Bush's Approval Takes a Tumble

washingtonpost.com
Bush's Approval Takes a Tumble

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Friday, March 25, 2005; 12:42 PM

Was President Bush's showy foray into the Terri Schiavo case a tremendous political miscalculation? Or could it be those skyrocketing gas prices?

One way or the other, Bush's approval ratings seem to have taken a sharp tumble in recent days.

As I noted in yesterday's column, the latest CBS and Newsweek polls showed a sudden drop-off.

Now comes Gallup, finding the public's satisfaction with the president at an all-time low.

Bill Nichols writes in USA Today: "President Bush's approval rating has fallen to 45%, the lowest point of his presidency, according to a new USA Today/CNN/Gallup Poll."

"The finding, in a poll of 1,001 adults Monday through Wednesday, is a dip from 52% in a poll taken last week. . . .

"The White House declined to comment. Republican National Committee spokeswoman Tracey Schmitt said that Bush is taking on 'tough issues, whether it's to reform Social Security, promoting the spread of democracy or making a renewed pitch to Congress to pass comprehensive energy reform.' "

Here's a fascinating fact: "The new poll found the largest drop for Bush came among men, self-described conservatives and churchgoers."

Now I should point out, to be fair, that Bush's approval ratings were as low or lower in other polls last spring, when the public was at the height of its unease with the situation in Iraq and the prison abuse scandal. See pollingreport.com for more.

And Gallup itself explains: "This is the lowest such rating Bush has received since taking office, although it is not significantly different from the 46% approval rating he received in May 2004."

So what's up?

Gallup speculates that "[t]he timing of the seven-point drop suggests that the controversy over the Terri Schiavo case may be a major cause."

But the survey also "suggests that the public's increasingly dismal views about the economy, and about the way things are going in general, could also be factors in Bush's lower approval rating. . . .

"One factor contributing to the economic malaise is almost certainly the rising price of gas and oil. In an open-ended question, 17% of Americans cited fuel prices as the most important economic problem facing the country, up from just 5% who said that a month ago, and 3% who mentioned it in mid-January."

Here is the spread in approval rating polls since Bush took office, from DePaul University economics Professor Stuart Eugene Thiel's wonderful Professor Pollkatz's Pool of Polls Web site.

Thiel has another chart showing how Bush's approval tracks pretty closely to gas prices (inversely of course).

For a little historical context, I went back to look at pollingreport.com's summary of President Clinton's second-term job approval ratings, and it looks like they never got anywhere near so low. In fact, even during impeachment proceedings they remained largely in the 60s.

The Gallup numbers come on the heels of a CBS poll that found Bush's job approval rating down six points in a month to 43 percent, with his disapproval rating up four points to 48; and a Newsweek poll that found Bush's approval rating down five points to 45 percent, with his disapproval rating up six points to 48 percent.

Meanwhile, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press finds that support for Bush's proposed private accounts for Social Security dropped over the last month among its most likely supporters: younger Americans.

"In February, people age 18-29 favored the idea of private accounts by a 66%-19% margin. Today, just 49% favor private accounts, while 25% are opposed, and nearly as many (26%) say they don't know how they feel about the issue.

"Despite the White House effort to keep Social Security reform on the front burner, public awareness of the issue has not increased substantially over the past month."

Ironically, for the White House, that's a good thing.

"In general, opposition to the plan to allow private accounts is much higher among people who have heard a lot about it than among those who are less familiar with it. Overall, people who have heard a lot about the plan oppose it by 52%-41%, while those who have heard little or nothing favor it by a 47% to 30% margin."
Gas Watch

John Harwood writes in the Wall Street Journal's Washington Wire column that the White House won't intervene on gas prices.

"Bush is 'a believer in the free market,' says economic adviser Hubbard, noting price rises spur 'more supply.' He reiterates administration opposition to tapping Strategic Petroleum Reserve except in emergencies."
Progressive Indexation Watch

When it comes to Social Security, Bush and Vice President Cheney just can't stop talking about progressive indexation all of a sudden.

Progressive indexation would reduce Social Security's shortfall by cutting future benefits from those promised under current law. By twiddling a few key formulas, it would eventually mean big cuts for the wealthy, smaller cuts for the middle class, and no cuts for the poor.

The version of progressive indexation that Bush and Cheney are talking about also includes some private accounts.

But what's really fascinating about this is that although Bush's private-accounts proposal would potentially transform Social Security into a big 401(K) plan, progressive indexation would tend to turn it into more of a welfare program.

Isn't that going in precisely the opposite direction?

Well yes. But opponents point out that the two things have something in common: They both would fundamentally change Social Security.

Edmund L. Andrews writes in the New York Times: "Though he has been loath to propose specific measures to reduce future benefits, Mr. Bush and other officials are gingerly promoting the idea as a way to cut costs and still protect low-income retirees.

"Supporters of 'progressive indexation' say it could achieve several goals: it would eliminate a big part of Social Security's long-running financial gap; it would guarantee benefits at current levels and allow them to rise in real terms for people at the bottom of the income ladder."

Andrews quotes critic Jason Furman, an economist at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: " 'This raises the question of whether broad political support for Social Security can be sustained if workers pay very different amounts of payroll taxes but most workers receive the same level of benefits,' Mr. Furman wrote in a research note on Monday."
Cheney Weighs In

James O'Toole writes in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette about Cheney's Social Security talk in western Pennsylvania yesterday:

"Enumerating some of the options for restructuring the retirement system, Cheney mentioned a proposal from Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., for lifting the $90,000 ceiling on the amount of income liable to the Social Security tax. President Bush has not ruled out that approach and Cheney mentioned it twice yesterday, although he noted that it would amount to 'a big hit,' on the self-employed and on small businesses.

"Cheney also pointed to a plan offered by Robert Pozen, a former member of Bush's advisory committee on Social Security, for indexing Social Security benefits on a sliding scale according to income." Pozen is the guru of progressive indexation.

O'Toole also notes: "By design, most of the audience, and most of the questions to Cheney, were friendly. Bob Glancey, chairman of the Allegheny County Republican Party, asked him why the proportion of contributions eligible for personal accounts wasn't even larger. . . .

"Cheney did face some skeptical questioning, however, as other members of the audience challenged him on the likely returns of the investment accounts, and on the fact, which Cheney acknowledged, that establishing personal accounts would not shore up Social Security's long-term financial outlook."

The Associated Press notes that Cheney got called out by an audience member after he lauded the Thrift Savings Plan, which lets federal government employees create private account over and above Social Security.

"One person in the audience, Kim Miller, 28, of Mount Lebanon, told the vice president she participated in that program during her three years as a congressional staffer, and did not do so well.

" 'Private accounts are putting a ton of risk on our shoulders,' she said."

Cheney also spoke in Battle Creek, Mich.

Blogger Holden doesn't like how the White House is being very slow about releasing the transcripts of the Cheney events, and he thinks it's on purpose.
WMD Commission Watch

Katherine Shrader writes for the Associated Press: "None of the 15 U.S. agencies that collected or assessed intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is likely to be commended for doing an exemplary job, according to officials familiar with a report being prepared by a presidential commission.

"The nine-member panel led by Republican Laurence Silberman, a retired federal appeals court judge, and Democrat Charles Robb, a former Senator from Virginia, is expected to issue its report on weapons of mass destruction next week. It's unclear how much of the report, which may run into the hundreds of pages, will be available to the public."
The Politics of Travel

Peter Baker writes in The Washington Post: "President Bush expanded his planned May trip to Moscow by adding stops in two former Soviet republics that have resisted Russian influence, an itinerary seen as a pointed message to President Vladimir Putin. . . .

"The addition of Latvia and Georgia to the trip is likely to irritate the Russians, while demonstrating U.S. concern over Moscow's attempts to exercise sway over parts of its former empire, analysts said."

Here's the White House announcement.
Where's the Statement?

After tragedies of a certain order, it's standard operating procedure for the president to make a statement.

But Ceci Connolly writes in The Washington Post: "Native Americans across the country -- including tribal leaders, academics and rank-and-file tribe members -- voiced anger and frustration Thursday that President Bush has responded to the second-deadliest school shooting in U.S. history with silence. . . .

" 'From all over the world we are getting letters of condolence, the Red Cross has come, but the so-called Great White Father in Washington hasn't said or done a thing,' said Clyde Bellecourt, a Chippewa Indian who is the founder and national director of the American Indian Movement here. . . .

"The reaction to Bush's silence was particularly bitter given his high-profile, late-night intervention on behalf of Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged Florida woman caught in a legal battle over whether her feeding tube should be reinserted."
Draft Cheney Watch

Turns out Jonathan Chait and I have been gathering string on the same phenomenon -- but he published first, in this morning's Los Angeles Times: 'The Draft Cheney movement is burbling just below the surface. Fred Barnes suggested it earlier this month in the Weekly Standard. Tod Lindberg of the Washington Times and Lawrence Kudlow of National Review Online echoed Barnes in columns this week."

Chait notes how "the columns hyping Cheney read like a thinly disguised plea for Bush's support. 'If the president let it be known he thinks Cheney would be the best person to succeed him,' writes Barnes, 'that would be enough to release Cheney from his promise not to run.' "
The Wead Tapes, an Epilogue

Robin Abcarian writes in the Los Angeles Times about what the last several weeks have been like for Doug Wead, the former Bush friend whose secret tapes of the president wound up on the front page of the New York Times in February.

"The secret taping came to light after the New York Times received an advance copy of his most recent book, 'The Raising of a President' and began pressing Wead to show that his assertions about Bush -- who, Wead wrote, was worried that questions about drug use would haunt a presidential campaign -- were based on fact or firsthand knowledge. Now Wead faces an uncertain future. Furious criticism has come from the right, left and center. And though the president joked at the recent Gridiron dinner about Wead, ('Anyone looking for a transcript of the program should call Doug Wead'), the Bushes are famous for remembering and punishing breaches of trust. All the apologies in the world are unlikely to reopen doors that have slammed in Wead's face."
Faith Based Watch

NBC's Campbell Brown got an interview with David Kuo, the former deputy director in the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.

She reports: "The president promised $8 billion a year in tax incentives. It would have amounted to a huge increase in funds for all charities. But in negotiating the president's tax cut plan, the White House dropped the $8 billion in favor of other tax cuts.

"Kuo believes the White House, having reaped political benefit, didn't fight hard enough for the money. . . .

"As for Kuo, he says he hopes speaking out will spur the White House to push harder to make the president's faith-based initiative more about getting help to those in need."
Begging to Differ

White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan writes in a letter to the editor in The Washington Post this morning: " 'U.S. Misled Allies About Nuclear Export,' the March 20 front-page story about nuclear material exported to Libya, was flat wrong. Our allies were not 'misled' by the United States about North Korea's proliferation activities. We provided an accurate account of the intelligence assessment of the most likely source of the nuclear material that was transferred to Libya through A.Q. Khan's network."
A Different Ballgame?

