Domestic terrorism: New trouble at home

Domestic terrorism: New trouble at home

Mon Nov 15, 2004

By Larry Copeland, USA TODAY

Since Sept. 11, the nation's attention has been focused on possible threats from Islamic terrorists. But home-grown terrorists have been steadily plotting and carrying out attacks in unrelated incidents across the nation, according to federal authorities and two organizations that monitor hate groups.

None of the incidents over the past few years matched the devastation of 9/11 or even the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, which killed 168 and remains the deadliest act of terrorism against the nation by a U.S. citizen.

But some of the alleged domestic terrorists who have been arrested had ambitious plans. The people and groups range from white supremacists, anti-government types and militia members to eco-terrorists and people who hate corporations. They include violent anti-abortionists and black and brown nationalists who envision a separate state for blacks and Latinos. And they have been busy.

"Not a lot of attention is being paid to this, because everybody is concerned about the guy in a turban. But there are still plenty of angry, Midwestern white guys out there," says U.S. Marshals Service chief inspector Geoff Shank.

Shank, who is based in the Chicago area, says the concerns about domestic terrorism range from anti-abortion extremists who threaten to attack clinics and doctors to some violent biker gangs that may be involved in organized crime. And the FBI (news - web sites) said in June that eco-terrorism - acts of violence, sabotage or property damage motivated by concern for animals or the environment - was the nation's top domestic terrorism threat. The bureau said then that eco-terrorists had committed more than 1,100 criminal acts and caused property damage estimated at least $110 million since 1976.

Alleged terrorist plots by U.S. citizens are not new, but many of the recent conspiracies were overshadowed by 9/11 and the hunt for terrorists abroad. Most of the foiled plots didn't get very far. And few got much publicity. But there were some potentially close calls, such as the scheme by William Krar, an east Texas man who stockpiled enough sodium cyanide to gas everyone in a building the size of a high school basketball gymnasium before he was arrested in 2002.

Shank, whose unit mainly searches for fugitives, including some wanted on domestic terror-related charges, led the manhunt for Clayton Lee Waagner, 48, of Kennerdell, Pa. Waagner was convicted in December of mailing hundreds of threat letters containing bogus anthrax to abortion clinics in 24 states. During his trial in Philadelphia, prosecutors documented Waagner's ties to the Army of God, an extremist group that believes violence against abortion providers is an acceptable way to end abortion.

'A very serious threat'

"There's been a very, very heavy focus nationally on foreign terrorism since 9/11," says Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., which has tracked hate groups since 1971. "The reality is that, meanwhile, domestic terrorism has hummed along at quite a steady clip. It ... still poses a very serious threat."

Among the incidents since 9/11:

• Last month in Tennessee, the FBI arrested a man who agents say hated the federal government and was attempting to acquire chemical weapons and explosives to blow up a government building. Demetrius "Van" Crocker, 39, of McKenzie, Tenn., pleaded not guilty Nov. 5. His attorney, public defender Stephen Shankman, did not return calls.

• In May, Krar, 63, of Noonday, Texas, was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison after he stockpiled enough sodium cyanide to kill everyone inside a 30,000-square-foot building. Krar, described by federal prosecutors as a white supremacist, also had nine machine guns, 67 sticks of explosives and more than 100,000 rounds of ammunition. Investigators and the federal prosecutor said they didn't know what Krar intended to do with the potentially deadly chemicals. Krar's common-law wife, Judith Bruey, 55, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to possess illegal weapons and was sentenced to nearly five years.

• Last month in Utah, two men described by the U.S. attorney there as "domestic terrorists" pleaded guilty to setting separate arson fires related to eco-terrorism. Justus Ireland, 23, admitted starting a fire that caused $1.5 million damage at a West Jordan lumber company and spray-painting "ELF" at the site. The Earth Liberation Front has been connected to dozens of acts of vandalism and arson around the country since 1996. Joshua Demmitt, 18, of Provo, pleaded guilty to starting a fire at Brigham Young University's Ellsworth Farm, where animal experiments are conducted, in the name of the Animal Liberation Front. A third man, Harrison Burrows, 18, also of Provo, pleaded guilty earlier.

• In May, the FBI's domestic terrorism unit charged seven members of an animal rights group with terrorism after investigating what they said was a marked increase in crimes to stop the use of animals for product-testing. The activists, arrested in New York, New Jersey, California and Washington state, are members of Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty. The group seeks to shut down Huntingdon Life Sciences, a New Jersey product-testing company.

Prosecutors allege that the activists set fire to Huntingdon employees' cars, vandalized shareholders' homes and threatened their families. They are charged with conspiring to commit terrorism against an enterprise that uses animals for research and could face up to three years in prison if convicted.

• In May, a Brookfield, Wis., man labeled a domestic terrorist by federal prosecutors received an eight-year prison sentence for interfering with Madison police radio frequencies. Rajib Mitra, 26, had blocked police radio signals and later broadcast sex sounds over police radios. His attorney argued that the transmissions were an accident.

Mitra was one of the first defendants sentenced under guidelines changed after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The changes, effective Nov. 5, 2003, impose stiffer penalties for domestic terrorism. Under the previous sentencing guidelines, Mitra probably would have been sentenced to 18 to 24 months.

Mitra's attorney, Chris Van Wagner, says his client was not a terrorist and should have received a lesser punishment. "It's clear that (the guidelines) were put in place to punish those who seek to subvert our government and not intended to increase the punishment for people who simply engage in criminal mischief but had no terrorist angle or connection whatsoever," Van Wagner says. "He was just a dolphin caught in a tuna net."

Mitra was charged under provisions of the Patriot Act that make it a crime to cause such public-safety problems, even if there were no monetary damages. "This is a vivid example of how the Patriot Act has been used in cases that clearly have nothing to do with terrorism and that are far removed from what Congress was concerned about when it passed the Patriot Act," says Timothy Edgar of the American Civil Liberties Union (news - web sites).

'Black helicopter' crowd

During the 1990s, anti-government groups sprang up all over the country, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League, which was founded in 1913 to combat anti-Semitism and now monitors hate groups. Many formed militias to prepare for large-scale resistance to the government, which the groups blamed for the Randy Weaver siege at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992 and the Branch Davidian confrontation in Waco, Texas, in 1993.

Many of these group members believed the federal government was secretly setting up concentration camps for dissident Americans and was planning a takeover of the United States by United Nations (news - web sites) troops as part of a "new world order." Many also said that mysterious black helicopters were conducting surveillance in the West, according to the ADL.

"The 'black helicopter' crowd is still out there," says Wisconsin federal prosecutor Tim O'Shea, referring to extremists who distrust and abhor the federal government.

Potok says the Southern Poverty Law Center identified 751 hate groups last year, a 6% increase over the 708 such organizations it counted in 2002.

Mark Pitcavage, director of fact-finding for the Anti-Defamation League, says incidents of domestic terrorism often don't get much media coverage beyond the local areas where they occur. He says he was surprised that the Krar case did not get wider attention. "This was the only case in U.S. history where we had a person in the U.S. building an actual chemical weapon," he says.

He cites two other cases. In 1997, militia members gathered in central Texas allegedly to plan to attack a military base on Independence Day. They were arrested the morning of July 4 near Fort Hood. Three years later, he says, three heavily armed people described by federal investigators as anti-government extremists shot down a California Highway Patrol helicopter near the California-Nevada border during a standoff with police.

Potok, director of the center's Intelligence Project, which monitors hate groups, says, "I don't mean to minimize the work of groups with ties to al-Qaeda. Obviously, there's a huge external threat as well. But there's a tendency to want to externalize the threat and say the people who want to hurt us don't look like us, they don't worship the same god and don't have the same skin color."

Earlier this year, the National District Attorneys Association, which has about 7,000 members, held a first-ever conference on domestic terrorism in Washington, D.C., to help local prosecutors identify potential terrorist groups.

"It was very well received," says the association's vice president, Robert Honecker, a prosecutor in Monmouth County, N.J. "They were appreciative of getting the information and the knowledge so they would be prepared should something happen in their jurisdiction."

Man sought nuclear materials

Some of the alleged efforts by domestic terrorists are chilling.

According to an FBI affidavit in the Tennessee case, Crocker had inquired last spring about where he could obtain nuclear waste or nuclear materials. An informant told the FBI that Crocker, who had "absolute hatred" for the government, wanted "to build a bomb to be detonated at a government building, particularly a courthouse, either federal or state."

In September, according to the affidavit, Crocker told an undercover FBI agent "it would be a good thing if somebody could detonate some sort of weapon of mass destruction in Washington, D.C.," while both houses of Congress "were in session." Crocker allegedly told the agent he admired Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. He said "establishing a concentration camp for Jewish insurance executives would be a desirable endeavor."

Crocker later bought what he thought was Sarin nerve gas and a block of C-4 explosive from the undercover agent, the affidavit says.

Authorities arrested Crocker last month. Pitcavage of the Anti-Defamation League says such arrests thwart possible attacks and show that U.S. law enforcement is effectively fighting domestic terrorism.

"One of the measures of this is that the number of people arrested for (plotting) terrorist acts is far greater than the number of people arrested for carrying out such attacks. So we're arresting them before they can carry out these acts, which is very important. 9/11 raised awareness generally among law enforcement."

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KERRY WON OHIO -- JUST COUNT THE BALLOTS AT THE BACK OF THE BUS

KERRY WON OHIO
JUST COUNT THE BALLOTS AT THE BACK OF THE BUS
In These Times
Friday, November 12, 2004
Most voters in Ohio chose Kerry. Here's how the votes vanished.

By Greg Palast

This February, Ken Blackwell, Ohio's Secretary of State, told his State Senate President, "The possibility of a close election with punch cards as the state’s primary voting device invites a Florida-like calamity." Blackwell, co-chair of Bush-Cheney reelection campaign, wasn't warning his fellow Republican of disaster, but boasting of an opportunity to bring in Ohio for Team Bush no matter what the voters wanted. And most voters in Ohio wanted JFK, not GWB. But their choice won't count because their votes won't be counted.

The ballots that add up to a majority for John Kerry in Ohio -- and in New Mexico -- are locked up in two Republican hidey-holes: "spoiled" ballots and "provisional" ballots.

