of a runaway, unregulated banking system.
3.
But these dangers were all at least new in some sense, harder to see in prospect than retrospect. This cannot be said for the President's decision to send American expeditionary armies to occupy two countries in the Greater Middle East. A better-read, more reflective man might have seen what was coming. Regretting adventures in the Middle East is one of the constants of history. The Greeks, the Romans, the Crusaders, the French, the British, and the Russians all sent armies and were forced in the end to bring them home again.
Invading the Middle East is the kind of imperial overreach that breaks the spine of great powers. Secretary of State Colin Powell tried to warn Bush against the magnitude of the undertaking with reference to the homespun "Pottery Barn rule" - if you break it, you own it. Did anyone go further and attempt to explain that Iraq was a seething cockpit of warring religions, political movements, social classes, and ethnic groups, many influenced by Iran? Did the President worry about the difficulty of occupying and rebuilding a country of nearly 30 million people with ancient scores to settle?
It appears that he did not. Going to war in Afghanistan and then Iraq was what the President wanted to do and he let nothing stand in his way. Afghanistan was not a hard sell but Iraq took real resolution. The arguments for war were weak to begin with and got weaker with time. The UN inspectors found none of the Iraqi weapons cited to justify war and asked only for some months to verify disarmament; the Security Council refused to pass a resolution for war; only Britain among America's most important allies joined the coalition of the willing to fight the war. But no setback cracked Bush's resolution and he went ahead. John McCain is content with the wars he will inherit if fate touches him with its finger, but Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama do not like the situation as they expect to find it. The war in Iraq promises only expense and failure, and the mix includes other daunting troubles - a Turkish military hovering just across the border from Iraq's quasi-autonomous Kurdish region, with one Turkish eye on the oil of Kirkuk; deepening connections between the Shiite government in Baghdad and Shiite Iran, which continues to ignore American threats of military action if it does not believably abandon its nuclear program; a safe haven for the Taliban in the Pakistani provinces bordering on Afghanistan; and loss of Pakistani support for Ameri-can desire to take the war into the tribal areas. That safe haven made it impossible for the Russians to win, and it will soon obsess the Americans as well.
But set Afghanistan aside. Iraq is the big war. Getting out of Iraq will require just as much resolution as it took to get in - and the same kind of resolution: a willingness to ignore the consequences. The consequence hardest to ignore will be the growing power and influence of Iran, which Bush has described as one of the two great security threats to the US. Israel shares this view of Iran. No new president will want to run the risk of being thought soft on Iran. This is where the military error exacts a terrible price. A political conflict transformed into a military conflict requires a military resolution, and those, famously, come in two forms - victory or defeat. Getting out means admitting defeat.
Is it possible that the new president will have that kind of resolution? I think not; to my ear Clinton and Obama don't sound drained of hope or bright ideas, determined to cut losses and end the agony. Why should they? They're coming in fresh from the sidelines. Getting out, giving up, admitting defeat are not what we expect from the psychology of newly elected presidents who have just overcome all odds and battled through to personal victory. They've managed the impossible once; why not again? Planning for withdrawals might begin on Day One, but the plans will be hostage to events.
At first, perhaps, all runs smoothly. Then things begin to happen. The situation on the first day has altered by the tenth. Some faction of Iraqis joins or drops out of the fight. A troublesome law is passed, or left standing. A helicopter goes down with casualties in two digits. The Green Zone is hit by a new wave of rockets or mortars from Sadr City in Baghdad. The US Army protests that the rockets or mortars were provided by Iran. The new president warns Iran to stay out of the fight. The government in Tehran dismisses the warning. This is already a long-established pattern. Why should we expect it to change? So it goes. At an unmarked moment somewhere between the third and the sixth month a sea change occurs: Bush's war becomes the new president's war, and getting out means failure, means defeat, means rising opposition at home, means no second term. It's not hard to see where this is going.
We are committed in Afghanistan. We are not ready to leave Iraq. In both countries our friends are in trouble. The pride of American arms is at stake. The world is watching. To me the logic of events seems inescapable. Unless something quite unexpected happens, four years from now the presidential candidates will be arguing about two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, one going into its ninth year, the other into its eleventh. The choice will be the one Americans hate most - get out or fight on.