Judy Keen writes in USA Today: "President Bush has remodeled his team, his priorities and his style for his second term.

"He has centralized power in the White House and named a Cabinet of loyalists to ensure that they promote his agenda, not their own. He has defined a few goals -- overhauling Social Security and the tax code, spreading democracy in the Middle East -- and is changing the way he deals with Congress to try to achieve them."
Or More of the Same?

Julian Borger writes in the Guardian Weekly that when it comes to foreign policy: "Any embryonic thoughts that the world view from the White House had changed . . . have been dispelled by three stunning appointments over the past two weeks. . . .

"Taken together this string of nominations (all subject to confirmation) is reminiscent of the stereotypical American tourist abroad who, on meeting a foreigner who does not speak English, simply repeats himself more loudly. In this administration's eyes, the rest of the world has failed to grasp the virtue of its policies and needs to hear them again through a diplomatic megaphone."
The Bald Truth

I noted in Wednesday's column, in my final item, the preoccupation among several bloggers with Bush's well-documented predilection for touching bald people's pates.

What is that all about?

Well, a reader calls my attention to the fact that the mystery, such as it is, was actually solved in one of the other articles I linked to that day.

Alan Freeman of Toronto's Globe and Mail was writing about the highlights and lowlights of life in Crawford and asked some folks inside the Coffee Station, "the diner-cum-gas station on Crawford's Main Street that's the only eating place in town," what they thought of Bush.

"'He's very gracious and he's just happy,' said Dorothy Spanos, who operates the Coffee Station with her husband Nick.

"Mr. Bush comes by the restaurant occasionally, the last time was the Friday after U.S. Thanksgiving. The routine is always the same.

"'The Secret Service comes first. They secure the area. We turn the fuel pumps off and they bring in the dog. They're very discreet.

" 'Then they come in and he signs autographs and visits with the people,' she said, bringing a framed collection of 12 photos from the November visit.

" 'He loves rubbing bald heads. He says it brings him luck.' "

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Tom DeLay's Cri de Coeur

The New York Times
March 25, 2005

Tom DeLay's Cri de Coeur

Here is some badly needed comic relief from Congress: The House ethics committee, now that it has been rendered impotent by the Republican leadership, is plumping for a 50 percent increase in financing to see to such vital needs as writing a new ethics manual to educate lawmakers. ("J is for Junket, so naughty and nice.")

The money would also pay for the hiring of an unusual new Capitol worker - specialists authorized to explain House rules to innocent representatives. Political grief counselors, let's call them. One of their first assignments should be succoring the majority leader, Tom DeLay, who issued a plaint before a gathering of power conservatives last week that lumped his own festering ethical troubles (attacks "against me") with all criticism of conservative causes, including the sorry attempt to exploit the troubles of Terri Schiavo ("a huge nationwide concerted effort to destroy everything we believe in").

Mr. DeLay's solipsistic wailing should be a further caution to the Republican majority who went along with the replacement of the ethics panel chairman and the neutering of its rules after the committee issued three cautions to Mr. DeLay. He was told to temper his autocratic behavior in dealing with members, lobbyists and federal agencies.

The panel purge, a favor by Speaker Dennis Hastert, was aimed at protecting Mr. DeLay from more investigation of complaints about such lapses as his reported junketeering on lobbyists' money. Beyond the House, Texas prosecutors have filed money-laundering charges against DeLay political operatives. Mr. DeLay denounces all these matters as vicious assaults. For a while, he even had House rules crimped last year to let him remain in power if he were indicted. That scandalous touch of homage was reversed after Republicans felt constituent heat that they were following the leader too far.

It is time for more such second thoughts. Any new money for the ethics panel will be wasted unless Republican members, wary of being yoked to Mr. DeLay, demand that the rules be stiffened to gain some ethical credibility in the House.

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What Happens Once the Oil Runs Out?

The New York Times
March 25, 2005

What Happens Once the Oil Runs Out?
By KENNETH S. DEFFEYES

Princeton, N.J.

PRESIDENT BUSH'S hopes for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge came one step closer to reality last week. While Congress must still pass a law to allow drilling in the refuge, the Senate voted to include oil revenues from such drilling in the budget, making eventual approval of the president's plan more likely.

Yet the debate over drilling in the Arctic refuge has been oddly beside the point. In fact, it may be distracting us from a far more important problem: a looming world oil shortage.

The environmental argument over drilling in the refuge has often been portrayed as "tree huggers" versus "dirty drillers" (although, as a matter of fact, the north coastal plain of Alaska happens to have no trees to hug). Even as we concede that this is an oversimplification, we should also ask how a successful drilling operation would affect American oil production.

The United States Geological Survey has estimated that the Arctic oil field is likely to be at least half the size of the Prudhoe Bay oil field, almost 100 miles to the west. Opening that oil field was like hitting a grand slam: Prudhoe Bay, which has already produced more than 13 billion barrels, is the biggest American oil field. (I was once at a party with a bunch of geologists from Mobil Oil when an argument broke out: who discovered Prudhoe Bay? Everybody in the room except me claimed to have done so.)

Unfortunately, you don't hit a grand slam in every at-bat. The geological survey estimates that the Arctic refuge could produce at least half as much oil as Prudhoe Bay. It is also possible, however, that the refuge could produce no oil at all - it often happens in the oil industry. At the other extreme, the upper range of the geological survey's estimate soars to 16 billion barrels. Although the geologists at the survey are widely respected, the upper ranges of their petroleum estimates for the refuge have drawn criticism, sometimes expressed as giggles, from other petroleum geologists.

Despite its size, Prudhoe Bay was not big enough to reverse the decline of American oil production. The greatest year of United States production was 1970. Prudhoe Bay started producing oil in 1977, but never enough to raise American production above the level of 1970. The Arctic refuge will probably have an even smaller effect. Every little bit helps, but even the most successful drilling project at the Arctic refuge would be only a little bit.

But if the question of whether to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is the wrong one, what's the right one? In 1997 and 1998, a few petroleum geologists began examining world oil production using the methods that M. King Hubbert used in predicting in 1956 that United States oil production would peak during the early 1970's. These geologists indicated that world oil output would reach its apex in this decade - some 30 to 40 years after the peak in American oil production. Almost no one paid attention.

I used to work with Mr. Hubbert at Shell Oil, and my own independent research places the peak of world oil production late this year or early in 2006. Even a prompt and successful drilling operation in the Arctic refuge would not start pumping oil into the pipeline before 2008 or 2009.

A permanent drop in world oil production will have serious consequences. In addition to the economic blow, there will be the psychological effect of accepting that there are limits to an important energy resource. What can we do? More efficient diesel automobiles, and greater reliance on wind and nuclear power, are well-engineered solutions that are available right now. Conservation, although costly in most cases, will have the largest impact. The United States also has a 300-year supply of coal, and methods for using coal without adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere are being developed.

After world oil production starts to decline, a small group of geologists could gather in my living room and all claim to have discovered the peak. "We told you so," we could say. But that isn't the point. The controversy over the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is a side issue. The problem we need to face is the impending world oil shortage.

Kenneth S. Deffeyes, a professor emeritus of geology at Princeton, is the author of "Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert's Peak."

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When You're Late, Call Albany

The New York Times
March 25, 2005

When You're Late, Call Albany

The last two months have not been friendly to New York's subway riders. Stalls, detours - any wise commuter now knows not to go into a subway station without a good book. Looking for someone to blame? Well, the people with the power to do something about it are making critical decisions this moment in Albany.

Right now, New York's lawmakers are haggling about how much of the $106-billion-plus budget should go for transportation. The debate is between upstate legislators who want money for roads and bridges versus downstate lawmakers who want to help the Metropolitan Transportation Authority fix its subways. The real fight, of course, is who should pay.

The state's mission has to be saving the core services of the authority. This is not a narrow, parochial matter about New York City; this is basic to the health of New York State. If these commuters cannot get to work, the New York City economy suffers. And if you start pulling the plug on the city, the state economy starts heading down the drain.

An additional source of revenue must be found, and the choice should be based on what is fair, not who has the most high-powered lobbyist. Some of the more reasonable options are a tax on new cars, a motor vehicle registration tax or a surcharge on real estate transfer taxes for sales of properties over $1 million.

These revenues should first pay for the fundamentals before they finance any additions to the subways. The hundreds of thousands of riders who have been late to work in the last few months can tell the Legislature that you don't start adding rooms to a house that badly needs fixing.

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Army Says 27 Detainees Killed From 2002 to 2004

The New York Times
March 25, 2005

Army Says 27 Detainees Killed From 2002 to 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 3:50 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Twenty-seven detainees were killed in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan in suspected or confirmed homicide cases between August 2002 and November 2004, the Army said Friday in its first comprehensive accounting.

The Army Criminal Investigation Command said that in the 16 cases it has completed thus far, it found sufficient evidence to support a range of charges against 21 soldiers, including murder, negligent homicide and assault. It did not specify how many of the 21 had been charged.

Five of the 16 closed cases were referred to other agencies, including the case of an Iraqi who died at the Abu Ghraib prison outside of Baghdad on Nov. 4, 2003. The cause of death was determined to be ``blunt force trauma.'' No Army personnel were found to be involved; the Navy took the case and has court-martial charges against several Navy SEAL commandos and one sailor.

The CIA and Justice Department also are investigating that death.

There are 24 cases encompassing the 27 deaths. All but two of the 24 cases involved a single Iraqi or Afghan death. One case involved two deaths and another involved three.

Of the eight Army criminal investigations that remain open, pending further leads and action, five of the cases involved incidents that occurred during raids or firefights or in other circumstances outside of a U.S.-operated detention facility.

Chris Grey, spokesman for the Criminal Investigation Command, said detailed information about the eight open cases is not being released ``to protect the integrity of the investigations.''

In two of the open cases, however, legal actions have begun against accused soldiers. One involves the death of an Iraqi major general in November 2003. Four soldiers from the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, based at Fort Carson, Colo., have been charged with murder and dereliction of duty.

Another of the open cases involves three separate killings in the Sadr City sector of Baghdad in August 2004, all involving soldiers from the 1st Cavalry Division who allegedly shot the Iraqis during search operations. Two soldiers in these cases have pleaded guilty at courts-martial and charges against two other soldiers are pending courts-martial, the Army said.

In one of the Sadr City cases, two 1st Cavalry soldiers have been convicted of murder.