OHIO SPOILED ROTTEN
American democracy has a dark little secret. In a typical presidential election, two million ballots are simply chucked in the garbage, marked "spoiled" and not counted. A dive into the electoral dumpster reveals something special about these votes left to rot. In a careful county-by-county, precinct-by-precinct analysis of the Florida 2000 race, the US Civil Rights Commission discovered that 54% of the votes in the spoilage bin were cast by African-Americans. And Florida, Heaven help us, is typical. Nationwide, the number of Black votes "disappeared" into the spoiled pile is approximately one million. The other million in the no-count pit come mainly from Hispanic, Native-American and poor white precincts, a decidedly Democratic demographic.

Ohio Republicans, simultaneously in charge of both the Bush-Cheney get-out-the-vote drive and the state's vote-counting rules, doggedly and systematically insured the spoilage pile would be as high as the White House.

Vote spoilage comes in two flavors. There are "overvotes" -- too many punches in the cards, and "undervotes." Here we find the hanging, dimpled and "pregnant" chads created by old, dysfunctional punch card machines, in which the bit of paper covering the hole doesn't fall out, but hangs on. Machines can't read these, but we humans, who know a hole when we see one, have no problem reading these cards … if allowed to. This is how Katherine Harris defeated Al Gore, by halting the hand count of the spoiled punch cards not, as is generally believed, by halting a "recount."

Whose chads are left hanging? In Florida in 2000 federal investigators determined that Black voters' ballots spoiled 900% more often than white voters, mainly due to punch card error. Ohio Republicans found those racial odds quite attractive. The state was the only one of fifty to refuse to eliminate or fix these vote-eating machines, even in the face of a lawsuit by the ACLU.

Apparently, the Ohio Republicans like what the ACLU found. The civil rights group's expert testimony concluded that Ohio's cussed insistence on forcing 73% of its electorate to use punch card machines had an "overwhelming" racial bias, voiding votes mostly in Black precincts. Blackwell doesn't disagree; and he hopes to fix the machinery … sometime after George Bush's next inauguration. In the meantime, the state's Attorney General Jim Petro, a Republican, strategically postponed the trial date of the ACLU case until after the election.

Fixing a punch card machine is cheap and easy. If Ohio simply placed a card-reading machine in each polling station, as Michigan did this year, voters could have checked to ensure their vote would tally. If not, they would have gotten another card.
Blackwell knows that. He also knows that if those reading machines had been installed, almost all the 93,000 spoiled votes, overwhelmingly Democratic, would have closed the gap on George Bush's lead of 136,000 votes.

JIM CROW'S PROVISIONAL BALLOT

Add to the spoiled ballots a second group of uncounted votes, the 'provisional' ballots, and -- voila! -- the White House would have turned Democrat blue.

But that won't happen because of the peculiar way provisional ballots are counted or, more often, not counted. Introduced by federal law in 2002, the provisional ballot was designed especially for voters of color. Proposed by the Congressional Black Caucus to save the rights of those wrongly scrubbed from voter rolls, it was, in Republican-controlled swing states, twisted into a back-of-the-bus ballot unlikely to be tallied.

Unlike the real thing, these ballots are counted only by the whimsy and rules of a state's top elections official; and in Ohio, that gives a virtually ballot veto to Bush-Cheney campaign co-chair, Blackwell.

Mr. Blackwell has a few rules to make sure a large proportion of provisional ballots won't be counted. For the first time in memory, the Secretary of State has banned counting ballots cast in the "wrong" precinct, though all neighborhoods share the same President.

Over 155,000 Ohio voters were shunted to these second-class ballots. The election-shifting bulge in provisional ballots (more than 3% of the electorate) was the direct result of the national Republican strategy that targeted African-American precincts for mass challenges on election day.

This is the first time in four decades that a political party has systematically barred -- in this case successfully -- hundreds of thousands of Black voters from access to the voting booth. While investigating for BBC Television, we obtained three dozen of the Republican Party's confidential "caging" lists, their title for spreadsheets listing names and addresses of voters they intended to block on any pretext.

We found that every single address of the thousands on these Republican hit lists was located in Black-majority precincts. You might find that nasty and racist. It may also be a crime.

Before 1965, Jim Crow laws in the Deep South did not bar Blacks from voting. Rather, the segregationist game was played by applying minor technical voting requirements only to African-Americans. That year, Congress voted to make profiling and impeding minority voters, even with a legal pretext, a criminal offence under the Voting Rights Act.

But that didn't stop the Republicans of '04. Their legally questionable mass challenge to Black voters is not some low-level dirty tricks operation of local party hacks. Emails we obtained show the lists were copied directly to the Republican National Committee's chief of research and to the director of a state campaign.

Many challenges center on changes of address. On one Republican caging list, 50 addresses changed from Jacksonville to overseas, African-American soldiers shipped Over There.

You don't have to guess the preferences registered on the provisional ballots. Republicans went on a challenging rampage, while Democrats pledged to hold to the tradition of letting voters vote.

Blackwell has said he will count all the "valid" provisional ballots. However, his rigid regulations, like the new guess-your-precinct rule, are rigged to knock out enough voters to keep Bush's skinny lead alive. Other pre-election maneuvers by Republican officials -- late and improbably large purges of voter rolls, rejection of registrations -- maximized the use of provisional ballots which will never be counted. For example, a voter wrongly tagged an ineligible "felon" voter (and there's plenty in that category, mostly African-Americans), will lose their ballot even though they are wrongly identified.


KERRY BLACKS OUT
It was heartening that, during his campaign, John Kerry broke the political omerta that seems to prohibit public mention of the color of votes not counted in America. "Don't tell us that in the strongest democracy on earth a million disenfranchised African Americans is the best we can do." The Senator promised the NAACP convention, "This November, we're going to make sure that every single vote is counted."

But this week, Kerry became the first presidential candidate in history to break a campaign promise after losing an election. The Senator waited less than 24 hours to abandon more than a quarter million Ohio voters still waiting for their provisional and chad-spoiled ballots to be counted.

While disappointing, I can understand the cold calculus against taking the fight to the end. To count the ballots, Kerry's lawyers would, first, have to demand a hand reading of the punch cards. Blackwell, armed with the Supreme Court's Bush v. Gore diktat, would undoubtedly pull a "Kate Harris" by halting or restricting a hand count. Most daunting, Kerry's team would also, as one state attorney general pointed out to me, have to litigate each and every rejected provisional ballot in court. This would entail locating up to a hundred thousand voters to testify to their right to the vote, with Blackwell challenging each with a holster full of regulations from the old Jim Crow handbook.

Given the odds and the cost to his political career, Kerry bent, not to the will of the people, but to the will to power of the Ohio Republican machine.

We have yet to total here the votes lost in missing absentee ballots, in eyebrow-raising touch screen tallies, in purges of legal voters from registries and other games played in swing states. But why dwell on these things? Our betters in the political and media elite have told us to get over it, move on.

To the victors go the spoils of electoral class war. As Ohio's politically ambitious Secretary of State brags on his own website, "Last time I checked, Katherine Harris wasn't in a soup line, she's in Congress."


NEW MEXICO GOES KERRY - BUT WHO'S COUNTING?

Why single out Ohio? So it also went in New Mexico where ballots of Hispanic voters (two-to-one Kerry supporters) spoil at a rate five times that of white voters. Add in the astounding 13,000 provisional ballots in the Enchanted State -- handed out "like candy" to Hispanic, not white, voters according to a director of the Catholic Church's get-out-the-vote drive -- and Kerry wins New Mexico. Just count up the votes … but that won't happen.

Investigative reporter Greg Palast is author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (Penguin 2004).

Oliver Shykles and Matthew Pascarella of GregPalast.com contributed to this article.

View Greg Palast's BBC Television film, "Bush Family Fortunes," now available on DVD, at http://www.gregpalast.com/bff-dvd.htm

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Some Small Shoes to Fill

The New York Times
November 16, 2004

THE CABINET SHUFFLE
And Some Small Shoes to Fill

Three other cabinet members announced their departures yesterday, virtually ignored in the shadow of Colin Powell's resignation. Their accomplishments, or lack thereof, say a lot about the president's first term and the prospects for his second.

When George W. Bush called himself a "compassionate conservative," he invariably pointed to his No Child Left Behind reform plan. As secretary of education, Rod Paige argued valiantly for the premise behind the law: that poor minority children deserve the same skilled teachers and high-quality schools as their affluent counterparts. But beyond the words, Dr. Paige turned out to be politically tone-deaf and a disastrous manager. His failures were recently outlined in a scalding report from the Government Accountability Office. The report noted that the department had squandered the authority given to it under the law and had failed even to provide written state-specific instructions to local governments attempting to comply with the new rules.

Among the people most mentioned as a possible successor for Dr. Paige is Margaret Spellings, Mr. Bush's chief domestic policy adviser and a principal architect of No Child Left Behind. Her background would give her both credibility and closer ties with the White House than Dr. Paige enjoyed. But whoever takes the job will need to make wholesale changes in the top echelons of the Education Department, which has been busier currying favor with religious organizations and the school voucher forces than carrying out the central mission at hand. Unless the department changes course quickly, it will miss the opportunity to ensure that the states comply with the all-important requirement for every classroom to have a highly qualified teacher.

As agriculture secretary, Ann Veneman generally toed the administration's pro-industry line on issues like forest policy and food safety. But she provided one notably fresh initiative in 2001, when she endorsed a new farm policy that would have drastically trimmed old-fashioned subsidies in favor of freer markets and more generous land conservation programs - a form of aid that is particularly helpful to small farmers. Unfortunately, the White House failed to give her much support in the face of Congressional resistance. The result was a swollen farm bill that greatly increased conservation spending but kept most of the old subsidies intact.

Ms. Veneman also began well on the area of forest policy, endorsing a strategy to prevent forest fires that would have focused on overgrown forests near at-risk communities while leaving the more valuable old-growth trees in remote areas pretty much alone. Within a year, however, under pressure from the timber industry, the White House and Congress, she reversed course in favor of a strategy that encouraged more aggressive commercial logging with only a modest payoff in fire suppression.

The energy secretary, Spencer Abraham, arrived at his cabinet post with the dubious distinction of having introduced a bill, when he was a United States senator, to abolish the very department Mr. Bush asked him to run. With that beginning, it's not surprising that Mr. Abraham pursued a pro-industry strategy that did little to steer the country to an energy future that would be cleaner, more efficient and less oil-dependent. To his credit, he began several useful steps to collect and safeguard nuclear materials that the United States and Russia had scattered around the world for research reactors. We have little hope that Mr. Abraham's successor will do any better at encouraging energy conservation, but given the president's campaign speeches about the importance of curbing nuclear proliferation, we hope that the next secretary will follow up on his lead on that critical initiative.

