Senator John Kerry's Speech at Brown University

Excerpts:

The incompetence of Katrina's response is not reserved to a hurricane. There's an enormous gap between Americans' daily expectations and government's daily performance. And the gap is growing between the enduring strength of the American people -- their values, their spirit, their imagination, their ingenuity, and their willingness to serve and sacrifice -- and the shocking weakness of the American government in contending with our country's urgent challenges. On the Gulf Coast during the last two weeks, the depth and breadth of that gap has been exposed for all to see and we have to address it now before it is obscured again by hurricane force spin and deception.

Katrina stripped away any image of competence and exposed to all the true heart and nature of this administration. The truth is that for four and a half years, real life choices have been replaced by ideological agenda, substance replaced by spin, governance second place always to politics. Yes, they can run a good campaign -- I can attest to that -- but America needs more than a campaign. If 12 year-old Boy Scouts can be prepared, Americans have a right to expect the same from their 59 year-old President of the United States.

Katrina reminds us that too often the political contests of our time have been described like football games with color commentary: one team of consultants against another, red states against blue states, Democratic money against Republican money; a contest of height versus hair - sometimes. But the truth is democracy is not a game; we are living precious time each day in a different America than the one we can inhabit if we make different choices.

...

Natural and human calamity stripped away the spin machine, creating a rare accountability moment, not just for the Bush administration, but for all of us to take stock of the direction of our country and do what we can to reverse it. That's our job -- to turn this moment from a frenzied expression of guilt into a national reversal of direction. Some try to minimize the moment by labeling it a "blame game" -- but as I’ve said - this is no game and what is at stake is much larger than the incompetent and negligent response to Katrina.

This is about the broader pattern of incompetence and negligence that Katrina exposed, and beyond that, a truly systemic effort to distort and disable the people's government, and devote it to the interests of the privileged and the powerful.

Full text of the speech:

September 19, 2005
Senator John Kerry's Speech at Brown University
Remarks As Prepared for Delivery

Providence, RI - Thank you for your invitation to be here. It’s rare for me to speak at a university like Brown. Usually I don’t speak at a football factory. I want to personally thank those of you who generously lent your efforts to my campaign last year. No one showed more passion than the thousands of students from across the country who knocked on doors, wore out shoes, endured desert heat and arctic cold and probably damaged their GPA's to get out the vote. You did everything, except move to Ohio.

I also want to thank you for what the Brown community has done to help and comfort the many victims of Hurricane Katrina. This horrifying disaster has shown Americans at their best -- and their government at its worst.

And that's what I've come to talk with you about today. The incompetence of Katrina's response is not reserved to a hurricane. There's an enormous gap between Americans' daily expectations and government's daily performance. And the gap is growing between the enduring strength of the American people -- their values, their spirit, their imagination, their ingenuity, and their willingness to serve and sacrifice -- and the shocking weakness of the American government in contending with our country's urgent challenges. On the Gulf Coast during the last two weeks, the depth and breadth of that gap has been exposed for all to see and we have to address it now before it is obscured again by hurricane force spin and deception.

Katrina stripped away any image of competence and exposed to all the true heart and nature of this administration. The truth is that for four and a half years, real life choices have been replaced by ideological agenda, substance replaced by spin, governance second place always to politics. Yes, they can run a good campaign -- I can attest to that -- but America needs more than a campaign. If 12 year-old Boy Scouts can be prepared, Americans have a right to expect the same from their 59 year-old President of the United States.

Katrina reminds us that too often the political contests of our time have been described like football games with color commentary: one team of consultants against another, red states against blue states, Democratic money against Republican money; a contest of height versus hair - sometimes. But the truth is democracy is not a game; we are living precious time each day in a different America than the one we can inhabit if we make different choices.

Today, more than ever, when the path taken last year and four years earlier takes us into a wilderness of missed opportunities -- we need to keep defining the critical choices over and over, offering a direction not taken but still open in the future.

I know the President went on national television last week and accepted responsibility for Washington's poor response to Katrina. That's admirable. And it's a first. As they say, the first step towards recovery is to get out of denial. But don't hold your breath hoping acceptance of responsibility will become a habit for this administration. On the other hand, if they are up to another "accountability moment" they ought to start by admitting one or two of the countless mistakes in conceiving, "selling", planning and executing their war of choice in Iraq.

I obviously don't expect that to happen. And indeed, there's every reason to believe the President finally acted on Katrina and admitted a mistake only because he was held accountable by the press, cornered by events, and compelled by the outrage of the American people, who with their own eyes could see a failure of leadership and its consequences.

Natural and human calamity stripped away the spin machine, creating a rare accountability moment, not just for the Bush administration, but for all of us to take stock of the direction of our country and do what we can to reverse it. That's our job -- to turn this moment from a frenzied expression of guilt into a national reversal of direction. Some try to minimize the moment by labeling it a "blame game" -- but as I’ve said - this is no game and what is at stake is much larger than the incompetent and negligent response to Katrina.

This is about the broader pattern of incompetence and negligence that Katrina exposed, and beyond that, a truly systemic effort to distort and disable the people's government, and devote it to the interests of the privileged and the powerful. It is about the betrayal of trust and abuse of power. And in all the often horrible and sometimes ennobling sights and sounds we've all witnessed over the last two weeks, there's another sound just under the surface: the steady clucking of Administration chickens coming home to roost.

We wouldn't be hearing that sound if the people in Washington running our government had cared to listen in the past.

They didn't listen to the Army Corps of Engineers when they insisted the levees be reinforced.

They didn't listen to the countless experts who warned this exact disaster scenario would happen.

They didn't listen to years of urgent pleading by Louisianans about the consequences of wetlands erosion in the region, which exposed New Orleans and surrounding parishes to ever-greater wind damage and flooding in a hurricane.

They didn't listen when a disaster simulation just last year showed that hundreds of thousands of people would be trapped and have no way to evacuate New Orleans.

They didn't listen to those of us who have long argued that our insane dependence on oil as our principle energy source, and our refusal to invest in more efficient engines, left us one big supply disruption away from skyrocketing gas prices that would ravage family pocketbooks, stall our economy, bankrupt airlines, and leave us even more dependent on foreign countries with deep pockets of petroleum.

They didn't listen when Katrina approached the Gulf and every newspaper in America warned this could be "The Big One" that Louisianans had long dreaded. They didn't even abandon their vacations.