One is Staff Sgt. Johnny M. Horne, of Winston-Salem, N.C., who pleaded guilty Dec. 10, 2004 to killing a critically wounded 16-year-old Iraqi on Aug. 18, 2004. Horne described it as a mercy killing. He was sentenced to three years in prison, a reduction in rank to private, total forfeiture of wages and a dishonorable discharge.

The other soldier convicted in the same killing was Staff Sgt. Cardenas J. Alban of Inglewood, Calif. He was convicted Jan. 14 and sentenced to one year in prison, a bad-conduct discharge from the Army and reduction in rank to private.

Another 1st Cavalry soldier faces charges of murder and obstruction of justice in the deaths of two other Iraqis who were killed while being detained during the same August 2004 operation in Sadr City. Still another soldier faces charges of murder and making a false statement in connection with one of those two deaths. The involvement of other soldiers is still under investigation.

Grey said 17 of the 24 total homicide cases happened in Iraq; the other seven were in Afghanistan.

``We take each and every death very seriously and are committed and sworn to investigating each case with the utmost professionalism and thoroughness,'' Grey said. He added that some cases are complicated by the fact that allegations have arisen long after the abuse occurred.

Once the Criminal Investigation Command finishes an investigation, it gives its findings to the relevant military command to determine whether charges will be filed. Sometimes an accused soldiers' commander will decide not to press criminal charges that investigators bring to him.

One such case involved the death of a detainee, a former Iraqi Army lieutenant colonel, on Jan. 9, 2004.

An autopsy indicated the cause of death was blunt force injuries and asphyxia, and it was ruled a homicide. Investigators determined there was sufficient evidence against two soldiers for the offense of negligent homicide and nine other soldiers for various offenses ranging from assault to making false official statements. The soldiers' commander, however, decided the Iraqi died as a result of the lawful use of force in response to misconduct by the Iraqi.

That case is closed.

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The Era of Exploitation

The New York Times
March 25, 2005

The Era of Exploitation
By BOB HERBERT

Congress is in recess and the press has gone berserk over the Terri Schiavo case. So very little attention is being paid to pending budget proposals that are scandalously unfair, but that pretty accurately reflect the kind of country the U.S. has become.

President Bush believes in an "ownership" society, which means that except for the wealthy, you're on your own. The president's budget would cut funding for Medicaid, food stamps, education, transportation, health care for veterans, law enforcement, medical research and safety inspections for food and drugs. And, of course, it contains big new tax cuts for the wealthy.

These are the new American priorities. Republicans will tell you they were ratified in the last presidential election. We may be locked in a long and costly war, and federal deficits may be spiraling toward the moon, but the era of shared sacrifices is over. This is the era of entrenched exploitation. All sacrifices will be made by working people and the poor, and the vast bulk of the benefits will accrue to the rich.

F.D.R. would have stared slack-jawed at this madness. Even his grand Social Security edifice is under assault by the vandals of the G.O.P.

While the press and the public are distracted by one sensational news story after another - Terri Schiavo, Michael Jackson, steroids in baseball, etc. - the president and his party have continued their extraordinary campaign to undermine the programs that were designed to fend off destitution and provide a reasonable foundation of economic security for those not blessed with great wealth.

President Bush has proposed more than $200 billion worth of cuts in domestic discretionary programs over the next five years, and cuts of $26 billion in entitlement programs. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which analyzed the president's proposal, said:

"Figures in the budget show that child-care assistance would be ended for 300,000 low-income children by 2009. The food stamp cut would terminate food stamp aid for approximately 300,000 low-income people, most of whom are low-income working families with children. Reduced Medicaid funding most certainly would cause many states to cut their Medicaid programs, increasing the ranks of the uninsured."

Education funding would be cut beginning next year, and the cuts would grow larger in succeeding years. Food assistance for pregnant women, infants and children would be cut. Funding for H.I.V. and AIDS treatment would be cut by more than half a billion dollars over five years. Support for environmental protection programs would be sharply curtailed. And so on.

Conservatives insist the cuts are necessary to get the roaring federal budget deficit under control. But they have trouble keeping a straight face when they tell that story. Laden with tax cuts, the president's proposal will result in an increase, not a decrease, in the deficit. Shared sacrifice is anathema to the big-money crowd.

The House has passed a budget that is similar to the president's, except it contains even deeper cuts in programs that affect the poor. In the Senate, a handful of Republicans balked at the cuts proposed for Medicaid. Casting their votes with the Democrats, they were able to eliminate the cuts from the Senate budget proposal. The Senate also added $5.4 billion in education funding for 2006.

All the budgets contain more than $100 billion in tax cuts over the next five years, which makes a mockery of the G.O.P.'s budget-balancing rhetoric. When Congress returns from its Easter recess, the Republican leadership will try to reconcile the differences in the various proposals. Whatever happens will be bad news for ordinary Americans. Big cuts are coming.

The advances in areas like education, antipoverty programs, health services, environmental protection and food safety were achieved after struggles that, in some cases, took many decades. To slide backward now (hurting millions of people in the process) because of a desire to siphon funds from those programs and hand them over as tax cuts to the wealthiest members of our society, is obscene.

This is not a huge national story. It's just the way things are. It was Herbert Hoover who said: "You know, the only trouble with capitalism is capitalists. They're too damn greedy."

E-mail: bobherb@nytimes.com

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US deserter denied Canada asylum

BBC NEWS

US deserter denied Canada asylum

A former US soldier who quit the army in protest against the Iraq war has been denied refugee status in Canada.

Jeremy Hinzman, 26, was the first to receive an answer from a number of US deserters seeking Canadian residency.

Mr Hinzman, who served in Afghanistan in a non-combat role, left the 82nd Airborne Regiment when he was deployed to Iraq.

Correspondents say the decision may affect eight other ex-servicemen, but improve Canadian-US relations.

In its judgement Canada's Immigration and Refugee Board said Mr Hinzman had not convinced its members that he would face persecution if he were sent back to the US.

Board member Brian Goodman wrote in the judgement: "The treatment does not amount to a violation of a fundamental human right, and the harm is not serious."

The ruling did not come as a surprise, the BBC's Lee Carter in Toronto says.

While Canada opposed the US-led invasion of Iraq, officials are aware that accusing Washington of persecuting its own citizens would cause an international diplomatic incident, our correspondent says.

Jail threat

Mr Hinzman's lawyer said he planned to appeal, and that they remained confident of success.

Given that I enlisted for a noble country, doing noble things, I thought, if called upon I would do it. After being trained, I realised I could not
Jeremy Hinzman

"He is disappointed. We don't believe that people should be imprisoned for doing what they believe is illegal," Jeffry House told Canadian TV.

Mr House also settled in Canada after dodging the US military draft during the Vietnam War.

If Mr Hinzman's appeal is not successful, his final option would be a direct plea to Canada's immigration minister for leave to remain on compassionate grounds.

He faces court martial proceedings and could be sentenced to up to five years in prison if he fails and is returned to the US.

Mr Hinzman fled his unit in January 2004, shortly before the 82nd Airborne was due in Iraq.

He had served three years in the army, but had asked to be classified as a conscientious objector ahead of deployment to Afghanistan in 2002.

Mr Hinzman now lives with his wife and young son in Toronto, where his case has been championed by Quakers and anti-war activist groups.

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Second Opinion

tnr.com
Second Opinion
by Howard Markel

Last Thursday, Bill Frist took to the Senate floor to offer a diagnosis of Terri Schiavo's condition. His conclusions were based not upon the time-honored technique of examining the patient in question but rather on watching "an hour or so" of video footage of Schiavo.

As a physician, I was astounded. Long-distance doctoring is problematic on many levels but especially for a doctor who has not practiced much medicine for more than a decade. Plus, there is the fact that even when Frist did see patients on a daily basis, he practiced as a heart transplant surgeon. Which means that most of his clinical work was done with anesthetized patients on an operating table. To be sure, no one has ever questioned his credentials as a transplant surgeon. But in the real world of medicine, his opinions on persistent vegetative state, especially those supported only by videotapes from Schiavo's parents, simply don't carry much clinical weight.

Given Frist's propensity to play doctor from the floor of the U.S. Senate, I thought it might be equally appropriate for me to play medical school professor--a role I play in real life--and evaluate his medical decision-making process, much as I do for medical students. Below are excerpts from Frist's statements to the Senate last Thursday, interspersed with my comments.

Mr. President, in closing tonight, I want to take a few final moments to speak on an issue that I opened with earlier this evening, and it has to do with the Terri Schiavo case in Florida. I'd like to close this evening speaking more as a physician than as a United States Senator and really speak to my involvement as a physician--and as a Senator and as leader in the United States Senate which has been a fascinating course of events for us over the last forty-eight hours.

It is vital for a physician to identify himself clearly and definitively. If you are the physician actually treating the patient or are involved in his or her treatment as a consultant, then say so. If not, identify that fact clearly and quickly to avoid misleading others who depend on your objectivity. This is especially important when you have not been involved in the patient's care or if you have some other agenda--in this case, political--at stake in the case.

I was interested in it in part because it is a very difficult diagnosis to make, and I've been in a situation such as this many, many times before as a transplant surgeon.

You may have encountered such situations "many, many times," but there's a big difference between encountering such situations and being an expert on them. And there's little reason to believe you are the latter. When, after all, would a transplant surgeon ever be called in to make a diagnosis of persistent vegetative state in a patient? Generally, other physicians--typically neurologists--make that decision long before the organ donor (either dead or clinically brain dead) is wheeled into your operating room. This is critical because these other physicians have no conflict of interest in the outcome; as the surgeon who has a relationship with the patient awaiting an organ, you do.

I have talked with her family and had the opportunity to meet her son, and her son told me that she is responsive. She has a severe disability; a lot of people with cerebral palsy and disabilities have severe disabilities.

Doctor, please be more precise in your medical terminology. Cerebral palsy is a neurological condition likely related to traumatic births that typically impairs one's ability to use muscles that affect walking, moving one's arms and hands, or even speaking. But cerebral palsy patients typically do not have cognitive deficits; Schiavo clearly does. No first-year medical student would link these very different neurological problems in the same sentence.

Persistent vegetative state, which is what the court has ruled--I question it. I question it based on a review of the video footage, which I have spent an hour or so looking at last night in my office.

Just a moment ago you correctly asserted that persistent vegetative state, or PVS, is a "very difficult diagnosis to make." But now, based on your brief review of a home video, you are willing to question the diagnosis of many other doctors who have actually examined Schiavo?

One of the classic textbooks that we use in medicine is called Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine. In the sixteenth edition, which was published just this year in 2005, on page 1625, it reads, "the vegetative state signifies an awake but unresponsive state. These patients have emerged from coma after a period of days or weeks to an unresponsive state in which the eyelids are open, giving the appearance of wakefulness."