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Good Soldier Powell

The New York Times
November 16, 2004

THE CABINET SHUFFLE
Good Soldier Powell

As Secretary of State Colin Powell resigned yesterday, reportedly to be succeeded by the national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, it was hard to avoid the feeling that this imposing figure - who once personified the dignity, integrity and promise of government service and was the first African-American considered to have a shot at the White House - will be remembered for one picture and three sentences.

On Feb. 5, 2003, in an appearance before the United Nations Security Council, Mr. Powell, the retired four-star general and former national security adviser, held up a vial of white powder as a symbol of what he claimed - falsely, as it turned out - were Iraq's huge stockpiles of anthrax. He offered a scathing indictment of Saddam Hussein. "My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources,'' he said. "These are not assertions. What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."

As an increasingly angry world soon learned, Mr. Powell in fact offered half-truths, poorly analyzed intelligence and outright fantasies, from a nuclear weapons program in Baghdad that didn't exist to wildly exaggerated estimates of Iraq's chemical and biological weapons stockpiles and its ties to Al Qaeda.

But at the time, Mr. Powell's performance convinced many Americans skeptical about the war that the Iraqi government was a clear and present danger to the rest of the world. His enormous stature and his image as a moderating force within the administration - valued especially by America's European allies - were squandered in defending a unilateral decision he did not agree with to launch a war in which he did not really seem to believe.

From the start of his tenure as secretary of state, there was a question about which Colin Powell had moved into Foggy Bottom. Was it the decisive, charismatic general who coined a military doctrine that called for waging war only after the establishment of a political consensus behind achievable goals and then the commitment of overwhelming force to reach those ends? Or was it the faithful soldier who prized loyalty above all else?

Mr. Powell began with promise, forcing the long-neglected issues of Africa to the forefront of the administration's agenda. Even after 9/11, when those issues naturally took the back seat, the über-Powell was forever being rumored to be on the cusp of emerging and asserting himself over Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and even Vice President Dick Cheney.

But it's now clear that Mr. Powell long ago chose loyalty over leadership and was not a major figure in the biggest foreign policy decisions of the Bush administration. Most accounts of the rush to war in Iraq show that Mr. Powell was deeply troubled about the planning for the war, its timing and the intense opposition of most of Washington's European allies. But he was unwilling or unable to exert much influence over the president in that critical time, and it's not clear whether Mr. Bush even consulted him before making his decision to go to war.

There were moments in his tenure when Mr. Powell could have resigned over principle. But he soldiered on, leaving when it was safe and convenient for his boss. Yesterday, he told the world that he'd long ago given up any ambition of sticking around for a second term. In the end, his legacy may simply be that the administration that bungled the handling of a war because the president failed to heed the Powell Doctrine was the one in which Mr. Powell himself served.

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Debt Doubles at Agency that Insures Pension Plans

The New York Times
November 16, 2004

Debt Doubles at Agency that Insures Pension Plans
By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH

The federal agency that insures pension plans said yesterday that its deficit, already at the highest in its history, had doubled in its last fiscal year, to $23.3 billion.

Over a 12-month period, the agency, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, incurred losses of $12.1 billion, according to the agency's audited annual report for fiscal 2004. Much of the loss was a result of pension fund failures in the airline industry.

The agency, created in 1974 to be the federal safety net when pensions fail, has now lost an average of $10 billion a year for the last three years, according to one estimate. The mounting losses come at a time when the agency is responsible for paying the pensions for more than one million people covered by pension plans that failed.

The agency's executive director, Bradley D. Belt, called on Congress yesterday to address the situation quickly, "so the problem doesn't spiral out of control." He said that the Bush administration was preparing a plan for a comprehensive overhaul of the pension system, which it would propose early next year.

The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation is paid premiums by companies that offer traditional pension plans. But it does not have the legal authority to raise those premiums or take other fundamental steps to bring its finances back into balance. Such measures would have to be enacted by Congress.

Congress, however, has not addressed the problems of America's pension system in a comprehensive way since the late 1980's, when a number of large steel companies with traditional pension plans defaulted. Since then, lawmakers have made some lesser amendments to the system, but even those have been made with great difficulty. The issues involved are complicated, and any true pension reform will be costly to someone - either companies, workers or the federal government.

Experts warn that waiting will not make the troubles go away. The system of regulating and insuring traditional pensions called defined-benefit pensions is increasingly resembling the system that did the same for the savings and loan industry two decades ago.

Congress had difficulty correcting that system's structural problems as well. As a result, there were delays and missteps, and the problems had years to grow and deepen. In the end, the entire system collapsed in 1989 and Congress had to authorize a federal bailout that cost about $200 billion.

"The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation is living on borrowed time," said Representative George Miller, a California Democrat who has followed the troubles in the pension system closely. He issued a statement yesterday saying the possibility of "an S.& L.-style taxpayer bailout of the agency to the tune of billions of dollars has increased."

In announcing the pension agency's latest financial results, Mr. Belt, the executive director, said that it was not running out of cash. With reserves of $39 billion, he said, it should be able to keep sending retirees their pension checks "for a number of years," even if Congress does nothing.

The problem is that the pensions the agency must pay retirees are much larger than the reserves, Mr. Belt said. The pensions owed retirees measure $62.3 billion in today's dollars.

Unless the agency finds a way to close the gap between the $39 billion that it has and the $62 billion that it owes, it will run out of money at some point. In that case, either retirees will be denied their benefits, or else Congress will have to appropriate money for a bailout.

Mr. Belt also noted that the agency's problems were worsening at a time when the general economic environment has been improving. He said the agency now faced $96 billion worth of risk from companies that are "reasonably possible" to default on their pension promises. The comparable number a year ago was just $82 billion.

The pension agency identifies such companies by looking at their corporate credit ratings, together with the weakness of their pension funds.

The agency does not identify the companies whose pension plans it expects to take over. Still, it is clear that the airline industry was responsible for much of the agency's loss for the fiscal year.

US Airways three pension funds are expected to cost the agency $2.1 billion. And United Airlines, a unit of UAL, recently announced that it would terminate all four of its pension plans as part of its efforts to emerge from bankruptcy. Taking over United's pensions alone will cost the agency an estimated $6.3 billion, by far the biggest pension insurance claim ever made by a single company. Accounting rules require the agency to book that loss in its fiscal 2004, even though it has not yet taken over United's plans.

Even before yesterday's announcement, analysts were warning that the pension agency needed help. Douglas J. Elliott, president of the Center on Federal Financial Institutions, said that if Congress took corrective action quickly, the cost would be small relative to the cost of a bailout some time in the future. The center is a nonpartisan research institute that examines the federal government's various lending and insurance programs.

Mr. Elliott said that the agency's new numbers brought its average losses to more than $10 billion a year for three years.

"This is a trend," he said. "This isn't something where you can just say, 'Well, that was a bad year, thank goodness we're over it.' "

In addition, the agency's fiscal 2004 was a year of general improvement in overall economic and financial conditions, Mr. Elliott said. Had interest rates not changed slightly in the agency's favor, its losses would have been even larger.

Congress is not expected to address the pension agency's problems in the current lame duck session because it already has a full workload. But some members said yesterday that they were concerned about the strength of the nation's pension system and hoped to introduce legislation early in 2005.

"This issue has wide-ranging implications on retirees, employers, workers, taxpayers and the government," said Representative John A. Boehner, the Ohio Republican who is the chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. Mr. Boehner said in a statement that he planned to introduce a bill in 2005 that would address what he called "systemic pension underfunding problems."

The Education and Workforce Committee has already held hearings on the problems of the pension system and possible remedies. Mr. Boehner said that in addition to making sure companies set aside enough money for their pensions, the bill would require companies to disclose clear information about their pension plans and pay adequate insurance premiums for their coverage.

In addition to the premiums it collects from companies, the pension insurance program receives the assets from the failed pension funds it takes over and invests them. It does not currently receive money from income tax receipts.

The insurance premiums have not been increased since 1994 and are thought to be inadequate relative to the amount of insurance coverage companies receive. United Airlines, for instance, has paid about $50 million in insurance premiums over the years, for coverage of its $6.3 billion claim.

Pension specialists also point out that the premiums do not have anything to do with the amount of risk companies bring to the pension insurance program. Companies with pension plans that do not have adequate funds do pay higher premiums than companies with strong plans. But that way of operating does not account for one of the most important signs of whether the plan will collapse or not: the company's own health.

A strong company with an unhealthy pension plan poses nowhere near the risk of a weak company with an unhealthy pension plan.

Mr. Boehner has suggested finding a way to distinguish between weak and strong companies, and charge higher premiums to the companies that pose greater risk.

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Supreme Court Rebukes Texas Again Over a Death Sentence

Note: For any reader who may have forgotten, President Bush was Governor of Texas prior to being President and was responsible for killing an extreme number of inmates, along with Mr. Gonzales, his nominee for Attorney General who said it was ok to ignore the Geneva Convention and torture the prisoners in Abu Graib. Bush thinks its OK to kill adults in prison and teenagers on a battlefied they should not be on.

The New York Times
November 16, 2004

Supreme Court Rebukes Texas Again Over a Death Sentence
By LINDA GREENHOUSE

WASHINGTON, Nov. 15 - The Supreme Court overturned a Texas death sentence on Monday while delivering its latest rebuke to the way the death penalty is being handled by judges in the state, which has executed far more people than any other in the modern era of capital punishment.

The errors committed by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in upholding the death sentence of LaRoyce L. Smith were so clear to a majority of the Supreme Court that the justices decided the case in the inmate's favor on the basis of the briefs, without hearing arguments.

Only Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas dissented from the unsigned 12-page opinion. They did not write an opinion of their own.

Mr. Smith was convicted in 1991 of murdering a co-worker at a Taco Bell restaurant in Dallas where he had recently worked. He was 19. With an I.Q. of 78, he had reached the ninth grade in special education classes.

In the sentencing phase of his trial, the jury sentenced him to death under a procedure that the Texas Legislature was then in the process of amending to conform to Supreme Court rulings.

The justices said Monday that the Texas appeals court ignored problems the Supreme Court had already identified and that it should have known, when it affirmed the sentence last April, that the jury instructions made the death sentence unconstitutional.The state court "erroneously relied on a test we never countenanced and now have unequivocally rejected," the justices said.