And the rush now to camouflage their misjudgments and inaction with money doesn’t mean they are suddenly listening. It's still politics as usual. The plan they’re designing for the Gulf Coast turns the region into a vast laboratory for right wing ideological experiments. They’re already talking about private school vouchers, abandonment of environmental regulations, abolition of wage standards, subsidies for big industries - and believe it or not yet another big round of tax cuts for the wealthiest among us!

The administration is recycling all their failed policies and shipping them to Louisiana. After four years of ideological excess, these Washington Republicans have a bad hangover -- and they can't think of anything to offer the Gulf Coast but the hair of the dog that bit them.

And amazingly -- or perhaps not given who we’re dealing with -- this massive reconstruction project will be overseen not by a team of experienced city planners or developers, but according to the New York Times, by the Chief of Politics in the White House and Republican Party, none other than Karl Rove -- barring of course that he is indicted for "outing" an undercover CIA intelligence officer.

Katrina is a symbol of all this administration does and doesn't do. Michael Brown -- or Brownie as the President so famously thanked him for doing a heck of a job - Brownie is to Katrina what Paul Bremer is to peace in Iraq; what George Tenet is to slam dunk intelligence; what Paul Wolfowitz is to parades paved with flowers in Baghdad; what Dick Cheney is to visionary energy policy; what Donald Rumsfeld is to basic war planning; what Tom Delay is to ethics; and what George Bush is to “Mission Accomplished” and "Wanted Dead or Alive." The bottom line is simple: The "we'll do whatever it takes" administration doesn't have what it takes to get the job done.

This is the Katrina administration.

It has consistently squandered time, tax dollars, political capital, and even risked American lives on sideshow adventures: A war of choice in Iraq against someone who had nothing to do with 9/11; a full scale presidential assault on Social Security when everyone knows the real crisis is in health care - Medicare and Medicaid. And that's before you get to willful denial on global warming; avoidance on competitiveness; complicity in the loss and refusal of health care to millions.

Americans can and will help compensate for government's incompetence with millions of acts of individual enterprise and charity, as Katrina has shown. But that’s not enough. We must ask tough questions: Will this generosity and compassion last in the absence of strong leadership? Will this Administration only ask for sacrifice in a time of crisis? Has dishonesty in politics degraded our national character to the point that we feel our dues have been paid as citizens with a one-time donation to the Red Cross?

Today, let’s you and I acknowledge what’s really going on in this country. The truth is that this week, as a result of Katrina, many children languishing in shelters are getting vaccinations for the first time. Thousands of adults are seeing a doctor after going without a check-up for years. Illnesses lingering long before Katrina will be treated by a healthcare system that just weeks ago was indifferent, and will soon be indifferent again.

For the rest of the year this nation silently tolerates the injustice of 11 million children and over 30 million adults in desperate need of healthcare. We tolerate a chasm of race and class some would rather pretend does not exist. And ironically, right in the middle of this crisis the Administration quietly admitted that since they took office, six million of our fellow citizens have fallen into poverty. That’s over ten times the evacuated population of New Orleans. Their plight is no less tragic - no less worthy of our compassion and attention. We must demand something simple and humane: healthcare for all those in need - in all years at all times.

This is the real test of Katrina. Will we be satisfied to only do the immediate: care for the victims and rebuild the city? Or will we be inspired to tackle the incompetence that left us so unprepared, and the societal injustice that left so many of the least fortunate waiting and praying on those rooftops?

That’s the unmet challenge we have to face together. Katrina is the background of a new picture we must paint of America. For five years our nation's leaders have painted a picture of America where ignoring the poor has no consequences; no nations are catching up to us; and no pensions are destroyed. Every criticism is rendered unpatriotic. And if you say “War on Terror” enough times, Katrina never happens.

Well, Katrina did happen, and it washed away that coat of paint and revealed the true canvas of America with all its imperfections. Now, we must stop this Administration from again whitewashing the true state of our challenges. We have to paint our own picture - an honest picture with all the optimism we deserve - one that gives people a vision where no one is excluded or ignored. Where leaders are honest about the challenges we face as a nation, and never reserve compassion only for disasters.

Rarely has there been a moment more urgent for Americans to step up and define ourselves again. On the line is a fundamental choice. A choice between a view that says “you’re on your own,” “go it alone,” or “every man for himself.” Or a different view - a different philosophy - a different conviction of governance - a belief that says our great American challenge is one of shared endeavor and shared sacrifice.

Over the next weeks I will address some of these choices in detail - choices about national security, the war in Iraq, making our nation more competitive and committing to energy independence. But it boils down to this. I still believe America’s destiny is to become a living testament to what free human beings can accomplish by acting in unity. That’s easy to dismiss by those who seem to have forgotten we can do more together than just waging war.

But for those who still believe in the great tradition of Americans doing great things together, it’s time we started acting like it. We can never compete with the go-it- alone crowd in appeals to selfishness. We can’t afford to be pale imitations of the other side in playing the ‘what’s in it for me’ game. Instead, it’s time we put our appeals where our hearts are - asking the American people to make our country as strong, prosperous, and big-hearted as we know we can be - every day. It’s time we framed every question - every issue -- not in terms of what’s in it for ‘me,’ but what’s in it for all of us?

And when you ask that simple question - what’s in it for all of us? - the direction not taken in America could not be more clear or compelling.

Instead of allowing a few oil companies to drill their way to windfall profits, it means an America that understands we can’t drill our way to energy independence, we have to invent our way there together.

Instead of making a mockery of the words No Child Left Behind when China and India are graduating tens of thousands more engineers and PhDs than we are, it means an America where college education is affordable and accessible for every child willing to work for it.

Instead of tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, it means an America that makes smart investments in your future like funding the science and research and development that will assure American technological leadership.

Instead of allowing lobbyists to rewrite our environmental laws, it means an America where lakes and rivers and streams are clean enough that when a family takes the kids fishing, it’s actually safe to eat the fish they catch.

Instead of letting a few ideologues get in the way of progress that can make us a stronger and healthier society, it means an America where the biology students here today will do the groundbreaking stem cell research tomorrow.

And instead of stubbornly disregarding intelligence, using force prematurely and shoving our allies aside, it means an America that restores its leadership in the world. An America that meets its responsibility of creating a world where the plagues of our time and future times - from terror to disease to poverty to weapons of mass destruction to the unknown - are overcome by allies united in common cause, and proud to follow American leadership.

That is the direction not taken but still open to us in the future if we answer that simple question - ‘what’s in it for all of us?’ It comes down to the fact that the job of government is to prepare for your future - not ignore it. It should prepare to solve problems - not create them.