While I am certainly glad you can quote Harrison's, it is not exactly the text of choice for this argument. That's because the book is basically an encyclopedia of just about every malady known to humankind. Each topic is covered in a few pages, which serve as only a quick introduction to the more in-depth searches every physician needs to perform--especially when entertaining diagnoses they do not typically see in their daily practices. Tell me, Doctor, did you check more comprehensive books or treatises on neurology and, more specifically, the vast medical literature on PVS produced in the past ten years?

I would simply ask, maybe she is not in this vegetative state, and maybe she's in this minimally conscious state. In which case the diagnosis upon which this whole case has been based would be incorrect. Fifteen neurologists have signed affidavits that Terri should have additional testing by unbiased, independent neurologists.

You cite these 15 neurologists who filed affidavits on behalf of Schiavo's parents. What about the dozens of presumably unbiased and independent experts appointed by the court who examined Schiavo numerous times over the past 15 years? All these doctors concluded that she was suffering from PVS and that there have been no significant signs of improvement. In fact, it has only been the physicians hired by Schiavo's family who have disagreed. Why do you discount the court-ordered doctors as well as those hired by her husband--but not those hired by her parents?

Time and again, Doctor, you have waved your stethoscope in the political arena. But physicians are expected to treat illness and not to let ideology get in the way of their medical judgments, especially when it comes to controversial issues such as end-of-life decisions, reproductive choices, or the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases. Our patients deserve and rely upon us for such objectivity; our professional ethics demand it. Perhaps you need to be shown to the Senate Cloak Room. It contains plenty of hooks where you might hang up your white coat before entering the Senate chambers.

Howard Markel is professor of pediatrics and the history of medicine at the University of Michigan. He is the author of When Germs Travel, due out in paperback from Vintage/Random House in May.

Originally published 03.23.05

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George W. to George W.

The New York Times
March 24, 2005

George W. to George W.
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Of all the stories about the abuse of prisoners of war by American soldiers and C.I.A. agents, surely none was more troubling and important than the March 16 report by my Times colleagues Douglas Jehl and Eric Schmitt that at least 26 prisoners have died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2002 - in what Army and Navy investigators have concluded or suspect were acts of criminal homicide.

You have to stop and think about this: We killed 26 of our prisoners of war. In 18 cases, people have been recommended for prosecution or action by their supervising agencies, and eight other cases are still under investigation. That is simply appalling. Only one of the deaths occurred at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, reported Jehl and Schmitt - "showing how broadly the most violent abuses extended beyond those prison walls and contradicting early impressions that the wrongdoing was confined to a handful of members of the military police on the prison's night shift."

Yes, I know war is hell and ugliness abounds in every corner. I also understand that in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, we are up against a vicious enemy, which, if it had the power, would do great harm to our country. You do not deal with such people with kid gloves. But killing prisoners of war, presumably in the act of torture, is an inexcusable outrage. The fact that Congress has just shrugged this off, and no senior official or officer has been fired, is a travesty. This administration is for "ownership" of everything except responsibility.

President Bush just appointed Karen Hughes, his former media adviser, to head up yet another U.S. campaign to improve America's image in the Arab world. I have a suggestion: Just find out who were the cabinet, C.I.A. and military officers on whose watch these 26 homicides occurred and fire them. That will do more to improve America's image in the Arab-Muslim world than any ad campaign, which will be useless if this sort of prisoner abuse is shrugged off. Republicans in Congress went into overdrive to protect the sanctity of Terri Schiavo's life. But they were mute when it came to the sanctity of life for prisoners in our custody. Such hypocrisy is not going to win any P.R. battles.

By coincidence, while following this prisoner abuse story, I've been reading "Washington's Crossing," the outstanding book by the Brandeis historian David Hackett Fischer about how George Washington and his troops rescued the American Revolution after British forces and German Hessian mercenaries had routed them in the early battles around New Jersey.

What is particularly moving is one of Mr. Fischer's concluding sections, "An American Way of War," in which he contrasts how Washington dealt with prisoners of war with how the British and Hessian forces did: "According to the 'the laws' of European war, quarter was the privilege of being allowed to surrender and to become a prisoner. By custom and tradition, soldiers in Europe believed that they had a right to extend quarter or deny it. ... In these 'laws of war,' no captive had an inalienable right to be taken prisoner, or even to life itself."

American attitudes were very different. "With some exceptions, American leaders believed that quarter should be extended to all combatants as a matter of right. ... Americans were outraged when quarter was denied to their soldiers." In one egregious incident, at the battle at Drake's Farm, British troops murdered all seven of Washington's soldiers who had surrendered, crushing their brains with muskets.

"The Americans recovered the mutilated corpses and were shocked," wrote Mr. Fischer. The British commander simply denied responsibility. "The words of the British commander, as much as the acts of his men," wrote Mr. Fischer, "reinforced the American resolve to run their own war in a different spirit. ... Washington ordered that Hessian captives would be treated as human beings with the same rights of humanity for which Americans were striving. The Hessians ... were amazed to be treated with decency and even kindness. At first they could not understand it." The same policy was extended to British prisoners.

In concluding his book, Mr. Fischer wrote lines that President Bush would do well to ponder: George Washington and the American soldiers and civilians fighting alongside him in the New Jersey campaign not only reversed the momentum of a bitter war, but they did so by choosing "a policy of humanity that aligned the conduct of the war with the values of the Revolution. They set a high example, and we have much to learn from them."

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DeLay, Deny and Demagogue

The New York Times
March 24, 2005

DeLay, Deny and Demagogue
By MAUREEN DOWD

Oh my God, we really are in a theocracy.

Are the Republicans so obsessed with maintaining control over all branches of government, and are the Democrats so emasculated about not having any power, that they are willing to turn the nation into a wholly owned subsidiary of the church?

The more dogma-driven activists, self-perpetuating pols and ratings-crazed broadcast media prattle about "faith," the less we honor the credo that a person's relationship with God should remain a private matter.

As the Bush White House desperately maneuvers in Iraq to prevent the new government from being run according to the dictates of religious fundamentalists, it desperately maneuvers here to pander to religious fundamentalists who want to dictate how the government should be run.

Maybe President Bush should spend less time preaching about spreading democracy around the world and more time worrying about our deteriorating democracy.

Even some Republicans seemed appalled at this latest illustration of Nietzsche's observation that "morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose."

As Christopher Shays, one of five House Republicans who voted against the bill to allow the Terri Schiavo case to be snatched from Florida state jurisdiction and moved to federal court, put it: "This Republican Party of Lincoln has become a party of theocracy. There are going to be repercussions from this vote."

A CBS News poll yesterday found that 82 percent of the public was opposed to Congress and the president intervening in this case; 74 percent thought it was all about politics.

The president, who couldn't be dragged outdoors to talk about the more than a hundred thousand people who died in the horrific tsunami, was willing to be dragged out of bed to sign a bill about one woman his base had fixated on. But with the new polls, the White House seemed to shrink back a bit.

The scene on Capitol Hill this past week has been almost as absurdly macabre as the movie "Weekend at Bernie's," with Tom DeLay and Bill Frist propping up between them this poor woman in a vegetative state to indulge their own political agendas. Mr. DeLay, the poster child for ethical abuse, wanted to show that he is still a favorite of conservatives. Dr. Frist thinks he can ace out Jeb Bush to be 44, even though he has become a laughingstock by trying to rediagnose Ms. Schiavo's condition by video.

As one disgusted Times reader suggested in an e-mail: "Americans ought to send Bill Frist their requests: 'Dear Dr. Frist: Please watch the enclosed video and tell us if that mole on my mother's cheek is cancer. Does she need surgery?' "

Jeb, keeping up with the '08 competition, vainly tried to get Florida to declare Ms. Schiavo a ward of the state.

Republicans easily abandon their cherished principles of individual privacy and states' rights when their personal ambitions come into play. The first time they snatched a case out of a Florida state court to give to a federal court, it was Bush v. Gore. This time, it's Bush v. Constitution.

While Senate Democrats like Hillary Clinton, who are trying to curry favor with red staters, meekly allowed the shameful legislation to be enacted, at least some Floridian House members decided to put up a fight, though they knew they couldn't win.

The president and his ideological partners don't believe in separation of powers. They just believe in their own power. First they tried to circumvent the Florida courts; now they're trying to pack the federal bench with trustworthy conservatives and even blow up the filibuster rule. But they may yet learn a lesson on checks and balances, as the federal courts rebuffed them in the Schiavo case.

Mr. DeLay moved yesterday to file a friend of the court brief with the Supreme Court asking that Ms. Schiavo's feeding tube be restored while the federal court is deciding what to do. But as he exploits this one sad case, Mr. DeLay has voted to slash Medicaid by $15 billion, denying money to care for poor people in nursing homes, some on feeding tubes.

Mr. DeLay made his personal stake clear at a conference last Friday organized by the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian group. He said that God had brought Terri Schiavo's struggle to the forefront "to help elevate the visibility of what is going on in America." He defined that as "attacks against the conservative movement, against me and against many others."

So it's not about her crisis at all. It's about his crisis.

E-mail: liberties@nytimes.com

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Spinning Schiavo

salon.com

Spinning Schiavo

Back in the Clinton impeachment era, the more emotional and agitated conservatives got about the topic, the further they found themselves from mainstream public opinion. The same thing is happening now with the Terri Schiavo episode. Stunned at how few Americans side with them on the right-to-die case, and how Congress' intervention has turned into a legal, political and public relations setback, right-wing critics online have been lashing out -- and they’re leaving the facts and reason far behind. (Did we mention that this reminds us of the impeachment days?)

Yesterday, a desperate consensus began to emerge that the real problem wasn’t that an overwhelming, 63-28 percent majority of Americans side with Michael Schiavo in his decision to remove his wife's feeding tube; it's that ABC News was "shameless" and "incompetent" in wording what critics called a "push poll" that produced those results. Yet even after stumbling their way through polling analysis, partisan critics refused to address this salient point: ABC’s findings were completely in line with every other poll taken regarding the Schiavo case. Truth is, the only real debate about public opinion is over just how lopsided the margin is in favor of keeping the feeding tube out.

Yet Mickey Kaus insisted the offending ABC poll and its "overwhelming anti-tube sentiment" were "surprising." Really? Last week, a previous ABC poll found 87 percent of Americans would want to die if they were in Terri Schiavo’s condition. Why, just seven days later, would it be surprising that 63 percent think Schiavo’s feeding should remain disconnected? It’s only "surprising" if you’ve paid no attention to previous polling data on this issue -- or if you simply refuse to acknowledge it. For instance, in March 2003, Fox News polled on the Schiavo story (it was making headlines in Florida back then) and asked what people would do if they were Schiavo’s guardian. By a huge margin of 61-22 percent, respondents said they would remove the feeding tube. Asked to reverse the scenario, an even larger percentage, 74, said they would want their guardian to remove a feeding tube.