In the last few years, the Supreme Court has overturned a number of death sentences in Texas while making evident its frustration with both the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals and the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, the federal court that hears habeas corpus petitions from Texas inmates.

With Texas having the second-biggest death row in the country, the Supreme Court's increasingly careful monitoring of death sentences in that state could have a significant effect on the overall death penalty picture.

Jordan Steiker, a law professor at the University of Texas who is Mr. Smith's lawyer, said although dozens of inmates might be freed from the Texas death row as a result of the ruling in Smith v. Texas, No. 04-5323, dozens of others in similar circumstances had been executed.

All were sentenced under a variant of jury instructions that the Supreme Court found unconstitutional in opinions that began in 1989 and ended on June 24 of this year, when the court overturned another death sentence in a case, Tennard v. Dretke.

Although the Tennard case had already been argued and a decision was imminent, the Texas appeals court rejected Mr. Smith's appeal without waiting for the Supreme Court's further clarification. The question the justices dealt with in all these cases was whether Texas juries had received instructions that permitted them to give adequate weight to any mitigating factors offered by the defendant to show why he should not be executed.

Under the Texas law that the Supreme Court approved when it permitted capital punishment to resume in 1976, a death sentence was mandatory if jurors answered yes to two questions: Was the killing deliberate, and would the defendant present a continuing danger to society?

There was no room for consideration of mitigating circumstances that the court found in subsequent decisions had to be considered by the jury if the defendant offered them.

After the court ruled in 1989 that Texas had to give jurors the chance to consider mitigating factors, the state added new instructions. Jurors who wanted to take mitigating factors into account should do so by answering no to one of the two questions, even if they believed that the correct answer was yes.

In a decision in 2001, the Supreme Court found this response constitutionally flawed. It then amplified that decision in the Tennard case in June.

Both in 2001 and in June, the justices said, telling jurors to answer the questions honestly and while at the same time instructing them to disregard their own answers placed the jurors in an untenable position, most likely preventing them from giving proper weight to the defendant's mitigating evidence.

The court said Monday that Mr. Smith's mitigating evidence of a low I.Q. and troubled family background - his father stole from the family to support a cocaine habit and was sent to prison - were substantial enough to require the jury's consideration.

Of the 943 executions in the country since 1976, Texas has carried out 335, more than the next six states combined. It has 457 people on death row, second to the 635 in California, which has conducted 10 executions.

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Former G.I.'s, Ordered to War, Fight Not to Go

The New York Times
November 16, 2004

Former G.I.'s, Ordered to War, Fight Not to Go
By MONICA DAVEY

The Army has encountered resistance from more than 2,000 former soldiers it has ordered back to military work, complicating its efforts to fill gaps in the regular troops.

Many of these former soldiers - some of whom say they have not trained, held a gun, worn a uniform or even gone for a jog in years - object to being sent to Iraq and Afghanistan now, after they thought they were through with life on active duty.

They are seeking exemptions, filing court cases or simply failing to report for duty, moves that will be watched closely by approximately 110,000 other members of the Individual Ready Reserve, a corps of soldiers who are no longer on active duty but still are eligible for call-up.

In the last few months, the Army has sent notices to more than 4,000 former soldiers informing them that they must return to active duty, but more than 1,800 of them have already requested exemptions or delays, many of which are still being considered.

And, of about 2,500 who were due to arrive on military bases for refresher training by Nov. 7, 733 had not shown up.

Army officials say the call-up is proceeding at rates they anticipated, and they are trying to fill needed jobs with former soldiers as they did in the Persian Gulf war of 1991.

Still, the resistance puts further strain on a military that has summoned reserve troops in numbers not seen since World War II and forced thousands of soldiers in Iraq to postpone their departures when their enlistment obligations ended.

Tensions are flaring between the Army and some of its veterans, who say they are surprised and confused about their obligations and unsure where to turn.

"I consider myself a civilian," said Rick Howell, a major from Tuscaloosa, Ala., who said he thought he had left the Army behind in 1997 after more than a decade flying helicopters. "I've done my time. I've got a brand new baby and a wife, and I haven't touched the controls of an aircraft in seven years. I'm 47 years old. How could they be calling me? How could they even want me?"

Some former soldiers acknowledge that the Army has every right to call them back, but argue that their personal circumstances - illness, single parenthood, financial woes - make going overseas impossible now.

Others say they do not believe they are eligible to be returned to active duty because, they contend, they already finished the obligations they signed up for when they joined the military. A handful of such former soldiers, scattered across the country, have filed lawsuits making that claim in federal courts.

These former soldiers are not among the part-time soldiers - reservists and National Guard members - who receive paychecks and train on weekends, and who have been called up in large numbers over the last three years.

Instead, these are members of the Individual Ready Reserve, a pool of former soldiers seldom ordered back to work. Ordinarily, these former soldiers do not get military pay, nor do they train. They receive points toward a military retirement and an address form to update once a year.

When soldiers enlist, they typically agree to an eight-year commitment to the Army but often are allowed to end active duty sooner. Some of them join the Reserves or National Guard to complete their commitment; others finish their time in the Individual Ready Reserve.

For officers, the commitment does not expire unless they formally resign their commissions in writing, a detail some insist they did not know and were not told when they signed their contracts, although Army officials strongly dispute that.

Lt. Col. Pamela Hart, a spokeswoman for the Army, said people in the service are well aware of the provision. "We all know about it," Colonel Hart said.

She said problems with the call-ups of former soldiers have involved a relatively small number of people, are being worked out, and are hardly unique to this conflict. In the first gulf war, she said, more than 20,000 former soldiers were called up. With medical problems and no-shows, only about 14,400 were actually deployed, she said.

Most of the deployments in the first gulf war lasted 120 days, the Army said. The current call-ups are more likely to last a year.

Of those seeking exemptions now, the Army is studying each person's case individually, Colonel Hart said, and has no set rule on what allows a person to avoid deployment. Army officials are still weighing more than half of the requests. So far, only 3 percent of requests for exemptions have been turned down, while 45 percent have been approved.

As for the former soldiers who failed to appear at bases by their assigned dates, the Army is trying to reach them, one by one, to discuss their circumstances, Colonel Hart said. In late September, some Army officials suggested that they would pursue harsher punishments - declaring people AWOL and possibly pursuing military charges - but the Army has since taken a quieter, more conciliatory approach.

"These are challenging times in their lives," Colonel Hart said, adding that some former soldiers who failed to report might have moved and not received the Army's notice. "We're contacting them as best as possible."

For the rest, though, some questions linger over who really qualifies for the callback.

Colette Parrish said she burst into tears the evening that her husband, Todd, walked into their house in Cary, N.C., with a letter from the Army calling him back to service. "We had no idea this could happen," she said. "We hadn't been preparing for any of it because we thought it wasn't possible."

At first, Mr. Parrish, 31, said he was convinced that the letter was just an administrative error because he believed that his time in the Individual Ready Reserve had ended.

He had gone to college on an R.O.T.C. scholarship, then served four years as a field artillery officer. He said he resigned his commission after that, became an engineer, and still owed the Army four years in the Individual Ready Reserve to complete his total obligation.

To Mr. Parrish, who has filed a lawsuit against the Army in federal court in North Carolina, that obligation ended on Dec. 19, 2003. But the Army apparently does not agree, and says that it never accepted Mr. Parrish's resignation as an officer.

As the court fight has continued, Mr. Parrish's date to report to Fort Sill, Okla., has been pushed back, again and again, one month at a time. Instead of thinking about long-term plans, for his wife and their future family, he is living in 30-day increments.

He said he always looked back on his service years fondly, and with a deep sense of patriotism.

"I guess I feel disillusioned now," he said. "This isn't about being for or against the war. It's not about Democrats or Republicans. It's just a contract, and I don't think this is right. If they need more people, shouldn't they get them the right way? How many more like me are there?"

Mark Waple, Mr. Parrish's lawyer, said he had received calls from 30 other former soldiers in recent months, all of whom had heard of Mr. Parrish's case and had similar stories.

At least two other former soldiers have filed suit over the question.

In Hawaii, David Miyasato, a former enlisted soldier who served in the first gulf war, said he would never go AWOL; he would have gone to Iraq, he said, if need be.

But Mr. Miyasato also said that his eight-year commitment ended nearly a decade ago. After he received his letter calling him back to service, he said, he called the Army repeatedly to argue that he was not eligible. Finally, he said, with his date to report to a base in South Carolina just days away, he contacted a lawyer and filed suit on Nov. 5.

"This was actually my last resort," said Mr. Miyasato, a former truck driver and fuel hauler who said that, at 34, he led an entirely different life, with an 8-month-old daughter and a window-tinting company to run. "I had been calling around everywhere for help."

On Nov. 10, Mr. Miyasato said, he learned that the Army had rescinded his orders.

In New York, Jay Ferriola, a former captain in the Army, filed a suit saying he had resigned his officer's commission in June and no longer qualified for call-up in the Individual Ready Reserve. On Nov. 5, the Army rescinded his orders and honorably discharged him.

"This shows that the system works," Colonel Hart said. "If the soldiers bring their situations to our attention, we're going to do what's right."

Barry Slotnick, Mr. Ferriola's lawyer, said he wondered how many other soldiers might be in similar positions, but without the money, the contacts or the certainty to sue. Mr. Slotnick said he had received numerous calls from others since he filed Mr. Ferriola's case in late October.

"We might as well add another phone bank," Mr. Slotnick said. "What I can see is that there are many, many cases of people being called up that shouldn't have been. This is a backdoor draft. I also have to wonder how many are already in Iraq who shouldn't be there, who just didn't think to question it."

The Army's current plan is to fill 4,400 jobs through March from among 5,600 former soldiers ordered to duty. But an Army official said last month that more former soldiers, perhaps in similar numbers, might be called on later next year, as well.

For now, those being sent to Iraq and Afghanistan are being asked to handle a variety of support positions, including truck drivers and fuel and food suppliers.

Months ago, the Army said some of the former soldiers would be needed to play the French horn, the clarinet, the euphonium, the saxophone and the electric bass as part of the military's bands, but the notion drew criticism from members of Congress who questioned the need to order people to give up their civilian lives to play instruments. Colonel Hart said the Army has since filled the musician jobs with volunteers.

Before going to Iraq, former soldiers are receiving as many days of training as they need, an Army spokesman said. Some of the soldiers said they were worried, though, about the prospect and safety of trying to get up to speed in a few months.