This Administration and the Republicans who control Congress give in to special interests and rob future generations. Real leadership stands up to special interests and sets the course for future generations. And the fact is we do face serious challenges as a nation, and if we don’t address them now, we handicap your future. My generation risks failing its obligation of assuring you inherit a safer, stronger America. To turn this around, the greatest challenges must be the starting point. I hope Katrina gives us the courage to face them and the sense of urgency to beat them.

That’s why the next few months are such a critical time. You’ll read about the Katrina investigations and fact-finding missions. You’ll get constant updates on the progress rebuilding New Orleans and new funding for FEMA. Washington becomes a very efficient town once voters start paying attention.

But we can’t let political maneuvering around the current crisis distract people from the gathering, hidden crises - like energy, environment, poverty, healthcare and innovation - that present the greatest threats to our nation’s competitiveness and character. The effort to rebuild New Orleans cannot obscure the need to also rebuild our country.

So realistically, I’m sure you’re wondering: How do I change all this? What can I do? The answer is simple: you have to make your issues the voting issues of this nation. You’re not the first generation to face this challenge.

I remember when you couldn’t even mention environmental issues without a snicker. But then in the 70’s people got tired of seeing the Cuyahoga River catch on fire from all the chemicals. So one day millions of Americans marched. Politicians had no choice but to take notice. Twelve Congressmen were dubbed the Dirty Dozen, and soon after seven were kicked out of office. The floodgates were opened. We got the Clean Air Act, The Clean Water Act and Safe Drinking Water. We created the EPA. The quality of life improved because concerned citizens made their issues matter in elections.

You are citizens in the greatest democracy in the world. Moments like Katrina are so difficult - so painful - but they help you define your service to your fellow citizens. I’ll never forget as a teenager standing in a field in October of 1957 watching the first man made spacecraft streak across the night sky. The conquest, of course, was Soviet - and while not everyone got to see the unmanned craft pass overhead at 18,000 miles per hour that night - before long every American knew the name Sputnik. We knew we had been caught unprepared.

In the uncertain years thereafter, President Kennedy challenged Americans to act on that instinct. He said, "This is a great country, but I think it could be a greater country...the question we have to decide as Americans," he said, is "are we doing enough today?"

Today, every American knows the name Katrina -- and once again we know our government was undeniably unprepared, even as Americans have shown their willingness to sacrifice to make up for it.

But in these uncertain weeks of Katrina's aftermath, we must ask ourselves not just whether a great country can be made greater -- the sacrifice and generosity of Americans these last weeks answered that question with a resounding yes.

No, our challenge is greater - it’s to speak out so loudly that Washington has no choice but to make choices worthy of this great country - choices worthy of the sacrifice of our neighbors in the Gulf Coast and our troops all around the world.

What's in it for all of us? Nothing less than the character of our country - and your future.

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Former President Clinton Rips Bush Fiscal, Tax Policies

ABC News
Clinton Rips Bush Fiscal, Tax Policies
Interviewed on ABC News' 'This Week,' Former President Calls Tax Cuts Combined with Deficit Spending 'Wrong'

Sep. 18, 2005 - Former President Bill Clinton slammed President Bush's fiscal and tax policies in an interview broadcast today on ABC News' "This Week." It was Clinton's first televised interview with George Stephanopoulos, now host of ABC News' "This Week," since Stephanopoulos worked in the Clinton White House.

"Tax cuts are always popular," Clinton said. "But about half of these tax cuts since 2001 have gone to people in my income group, the top 1 percent. I've gotten four tax cuts.

"Now, what Americans need to understand is that that means every single day of the year, our government goes into the market and borrows money from other countries to finance Iraq, Afghanistan, Katrina, and our tax cuts," Clinton added. "We depend on Japan, China, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, and Korea primarily to basically loan us money every day of the year to cover my tax cut and these conflicts and Katrina. I don't think it makes any sense. I think it's wrong."

Former President Clinton also discussed bringing world leaders together to combat the world's chronic problems -- including extreme poverty, global warming and religious conflicts -- as well as the Hurricane Katrina recovery effort and Hillary Clinton's political future.

The interview follows:

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Mr. President, good to see you again.

FORMER PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON: Thank you, George.

STEPHANOPOULOS: We're here on your initiative, and I want to talk about that, but let's begin with Katrina. President Bush has brought you into the recovery effort, but he's not taking all of your advice. You say roll back the tax cuts for the wealthy. He says no tax increase of any kind. We're spending $5 billion a month in Iraq, probably $200 billion on Katrina. Something's got to give.

CLINTON: Well, that's what I think. I think this idea-- I think it's very important that Americans understand, you know, tax cuts are always popular, but about half of these tax cuts since 2001 have gone to people in my income group, the top 1 percent. I've gotten four tax cuts.

They're responsible for this big structural deficit, and they're not going away, the deficits aren't. Now, what Americans need to understand is that that means every single day of the year, our government goes into the market and borrows money from other countries to finance Iraq, Afghanistan, Katrina, and our tax cuts. We have never done this before. Never in the history of our republic have we ever financed a conflict, military conflict, by borrowing money from somewhere else.

STEPHANOPOULOS: The president is not going to move. What do Democrats do?

CLINTON: They should continue to oppose it, and they should make it an issue in the 2006 election, and they should make it an issue in the 2008 election. And they should hope, to goodness, for the sake of our country, that the cows don't come home before we have time to rectify it.

I mean, sooner or later, just think what would happen if the Chinese-- We're pressing the Chinese now, a country not nearly rich as America per capita, to keep loaning us money with low interest to cover my tax cut, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Katrina and at the same time to raise the value of their currency so their imports into our country will become more expensive, and our exports to them will become less expensive. And by the way, we don't want to let them buy any oil companies or anything like that.

So what if they just got tired of buying our debt? What if the Japanese got tired of doing it? Japan's economy is beginning to grow again. Suppose they decided they wanted to keep some of their money at home and invest it in Japan, because they're starting to grow?

We depend on Japan, China, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, and Korea primarily to basically loan us money every day of the year to cover my tax cut and these conflicts and Katrina. I don't think it makes any sense. I think it's wrong.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Is there anything coming out of this initiative here that you can apply directly to Katrina and the poverty we saw revealed there?

CLINTON: Oh, yes, we have raised quite a bit of money for Katrina here. And former President Bush and I, you know, we were asked to raise money. We already have $90 million to $100 million. And what we're trying to do is make sure that our money goes directly to the poorest people who have been dislodged by working with church groups and others. We're working on some mechanisms now to do that, and we'll have some announcements in the next week or so.