Those kinds of numbers don’t offer conservatives much solace, so they have set out to discredit them. Specifically, they have faulted the ABC poll question for describing Schiavo as being on "life support." Critics such as Michelle Malkin cried foul, insisting that Schiavo is "not on 'life support' and has never been on 'life support.'" She suggested it was only because ABC had misled people that so many of them sided against pro-life Republicans in Congress.

Three points for Malkin and her online band of would-be medical
scholars:

1. The phrase "life support" came straight out of court documents from the appellate court decision in Florida, as in, "In this case, the undisputed facts show that the guardianship court authorized Michael to proceed with the discontinuance of Theresa's life support."

2. Dr. Jay Wolfson, the court-appointed doctor who examined Schiavo for months, recently noted during a Washington Post online chat: "In Florida and elsewhere, including according to the guidelines published by the American College of Cardinals, feeding tubes are defined as 'artificial life support.'"

3. The U.S. Supreme Court has found that, legally, tube feeding is no different from other forms of life support in that it too, represents "life-sustaining treatment."

Also, regarding the Fox News poll from 2003 which found 61 percent would remove Schiavo’s feeding tube, here’s how she was described in that poll question: "Terri Schiavo has been in a so-called 'persistent vegetative state' since 1990. Her eyes sometimes open, but doctors say she has no consciousness." Note that even with the more descriptive language and the absence of "life support," the poll produced almost exactly the same results as this week’s ABC survey.

But all the right-wing chatter about push polls became irrelevant late yesterday when CBS released its own poll which illustrated, yet again, that a huge majority side with Michael Schiavo, 66 to 27 percent. (Note the numbers are nearly identical to the ABC poll.) Additionally, in this age of bitter partisan divide, it seems one of the few things on which Americans agree -- besides the fact that Terri Schiavo should be able to die in peace -- is that the legislative and executive branches were wrong to get involved. According to the CBS survey, 82 percent think Congress and the president should not have intervened. That includes 68 percent of white evangelicals. Worse for the GOP, 74 percent think the action was done in order to "advance a political agenda."

The bottom line, according to the CBS poll: In the wake of the Schiavo controversy, approval ratings for Congress (34 percent) and President Bush (43 percent) have plummeted to new lows.

How are Malkin and friends going to spin that?

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U.S. bars Italians from examining victim’s car

armytimes.com
March 23, 2005

U.S. bars Italians from examining victim’s car

Associated Press

ROME — The U.S. military command in Iraq has blocked two Italian policemen from examining the car in which an Italian intelligence agent was shot to death in Baghdad, a newspaper said Wednesday.

Corriere della Sera said that the policemen were about to leave when the Italian Embassy in Baghdad received an order from the U.S. command on Monday to abort the mission for security concerns.

The embassy in Baghdad reportedly alerted Rome authorities, who called off the trip.

The car, a Toyota Corolla, is reportedly still in American hands, at Baghdad airport where it was originally rented.

The Foreign Ministry in Rome declined comment on the report, while officials at the Italian Embassy in Baghdad could not immediately be reached. The U.S. military in Baghdad had no immediate comment.

Italian authorities say that examining the vehicle is key to assessing what happened on March 4, when U.S. troops opened fire on the car carrying secret service agent Nicola Calipari, another intelligence officer and journalist Giuliana Sgrena, who had just been released after a month of captivity in Iraq.

Calipari died on the spot, while the other two were wounded.

Prosecutors investigating the shooting have received photographs of the car, but they want to analyze bullet holes and other elements, according to Corriere.

Calipari’s killing outraged Italians and prompted Premier Silvio Berlusconi to demand that Washington provide an explanation. Italy agrees that the shooting was an accident but disputes some key elements of the U.S. account.

The U.S. military said that the vehicle was speeding and refused to stop, and that a U.S. patrol tried to warn the driver with hand and arm signals, by flashing white lights and firing shots in front of the car and into the car’s engine block.

Berlusconi said the car was traveling slowly at night and stopped immediately when a light was flashed at it, shortly before U.S. troops fired on the car. Foreign Minister Gianfranco Fini said the fire appeared to have hit the right side of the car.

Vowing to shed light on the incident, Washington has ordered an investigation into the shooting, to be led by a U.S. brigadier general with the participation of Italian officials. The joint commission is expected to release its findings by mid-April.

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Frist Urged Changing The Definition of Brain Dead to Include Babies Born With Condition Comparable to Schiavo's

dcinsidescoop.blogspot.com

Frist Urged Changing The Definition of Brain Dead to Include Babies Born With Condition Comparable to Schiavo's

Frist wrote a book in 1989 called Transplant where he advocated changing the definition of "brain dead" to include anencephalic babies. Anencephalic babies are in the same state as Terri Schiavo except that she suffered a physical trauma that put her into a vegetative state while the anencephalic babies are born that way.

This remarkable discovery buttresses the argument that Frist's advocacy for Schiavo is wholly political. How does he explain this remarkable inconsistency? Here is the relevant passage on Frist as quoted by the New Republic in 2003:

"And, although Frist writes frequently about the ethical issues surrounding transplants--for example, the question of when death begins--he approaches these issues in starkly scientific terms, with little patience for religious objections.

"Near the end of the book, for example, Frist suggests changing the legal definition of 'brain death' to include anencephalic babies, who are born with a fatal neurological disorder but show just the slightest hint of brain-stem activity. Such a change would make it possible to harvest their organs for transplant--something the Catholic Church and pro-life groups oppose. 'Three thousand anencephalic babies were born a year, enough to solve our demand many times over--but we never used them.'" [The New Republic, 1/27/03]

originally published March 23, 2005

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Hiding Our War Dead. Italy Publicly Honors Its War Dead, America Hides Its Dead

bellaciao.org

Hiding Our War Dead. Italy Publicly Honors Its War Dead, America Hides Its Dead
Wednesday 23rd March 2005

Is That Respecting Our Soldiers?

by Gail Vida Hamburg



The state funeral in Rome last month for Nicola Calipari - the Italian intelligence officer who rescued a kidnapped journalist from Iraqi captors, only to be gunned down by jittery American soldiers at a checkpoint in Baghdad - was a national event that united all Italians, merging their raw sorrow with the singular grief of his widow and children. It was the second time Italy pulled out all the stops for its Iraq War dead. In November of 2003, it staged an elaborate state funeral for nineteen of its citizens, killed in a suicide truck bombing in Nasiriyah.

In both instances, Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, his ministers, President Carlo Ciampi, and an honor guard in full-dress uniform stood with grieving families on the tarmac of Rome’s Ciampino military airport to receive their dead. There were national days of mourning and public visitation hours to the reposed, and at night, the Coliseum’s lights were dimmed in a mark of respect.

All Italy watched (on television) as officers from Italy’s civil services carried the flag-draped coffins past honor guards representing every branch of the military. The Carabinieri (paramilitary corps), in their regal uniforms and blue-and-red plume hats, stood guard while lone buglers played the Last Post and other laments. Stricken Italians lined the routes of the funeral cortege to pay their respects, before the bodies were entombed in Rome’s war memorial.

The participation in these last rites symbolized a shared sacrifice between those who prosecute wars, those who must fight them, and those who grieve and honor them-not just the dead and their families, but the entire nation. The pageantry on display was no more excessive than the heroism of the fallen, for surely there can be no greater excess than surrendering one’s life for the country.

America, on the other hand, with 1,516 U.S. fatalities in Iraq as of March 16, 2005, pays little public attention to its war dead. Indeed, aside from the printed obituaries in metro sections of dailies, there is little acknowledgment by the government or substantial reporting in the media of the soldiers who perish in Iraq and the families they leave behind. We do not see or hear them. They die alone on the hot sands of Iraq and their survivors grieve privately on American soil.

This administration, which asks for courage and resolve from the military, can find in itself neither courage nor resolve to embrace them in death. According to Pentagon rules, “There will be no arrival ceremonies for, or media coverage of, deceased military personnel returning to or departing from Ramstein [Germany] airbase or Dover [Del.] base, to include interim stops.” Last year, defense contractor Maytag Aircraft fired civilian workers, Tami Silicio and David Landry, for taking photographs of soldiers’ coffins at an airbase in Kuwait. The photographs surfaced at www.memoryhole.com after a Freedom of Information Act request by First amendment advocate, Russ Kick.

Even acknowledging soldiers’ deaths through meaningful tributes upsets many in the war faction. When Nightline anchor, Ted Koppel, broadcast a tribute to the soldiers who had died in Iraq by reading their names off camera while the photographs of the dead men and women were projected on the screen, supporters of the war cried foul.

The President has also made it his policy not to attend military funerals. If he believes our military is fighting for noble ideals, if he admires, as he says, their valor and sacrifice, why must he absent himself from their funerals or prevent our witness of their final return? Why must our war dead come home like thieves in the night?

Many mothers and fathers and children of dead soldiers are wrestling with their gods and demons, trying to find meaning for the holes in their hearts. Recognition of their departed - not with lavish state funerals, but public acknowledgment and remembrance of their sacrifice - may not give the families the meaning they seek, but it could show them that America honors and values their irrevocable loss.

In July of 1965, at the height of the Vietnam War, President Lyndon Johnson spoke with a previously elusive candor. “I do not find it easy to send the flower of our youth, our finest young men, into battles. I have seen them filled with hope and life. I think that I know, too, how their mothers weep and how their families sorrow.”

But president Bush doesn’t know and neither do we. His war machine brings our fallen soldiers home from Iraq, dead as dead can be, and drops them down the well of forgetting. forgetting.

Do you hear the thud? Can you bear it?

http://www.interventionmag.com/cms/...

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Heart surgeon Frist has pulled the plug regularly

New York Daily News
Heart surgeon Frist has pulled the plug regularly
BY RICHARD SISK and KENNETH R. BAZINET
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU
Wednesday, March 23rd, 2005

WASHINGTON - Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who has championed the "rescue" of Terri Schiavo, is a renowned heart surgeon who has pulled the plug on a "regular basis," his office acknowledged yesterday.

But Frist (R-Tenn.) ended life support only when the patient was ruled brain-dead, and he is convinced Schiavo is not brain-dead.

"He certainly has a lot of clinical experience" in the withdrawal of life support, said Frist spokeswoman Amy Call.