"These guys like me are basically untrained civilians now," said Mr. Howell, the former helicopter test pilot. Mr. Howell said he left the Army years ago with an injured back, knee and elbow, leaving him wondering about his own physical condition.

"I don't even have a uniform anymore," he said. "But they don't have any more reserves left, so we're it. All they want is some bodies to go to Iraq, just someone to be there, to sit on the ground."

When he left the military in 1997 as part of a reduction in forces, Mr. Howell said, he saw a note in the "little print" in his annuity agreement about a future commitment. But he said he was told that his obligation to the Individual Ready Reserve would be brief and meant little anyway. "They said it was just a way of having me on the books," he said.

After that, Mr. Howell said, he jumped into the civilian world. He got married. He and his new wife began building a house. They struggled to have children.

In September, his first child, Clayton, was born. Just before that, his orders arrived.

"It does rip my heart out that these young men and women are over there, and there is part of me that wants to be with them," he said recently. "But I have responsibilities here now."

Mr. Howell said he had applied to the Army for an exemption but was recently turned down. If he loses his appeal, he will be given a new reporting date. His best hope, he said, is that his appeal is buried somewhere at the very bottom of a big stack of them.

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Microsoft Expands Operations in India

The New York Times
November 16, 2004

Microsoft Expands Operations in India
By SARITHA RAI

BANGALORE, India, Nov. 15 - The Microsoft Corporation announced on Monday that it was significantly expanding its software development operations in India as it opened a new campus near Hyderabad, its second-largest campus after its headquarters in Redmond, Wash.

Microsoft's chief executive, Steven A. Ballmer, formally opened the 28-acre campus in the suburbs of Hyderabad, which is 250 miles north of Bangalore, a rival technology center. The campus thus far has only one building, with capacity for 1,600 workers.

Besides Mr. Ballmer, the chief executive of the Intel Corporation, Craig R. Barrett, is to arrive in India this week, highlighting the country's growing role as a source of skilled technical labor as well as a sizable market. Mr. Barrett is scheduled to visit Bangalore and Delhi this week.

The issue of outsourcing, the movement of work to cheaper labor markets like India, was an issue in this year's presidential elections in the United States. The Democratic contender, Senator John F. Kerry, had promised to get tough on companies that were moving jobs overseas.

Even with the re-election of President Bush, corporations like Microsoft are still wary of being tarred as the cause of job losses. Mr. Ballmer said that his company would expand in India, but that this would not reduce job opportunities at its operations in the United States.

"The nature of our business is such that there is enough growth potential which allows us to hire both at our Redmond headquarters and here in India," Mr. Ballmer said after the opening. Microsoft has nearly 450 programmers at its development center in Hyderabad. "Since we are looking for very high levels of skills, we are looking to hire in the hundreds," Mr. Ballmer said.

Last year, Microsoft said that it expected its development center to have 500 employees by 2005, but Mr. Ballmer said the company would exceed that target.

Microsoft is not alone. Global corporations like General Electric and American Express started by outsourcing low-end code-writing work to India, but taking advantage of India's pool of technical workers and lower labor costs, many multinational companies have recently stepped up outsourcing. Microsoft's own software development center in Hyderabad opened in 1998 with only 12 employees.

Increasingly, though, these corporations are outsourcing high-end technology work to India. Microsoft, for instance, outsources work, from call centers to advanced embedded software development, to India.

"Many corporations have super-, hyperaggressive outsourcing plans to India to meet their growing needs while keeping costs under check," said Chris Disher, the Chicago-based vice president and head of Booz Allen Hamilton's outsourcing advisory service.

While Microsoft's hiring plans are not huge, Mr. Disher said, its moves do send "an important signal about the competencies and innovation skills that are available in India."

Mr. Ballmer, who visited three Indian cities on Monday, signed major agreements with two of India's leading outsourcing companies, Infosys Technologies and Wipro in Bangalore. The deals will enable Infosys and Wipro to use Microsoft technologies to build software for their clients at more favorable terms. With Infosys, Mr. Ballmer announced an $8 million joint venture.

"These deals signify Indian outsourcing companies' growing clout in influencing technology decision in American boardrooms," said Sudip Nandy, chief strategy officer of Wipro.

Microsoft is one of Wipro's top five customers, and Wipro provides it with a range of services, from call centers to I.T. services to software development. The work for Microsoft employed 200 Wipro employees in March 2001; now it uses more than 5,000.

"I'm excited about what's going on here in India," Mr. Ballmer told reporters in Bangalore after signing the two deals.

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From Bad To Worse: Bush Chooses Rice To Replace Powell

As if things weren't bad enough, President Bush has nominated Condoleeza Rice, the know nothing do nothing lie to Congress so-called National Security Advisor. This is the same person who, like Bush, had no interest in and ignored all of the warnings and information leading up to 9/11/01. The USA is in deep trouble!

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Bush Orders CIA Purge

airamericaradio.com

Bush Orders CIA Purge

The CIA a hotbed of liberal dissidents? The White House thinks so and has ordered "the new CIA director, Porter Goss, to purge the agency of officers believed to have been disloyal to President George W. Bush or of leaking damaging information to the media about the conduct of the Iraq war and the hunt for Osama bin Laden." New York Newsday quotes a former senior CIA official as saying that "Goss was given instructions ... to get rid of those soft leakers and liberal Democrats. The CIA is looked on by the White House as a hotbed of liberals and people who have been obstructing the president's agenda."

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Before and After

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CIA

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Credibility

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And so the sorting and discarding of Kerry votes begins

The Free Press
freepress.org

Bob Fitrakis

And so the sorting and discarding of Kerry votes begins
November 10, 2004

Are the provisional ballots in Ohio being thrown out? A new rule for counting provisional ballots in Cuyahoga County, Ohio was implemented on Tuesday, November 9 at approximately 2:30 in the afternoon, according to election observer Victoria Lovegren.

The new ruling in Cuyahoga County mandates that provisional ballots in yellow packets must be “Rejected” if there is no “date of birth” on the packet. The Free Press obtained copies of the original “Provisional Verification Procedure” from Cuyahoga County which stated “Date of birth is not mandatory and should not reject a provisional ballot.” The original procedure required the voter’s name, address and a signature that matched the signature in the county’s database.

Lovegren described the clerks as “kind of disturbed” after the new ruling came down. She said that one of the clerks told her, “This is new. This just came down. They just changed it in the last thirty minutes.” According to Lovegren, 80 yellow-jacketed provisional ballots piled up in the hour and 45 minutes she observed. By Lovegren’s tally, three provisional ballots were rejected because the registered voters’ registration had been “cancelled.” The rest, she said, were being discarded because of no date of birth.

In 2000, an estimated 9% of Ohio’s provisional ballots were rejected and not counted, according to Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell. Many election observers are predicting the number will be much higher this year due to directives from Blackwell’s office.

An earlier analysis in the Free Press of the 155,428 unofficial provisional ballots recorded at the Secretary of State’s website found that a clear majority, 85,096, came from the 15 counties Kerry won. An additional 17,038 came from urban Hamilton County, home of Cincinnati, and Wood County, where Bush won with 53% and 53.5% respectively. Traditionally, Hamilton County’s provisional ballots are disproportionately cast in the African American majority wards of the central city and not in the affluent Republican-dominated suburbs. Thus, nearly two-thirds (65.7%), or 102,134, provisional ballots come from areas where the provisional ballots are likely to be pro-Kerry.

The official county-by-county board of elections’ final tally will begin on Saturday, November 13, the 11th day after the election and be completed by the 15th day. Following this canvassing period, 11-15 days after the election, an automatic recount would ensue if the gap between Kerry and Bush narrowed to less than one quarter of one percent, an estimated 16-19,000 votes, depending on how many are actually counted.

During the canvassing, Bush will no doubt lose 3,893 votes from the infamous ward 1B in Gahanna, Ohio where a “computer glitch” counted 4,258 votes for Bush from 638 voters. But it is unlikely that Kerry will draw within the needed automatic recount margin.

At the end of the canvass, candidates including Kerry have five days to apply for a paid recount, according to election attorney Donald McTigue. McTigue served as U.S. representative Dennis Kucinich’s campaign treasurer during the Democratic presidential primaries. The recount would be held within five days, and gives any candidate who applies, Kerry or others, the right to physically inspect the polling place materials including 92,672 ballots that failed to record a vote for President.

Under Ohio law, like Florida law in 2000, the recount can include these ballots, many of them punch cards with the notorious “hanging chads” and optically scanned ballots where marks may have gone slightly astray but a vote for president is clearly evident.

Overseas ballots postmarked by Election Day and late absentees just prior to the election also remain to be counted. During a recount, candidates may also inspect authorizations to vote, to make sure that the machine tallies are in line with the actual votes cast. They also may examine voter registration forms to argue for improperly rejected provisional ballots.

Local boards of elections may amend election results if obvious mistakes are pointed out. It will cost $10 per precinct in Ohio, or an estimated $120,000, to recount the whole state.

The official tallies are due at the Secretary of State’s Office by December 1. The Secretary of State must certify the election under Ohio law by December 3.

U.S. representative Dennis Kucinich complained in an article on CommonDreams.org that “Dirty tricks occurred across the state, including phony letters from Boards of Elections telling people that their registrations through some Democratic activist groups were invalid and that Kerry voters were to report on Wednesday because of massive voter turnout.”

The Free Press, in its November 7 article “None dare call it voter suppression or fraud,” pointed to possible voting anomalies in Miami County, Ohio where nearly 19,000 new ballots appear to have been added after 100% of the precincts had reported. The additional votes were at virtually the exact same ratio as earlier Bush votes, 65.8% for earlier votes and 65.77% for the latter. Kerry’s vote percentage was identical, despite the nearly 19,000 new votes at 33.92%.

Roger Kearney of Rhombus Technologies, Ltd. told the Free Press, “The report you saw the following morning at 9 a.m. was probably either the 60 or 80 percent report.” Kearney’s company is the reporting company for vote results for Miami County; he claims that the problem was not with his reporting and that the additional 19,000 votes came before 100% of the precincts were in.

As for the statistical anomaly that showed virtually identical ratios after the final 20-40% of the vote came in, Kearney offered no explanation and said he merely reports the results given to him.

Miami County reports its votes in 20 percent blocks instead of a continuous running tally. “I watch as Steve Quillen, the Board Director, put floppy disks that he had taken from the tabulating computer and put them into the reporting computer. He did this at about 20%, 40%, 60%, 80% and 100% of the count ... I looked at each of these reports. When the final one came out about midnight, we copied the report file onto my floppy disk. I came home and immediately posted it to the website. The page is still on our website exactly as it was shortly after midnight ... No one had access to this computer but me.”