But I think there will be a lot of money coming forward from the federal government. A lot of it will be necessary, you know, to build the infrastructure, rebuild the fabric of life and not simply in New Orleans but along the Gulf Coast.

STEPHANOPOULOS: The Gulf Coast.

CLINTON: Yes; you know, keep in mind, Mississippi was devastated. Everything from a mile in Mississippi was blown down, and Alabama, but we've got to do that.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Excuse me; the problems of race that were tied to poverty here, and I know you don't think there's any conscious racism at play in the response, but we saw one more time blacks and whites looked at this event through very different eyes. What can President Bush do about that, and looking back, do you think there was anything more you could have done as president?

CLINTON: Well, I think we did a good job of disaster management.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But the racial divide.

CLINTON: Well, I think we did a good job of that. For example, we had the lowest African-American unemployment, the lowest African-American poverty rate ever recorded. We had the highest homeownership, highest business ownership, and we moved 100 times as many people out of poverty in eight years as had been moved out in the previous 12 years.

This is a matter of public policy, and whether it's race-based or not, if you give your tax cuts to the rich and hope everything works out all right, and poverty goes up, and it disproportionately affects black and brown people, that's a consequence of the action made. That's what they did in the eighties; that's what they've done in this decade.

In the middle, we had a different policy. We concentrated tax cuts on lower income working people and benefits to low-income people that helped them move from welfare to work, and we moved 100 times as many people out of poverty. We know what works, and we had a program that was drastically reducing poverty, and they got rid of it. And they don't believe in it.

And I don't think that it's race-based, but it has a class impact. And in Louisiana, if what you do affects poor people disproportionately, then, it will disproportionately affect black people. Now, there were a lot of poor people in St. Bernard Parish who were white who were also hurt.

But I think the fundamental problem there was, it's like when they issued the evacuation order: That affects poor people differently. A lot of them in New Orleans didn't have cars. A lot of them who had cars had kinfolk they had to take care of. They didn't have cars, so they couldn't take them out.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And they couldn't get gas.

CLINTON: And they couldn't get gas.

Then, you had another thing nobody's talked about: a lot of these people never had any home insurance, didn't have any flood insurance. Everything they owned was in their little home. And if we really wanted it to do it right, we would have had lots of buses lined up to take them out and also lots of empty vans so that everybody with no kind of home or flood insurance could have been given a little bit--

STEPHANOPOULOS: The mayor probably should have had those buses.

CLINTON: A little bit of it.

Maybe the mayor, maybe the governor. But all I can tell you is that when James Lee Witt ran FEMA, because he had been both a local official and a federal official, he was always there early, and we always thought about that. But both of us came out of environments with a disproportionate number of poor people.

I think that we were sensitive to the racial issue, but I think we were sensitive to the economic issue. And you can't have an emergency plan that works if it only affects middle-class people up, and when you tell people to go do something they don't have the means to do, you're going to leave the poor out.

STEPHANOPOULOS: You said you didn't want this conference to just be about talk. You wanted it to be action. Can you total it up over the three days that you've gotten--

CLINTON: Looks like now, we're not quite through yet, but it looks like we're at about $800 million worth of commitments. And they're very specific, and they've written cards out, you know, with their commitments. And we're going to have people during the year that check in, see if they need help making them, and we're going to give reports, progress reports between now and next year. So everybody is going to know whether we've kept our commitments or not.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Take us out 10 years. It's 2015. What do you want the Clinton initiative to have achieved? And will it be the center of your public life?

CLINTON: Well, it won't be the center, because what I'm trying to do is to provide a forum to empower other people. But I'm doing my own projects now, you know, the disaster project here, the tsunami [project] abroad, the AIDS project, which is the biggest thing I'm doing in terms of the number of lives it's affecting. We are getting medicine to 175,000 people now, which is 25 percent of all the people who have been added since 2003 in the poor countries.

But the Clinton Global Initiative has the power, the potential to affect the largest number of people in a positive way, because we're giving people a forum where they not only talk and learn, but do. You can't come here unless you promise to do something. And I believe that this whole nongovernmental organization movement is really the sort of new thing about governance and working on public problems in the 21st century.

It's not anti-government. We had as many public officials here as we could get from the Bush administration, from the Congress, from the other countries of the world, but they have to work together. So if we do this together for 10 years, I think there will be a measurable impact on some of the world's most severe problems.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Let's talk about John Roberts. You had two picks to the Supreme Court, Justice Breyer and Justice Ginsburg. Republicans voted for them overwhelmingly in both cases. John Roberts is unquestionably qualified; no ethical problems at all. Why shouldn't Democrats vote for John Roberts in the same proportions Republicans voted for Justice Breyer and Justice Ginsburg?

CLINTON: Well, I think, in fairness, that there is a little bit of difference.

STEPHANOPOULOS: How so?

CLINTON: Because the Republicans knew I wouldn't appoint somebody they wanted on the Court, and they knew that I'd appointed judges that were not extreme left-wingers, that were more or less mainstream judges and were unquestionably qualified.

Now, Judge Roberts is unquestionably qualified by intellect and character and background and by experience, but the next two appointments to the Supreme Court, his and the replacement for Justice O'Connor, can change the balance on a lot of important things. So I think that's —

STEPHANOPOULOS: But he's a one-for-one replacement for Rehnquist, isn't he?

CLINTON: I think that they have to think that. Well, maybe; we have to see-- I think a lot of them would like to know who the other nominee is.

The other thing is there was no issue with my appointees of their refusal to release documents, which I think is still a little bit of an issue in the Roberts case, although I don't know that it would make any difference if he released the documents, since he now says the first documents where he expressed his opinion didn't really reflect his opinion.

But I suspect he probably will be confirmed, but I think for a lot of Democrats, particularly-- And keep in mind, I think the whole idea of the Roe v. Wade issue is a big issue, because Justice Thomas said he'd never even discussed it with anybody, and then, like the minute he got on the Court, he made it clear that he wanted to repeal it.

So I think that the Democrats and some of the Republicans, like Senator Specter, can be forgiven for being somewhat skeptical. I think he'll probably be confirmed. I don't know. Hillary would know better than me, but I think that--

STEPHANOPOULOS: Think she'll vote for him?

CLINTON: --there's a sense that-- I don't know. I have no idea what she's going to do. I haven't talked to her about it.

But I think there's a sense that there's a lot more at stake here than just any Supreme Court appointment. But I agree that he is qualified by intellect, character, and experience, and he's obviously a very bright man. The only question is whether the Senate has an extra burden here because it's likely to have a significant impact on the balance of Court decisions, depending on who the next nominee is.