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Party Like It’s 2008
By FRANK RICH
ANOTHER weekly do-or-die primary battle, another round of wildly predicted “game changers” that collapsed in the locker room.
Hillary Clinton’s attempt to impersonate a Nascar-lovin’, gun-totin’, economist-bashin’ populist went bust: Asked which candidate most “shares your values,” voters in both North Carolina and Indiana exit polls opted instead for the elite and condescending arugula-eater. Bill Clinton’s small-town barnstorming tour, hailed as a revival of old-time Bubba bonhomie, proved to be yet another sabotage of his wife, whipping up false expectations for her disastrous showing in North Carolina. Barack Obama’s final, undercaffeinated debate performance, not to mention the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s attempted character assassination, failed to slow his inexorable path to the Democratic nomination.
“It’s still early,” Mrs. Clinton said on Wednesday. Though it’s way too late for her, she’s half-right. We’re only at the end of the beginning of this extraordinary election year. While we wait out her self-immolating exit, it’s a good time to pause the 24/7 roller coaster for a second and get our bearings. The reason that politicians and the press have gotten so much so wrong is that we keep forgetting what year it is. Only if we reboot to 2008 will the long march to November start making sense.
This is not 1968, when the country was so divided over race and war that cities and campuses exploded in violence. If you have any doubts, just look (to take a recent example) at the restrained response by New Yorkers, protestors included, to the acquittal of three police officers in the 50-bullet shooting death of an unarmed black man, Sean Bell.
This is not 1988, when a Democratic liberal from Massachusetts of modest political skills could be easily clobbered by racist ads and an incumbent vice president running for the Gipper’s third term. This is not the 1998 midterms, when the Teflon Clintons triumphed over impeachment. This is not 2004, when another Democrat from Massachusetts did for windsurfing what the previous model did for tanks.
Almost every wrong prediction about this election cycle has come from those trying to force the round peg of this year’s campaign into the square holes of past political wars. That’s why race keeps being portrayed as dooming Mr. Obama — surely Jeremiah Wright = Willie Horton! — no matter what the voters say to the contrary. It’s why the Beltway took on faith the Clinton machine’s strategic, organization and fund-raising invincibility. It’s why some prognosticators still imagine that John McCain can spin the Iraq fiasco to his political advantage as Richard Nixon miraculously did Vietnam.
The year 2008 is far more complex — and exhilarating — than the old templates would have us believe. Of course we’re in pain. More voters think the country is on the wrong track (81 percent) than at any time in the history of New York Times/CBS News polling on that question. George W. Bush is the most unpopular president that any living American has known.
And yet, paradoxically, there is a heartening undertow: we know the page will turn. For all the anger and angst over the war and the economy, for all the campaign’s acrimony, the anticipation of ending the Bush era is palpable, countering the defeatist mood. The repressed sliver of joy beneath the national gloom can be seen in the record registration numbers of new voters and the over-the-top turnout in Democratic primaries.
Mr. Obama hardly created this moment, with its potent brew of Bush loathing and sweeping generational change. He simply had the vision to tap into it. Running in 2008 rather than waiting four more years was the single smartest political decision he’s made (and, yes, he’s made dumb ones too). The second smartest was to understand and emphasize that subterranean, nearly universal anticipation of change rather than settle for the narrower band of partisan, dyspeptic Bush-bashing. We don’t know yet if he’s the man who can make the moment — and won’t know unless he gets to the White House — but there’s no question that the moment has helped make the man.
For five years boomers have been asking, “Why are the kids not in the streets screaming about the war the way we were?” The simple answer: no draft. But as Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais show in “Millennial Makeover,” their book about the post-1982 American generation, that energy has been plowed into quieter social activism and grand-scale social networking, often linked on the same Web page. The millennials’ bottom-up digital superstructure was there to be mined, for an amalgam of political organizing, fund-raising and fun, and Mr. Obama’s camp knew how to work it. The part of the press that can’t tell the difference between Facebook and, say, AOL, was too busy salivating over the Clintons’ vintage 1990s roster of fat-cat donors to hear the major earthquake rumbling underground.