Frist, the driving force behind the Senate bill to move Schiavo's case to federal court and a likely 2008 presidential candidate, is under fire for declaring she is not brain-dead after reviewing a video of Schiavo.

"On a regular basis, he's dealt with a diagnosis of brain death," Call said defending Frist, a heart and general surgeon.

Medical ethicists like Dr. Kenneth Prager, chairman of the Medical Ethics Committee at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, say it's "inappropriate" for Frist to make an armchair diagnosis. "A diagnosis should be made bedside by a neurologist. He's not a neurologist, and he wasn't bedside," Prager said.

In a 2002 interview with the Chicago Tribune, Frist recalled moral debate into "Why is somebody dead when there's no brain activity, but everything else is warm and beating?" from the early days of organ transplants. "Finally, we came to a consensus, an ethical framework, that people can generally agree to and have faith in."

The other driving force behind the Terri Schiavo bill, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), is accused of using the Schiavo case to divert attention from his own ethics problems. A Texas grand jury has indicted three of DeLay's cronies and is now looking into his campaign finances.

A DeLay spokesman said, "Anybody would be hard-pressed to question Congressman Delay's commitment to life issues throughout his career."

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Terri Schiavo Would Not Be Starved in Israel

Terri Schiavo Would Not Be Starved in Israel
By Julie Stahl
CNSNews.com Jerusalem Bureau Chief
March 23, 2005

Jerusalem (CNSNews.com) - Terri Schiavo probably would not be disconnected from her feeding tube if she lived in Israel, experts here said.

A bill allowing "passive euthanasia" -- the removal of life support -- is currently under debate in the Israeli Knesset. In the first of three readings, the bill passed overwhelmingly.

But experts here noted that the bill would not affect Schiavo's case.

The pending "Terminal Patient Bill" would allow the removal of life support if the patient is terminally ill and expected to die within six months; is experiencing "great suffering"; and has "clearly requested not to be kept alive under the above circumstances."

Schiavo is not terminally ill and she did not leave any clear request regarding the termination of treatment.

"It's a very difficult case," said Professor Michel Revel, chairman of the newly created Bio-Ethics Council of Israel.

He said Schiavo would not be classified as terminally ill but would fall into the category of "somebody who is incapable or communicating with the outside world," Revel said in a telephone interview.

Nevertheless, he said, it is possible that after 15 years in a coma a court might decide in favor of a legal representative's request to disconnect life support.

The pending Israeli law is based on the principle that there can be no "active action taken to end the life of a person," Revel said. There is a very strict protocol of tests that must be administered to determine if a person is "brain dead," he said.

The Israeli law is based on Jewish law, which forbids helping someone die; but says if death is inevitable, prolonging life is not allowed.

An editorial in the Jerusalem Post on Wednesday also noted that Schiavo's case doesn't fall within the criteria laid down by the Israeli law and that the outcome here would likely have been very different.

"It is indeed hard to imagine an Israeli court ruling like the one in Florida in a case such as Schiavo's," the paper said.

"True, preserving life can sometimes risk prolonging suffering in a way that a patient would not choose. But our judicial system is right to be wary of an even greater danger, that of granting license for the elimination of incapacitated people, especially on the say-so of people who can hardly be trusted to have the patients' best interests at heart...

Avraham Ravitz, who belongs to a religious Knesset faction, supports a "passive euthanasia" law.

"It is very necessary [to have a law]. Without a law every doctor could make a decision [and] a judge is making decisions not based on [anything but] his personal feelings," Ravitz said in a telephone interview.

There have been several cases in Israel where terminally ill patients brought their cases before civil courts demanding the right to die.

But Ravitz said that the Israeli law would protect doctors.

Family members that wanted to dispose of relatives they thought were too bothersome would not be allowed to do so, nor would doctors be allowed to make a final choice for death if family members wanted to keep a relative alive.

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DeLay and Schiavo: Who's saving whom?

salon.com

DeLay and Schiavo: Who's saving whom?

In our most cynical moments over the last few days, we began to wonder
whether Washington's obsession with the Terry Schiavo case weren't some
sort of wag-the-dog distraction from what would otherwise have been a
weekend marked with second-anniversary assessments of the Bush
administration's adventures in Iraq.

It may have been worse than that. As the New York Times reports

this morning, Tom DeLay told a conference organized by the
ultra-conservative Family Research Council Friday that God himself
handed Republicans the Terry Schiavo issue in order to help further
their conservative political agenda -- and to save DeLay from
accusations about his own ethical lapses.

"One thing that God has brought to us is Terri Schiavo, to help
elevate the visibility of what is going on in America," DeLay says on a
tape provided to the Times by Americans United for Separation of Church
and State. "This is exactly the issue that is going on in America, of
attacks against the conservative movement, against me and against many
others."

According to the Times, DeLay said that the "other side" has finally
learned how to "defeat the conservative movement" by engaging in
personal attacks and persuading the media to report on them. DeLay said
the "whole syndicate" -- and by that, we assume he means the
reality-based community
-- is
involved in a "huge nationwide effort to destroy everything we believe
in."

With Terri Schiavo, the man once known as "Hot Tub Tom" believes that
the religious right finally has a way to turn the fight around. In the
morality play that is Washington, we thought that Schiavo was the
victim and DeLay was playing her savior. It turns out that we had it
exactly wrong.

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Right to Life backed law that allows hospital to kill spouse

HoustonChronicle.com

Right to Life backed law that irks wife
By RICK CASEY
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

Jannette Nikolouzos is angry with the Texas law that allows St. Luke's Hospital to unhook her husband from life support tomorrow.

"I'm so ashamed of my state that it executes civilians without criminal history," she told reporter Todd Ackerman.

She may be surprised to learn that National Right to Life, the organization that is helping to lead the fight to keep a Florida hospital from removing life support for Terri Schiavo, helped write the Texas law.

Spiro Nikolouzos had been unable to speak for some time, and was fed through a stomach tube by his wife at home. But she said he was able to recognize family members and show emotion. A month ago she rushed him to the hospital, where it was determined he had bleeding related to a shunt in his brain. He has been on a ventilator since.

Doctors apparently determined further care was futile. Under the law, the hospital's ethics committee met last week to consider the case, with Mrs. Nikolouzos able to participate. The committee, over her objection, agreed with the doctors.

She then had 10 days to find another facility to take her husband, while the hospital made a good-faith effort to do the same. When she was unable to find such a facility, she went to court.

'20 to 25' meetings

Judge Tony Lindsay expressed "most sincere sadness and apologies," but said the law required Nikolouzos show a reasonable expectation of finding an alternative facility before Lindsay could order the hospital to continue treatment it did not feel was advisable.

It's the same law under which another judge denied Wanda Hudson's request to force Texas Children's Hospital to maintain Sun Hudson on life support.

The law was passed in 1999 and amended two years ago. Acting as a negotiator for Houston-based Texas Right to Life, Burke Balch flew in from Washington "20 to 25 times" to sit at a table with represent-
atives of the Texas Hospital Association and other parties to negotiate the law and its amendment.

Balch is director of National Right to Life's Robert Powell Center for Medical Ethics.

Right to Life was at the table partly because then-Gov. George W. Bush had vetoed a similar bill two years earlier at the request of some members of the religious right, according to its sponsor, then-Sen. Mike Moncrief, now mayor of Fort Worth.

Making compromises

After new negotiations, the bill went before a Senate committee without opposition. Balch testified in favor, as did representatives of the Baylor Health Care System and the Texas Conference of Catholic Health Facilities.

Balch said both the right to seek an alternative facility and the 10-day period to do so were negotiated compromises.

"When you're dealing with legislation, you make compromises," he said.

Two years later, his group won an Internet registry of doctors and institutions willing to consider accepting patients under the bill in order to make it easier to find them.

"Before this bill there was no legal requirement to provide treatment in these circumstances at all, so we found it an advance to provide this opportunity of a transfer," Balch said.

Before the bill, however, judges had little guidance from the law when families went to court to challenge the decision of hospitals, or of some family members pitted against others. Boston College ethics professor John Paris, a leading medical ethicist, said judges were extremely reluctant to allow life support to be removed.

He told the story of presenting a national seminar on the subject, with former Texas Supreme Court Justice C.L. Ray in attendance. He said he asked Ray how he would rule if, as a judge, a young lawyer asked for 30 days to research the legal questions in requiring a hospital to keep a child on life support and wanted him to order the hospital to do so while he did the research.

"I'd tell him, 'Son, take 60 days,' " Paris quoted Ray as saying. When Paris said he knew why, Ray continued, "You're damn right. I'm hoping the kid will die on his own during that time so I won't have to make the decision."

Now in Texas, judges don't have to make the decision as to who is right. They just have to decide whether the hospital followed the law and whether there is a reasonable prospect of finding another institution to take the patient.

And the law they follow was made in a manner that appears to be growing old-fashioned: by consensus.


This article was originally published on March 10, 2005

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Definitions: Compassionate, Conservative

compassionate
-------------

adjective

1. Feeling or expressing pity: commiserative, condolatory, pitying, sympathetic. Archaic piteous, pitiful. See feelings, pity.

2. Concerned with human welfare and the alleviation of suffering: charitable, human, humane, humanitarian, merciful.

verb

To experience or express compassion: ache, commiserate, feel, pity, sympathize, yearn. Idioms: be sorry, have/take pity.


Synonyms: humane, compassionate, humanitarian, merciful

These adjectives mean marked or motivated by concern with the alleviation of suffering: a humane physician; compassionate toward impoverished people; released the prisoner for humanitarian reasons; is merciful to the repentant.

---

conservative
------------

adjective

1. Strongly favoring retention of the existing order: orthodox, right, rightist, right-wing, Tory, traditionalist, traditionalistic.

2. Kept within sensible limits: discreet, moderate, reasonable, restrained, temperate. See plain/fancy, restraint/unrestraint.

3. Clinging to obsolete ideas: backward, reactionary, unprogressive.

4. Able to preserve: preservative, protective.

noun

One who strongly favors retention of the existing order: orthodox, rightist, right-winger, Tory, traditionalist.

Source: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition and Roget's II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition by the Editors of the American Heritage

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Torture doublespeak

The Washington Times
www.washingtontimes.com
Torture doublespeak
By Nat Hentoff

The word "covert" has long been associated with the CIA's use of "extraordinary renditions" by which suspected terrorists, believed to have essential information, are sent to countries our own State Department condemns for torturing prisoners. This is no longer a secret, as shown March 6 on CBS -TV's "60 Minutes," which began with: "Witnesses tell the same story: masked men in an unmarked jet seize their target, cut off his clothes...Tranquilize him and fly him away."