I think if President Bush nominated a clear moderate before the vote happened in the Roberts case, he would sail through.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Interesting advice.

Let's talk Iraq for a second. We just had one of the bloodiest weeks of the war. I know you've said that we have to have a strategy for victory and see this through to victory, but a lot of Democrats and also some Republicans like Chuck Hagel look at the situation now and say you know what? We don't have that strategy. We're not winning.

CLINTON: We don't.

STEPHANOPOULOS: We don't have a strategy for victory?

CLINTON: Well, if we do, it's not working right now, at least. But I know what they say.

Let me take a step back a little bit. I did not favor what was done. I did favor the Congress giving the president the power to use force, because when he asked for it in his speech in Cincinnati, he basically made the argument I've made many times, which is Saddam Hussein never did anything he wasn't forced to do, so he needed to know that there would be consequences if he didn't fully comply with the U.N. inspections.

But the administration, then, decided to launch this invasion virtually alone and before the U.N. inspections were completed, with no real urgency, no evidence that there were any weapons of mass destruction there. So I thought that diverted our attention from Iraq and … al Qaeda and undermined the support that we might have had.

Now, but what's done is done. Now, the question is, after 58 percent of those people voted, after there has been a heroic but so far unsuccessful effort to put together a constitution that everybody can buy off on, that the world would be better off if this enterprise did not fail and if the 58 percent of Iraqis who believed in it were given the chance to govern themselves in a stable and secure environment. I also think they will want us to leave as soon as they can defend themselves.

So the stated strategy of trying to develop the security and police forces to the point where they can defend themselves I think is the correct strategy. The problem is we may not have, in the short run, enough troops to do that.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Would you put more troops in now?

CLINTON: I don't know if they can, and I think it's even more important not to let Afghanistan fail, even more important. You know, you've got civilian contractors moving out of Afghanistan. We had a record week of casualties there last week. Every time we put a soldier in Afghanistan, we get a soldier from NATO.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So we're losing in Afghanistan, at risk of losing in Iraq. What do we do right now? What should the new strategy be?

CLINTON: Well as I said, I don't know, because I'm not president, I don't know what his military options are. I don't know how many troops he's got where. But I know my view is if there is a reasonable chance that this constitutional process can be completed and that it will not be rejected under the terms that govern the vote, once that happens, I think that will give another boost to the civilian government. Then, I think that we will know how long it takes to train enough and equip enough forces that they ought to be able to defend themselves. When that happens, I think we can begin drawing down our presence.

But my problem with setting a date certain for withdrawal now is I always assumed that whoever I was competing against was smart. And suppose you were running the Iraqi insurgency, and I know you, and I know how smart you are. If I told you I was going to leave in six months, 12 months, or 18 months, and you could survive that long, there's no way in the wide world you would join the political process.

Now, let's look at the other thing: When the IRA says they're going to give up arms, and they want the international body to observe the blowup, and they want the representative of the Catholics and Church of England, the Protestants to observe the blowup, what does that say? They say they've decided they've got more to gain from the political process than from continuing the conflict.

When 13,000 armed guerrillas and paramilitaries in Colombia give up their weapons and rejoin civil society, and President Uribe, who's been so tough on them, offers them a chance to reconcile, why are they doing that? Because they know they're not going to win anymore, and they want to be part of a political process. [In Rwanda,] when the Hutu soldiers came home in response to President Kigami's welcome and rejoined civil society and did their community atonement work, why did they do that? Because they knew they couldn't win anymore.

So the reason I don't want to see an announcement made is I see no reasonable prospect that this insurgency can be transformed into a political process, and the Sunnis who are alienated will come back if they know all they have to do is wait. It may not work. I've never known whether it would work. All I know is a majority of the Iraqis would like it to work. We'd be better off, and the Middle East would be better off if it did work.

A lot of good Americans have given their lives; thousands of others have been horribly wounded. So I have been in a position where I wanted the strategy to work. Whether it will or not, I don't know. But the only thing I would sacrifice it to is if I thought we were going to lose in Afghanistan. We cannot lose in Afghanistan. We cannot let the Taliban come back. We cannot let Karzai fail. We cannot relax our efforts to try to keep undermining al Qaeda, because that's still by far a bigger threat to our security.

STEPHANOPOULOS: You know, we're just about out of time. What's the Democratic bumper sticker in 2008?

CLINTON: Let's get the country back together, move the country forward again.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Not buy one, get one free?

CLINTON: No, get the country back together, move the country forward again. I have no idea what's going to happen. My family has an election in 2006, and I don't want to look past it. You know, I always say if you look past the next election, you may not get past the next election.

The country in 2008, and I think in 2006, will be in a desperate mood to come together and move forward. I think they're going to reject ideological solutions that are not fact-based, and I think they're going to want a government that works.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Mr. President, thank you very much.

CLINTON: Thanks.

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N.Y. Independence Party Ousts Fulani

ABC News
N.Y. Independence Party Ousts Fulani
New York's Influential Independence Party Ousts Woman Accused of Making Anti-Semitic Remarks
By MARC HUMBERT
The Associated Press

Sep. 19, 2005 - A woman accused of making anti-Semitic remarks was removed Sunday from the executive committee of New York's small but politically influential Independence Party.

Lenora Fulani's comments had drawn criticism not only from fellow Independence Party members, but also from powerful Democrats such as Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and from Republicans including New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Fulani has been accused of saying Jews "function as mass murderers of people of color" and "had to sell their souls" to acquire Israel.

Fulani and five of her supporters were purged from the Ross Perot-inspired party's 25-member executive committee after more than three hours of often heated debate.

"There are anti-Semites in this country, and a ton of them," Fulani said before the vote. "Lenora Fulani isn't one of them."

Fulani, who said she had many Jewish friends and colleagues, claimed Democrats were behind the move against her because of concern she was leading fellow blacks away from the Democratic Party. She remains a leader of the Manhattan wing of the Independence Party.

Fulani, who ran for president in 1988 and 1992 on the New Alliance Party ticket, has been a perennial candidate for state and city offices in New York.

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The bucks start here: Bush's plan raises questions

USA TODAY

The bucks start here: Bush's plan raises questions
By Richard Wolf and Judy Keen, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — President Bush's vow to rebuild the devastated Gulf Coast with a reconstruction program of historic proportions has lawmakers, policy analysts and budget watchdogs debating how much it will cost and who will pick up the tab.

"It's going to cost whatever it costs," Bush said Friday. Allan Hubbard, Bush's economic adviser, was equally blunt when asked who will pay: "The money ... is going to come from the federal taxpayer."