The demographic reshaping of the electoral map, though more widely noted, still isn’t fully understood. From Rust Belt Ohio through Tuesday’s primaries, cable bloviators have been fixated on the older, white, working-class vote. Their unspoken (and truly condescending) assumption, lately embraced by Mrs. Clinton, is that these voters are Reagan Democrats, cryogenically frozen since 1980, who come in two flavors: rubes who will be duped by a politician backing a gas-tax pander or racists who are out of Mr. Obama’s reach.
Guess what: there are racists in America and, yes, the occasional rubes (even among Obama voters). Some of them may reside in Indiana, which hasn’t voted for a national Democratic ticket since 1964. But there are many more white working-class voters, both Clinton and Obama supporters, who prefer Democratic policies after seven years of G.O.P. failure. And there is little evidence to suggest that there are enough racists of any class in America, let alone in swing states, to determine the results come fall.
As the Times columnist Charles Blow charted last weekend, Mr. Obama’s favorable and unfavorable ratings from white Democrats are both up 5 points since last summer in the Times/CBS poll — a wash despite all the hyperventilating about Mr. Wright and Bittergate. (By contrast, Mrs. Clinton’s favorable rating among black voters fell 36 points while her unfavorable rating rose 17.) Gallup last week found that after the Wright circus Mr. Obama’s white support in a matchup against Mr. McCain is still no worse than John Kerry’s against President Bush in 2004.
But this isn’t 2004, and the fixation on that one demographic in the Clinton-Obama contest has obscured the big picture. The rise in black voters and young voters of all races in Democratic primaries is re-weighting the electorate. Look, for instance, at Ohio, the crucial swing state that Mr. Kerry lost by 119,000 votes four years ago. This year black voters accounted for 18 percent of the state’s Democratic primary voters, up from 14 percent in 2004, an increase of some 230,000 voters out of an overall turnout leap of roughly a million. Voters under 30 (up by some 245,000 voters) accounted for 16 percent, up from 9 in 2004. Those younger Ohio voters even showed up in larger numbers than the perennially reliable over-65 crowd.
Good as this demographic shift is for a Democratic ticket led by Mr. Obama, it’s even better news that so many pundits and Republicans bitterly cling to the delusion that the Karl Rove playbook of Swift-boating and race-baiting can work as it did four and eight years ago. You can’t surf to a right-wing blog or Fox News without someone beating up on Mr. Wright or the other predictable conservative piñata, Michelle Obama.
This may help rally the anti-Obama vote. But that contingent will be more than offset in November by mobilized young voters, blacks and women, among them many Clinton-supporting Democrats (and independents and Republicans) unlikely to entertain a G.O.P. candidate with a perfect record of voting against abortion rights. Even a safe Republican Congressional seat in Louisiana fell to a Democrat last weekend, despite a campaign by his opponent that invoked Mr. Obama as a bogeyman.
A few conservatives do realize the game has changed. George Will wrote last week that Mr. Obama was Reaganesque in the stylistic sense that “his manner lulls his adversaries into underestimating his sheer toughness — the tempered steel beneath the sleek suits.” John and Cindy McCain get it too, which is why both last week made a point (he on “The Daily Show,” she on “Today”) of condemning negative campaigning. But even if Mr. McCain keeps his word and stops trying to portray Mr. Obama as the man from Hamas, he can’t disown the Limbaugh axis of right-wing race-mongering. That’s what’s left of his party’s base.
Now that the Obama-Clinton race is over, the new Beltway narrative has it that Mr. McCain, a likable “maverick” (who supported Mr. Bush in 95 percent of his votes last year, according to Congressional Quarterly), might override the war, the economy, Bush-loathing and the bankrupt Republican brand to be competitive with Mr. Obama. Anything can happen in politics, including real potential game changers, from Mr. McCain’s still-unreleased health records to new excavations of Mr. Obama’s history in Chicago. But as long as the likely Democratic nominee keeps partying like it’s 2008 while everyone else refights the battles of yesteryear, he will continue to be underestimated every step of the way.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/opinion/11rich.html?em&ex=1210651200&en=0516252791fa0363&ei=5087%0A&exprod=myyahoo
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
ANOTHER weekly do-or-die primary battle, another round of wildly predicted “game changers” that collapsed in the locker room.