The next night, on ABC-TV's "World News Tonight," chief investigative correspondent Brian Ross reported: "Flight logs shown to ABC News detail trips to Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan." And on "60 Minutes," Scott Pelley had noted that one of these kidnapping planes "made at least 600 flights to 40 countries... after 9/11." And on March 7, on Fox News, a network not notable for criticizing the Bush administration, Senior Judicial AnalystJudgeAndrew Napolitano emphasized that "the United States signed over four treaties prohibiting this practice of extraordinary rendition. And the treaties required that the signing countries enact criminal statutes prohibiting them.

"They carry 20-year penalties for anybody having anything to do with... planning it (and) supplying planes." Mr. Napolitano added: "The president... can't change a treaty, he can't change a law... the most he can say to his CIA operatives is: 'On my watch, you won't be prosecuted.' " But there is a growing disquiet among certain CIA operatives that despite the "special rules" the administration has given the CIA, there might be consequences for those agents who have broken both our laws and the international treaties we have signed.

On "60 Minutes," Mr. Pelley interviewed Michael Scheuer, who helped begin the rendition program under Bill Clinton and, until recently, was a senior CIA counterterrorist official. Mr. Scheuer said: "Basically, the NationalSecurity Council gave us the mission... take people off the streets so they can't kill Americans." Mr. Scheuer, who still believes these renditions are productive, characterizes them as "finding someone else to do your dirty work."

Or, as one Bush administration official told the Washington Post (Dec. 26, 2002): "If we're not there in the room, who is to say?" However, Mr. Scheuer candidly told Mr. Pelley: "Oh, I think from the first day we ever did it there was a certain macabre humor that said sooner or later this this this sword of Damocles is going to fall, because if something goes wrong, the policy maker, the politicians and the congressional committees aren't going to belly up to the bar and say, 'We authorized this.'" On March 6, in the House of Representatives, Rep. Edward Markey, Massachusetts Democrat, held the sword of Damocles over the head of President Bush when he declared that "the president needs to rescind his extraordinary rendition 'outsourcing torture' directive... I call on the President to declassify this secret order of his immediately.

"The war against terrorism," Mr. Markey continued, "is a war against those who engage in torture. If we fight our enemy using the same inhumane and morally bankrupt techniques that we are trying to stop, we will simply become what we have beheld. I call on President Bush to stop the outsourcing of torture immediately, in deed as well as word." On ABC-TV's "World News Tonight," Mr. Markey said hopefully: "Like Abu Ghraib, it took a while for the outrage to build. The more the American people find out we are allowing other countries to torture in our name, there is going to be an outcry in this country."

I am listening hard, but I don't hear that outcry yet, certainly not among the Republican leadership in Congress, which refuses to authorize an independent investigation of the CIA's "renditions." One of the CIA's jets transporting suspected terrorists made 10 trips to Uzbekistan. Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to that country, told Mr. Pelley about the techniques of Uzbek interrogators: "drowning and suffocation, rape was used... also the insertion of limbs in boiling liquid... it's quite common." Mr. Murray also told Brian Ross of ABC News that he received photos of one prisoner who was actually boiled to death.

That corpse may not have been a person the CIA kidnapped, but how do we know? In a March 6 New York Times story on these horrifying renditions, a CIA official "would not discuss any legal directive under which the agency operated, but said that the CIA has existing authorities to lawfully conduct these operations."

The authority came directly from the president in a Sept. 17, 2001 "memorandum of notification." Then why doesn't the president let us and Congress see this directive? Meanwhile, Fox News reports that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales says "the United States would never send terrorism suspects to countries where they would be tortured." But he did admit that once they had been sent, "the U.S. government didn't have control over how they were tortured." Isn't this manipulation of words what George Orwell chillingly called "doublespeak"?

originally published March 21, 2005

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VALUES: 'Defending Life for All Americans'

The Progress Report

by Christy Harvey, Judd Legum and Jonathan Baskin with Nico Pitney and Mipe Okunseinde

www.progressreport.org

3/22/2005

VALUES: 'Defending Life for All Americans'

President Bush said that he intervened in the Terri Schiavo case
yesterday morning because he believes in " defending life for all Americans,
including those with disabilities
(http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/03/20050321.html) ."
Supporting life, however, takes more than political grandstanding. Time and
again the Bush administration has pursued policies that undermine the
lives and health of the American people. While the Schiavo case is
being considered by the federal courts
(http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000087&sid=awf.g_4rPNs8&refer=top_world_news)
, President Bush has an opportunity to show his commitment to
"defending life for all Americans" by reconsidering his policies that affect
millions of Americans.

ELIMINATING HEALTH CARE FOR THE POOR: According to the Institute of
Medicine, lack of health insurance already " causes roughly 18,000
unnecessary deaths every year in the United States
(http://www.iom.edu/report.asp?id=17632) ." Since President Bush took
office the number of Americans who are uninsured has swelled by more
than 5 million people
(http://www.kff.org/uninsured/loader.cfm?url=/commonspot/security/getfile.cfm&PageID=49531)
. Now he's poised to make the situation worse. President Bush is
proposing significant funding cuts to Medicaid and the related State
Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). Bush's 2006 budget slashes funding
for the programs -- which provide vital health coverage to 1 in 6
Americans and 1 in 4 children -- by more than $20 billion over five years.
According to Heather Boushey, an economist at the Center for Economic
and Policy Research, " the cut would make 1.2 million children unable to
access the system.
(http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0321/p15s01-cogn.html) " Gov. Mike Huckabee (R-AR) said of Bush's proposed Medicaid cuts:
"[P]eople need to remember that to balance the federal budget on the
backs of the poorest people in the country is simply unacceptable.... You
don't pull the wheelchair out from under the child with muscular
dystrophy
(http://www.theledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041226/ZNYT02/412260419)
."

EXPOSING CHILDREN TO TOXIC MERCURY: Mercury is a powerful toxin that
can have serious neurological effects, especially in kids. It is known to
directly harm the nervous systems of children
(http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/14/politics/14mercury.html?ex=1268542800&en=c5b2dcc816096d3f&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt)
, causing birth defects and other maladies. Currently, 600,000 babies
born in the United States every year "may be exposed to dangerous levels
of mercury in the womb." Yet, the Bush administration recently issued
rules which would allow some power plants to " increase [mercury]
pollution
(http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2005/03/14/national/w233123S45.DTL)
, while others turn a profit selling unused pollution allowances." The
new "cap-and-trade" policy rolls back a plan created by the EPA in 2000
which "would have mandated curtailing emissions at every plant by the
maximum amount possible, which proponents said could bring a 90%
reduction in three years
(http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-mercury15mar15,1,1811310,print.story)
using existing technology."

UNDERMINING PROPER NUTRITION FOR BABIES: Bush's proposed budget
significantly reduces funding for the Women, Children and Infants (WIC)
program -- " a major preventative against low-weight babies.
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54741-2005Feb25.html) "
In 2010, for example, Bush's budget would cut funding for the program
by $658 million, which would require eliminating coverage for 660,000
women.

LEAVING THE DISABLED ON THE STREET: Bush's statement about his
intervention in the Schiavo case implies that he is a champion for the
well-being of the disabled. Not quite. He is proposing " to stop financing the
construction of new housing for the mentally ill
(http://www.disnetwork.org/Housing%20Cuts%20Article.htm) and physically
handicapped." The program has existed for three decades.

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A Blow to the Rule of Law

The New York Times
March 22, 2005

A Blow to the Rule of Law

If you are in a "persistent vegetative state" and there is a dispute about whether to keep you alive, your case will probably go no further than state court - unless you are Terri Schiavo. President Bush signed legislation yesterday giving Ms. Schiavo's parents a personal right to sue in federal court. The new law tramples on the principle that this is "a nation of laws, not of men," and it guts the power of the states. When the commotion over this one tragic woman is over, Congress and the president will have done real damage to the founders' careful plan for American democracy.

Ms. Schiavo's case presents heart-wrenching human issues, and difficult legal ones. But the Florida courts, after careful deliberation, ruled that she would not want to be kept alive by artificial means in her current state, and ordered her feeding tube removed. Ms. Schiavo's parents, who wanted the tube to remain, hoped to get the Florida Legislature to intervene, but it did not do so.

That should have settled the matter. But supporters of Ms. Schiavo's parents, particularly members of the religious right, leaned heavily on Congress and the White House to step in. They did so yesterday with the new law, which gives "any parent of Theresa Marie Schiavo" standing to sue in federal court to keep her alive.

This narrow focus is offensive. The founders believed in a nation in which, as Justice Robert Jackson once wrote, we would "submit ourselves to rulers only if under rules." There is no place in such a system for a special law creating rights for only one family. The White House insists that the law will not be a precedent. But that means that the right to bring such claims in federal court is reserved for people with enough political pull to get a law passed that names them in the text.

The Bush administration and the current Congressional leadership like to wax eloquent about states' rights. But they dropped those principles in their rush to stampede over the Florida courts and Legislature. The new law doesn't miss a chance to trample on the state's autonomy and dignity. There are a variety of technical legal doctrines the federal courts use to show deference to state courts, like "abstention" and "exhaustion of remedies." The new law decrees that in Ms. Schiavo's case, these well-established doctrines simply will not apply.

Republicans have traditionally championed respect for the delicate balance the founders created. But in the Schiavo case, and in the battle to stop the Democratic filibusters of judicial nominations, President Bush and his Congressional allies have begun to enunciate a new principle: the rules of government are worth respecting only if they produce the result we want. It may be a formula for short-term political success, but it is no way to preserve and protect a great republic.

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Shooting Rampage by Student Leaves 10 Dead on Reservation

The New York Times
March 22, 2005
Shooting Rampage by Student Leaves 10 Dead on Reservation
By JODI WILGOREN

CHICAGO, March 21 - A high school student went on a shooting rampage on the Red Lake Indian Reservation in northern Minnesota on Monday, killing his grandparents, five fellow students, a teacher and a security guard, as well as himself, the authorities said.

A dozen others were injured in the barrage, which erupted at the 300-student Red Lake High School about 3 p.m., officials said. The grandparents were apparently killed at their home earlier in the day, and the authorities were investigating whether guns used in the shooting were taken from the grandfather, a veteran officer on the tribal police force.

"It will probably take us throughout the night to really put the whole picture together," Paul McCabe, an F.B.I. spokesman in Minneapolis, said at a briefing. "It's still a very fluid investigation. Right now there's still a lot of work to do."

Mr. McCabe did say that "we do have evidence that we believe that the shooter is dead," and that "we believe he was acting alone."

He identified the gunman's grandfather as Daryl Lussier, a longtime officer with the Red Lake Police Department and said Mr. Lussier's guns may have been used in the shootings, The Associated Press reported.