But the economic and political questions raised by Katrina's price tag are complex. The recovery effort is likely to increase the federal budget deficit, intensify pressure on Bush to raise taxes and delay some of his priorities, such as overhauling Social Security. It also is exposing the extent to which the budget already has been squeezed to pay for the Iraq war and calls into question Bush's commitment to the Republican tenet of small government.

Those issues don't change the bottom line: Katrina is not just a Gulf Coast problem anymore. It will affect the federal government and taxpayers for years.

"There's no choice here," says former representative Robert Livingston, a Louisiana Republican who once chaired the House Appropriations Committee.

"The federal government is the only one that can provide immediate assistance," says former representative Jack Kemp, R-N.Y., secretary of Housing and Urban Development from 1989 to 1993.

That raises basic questions:

•How much will it cost? Congress has approved $62.3 billion. The final cost will be much higher, but how much higher is guesswork.

"Early estimates top $200 billion," the conservative Heritage Foundation, a Washington think tank, says in a report posted on its website, www.heritage.org. "It may cost $300 billion, but a lot of it will be borne by the private sector," former president Bill Clinton, who's helping raise donations, said Sunday on NBC's Meet the Press. "It's not going to be anywhere near $200 billion," Kemp says.

The scale of the disaster suggests the initial billions are just a down payment. Mayor Ray Nagin has said half of New Orleans' 215,000 homes may have to be torn down and rebuilt. Louisiana State University's hurricane center estimates that it could cost $18 billion to rebuild wetlands, enlarge barrier islands and strengthen levees.

On Thursday, Bush proposed $2 billion in incentives to bring businesses back to the region, another $2 billion to cover the costs of educating an estimated 372,000 public- and private-school students displaced by the storm and $5,000 recovery accounts for each job-seeker in the disaster area.

•Where will the cash come from? "We're going to have to make sure we cut unnecessary spending," Bush said without volunteering any specific programs. "We should not raise taxes."

Big cuts in federal spending or tax increases are unlikely in "this climate of fiscal relaxation," says Urban Institute President Robert Reischauer, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office.

That leaves increasing the budget deficit as the most likely option. "It's easy to practice checkbook compassion," says Brian Riedl, a budget expert at the Heritage Foundation, which estimates Katrina's costs could push the federal deficit in 2015 to $873 billion, more than double the record set in 2004. This year's deficit is expected to be $331 billion, the third highest ever.

Some Republicans worry that Bush's willingness to spend whatever it takes betrays conservatives' small-government philosophy. "We simply cannot break the bank of the federal budget that is currently running about an $8 trillion national debt, about $26,000 per family," Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., said Sunday on ABC's This Week.

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, said he's willing to cut unneeded spending, "but no one is able to come up with any."

The libertarian Cato Institute, a Washington think tank, urges cuts in farm price supports, NASA and the Army Corps of Engineers, which is responsible for fixing New Orleans' levees. The Heritage Foundation proposes delaying the Medicare prescription-drug program, which takes effect in January.

The Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, says a start would be cutting "indefensible spending" in two big bills passed this summer. The energy bill included $1.5 billion for an oil-drilling consortium in DeLay's district, and the highway bill included $223 million for a bridge to a virtually uninhabited Alaskan island.

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http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-09-18-bush-plan-analysis_x.htm?csp=34

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GOP to propose budget cuts to cover Katrina costs

USA TODAY

GOP to propose budget cuts to cover Katrina costs

WASHINGTON (AP) — House Republicans are looking at delaying some federal spending, including money for a prescription drug benefit under Medicare and thousands of highway projects, to offset the cost of rebuilding the Gulf Coast, a leading GOP fiscal conservative said Sunday.

Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., said there is a need for dramatic spending cuts in "big-ticket items."

However, Democrats appearing on Sunday news programs questioned how President Bush can trim the budget to pay for Katrina recovery and support tax cuts for the wealthy.

"Where is he going to find roughly half a trillion dollars over the next several years for Iraq and for Katrina?" Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., asked on "Late Edition" on CNN. "I think we're not leveling with the American people."

Raising taxes or not making permanent the president's tax cuts is not the answer now, said Pence, head of the Republican Study Group, the spearhead group for the GOP's most conservative members.

"We simply cannot break the bank of the federal budget," Pence told ABC's This Week.

"We simply can't allow a catastrophe of nature to become a catastrophe of debt for our children and grandchildren," he said.

The drug benefit program, set to begin Jan. 1, is expected to cost $40 billion a year. Last month President Bush signed a $286.4 billion highway bill that has been criticized for including about 6,000 projects added by lawmakers to benefit their districts and states.

Setting aside all of those additional highway projects and delaying the drug benefit by a year are expected to be among the proposals House Republicans are preparing for "Operation Offset" this week, Pence said.

"We need to rebuild," he said. "We can find the cuts in Washington, D.C., to do that, I really believe that."

Sen. David Vitter, R-La., said tax increases will not be a part of the recovery plan he intends to offer this week. Although cuts in spending and delays in spending already approved will not be in his proposal, Vitter said he is open to considering such actions.

Vitter said people should not take on faith that Republicans will make cuts in light of the high spending during the Bush administration.

"We haven't been disciplined enough over the last 10 years. We need to do that, and we needed to do that before Katrina. We still need to do that over the medium and long term," Vitter said.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said an across-the-board cut in spending, excluding defense spending, would be appropriate. He suggested lawmakers consider delaying the drug benefit and review the highway and energy bills passed this summer. The energy bill totaled $12.3 billion over 10 years.

"We're failing when it comes to controlling spending," Graham told Fox News Sunday.

"The idea that this government of $2.4 trillion is efficiently being spent I disagree with," he said.

Former President Clinton said that Democrats should oppose policies that result in the government borrowing more money from other countries to pay for the costs of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, rebuilding the Gulf Coast and providing tax cuts to the wealthiest.

He said Democrats should make those policies an issue in next year's congressional elections.

"We depend on Japan, China, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, and Korea primarily to basically loan us money every day of the year," Clinton said. "I don't think it makes any sense. I think it's wrong."

Biden and Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., appearing together, disagreed over whether the federal budget could be trimmed. Bush "just sent us a budget, presumably with nothing but necessary spending in it," Biden said.

Kyl, saying "there's a lot of fat in the current budget," proposed taking a fourth of the money allocated to the highway bill and redirecting it to the Gulf region.

Kyl cautioned against raising taxes, saying they slow the economy and thus diminish tax revenues. Biden, however, suggested forgoing further tax cuts for the wealthy and the elimination of the estate tax.