Hillary Clinton’s attempt to impersonate a Nascar-lovin’, gun-totin’, economist-bashin’ populist went bust: Asked which candidate most “shares your values,” voters in both North Carolina and Indiana exit polls opted instead for the elite and condescending arugula-eater. Bill Clinton’s small-town barnstorming tour, hailed as a revival of old-time Bubba bonhomie, proved to be yet another sabotage of his wife, whipping up false expectations for her disastrous showing in North Carolina. Barack Obama’s final, undercaffeinated debate performance, not to mention the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s attempted character assassination, failed to slow his inexorable path to the Democratic nomination.
“It’s still early,” Mrs. Clinton said on Wednesday. Though it’s way too late for her, she’s half-right. We’re only at the end of the beginning of this extraordinary election year. While we wait out her self-immolating exit, it’s a good time to pause the 24/7 roller coaster for a second and get our bearings. The reason that politicians and the press have gotten so much so wrong is that we keep forgetting what year it is. Only if we reboot to 2008 will the long march to November start making sense.
This is not 1968, when the country was so divided over race and war that cities and campuses exploded in violence. If you have any doubts, just look (to take a recent example) at the restrained response by New Yorkers, protestors included, to the acquittal of three police officers in the 50-bullet shooting death of an unarmed black man, Sean Bell.
This is not 1988, when a Democratic liberal from Massachusetts of modest political skills could be easily clobbered by racist ads and an incumbent vice president running for the Gipper’s third term. This is not the 1998 midterms, when the Teflon Clintons triumphed over impeachment. This is not 2004, when another Democrat from Massachusetts did for windsurfing what the previous model did for tanks.
Almost every wrong prediction about this election cycle has come from those trying to force the round peg of this year’s campaign into the square holes of past political wars. That’s why race keeps being portrayed as dooming Mr. Obama — surely Jeremiah Wright = Willie Horton! — no matter what the voters say to the contrary. It’s why the Beltway took on faith the Clinton machine’s strategic, organization and fund-raising invincibility. It’s why some prognosticators still imagine that John McCain can spin the Iraq fiasco to his political advantage as Richard Nixon miraculously did Vietnam.
The year 2008 is far more complex — and exhilarating — than the old templates would have us believe. Of course we’re in pain. More voters think the country is on the wrong track (81 percent) than at any time in the history of New York Times/CBS News polling on that question. George W. Bush is the most unpopular president that any living American has known.
And yet, paradoxically, there is a heartening undertow: we know the page will turn. For all the anger and angst over the war and the economy, for all the campaign’s acrimony, the anticipation of ending the Bush era is palpable, countering the defeatist mood. The repressed sliver of joy beneath the national gloom can be seen in the record registration numbers of new voters and the over-the-top turnout in Democratic primaries.
Mr. Obama hardly created this moment, with its potent brew of Bush loathing and sweeping generational change. He simply had the vision to tap into it. Running in 2008 rather than waiting four more years was the single smartest political decision he’s made (and, yes, he’s made dumb ones too). The second smartest was to understand and emphasize that subterranean, nearly universal anticipation of change rather than settle for the narrower band of partisan, dyspeptic Bush-bashing. We don’t know yet if he’s the man who can make the moment — and won’t know unless he gets to the White House — but there’s no question that the moment has helped make the man.
For five years boomers have been asking, “Why are the kids not in the streets screaming about the war the way we were?” The simple answer: no draft. But as Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais show in “Millennial Makeover,” their book about the post-1982 American generation, that energy has been plowed into quieter social activism and grand-scale social networking, often linked on the same Web page. The millennials’ bottom-up digital superstructure was there to be mined, for an amalgam of political organizing, fund-raising and fun, and Mr. Obama’s camp knew how to work it. The part of the press that can’t tell the difference between Facebook and, say, AOL, was too busy salivating over the Clintons’ vintage 1990s roster of fat-cat donors to hear the major earthquake rumbling underground.