The shooting was the worst at a school since 15 people were killed at Columbine High School near Littleton, Colo., in 1999, and came just 18 months after two students were fatally shot at Rocori High School in the central Minnesota town of Cold Spring, 200 miles away.

Roman Stately, director of the Red Lake Fire Department, told The A.P. and local television stations that the police found the grandparents' bodies an hour after the school shooting and that the young man used his grandfather's shotgun and two pistols in the rampage.

"Apparently, he walked out in the hallway shooting and then he entered a classroom," Mr. Stately told KARE-TV, the NBC affiliate in Minneapolis-St. Paul. "Shot several students and a teacher." He added, "And then himself."

Witnesses told The Pioneer, a newspaper in Bemidji, the nearest town, an hour's drive away, that the gunman was "grinning and waving" as he fired his weapon and that students pleaded with him to stop, according to The A.P.

"You could hear a girl saying, 'No, Jeff, quit, quit, leave me alone, what are you doing?' " The A.P. quoted Sondra Hegstrom, a student, as telling The Pioneer. "I looked him in the eye and ran in the room, and that's when I hid."

A teacher, Diane Schwanz, told The Pioneer that she herded students under benches as she dialed 911 on her cellphone. "I just got on the floor and called the cops," she said.

Mr. McCabe said the victims at the high school were all found in one room. The dead teacher was a woman, he said, the security guard a man; four students, including the gunman, died at the scene and two more later at a hospital.

The Red Lake reservation, about 240 miles north of the Twin Cities and about 120 miles south of Canada, is home to about 5,000 Ojibwa Indians, commonly called Chippewa. The tribe operates three casinos and other tourist attractions on some half-million acres.

Clyde Bellecourt, founder of the Minneapolis-based American Indian Movement, said he could not "remember anything as tragic as this happening" on a reservation.

"Everyone in the Indian community is feeling really bad right now, whether they're a member of the Red Lake or not, we're all an extended family, we're all related," he said. "Usually this happens in places like Columbine, white schools, always somewhere else. We never hear that in our community."

Mr. Bellecourt and his brother Vernon, another longtime American Indian leader, said that the gunman's grandfather had been on the local police force for perhaps 35 years, and belonged to one of the tribe's most prominent and respected families.

"No one would ever think that that type of violence would visit itself in our communities, it's not part of our culture and our traditions, so we're kind of puzzled by it all," Vernon Bellecourt said.

"But our young people are not exempt from the same problems young people have across the country," he added, "so our communities are now being victimized by this same kind of violence."

Sherri Birkeland, a spokeswoman for North Country Regional Hospital in Bemidji, said six of the injured were treated at her emergency room, two of them later airlifted to MeritCare Healthcare Systems in Fargo, N.D.

One of the remaining four died, Ms. Birkeland said, declining to release information about the conditions of the others or describe any injuries. The hospital was shut for several hours afterward, she said.

In Fargo, Carrie Johnson, a spokeswoman for MeritCare, said the first victim arrived by helicopter at 5:55 p.m.

Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota issued a statement Monday evening expressing "profound sorrow" and extending "heartfelt prayers and condolences to the families who lost loved ones in this senseless tragedy."

Reporting for this article was contributed by Mikkel Patesfrom Fargo; Kermit Pattison from Minneapolis; and Gretchen Reuthling from Chicago.

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It's 'Private' vs. 'Personal' in Social Security Debate

The New York Times
March 22, 2005
It's 'Private' vs. 'Personal' in Social Security Debate
By ROBIN TONER

WASHINGTON, March 21 - What's in a name? Would a personal account by any other name smell as sweet?

Apparently not, according to strategists in the two political parties.

In the Social Security debate, one of the most ferocious struggles is over language, whether President Bush is proposing to create "personal" or "private" accounts in the program, whether he is really proposing the "privatization" of Social Security.

Mr. Bush complained last week that " 'privatization' is a trick word," intended to "scare people." Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader, interrupted a news conference to correct a reporter who asked about "personal" accounts.

"It's 'privatization,' " Mr. Reid said, adding that "personal accounts" was "the Republican term."

The staff of the House Franking Commission, which regulates the political content of Congressional mail that goes out at taxpayer expense, has weighed in with advice on which versions of the word "privatize" can be used to describe the president's plan. (The distinction revolves around the difference between "full" and "partial" privatization.)

This is not simply a semantic exercise. Real issues are at stake, the sides agree. Mr. Bush has proposed letting younger workers divert part of their payroll taxes into private (or personal) investment accounts.

Democrats say that amounts to a fundamental revision of the 70-year-old program, draining huge sums of money from it, reducing the government's role and exposing individuals to far more risk - in short, at least partly "privatizing" it.

Republicans say it is no such thing.

"To most people 'privatization' means you're going to take the program out of the federal government and put it in the hands of private individuals totally," said Representative Jim McCrery, the Louisiana Republican who is chairman of the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Social Security. "That's not what I'm proposing, and it's not what the president is proposing.

"Accounts are not private in the sense that that individual has complete control over those accounts. He doesn't. His investment choices are very limited. He can't take the money out for any reason other than retirement. And he must annuitize a certain portion of it upon retirement."

In short, a frustrated Mr. McCrery said: "They are not private accounts. They are personal accounts."

The Republican National Committee distributed to reporters a definition of "privatize" and why it should not apply to the proposal.

Democrats and their allies counter that such individual investment accounts have been described as a form of "privatization" for many years - by the very people advocating them. The Cato Institute, the research center that has long pushed for the accounts, called its effort the Project on Social Security Privatization until a few years ago.

Michael Tanner, an expert on the issue at Cato, said the organization decided to change the name independently of the Republican Party, but added, "We were all probably reading the same polls."

Peter Orszag of the Brookings Institution, a critic of Mr. Bush's approach to private accounts, said: "I do find this a bit Orwellian. It's taking a term and saying you're not allowed to use this, even though it was widely used for years."

The two sides agree that the language struggle is fueled by polls and pollsters, who say public opinion can swing significantly when the word "privatize" is used.

"What it conveys is putting your retirement up to the mercy of private-sector forces that you may or may not have any control over," said Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster who works for a coalition of groups that oppose Mr. Bush's plan. "It conveys a fundamental change in a program that works."

Frank Luntz, a Republican consultant who has performed extensive work with focus groups on language, said:

" 'Private' is exclusive. 'Private' is limiting. 'Private' is something that's not available to all.

" 'Personal' is encompassing. It's individual. It's ownership. In the end, you need the combination of 'personal' and 'security.' "

A recent poll found that it made no difference whether the accounts were described as personal or private, and Robert Blendon, an expert on public opinion at Harvard, theorized that the public reacted more to the way the argument was framed than the use of a few words.

Glen Bolger, a Republican pollster, noted that a recent poll that his firm helped conduct for National Public Radio highlighted that effect. When asked, "Do you favor or oppose President Bush's proposal to create voluntary personal retirement accounts as part of the Social Security system?" 41 percent favored it, 49 percent opposed.

When asked, "Do you favor or oppose President Bush's proposal to privatize Social Security and divert part of the Social Security system into private accounts?" 34 percent said they favored it, and 58 percent opposed.

"Calling it a personal retirement account is stronger across the board," Mr. Bolger said. "Whereas 'privatization' hurts across the board."

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The House Vote: For the relief of the parents of Theresa Marie Schiavo

For the relief of the parents of Theresa Marie Schiavo

On Motion to Suspend the Rules and Pass
House Roll Call No. 90
109th Congress, 1st Session

Passed: 203-58

See how your Representatives voted:

http://mygov.governmentguide.com/mygov/issues/votes/?votenum=90&chamber=H&congress=1091

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TERRI SCHIAVO AND THE LIMITS OF CYNICISM

washingtonmonthly.com/

March 21, 2005

Kevin Drum

TERRI SCHIAVO AND THE LIMITS OF CYNICISM....Via Think Progress, here's a fascinating ABC News poll about the Terri Schiavo affair. It turns out that not only do large majorities favor removing her feeding tube and oppose federal intervention in her case, but huge majorities know perfectly well that Tom DeLay and his crew are in it solely for political advantage. When you drill down into the numbers, it becomes obvious that even people who support DeLay's position don't believe he has any actual concern for Terri Schiavo.



Now, I realize that in one sense this doesn't matter. This whole thing isn't about majority support, it's about pandering to one specific segment of the GOP base. But here's the thing: even evangelical Christians don't support congressional intervention. Apparently the DeLay/Frist/Bush axis has dealt with this so cynically that even the people they're pandering to are uneasy about being treated with such open condescension.

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"Compassionate" Conservatism?

"Compassionate" Conservatism?

OK. So let me see if I understand Compassionate Conservatism (aka Neo-Conservatism aka right-wing conservatism) correctly:

Compassionate Conservatives (aka Neo-Conservatives aka right-wing conservatives) believe it is ok to execute people as a form of punishment (the death penalty -- Texas, home of President Bush who was formerly Governor of Texas, and home of Representative Tom Delay, being the state with the most executions). It is also ok to torture people, spy on people, and take away and semblance of personal freedom.

Compassionate Conservatives (aka Neo-Conservatives aka right-wing conservatives) believe it is ok to send US citizens to fight and die in a war against a country that was not a threat to the US (so long as none of the US Citizens that are sent are friends or relatives of theirs).

Compassionate Conservatives (aka Neo-Conservatives aka right-wing conservatives) believe only the very rich should have money and the ability to generate more. The middle class should be eliminated. All jobs should be moved offshore so large corporate CEOs and their friends can make more money. The poor are not entitled to any rights (see below).

Compassionate Conservatives (aka Neo-Conservatives aka right-wing conservatives) believe in the sanctity of marriage, but only if it is between a man and a woman.

Compassionate Conservatives (aka Neo-Conservatives aka right-wing conservatives) do not believe in the sanctity of marriage if it means that the spouse can make decisions for the other spouse if that other spouse is incapacitated -- even if it can be shown that the decisions are consistent with previously expressed wishes of that incapacitated spouse -- as proven and accepted by a court of law. In such cases, they now believe that Congress and the President should overstep its bounds, and ignore the constitutional separation and definitions of the three major branches of the US government. But wait: George W. Bush (as Governor) signed a law in Texas that expressly gave hospitals the right to remove life support if the patient could not pay and there was no hope of revival, regardless of the patient's family's wishes. It is called the Texas Futile Care Law. Under this law, a baby was removed from life support against his mother's wishes in Texas just this week. So Congress and the President won't get involved if you are poor. The President has also recently signed into law a revision to the bankruptcy rules that make it even harder to afford health care if you have no or limited funds or if medical expenses exhaust your funds.

Clearly, the term "Compassionate" does not apply.

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