Kearney told the Free Press that the software used at the Miami County Board of Elections for counting the votes is from Elections Systems & Software (ES&S). The strong Republican ties of ES&S are well established in the public record. (See for example, “Diebold’s political machine” at motherjones.com).

Such statistical anomalies may be examined if Kerry has the courage to demand a recount, or if other candidates who have legal standing to request a recount are curious. McTigue told a gathering of suburban Democrats that Kerry may recount eight counties of interest, and other candidates may recount the rest of Ohio.

Unless the opportunity is seized, more than 100,000 votes will likely go uncounted, and statistical anomalies and “computer glitches” will remain unexamined.

--
Bob Fitrakis is a Professor in the Social and Behavioral Sciences Department at Columbus State Community College. He has a Ph.D in Political Science and a J.D. from The Ohio State University Law School. He is the author of seven books, an investigative reporter, and Editor of the Columbus Free Press (freepress.org). He has won ten major investigative journalism awards including Best Coverage of Politics in Ohio from the Ohio Society of Professional Journalists. He served as an international election observer in the 1994 presidential elections in El Salvador and was the co-author and editor of the report to the United Nations. He served as legal advisor for eight polling locations on Columbus' Near East Side for the Election Protection Coalition.

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Green and Libertarian Presidential Candidates to Demand Ohio Recount

From gp.org

News Release

GREEN & LIBERTARIAN PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES TO DEMAND OHIO RECOUNT

David Cobb and Michael Badnarik, the 2004 presidential candidates for the Green and Libertarian parties, today [November 11, 2004] announced their intentions to file a formal demand for a recount of the presidential ballots cast in Ohio.

“Due to widespread reports of irregularities in the Ohio voting process, we are compelled to demand a recount of the Ohio presidential vote. Voting is the heart of the democratic process in which we as a nation put our faith. When people stand in line for hours to exercise their right to vote, they need to know that all votes will be counted fairly and accurately. We must protect the rights of the people of Ohio, as well as all Americans, and stand up for the right to vote and the right for people’s votes to be counted. The integrity of the democratic process is at stake,” the two candidates said in a joint statement.

The candidates also demanded that Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, a Republican who chaired the Ohio Bush campaign, recuse himself from the recount process.

The Ohio presidential election was marred by numerous press and independent reports of voter intimidation, mis-marked and discarded ballots, problems with electronic voting machines and the targeted disenfranchisement of African American voters. A number of citizens’ groups and voting rights organizations are holding hearings this Saturday in Columbus, Ohio to investigate voting irregularities and voter suppression in the Ohio 2004 general election. The hearings will be held from 1-4 p.m. at the New Faith Baptist Church, 955 Oak Street. Voters, poll workers, journalists and voting experts are invited to testify. A second hearing will be held on Monday at a location TBA, from 6-9 p.m.

The Cobb and Badnarik campaigns are in the process of raising the required fee, estimated at $110,000, for filing for a complete recount. The campaigns are accepting contributions through their websites.

The Cobb-LaMarche website is http://www.votecobb.org.
The Badnarik-Campagna contribution page is https://badnarik.org.

The Cobb and Badnarik campaigns have displayed a level of cooperation and civility rarely found in electoral politics. The campaigns jointly participated in and/or sponsored a series of independent debates. Cobb and Badnarik were also simultaneously arrested in St. Louis protesting their exclusion from the restricted, two-party corporate-sponsored debates.

To see an investigative report by Greg Palast, author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, which asserts that the Ohio vote was improperly decided, see http://www.tompaine.com/articles/kerry_won.php.

For an article detailing a dozen ways in which the Ohio vote was potentially manipulated, see http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/810.

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I swear: I'm on vacation (Keith Olbermann)

From http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6210240/
Countdown with Keith Olbermann

I swear: I'm on vacation (Keith Olbermann)

SECURE UNDISCLOSED LOCATION— Golly, I’ve never been the subject of a conspiracy theory before.

Yet, there it is, flying around the Internet under the byline of a Peter Coyote: that when I attempted to break the “lock-down” of coverage of the voting irregularities story in the media during Friday night’s edition of Countdown, I was fired, and left the studio in the middle of the program.

Um, no, actually.

I’m on vacation— it’s been scheduled since August; I’ll be blogging in the interim; Countdown will continue to cover the story in my absence; I not only wasn’t fired for ‘mentioning’ the story - but we covered it five nights in a row; and, I’ll be back on television on the 22nd (earlier, if developments warrant).

But we can now trace how just a dollop of the truth can be subverted into an item available for purchase in the Tin Foil Hat District - and we have another reminder that what you read on the Web, no matter how much it might fit your beliefs, anxieties, or even other facts, might still resemble more a game of telephone than actual investigative reporting.

I’m reminded suddenly of the lyric from The Talking Heads’ “Life During Wartime”: “Heard about Houston? Heard about Detroit? Heard about Pittsburgh, PA?”

What happened was this. We end nearly every Friday show with a news quiz. Each week my colleague Monica Novotny asks me a series of questions sent in by viewers. If I get half or more correct, I win a “prize” - if not, I suffer a “punishment.” This edition’s prize was a week’s vacation. I feigned surprise, asked when it began, was told it began whenever I wanted, and promptly got up and literally ran off the set.

Two insider facts:

a) We planned that gag to tamp down any surprise or speculation if people tuned in Monday and didn’t see me (I assumed reactions would divide into three groups: ones from the left which assumed I’d been “silenced,” ones from the right which assumed I’d been “suspended,” and, the largest group by far, ones who couldn’t care less).

b) The rest of the show is live, but, for reasons of technical complexity, we always pre-tape the quiz in advance. The whole running-off-the-set gag was recorded at 7:45. Temporally speaking, my “mid-show firing” occurred before the newscast itself.

Thanks, though, to all who e-mailed fearing a reply “Olbermann? No Olbermann ever worked here.” The e-mail volume since the first blog last week, incidentally, is up to 27,000 as of 2 PM ET Sunday, and it continues to run at about 22:1 in favor, with the “ones” boiling down to messages like “get over it” and the cordial greeting from a woman in late middle age: “Shut the F up.” We do learn from this correspondence that not a lot of people like Ann Coulter, and that the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review is so infrequently read that the oxygen over there is being utterly wasted.

There is another fallacy in the Olbermann’s Been Disappeared story, and it’s the very idea that there is a “media lock-down” of coverage. Nobody can argue that the MSM has been vigorous here - nor, in television’s case, anything but largely dismissive - but you can ring that up much more to hauteur than to censorship.

On Friday, David Shuster, who has already done some excellent research at Hardblogger, did a piece on the mess for Hardball, and Chris followed up with a discussion with Joe Trippi and Susan Molinari. There was a cogent, reasoned, unexcited piece about the mechanics of possible tampering and/or machine failure on CNN’s “Next” yesterday, and Saturday alone there were serious news pieces in the Cincinnati Enquirer, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Los Angeles Times, Salt Lake Tribune, and Seattle Post-Intelligencer. NPR did a segment of its “On The Media” on the topic (with said blogger as the guest).

And today the New York Times continues its series of “Making Vote Counts” editorials with a pretty solid stance on the necessity of journalistic and governmental proof that the elections weren’t tampered with, nor the victims of Speak & Spell toys retro-fitted as electronic voting units. By way of contrast, though, the Houston Chronicle has an editorial so puerile that it may be the most naïve thing I’ve ever read that was actually written by a grown-up.

I suspect the coverage is going to go through the roof as the news spreads that Nader has gotten his recount in New Hampshire, and that the Greens and Libertarians are actually going to get their Ohio recount. When reporters discover what Jonathan Turley pointed out to us on Tuesday’s show, namely that 70% of Ohio’s votes were done with punch cards and as Florida proved in 2000, in court, a lot of those punch cards— as Jon put it— “turn over,” I suspect there will be long-form television on the process. As an aside: as of earlier today, the Green/Libs— should we just go ahead and call them the Glibs?— were at $118,000 towards their Ohio war-chest goal of $150,000. I’ve gotten a peck of e-mails about why neither party’s Website has details, and it turns out the site you want on this is VoteCobb.Org.

All that having been said, the most remarkable read of the day is probably the item buried on page A5 of The Washington Post. (Registration required but free). There, Charles Babington and Brian Faler take the wind out of the primary post-election grist for the yak-fests of radio and television: the overwhelming relevance of “Moral Values” to 2004’s presidential voters.

You will recall that the Exit Polling on November 2nd ranked the most important issues as follows:

1. Moral Values, 22%
2. Economy and Jobs, 20%
3. Terrorism, 19%
4. Iraq, 15%

The authors point out that those results came when pollsters offered voters a list of which issues factored most into their decision to vote. They note that last week, Pew Research went back and surveyed voters again, and took their temperatures in two ways— with a list (as was offered on election day), and without one (in other words, voters had to remember their issues; it ceased to be multiple choice). Those working off the checklist responded similarly to the election day exit pollees:

1. Moral Values, 27%
2. Iraq, 22%
3. Economy and Jobs, 21%
4. Terrorism, 14%

But the free-form Pew survey produced entirely different data. Given nothing to work with, simply asked to name the deciding factor in their vote, “moral values” shrunk back to human size:

1. Other, 31%
2. Iraq, 25%
3. Moral Values, 14%
4. Economy and Jobs, 12%
5. Terrorism, 9%

Babington and Faler point out that “other” included such gems as not liking Bush, not liking Kerry, honesty, and presumably “I was following instructions from Jon Stewart.”

Oh and by the way: how come the “Kerry’s winning” part of the election night exit polling is presumed to have been wrong, or tampered with, but the “Moral Values” part of the same polling is graded flawless, and marks the dawn of a new American century?

On Vaco but still reading your e-mails. Write to me at KOlbermann@msnbc.com

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Comment: Write to Keith and encourage him to continue covering the post election examination of the ballots.

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'Apology for Bush win' website is a big hit

'Apology for Bush win' website is a big hit

Thousands of remorseful Americans say sorry to the world for president's victory

South China Morning Post
Monday, November 15, 2005

It started the day after the US presidential election with one student posting a picture of himself on the internet holding up a sign reading: "Sorry world (we tried) - half of America".