Calling talk among Republican senators of proceeding with a plan to repeal the estate tax "mind-boggling," Sen. Barak Obama, D-Ill., said the country could not fight a war in Iraq, rebuild the Gulf region and deal with other domestic needs while cutting taxes for the wealthy.

"We need some adult supervision of the budget process. And we need to take responsibility for this process. That's something that we need from the president as well as our congressional leaders," Obama told Face the Nation on CBS.
Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Non-believers raising voice in capital

USA TODAY

Non-believers raising voice in capital
By Jill Lawrence, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — Americans who don't believe in God have decided it's time they had a lobbyist in the nation's capital. Their new advocate describes herself as a "soft, fuzzy atheist."

Lori Lipman Brown starts Monday as executive director of the Secular Coalition for America. Her two goals: keep religion out of government and win respect for a stigmatized minority.

The magnitude of those challenges is, well, biblical. Think Daniel entering the lion's den, or David taking on Goliath.

Christian conservatives wield enormous clout here through a network of advocacy groups and relationships with politicians from President Bush on down. Atheists, humanists and freethinkers, as Brown's constituents call themselves, are usually ignored .

Is she scared? "Nah," says Brown, 47, an atheist with a Jewish background. "It feels good to be the first."

Brown likens atheists today to gays in the 1970s: people just coming out of the closet to fight for acceptance. "There's been so much rhetoric in the past decade about how important religion is to being a good person," she says, that "it's been scary" for people to say they don't believe in God. She vows to "use the A-word and not cringe."

In a recent Pew Research Center poll, 11% said they do not believe in God but do believe in a "universal spirit" or "higher power"; 3% said they do not believe in God or a spirit or power. In a separate question, 1% said they are atheists (those who believe there is no God), 2% said they are agnostics (those unsure whether there is a God), and 11% said they have no religious preference.

The no-preference category includes people "who may not be ready to declare themselves atheists or agnostics," Pew Director Andrew Kohut says.

Herb Silverman, president of the Secular Coalition for America, counts them as non--believers — part of "a 30-million-strong constituency that is informed about the issues and votes."

Brown plans to work for non-believers in three ways:

•As part of broad coalitions fighting policies rooted in religious beliefs, such as limits on stem cell research and access to emergency contraception.

•In alliances with groups opposed to policies they believe breach the wall between church and state, such as giving taxpayer money to "faith-based" service programs.

•On causes Brown concedes are hard for politicians and the public to swallow, such as eliminating references to God from the U.S. oath of citizenship. She plans to stay out of the Pledge of Allegiance controversy for now because "the courts are on our side." Last week, a federal judge reaffirmed an earlier ruling that teacher-led recitation of the Pledge's phrase "under God" in public schools is an unconstitutional government endorsement of religion.

Gary Bauer, a Christian conservative and former presidential candidate who now lobbies against gay marriage and for conservative values, says atheists' timing couldn't be worse, given Hurricane Katrina. "We're right in the middle of a horrible event when people are turning to God," he says. "They're going to find it very hard to get people to vote for the sort of things they're in favor of."

Brown says she doesn't expect immediate success on tough issues but, as the only advocate for non--believers in Washington, it's her job to raise them.

"We want to get people thinking about what they do that excludes us," she says. "The things that ... perpetuate the idea that we are outsiders — that we can't be patriotic or that we can't be moral or ethical — when in reality our community is tremendously active in making the world a better place to live."

A lawyer and teacher, Brown is used to controversy. As a Nevada state senator from 1992 to 1994, she fought for gun control, gay rights and abortion rights. She says she received threats and hate messages and calls.

Five humanist and atheist groups formed the Secular Coalition for America after the Sept. 11 attacks, unsettled by talk linking God and patriotism. "That was a major impetus to try to raise our profile," said Duncan Crary, a spokesman for one coalition member, the Institute for Humanist Studies in Albany, N.Y.

The institute had a lobbyist, Tim Gordinier, at the New York Legislature but nobody at Congress. "The cultural wars are going to be fought in Washington, D.C.," Gordinier says. "This is where we're going to have our skirmishes."

The first-year budget for the coalition office here, including Brown's salary and a six-month stipend for a legislative assistant, is $100,000. That's minuscule for a Washington lobbying office.

Brown, who taught college-level constitutional law as well as high school English, is taking a pay cut. "It's important to do the work, even if you're not a high-paid lobbyist," she says. "At least there'll be an atheist voice in the mix."

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Heck of a job

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Infrastructure

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Support from the base

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Iraq War Survivor Death Match

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Insurance

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Cut me some slack

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Drowning in tax cuts

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Mission Accomplished 2

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I take responsibility - not!

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Responsibility anyone?

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Message: I Care About the Black Folks

The New York Times

Message: I Care About the Black Folks
By FRANK RICH

ONCE Toto parts the curtain, the Wizard of Oz can never be the wizard again. He is forever Professor Marvel, blowhard and snake-oil salesman. Hurricane Katrina, which is likely to endure in the American psyche as long as L. Frank Baum's mythic tornado, has similarly unmasked George W. Bush.

The worst storm in our history proved perfect for exposing this president because in one big blast it illuminated all his failings: the rampant cronyism, the empty sloganeering of "compassionate conservatism," the lack of concern for the "underprivileged" his mother condescended to at the Astrodome, the reckless lack of planning for all government operations except tax cuts, the use of spin and photo-ops to camouflage failure and to substitute for action.

In the chaos unleashed by Katrina, these plot strands coalesced into a single tragic epic played out in real time on television. The narrative is just too powerful to be undone now by the administration's desperate recycling of its greatest hits: a return Sunshine Boys tour by the surrogate empathizers Clinton and Bush I, another round of prayers at the Washington National Cathedral, another ludicrously overhyped prime-time address flecked with speechwriters' "poetry" and framed by a picturesque backdrop. Reruns never eclipse a riveting new show.

Nor can the president's acceptance of "responsibility" for the disaster dislodge what came before. Mr. Bush didn't cough up his modified-limited mea culpa until he'd seen his whole administration flash before his eyes. His admission that some of the buck may stop with him (about a dime's worth, in Truman dollars) came two weeks after the levees burst and five years after he promised to usher in a new post-Clinton "culture of responsibility." It came only after the plan to heap all the blame on the indeed blameworthy local Democrats failed to lift Mr. Bush's own record-low poll numbers. It came only after America's highest-rated TV news anchor, Brian Williams, started talking about Katrina the way Walter Cronkite once did about Vietnam.