The demographic reshaping of the electoral map, though more widely noted, still isn’t fully understood. From Rust Belt Ohio through Tuesday’s primaries, cable bloviators have been fixated on the older, white, working-class vote. Their unspoken (and truly condescending) assumption, lately embraced by Mrs. Clinton, is that these voters are Reagan Democrats, cryogenically frozen since 1980, who come in two flavors: rubes who will be duped by a politician backing a gas-tax pander or racists who are out of Mr. Obama’s reach.
Guess what: there are racists in America and, yes, the occasional rubes (even among Obama voters). Some of them may reside in Indiana, which hasn’t voted for a national Democratic ticket since 1964. But there are many more white working-class voters, both Clinton and Obama supporters, who prefer Democratic policies after seven years of G.O.P. failure. And there is little evidence to suggest that there are enough racists of any class in America, let alone in swing states, to determine the results come fall.
As the Times columnist Charles Blow charted last weekend, Mr. Obama’s favorable and unfavorable ratings from white Democrats are both up 5 points since last summer in the Times/CBS poll — a wash despite all the hyperventilating about Mr. Wright and Bittergate. (By contrast, Mrs. Clinton’s favorable rating among black voters fell 36 points while her unfavorable rating rose 17.) Gallup last week found that after the Wright circus Mr. Obama’s white support in a matchup against Mr. McCain is still no worse than John Kerry’s against President Bush in 2004.
But this isn’t 2004, and the fixation on that one demographic in the Clinton-Obama contest has obscured the big picture. The rise in black voters and young voters of all races in Democratic primaries is re-weighting the electorate. Look, for instance, at Ohio, the crucial swing state that Mr. Kerry lost by 119,000 votes four years ago. This year black voters accounted for 18 percent of the state’s Democratic primary voters, up from 14 percent in 2004, an increase of some 230,000 voters out of an overall turnout leap of roughly a million. Voters under 30 (up by some 245,000 voters) accounted for 16 percent, up from 9 in 2004. Those younger Ohio voters even showed up in larger numbers than the perennially reliable over-65 crowd.
Good as this demographic shift is for a Democratic ticket led by Mr. Obama, it’s even better news that so many pundits and Republicans bitterly cling to the delusion that the Karl Rove playbook of Swift-boating and race-baiting can work as it did four and eight years ago. You can’t surf to a right-wing blog or Fox News without someone beating up on Mr. Wright or the other predictable conservative piñata, Michelle Obama.
This may help rally the anti-Obama vote. But that contingent will be more than offset in November by mobilized young voters, blacks and women, among them many Clinton-supporting Democrats (and independents and Republicans) unlikely to entertain a G.O.P. candidate with a perfect record of voting against abortion rights. Even a safe Republican Congressional seat in Louisiana fell to a Democrat last weekend, despite a campaign by his opponent that invoked Mr. Obama as a bogeyman.
A few conservatives do realize the game has changed. George Will wrote last week that Mr. Obama was Reaganesque in the stylistic sense that “his manner lulls his adversaries into underestimating his sheer toughness — the tempered steel beneath the sleek suits.” John and Cindy McCain get it too, which is why both last week made a point (he on “The Daily Show,” she on “Today”) of condemning negative campaigning. But even if Mr. McCain keeps his word and stops trying to portray Mr. Obama as the man from Hamas, he can’t disown the Limbaugh axis of right-wing race-mongering. That’s what’s left of his party’s base.
Now that the Obama-Clinton race is over, the new Beltway narrative has it that Mr. McCain, a likable “maverick” (who supported Mr. Bush in 95 percent of his votes last year, according to Congressional Quarterly), might override the war, the economy, Bush-loathing and the bankrupt Republican brand to be competitive with Mr. Obama. Anything can happen in politics, including real potential game changers, from Mr. McCain’s still-unreleased health records to new excavations of Mr. Obama’s history in Chicago. But as long as the likely Democratic nominee keeps partying like it’s 2008 while everyone else refights the battles of yesteryear, he will continue to be underestimated every step of the way.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/opinion/11rich.html?em&ex=1210651200&en=0516252791fa0363&ei=5087%0A&exprod=myyahoo
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
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