Within just a few days, the website www.sorryeverybody.com, set up by James Zetlen, had 27 million hits, he said.

The site features more than 2,200 pictures of contrite Americans holding up placards expressing their sorrow at the victory of George W. Bush. There are 1,000 more pictures waiting to be posted.

"It was mind-boggling the amount of emotion the website has triggered," said the 20-year-old neuroscience student at the University of Southern California.

Not all the emotional responses have been positive, however. Mr Zetlen's site for rueful Americans has spawned at least eight websites for people who say they are not at all sorry that Mr Bush beat Democratic candidate John Kerry.

Mr Zetlen said the reaction from outside the US has been overwhelmingly positive. "The international community is absolutely mortified at what has happened," he said.

About half of the more than 3,000 e-mails he received came from abroad. The worldwide reaction included responses from Germany, France, Italy, Bulgaria, the Netherlands, Australia, Canada, South Africa, Senegal, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Chile, Brazil, China and South Korea.

The German daily newspaper Der Spiegel wrote about the website and the French daily newspaper Liberation called the number of penitent people "impressive".

All the pictures share a common theme, asking forgiveness for the re-election of Mr Bush.

"Sorry everybody, the inmates are running the asylum. AGAIN! Please don't hate half of us."

"Dear World. We are so sorry! It makes no sense to us either."

One man's sign reads: "This one of the 55,902,001 Americans that voted against Mr Bush would like to apologise for the 59,422,689 idiots who did."

Several talk of leaving the United States. "We are so sorry that we are moving to your country." One man is holding up an SOS distress call, spelled out in Morse code. Another pictures a toddler wearing a T-shirt saying: "If I could vote, I'd vote against Bush." One picture shows the American eagle with the words: "Sorry everybody."

Some non-Americans have posted supportive photos and messages on the site. Stefan from Germany said: "On behalf of my country I accept your apology. I know you tried hard."

Mr Zetlen said he was surprised at the number of submissions and traffic the site attracted. The University of Southern California had to ask Mr Zetlen to take the site off their server because it was taking up 82 per cent of the traffic.

He now hosts the website privately, which he estimates will cost US$6,000 to US$7,000 a month. He has received almost as much in donations.

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Bush Wants Line-Item Veto to Be Revived

Bush Wants Line-Item Veto to Be Revived

(AP) - Six years after the Supreme Court took away the president's ability to veto specific parts of legislation, President Bush is asking Congress to bring back the line-item veto to let him make precision strikes against projects and tax provisions he doesn't like. At a news conference after his re-election, Bush said he wanted a line-item veto that "passed constitutional muster," explaining it would help him work with lawmakers "to make sure that we're able to maintain budget discipline."

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Commentary:
This statement, "to make sure that we're able to maintain budget discipline," coming from the President who has created the largest deficit in US history and who clearly has no clue about "budget discipline" is a very sad joke.

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Bush Moves to Privatize Social Security

Bush Moves to Privatize Social Security

(AP) - Fresh from re-election, President Bush is dusting off an ambitious proposal to overhaul Social Security, a controversial idea that had been shelved because of politics and the administration's focus on tax cuts and terrorism. Bush envisions a framework that would partially privatize Social Security with personal investment accounts, similar to 401(k) plans, that would be voluntary for younger workers.

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Commentary:
A big problem with this proposal is that the money that will be diverted from funding the Social Security fund will cause there to not be enough money to support those currently on or eventually to be dependent upon Social Security. An additional problem is that the government will dictate where these so-called personal investment accounts can be invested, both dictating what companies will control the funds (thus increasing the coffers of those companies) and what funds one can invest in. In other words, this is a very bad idea.

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Powell and Three Others Leaving Cabinet

Powell and Three Others Leaving Cabinet

(AP) - Secretary of State Colin Powell and three other Cabinet members have resigned, it was disclosed Monday, escalating the shake-up of President Bush's second-term team. Senior administration officials said national security adviser Condoleezza Rice was most likely to succeed Powell. "I believe that now that the election is over, the time has come for me to step down," Powell wrote. The White House released the letter Powell sent to the president on Friday as well as those written by Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman, Education Secretary Rod Paige and Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, confirming their departures.

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Beyond red and blue (again)

The Boston Globe
Beyond red and blue (again)

By Robert David Sullivan | November 14, 2004

GEORGE W. BUSH can now claim a clear victory in the popular vote for president, thanks in part to people in and around the city of New York. But the president got no reelection mandate from the citizens of Savannah, Ga.

Wait a minute! Doesn't the familiar red-and-blue map prove that the Northeast is indefatigably Democratic and the South irrevocably Republican? Well, when you go beyond red and blue, things in the electorate get more complicated.

Last year, under the auspices of CommonWealth magazine, I devised a map that divided the United States into 10 distinct political regions, based on returns from national and state elections, demographic data from the US Census, and certain geographical features. These regions -- which each cast about 10.5 million votes in 2000 -- cut across state lines and even leapfrog them entirely (as with Upper Coasts, which includes most of New England as well as the coastal West from San Francisco up to the Canadian border). In many cases, they divide battleground states into two or three different regions, which explains why those states "swing."Last year, I predicted that if Bush or the Democratic nominee carried a sixth region, while holding on to the five that he or his party's nominee won in 2000, he would have a clear (i.e., litigation-free) win. Bush accomplished this feat, but not by much, winning the Big River region with a margin of 50.1 percent to 49.0 percent. Big River, which follows the Mississippi from northern Minnesota to Memphis, includes most of three states (Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin) that were showered with television ads and candidate appearances this fall. Bush and John Kerry were separated by less than one percentage point in only about 65 of the 3,140 counties nationwide, and the greatest number were in Big River.

When Bush spoke after the election of having "the will of the people at my back," he was more likely referring to the 3.5 million-vote advantage he won in the popular tally than to his narrow victory in the Electoral College. Across the country, voter turnout was so high that Bush and Kerry each increased his party's raw vote in every region. The higher turnout benefited Bush in eight of them, including Northeast Corridor -- the most Democratic region in the country four years ago. The Democratic margin in this region, which includes such major cities as New York and Philadelphia, shrank from 2.9 million in the last presidential election to 2.2 million votes this time.

Kerry won the battle for new votes in only two regions, Upper Coasts (his home base, where he won 60.3 percent) and Great Lakes (which includes Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit, and which he won with 56.7 percent). But it's worth repeating that Kerry still beat Bush in two other regions -- and that he didn't actually lose votes in any region. Compared with 2000, Bush's win was decisive, but this map shows that the Republican Party can hardly rest easy in 2008.

The red-and-blue map didn't change much from 2000 to 2004, but our 10 regions reveal some significant shifts. With 61.4 percent of its vote cast for Bush, Appalachia -- which has the poorest and most rural population in the United States, and was a bedrock region for Democratic nominees from Andrew Jackson to Harry Truman -- became the most Republican region in the country for the first time since at least 1976 (as far back as our county-level data go), and probably for the first time in American history. In almost all of the states in this region, Bush carried rural counties that haven't voted Republican since the Nixon landslide of 1972, and even stuck with Walter Mondale over Ronald Reagan in 1984. Meanwhile, the most Republican region of 2000, the Gulf Coast-oriented Southern Comfort, was a close second this time (61.3 percent for Bush), and it was a key factor in keeping Florida in Bush's column.

But the growing Republican strength in Appalachia and Southern Comfort obscures the fact that Southern Lowlands, which lies in between, remains closely divided between the two parties. While Bush once again won Southern Lowlands (with 51.5 percent of the vote), Kerry increased Democratic margins in many parts of the region: northern Virginia; most of the major cities of North Carolina; and not only Atlanta but two adjoining suburban counties. He also pulled the county that includes Savannah, Ga., into the Democratic column.

This year Upper Coasts was the most Democratic region in the country -- again, probably for the first time in US history. If its representation in Congress is any indication, Upper Coasts is the most liberal region in the country on social and environmental issues; many Democratic Party strategists now deem it essential not to nominate someone from this region in 2008. Kerry's strength in his home region did help him capture New Hampshire, and four years ago that state's electoral votes would have been enough to put Gore in the White House. But the redistribution of electoral votes to fast-growing Southern and Western states meant that New Hampshire wouldn't have been enough of a boost this time even if Kerry had held onto the Gore states of Iowa and New Mexico.

The next most Democratic region was Northeast Corridor, but it was hardly something for Kerry to brag about. It was here that Bush enjoyed his biggest surge in the popular vote percentages, turning a 62-35 loss into a less lopsided 59-40. Nationally, four of the five counties with the biggest GOP gains, in raw votes, were those that make up Long Island. Kings (Brooklyn), Queens, Nassau, and Suffolk counties all went for Kerry, but his margin there was more than 250,000 votes short of Gore's in 2000. At the same time, Staten Island flipped from 57 percent for Gore to a 50 percent win for Bush, while New Jersey's Ocean County (which has a high retiree population) went from a 49 percent plurality for Bush to a 60 percent landslide.

Despite these shifts, the "must-win" regions for each party will probably be the same in 2008 as they were in 2004 -- and 2000. For example, it's hard to imagine the Democrats winning without taking back the Big River region -- that is, holding on to enough rural and small-town votes to keep Minnesota and Wisconsin, win back Iowa, and at least make the Republicans fight for Arkansas and Missouri.As for the Republicans, the question may be whether they can go any farther by revving up their conservative, mostly rural base in Appalachia and the Farm Belt (which Bush won with 59 percent). It's possible that they'll need to look toward more populous counties with culturally conservative Catholic and blue-collar workers -- those old "Reagan Democrats."

This year in Pennsylvania, Bush did flip two counties in the corridor between Pittsburgh and Erie; if the GOP is maxed out in Appalachia, those are the kinds of places that could switch the state's electoral votes. And in Michigan, Bush did well in the most rural parts of the Farm Belt, but he would have had to bulk up his showings in the region's urban counties to carry the state.The Republicans must also keep an eye on the Southwest. In winning the Sagebrush region by a bigger margin (60.6 percent) than the Democrats won the more heavily Hispanic and urban El Norte (54.9 percent), the GOP helped to snatch New Mexico and hold onto Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada. But the population is growing so rapidly in those states that the Republicans can't be sure of that equation holding for four more years.

The 10 Regions approach also puts the perplexing question of what the Democratic Party needs to do about the South in a different light. Right now, common wisdom is that the party must reduce the Republican margin in Appalachia by somehow neutralizing the "guns, God, and gays" issues that have doomed Democrats in rural areas. But it could be just as important to build on the party's foundation in Southern Lowlands, which is more urban, better-educated, and more heavily minority than the other Southern regions (indeed, Southern Lowlands has the highest percentage of blacks in the population, nearly 28 percent, of any of our 10 regions).

This choice isn't obvious on the red-and-blue map, which simply screams "Look South" or "Go West" to the Democratic party. But it would be foolish to assume there's only one way to court the South -- just as it would be short-sighted for the Republicans to believe that voters on the West Coast and in the Maine-to-Minnesota corner of America move in lockstep. If the parties want to understand the American electorate in 2008, they're going to have to go beyond red and blue.

Robert David Sullivan is an associate editor of CommonWealth, a quarterly journal published by MassINC, a Boston-based nonpartisan think tank. More on the 10 Regions of US Politics can be found at www.massinc.org.

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GOP to press for gay-marriage ban

The Boston Globe
GOP to press for gay-marriage ban
Democrats facing reelection pressure

By Anne E. Kornblut, Globe Staff | November 14, 2004

WASHINGTON -- Emboldened by the 11-state sweep of bans on same-sex marriage Nov. 2, conservative leaders intend to fuel the debate further when they return with an expanded majority to the next Congress, and press vulnerable Democrats into an awkward corner over the divisive issue.

There is little chance a federal constitutional amendment will pass the House or Senate with the necessary two-thirds' majority, but advocates expect it to be reintroduced in both chambers, prompting a vote that would placate conservatives and could then be used against Democrats up for reelection in 2006.

With as many as 15 states poised to introduce their own same-sex marriage bans in the next two years, following a campaign that proved the political potency of the issue, Republicans see it as one of their most powerful issues heading into the 109th Congress.

Asked whether politicians should vote against same-sex marriage bans at their peril, senior White House adviser Karl Rove told reporters last week, "I think people would be well-advised to pay attention to what the American people are saying. This is an issue on which there is a broad consensus."

Gay-rights advocates strongly disagree and cite polling data that show many voters support civil unions and oppose a step as drastic as a constitutional amendment, preferring to leave decisions about marriage to the states.

But those who have been promoting same-sex marriage said they cannot help being chastened by the Nov. 2 votes, wary they may have pushed too far too fast. Many are concerned about the political reverberations for Democrats and moderate Republicans who have typically been on their side.

"We have to win in the legislatures and the voting booths; otherwise, this will be seen as a movement that is forcing itself on the American people," said Patrick Guerriero, executive director of the Log Cabin Republicans. On that score, and on winning popular support for its cause, he said, "I don't think we have done a great job."

At the state level, ban opponents are considering introducing their own ballot initiatives, stopping short of same-sex marriage but ensuring domestic-partner provisions, such as healthcare benefits and visitation rights.

At the federal level, where a constitutional ban failed in both houses of Congress last year, both sides are floating a number of proposals in the hope of working toward a national consensus on same-sex marriage. One proposal, backed by groups opposing same-sex marriage, would bar the federal courts from hearing cases that would extend gay marriage beyond states that allow it.

But the constitutional amendment, as unlikely as it is to pass, remains the ground on which conservatives hope to build political pressure on Democrats -- and to openly reward the conservative activists who believe they helped deliver the election to Bush by turning out their supporters.

In the Senate, at least five Democrats are expected to face close races in the next election, putting them in the crosshairs of Republican strategy every time there is a vote on same-sex marriage. One of them, Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, represents a state that voted to ban same-sex marriage Nov. 2.

Stabenow voted with the majority last summer, when the Senate rejected the federal constitutional ban; 50 senators voted against it, 48 senators voted for it, and two did not vote.

Three of the other vulnerable Democrats facing reelection -- Senators Maria Cantwell of Washington, Mark Dayton of Minnesota, and Bill Nelson of Florida -- won within a two-percentage-point margin in their last races and are in presidential battlegrounds. They, too, voted against the ban on same-sex marriage ban last July, making them appealing GOP targets. Another endangered Democratic incumbent, Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska, voted yes on the ban.

"Legislators in those states are . . . going to be hard-pressed not to be supportive," said Paul Weyrich, CEO of the conservative Free Congress Foundation. "If under those conditions legislators continue to vote against the amendment, I think there will be some political translation."

Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council, the leading opponent of same-sex marriage, warned that opponents can either switch their votes or continue to see same-sex marriage wielded against them in elections to come.

Sprigg said he expects to use same-sex marriage as a political wedge until it is blocked at the federal level. "An easy way for Democrats in Congress to take this issue off the table is simply to vote in favor of it," he said, referring to the constitutional ban.

Chances of a mass reversal in the Democratic ranks are slim to none, Democratic strategist David Axelrod said. "I don't think if we opposed a constitutional amendment before, we should support it now," Axelrod said. "That would be craven and stupid." But, he conceded, the 11-state sweep did signal a greater truth about the dilemma facing his party. "There is a more meaningful question about values that needs to be addressed."

But certain moderate Republicans who voted against the ban could be in trouble as well, especially Senators Lincoln D. Chafee of Rhode Island and Olympia J. Snowe of Maine, both facing reelection in the next cycle. Both, according to advocates on both sides, are in danger of primary challenges from conservative Republicans.

The risk for conservatives is that Chafee and Snowe represent states that often lean to the Democrats. If either were defeated in the Republican primary, the winner would risk losing the seat to a candidate more liberal than Chafee or Snowe.

Opponents of the ban, as well as gay-rights advocates, said Republicans appear increasingly in danger of overreaching on the issue, putting their own majority in jeopardy if they appear too zealous to pass a measure that lacks even a 51-vote margin in the Senate, let alone the 67 votes required for a constitutional amendment.

Senator Rick Santorum, Republican of Pennsylvania, a leading voice on conservative cultural issues who is planning his next steps about same-sex marriage on Capitol Hill, is "wildly out of step with where his state is," said Christopher R. Barron, political director of the Log Cabin Republicans.

Pennsylvania backed Democrat John F. Kerry over President Bush.

If the Nov. 2 vote unsettled Democrats anywhere, it was in Michigan and Oregon, which supported Kerry and voted to ban same-sex marriage at the same time. Rove and other Bush strategists have cited those votes as evidence the ballot measures reflect a wider national sentiment against same-sex marriage, backed even by people who oppose Bush.

"In states like Arkansas and Ohio, where it was on the ballot, Bush won, and in states like Oregon and Michigan, where it was on the ballot, it won by significant margins, and we lost," Rove said. "I do think it was part and parcel of a broader fabric where this year moral values ranked higher than they have traditionally."

Many supporters believe that, as a civil rights issue, same-sex marriage is not like taxes or healthcare.

"It's like any other civil rights progress we've had in this country," said Representative James P. McGovern, a Worcester Democrat. "Maybe it's unrealistic to expect things to change overnight, but . . . I think the president and Karl Rove and all those others who are demagoguing this issue are on the wrong side of history."

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The Arafat Voids

The New York Times
November 14, 2004

The Arafat Voids
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

The day after Yasir Arafat died, USA Today carried a big, bold headline that caught my eye. It said: "Arafat Dies, Leaves Void."

All I could think of when reading that headline was its double meaning. Yasir Arafat left a void of leadership, with no formal successor. But he also left a void of achievement. And it is that second void that really matters, considering that he led the Palestinian movement for some 40 years.

You will pardon me if I don't join in the insipid chorus about how Arafat's great achievement was the way he represented the "aspirations" for statehood of the Palestinian people and, through terrorism and resistance, put the Palestinian cause on the world map.

Excuse me, but Yasir Arafat put the Palestinian cause on the world map in 1974, when he was invited to address the U.N. General Assembly. What did he do with all that attention after that? Very little. There is a message in his life and his legacy for every world leader: If all you do is express the aspirations, but never produce the reality, then history will judge you very harshly. And any honest history of Yasir Arafat will judge him on his voids, not his visions.

Will we now see the emergence of a Palestinian leadership - a broad coalition from Hamas to Fatah - ready to take the collective decision to really reconcile with the Jews that Arafat was not ready to make on his own?

Will Arab leaders, like Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who put forth a peace plan, be ready to really help the Palestinians make the tough decisions by giving them Arab cover? Or will we simply have another generation of expressive politics by Arab leaders, who love the Palestinian cause but not the Palestinian people?

Ariel Sharon seems to have already started to learn some of the lessons of Arafat's life. Mr. Sharon was asked recently what made him change his mind, and risk his own life and political career, to undertake a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from Gaza after so many years opposing such a move. His answer: There were things he could see "from here" that he couldn't see "from there."

In other words, sitting in the chair of the prime minister, he could suddenly see the long-term interests of the Israeli people in a different way.

"Sharon has started to give up his popularity among his own constituency, because he realizes that the welfare of the Israeli people, as a whole, requires decisions that are unpopular but unavoidable," said the Israeli political theorist Yaron Ezrahi. But Sharon cannot stop just with Gaza. He's got a lot more popularity to give up with his old constituency if we're going to see a deal on the West Bank.

Finally, what about President Bush? When it comes to the Arab-Israel question, he's had a little bit of Arafat disease himself. He's given some of the best speeches of any president on the Arab-Israel issue and delivered the most pathetic diplomacy I have ever seen.

This divide reflects the paralyzing split in his administration between those who understand that America will never win the war of ideas in the Middle East without working seriously on the most emotional issue in Arab political life - the Palestine question - and those, like the vice president and secretary of defense, who think the whole issue is overrated. The first group are right, the second are wrong. The president needs to choose.

If only President Bush called in Colin Powell and said: "Colin, neither of us have much to show by way of diplomacy for the last four years. I want you to get on an airplane and go out to the Middle East. I want you to sit down with Israelis and Palestinians and forge a framework for a secure Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and progress toward a secure peace in the West Bank, and I don't want you to come back home until you've got that. Only this time I will stand with you.

"As long as you're out there, I will not let Rummy or Cheney fire any more arrows into your back. So get going. It's time for you to stop sulking over at Foggy Bottom and time for me to make a psychological breakthrough with the Arab world that can also help us succeed in Iraq - by making it easier for Arabs and Muslims to stand with us. I don't want to see you back here until you've put our words into deeds."

Yasir Arafat preferred to die, beloved by all his people, in a Paris military hospital - rather than sacrifice his popularity and maybe his life so that the majority of his people could live and die at home. Will Ariel Sharon, George Bush and the Arab and Palestinian leaders now follow his model and play to the crowds, or play to history?

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