Taking responsibility, as opposed to paying lip service to doing so, is not in this administration's gene pool. It was particularly shameful that Laura Bush was sent among the storm's dispossessed to try to scapegoat the news media for her husband's ineptitude. When she complained of seeing "a lot of the same footage over and over that isn't necessarily representative of what really happened," the first lady sounded just like Donald Rumsfeld shirking responsibility for the looting of Baghdad. The defense secretary, too, griped about seeing the same picture "over and over" on television (a looter with a vase) to hide the reality that the Pentagon had no plan to secure Iraq, a catastrophic failure being paid for in Iraqi and American blood to this day.

This White House doesn't hate all pictures, of course. It loves those by Karl Rove's Imagineers, from the spectacularly lighted Statue of Liberty backdrop of Mr. Bush's first 9/11 anniversary speech to his "Top Gun" stunt to Thursday's laughably stagy stride across the lawn to his lectern in Jackson Square. (Message: I am a leader, not that vacationing slacker who first surveyed the hurricane damage from my presidential jet.)

The most odious image-mongering, however, has been Mr. Bush's repeated deployment of African-Americans as dress extras to advertise his "compassion." In 2000, the Republican convention filled the stage with break dancers and gospel singers, trying to dispel the memory of Mr. Bush's craven appearance at Bob Jones University when it forbade interracial dating. (The few blacks in the convention hall itself were positioned near celebrities so they'd show up in TV shots.) In 2004, the Bush-Cheney campaign Web site had a page titled "Compassion" devoted mainly to photos of the president with black people, Colin Powell included.

Some of these poses are re-enacted in the "Hurricane Relief" photo gallery currently on display on the White House Web site. But this time the old magic isn't working. The "compassion" photos are outweighed by the cinéma vérité of poor people screaming for their lives. The government effort to keep body recovery efforts in New Orleans as invisible as the coffins from Iraq was abandoned when challenged in court by CNN.

But even now the administration's priority of image over substance is embedded like a cancer in the Katrina relief process. Brazenly enough, Mr. Rove has been officially put in charge of the reconstruction effort. The two top deputies at FEMA remaining after Michael Brown's departure, one of them a former local TV newsman, are not disaster relief specialists but experts in P.R., which they'd practiced as advance men for various Bush campaigns. Thus The Salt Lake Tribune discovered a week after the hurricane that some 1,000 firefighters from Utah and elsewhere were sent not to the Gulf Coast but to Atlanta, to be trained as "community relations officers for FEMA" rather than used as emergency workers to rescue the dying in New Orleans. When 50 of them were finally dispatched to Louisiana, the paper reported, their first assignment was "to stand beside President Bush" as he toured devastated areas.

The cashiering of "Brownie," whom Mr. Bush now purports to know as little as he did "Kenny Boy," changes nothing. The Knight Ridder newspapers found last week that it was the homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff, not Mr. Brown, who had the greater authority to order federal agencies into service without any request from state or local officials. Mr. Chertoff waited a crucial, unexplained 36 hours before declaring Katrina an "incident of national significance," the trigger needed for federal action. Like Mr. Brown, he was oblivious to the humanitarian disaster unfolding in the convention center, confessing his ignorance of conditions there to NPR on the same day that the FEMA chief famously did so to Ted Koppel. Yet Mr. Bush's "culture of responsibility" does not hold Mr. Chertoff accountable. Quite the contrary: on Thursday the president charged Homeland Security with reviewing "emergency plans in every major city in America." Mr. Chertoff will surely do a heck of a job.

WHEN there's money on the line, cronies always come first in this White House, no matter how great the human suffering. After Katrina, the FEMA Web site directing charitable contributions prominently listed Operation Blessing, a Pat Robertson kitty that, according to I.R.S. documents obtained by ABC News, has given more than half of its yearly cash donations to Mr. Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network. If FEMA is that cavalier about charitable donations, imagine what it's doing with the $62 billion (so far) of taxpayers' money sent its way for Katrina relief. Actually, you don't have to imagine: we already know some of it was immediately siphoned into no-bid contracts with a major Republican donor, the Fluor Corporation, as well as with a client of the consultant Joe Allbaugh, the Bush 2000 campaign manager who ran FEMA for this White House until Brownie, Mr. Allbaugh's college roommate, was installed in his place.

It was back in 2000 that Mr. Bush, in a debate with Al Gore, bragged about his gubernatorial prowess "on the front line of catastrophic situations," specifically citing a Texas flood, and paid the Clinton administration a rare compliment for putting a professional as effective as James Lee Witt in charge of FEMA. Exactly why Mr. Bush would staff that same agency months later with political hacks is one of many questions that must be answered by the independent investigation he and the Congressional majority are trying every which way to avoid. With or without a 9/11-style commission, the answers will come out. There are too many Americans who are angry and too many reporters who are on the case. (NBC and CNN are both opening full-time bureaus in New Orleans.) You know the world has changed when the widely despised news media have a far higher approval rating (77 percent) than the president (46 percent), as measured last week in a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll.

Like his father before him, Mr. Bush has squandered the huge store of political capital he won in a war. His Thursday-night invocation of "armies of compassion" will prove as worthless as the "thousand points of light" that the first President Bush bestowed upon the poor from on high in New Orleans (at the Superdome, during the 1988 G.O.P. convention). It will be up to other Republicans in Washington to cut through the empty words and image-mongering to demand effective action from Mr. Bush on the Gulf Coast and in Iraq, if only because their own political lives are at stake. It's up to Democrats, though they show scant signs of realizing it, to step into the vacuum and propose an alternative to a fiscally disastrous conservatism that prizes pork over compassion. If the era of Great Society big government is over, the era of big government for special interests is proving a fiasco. Especially when it's presided over by a self-styled C.E.O. with a consistent three-decade record of running private and public enterprises alike into a ditch.

What comes next? Having turned the page on Mr. Bush, the country hungers for a vision that is something other than either liberal boilerplate or Rovian stagecraft. At this point, merely plain old competence, integrity and heart might do.

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Chavez' surprise for Bush

New York Daily News - http://www.nydailynews.com
Chavez' surprise for Bush

Worried about the skyrocketing cost of gasoline and heating oil this winter?

Well, Hugo Chavez, the firebrand president of oil-rich Venezuela, wants to help.

Chavez, a former army officer twice elected president in huge landslides, has become a target of the Bush administration for his radical social policies.

Last month, right-wing evangelist Pat Robertson openly urged his assassination.

But now Chavez is firing back at Bush and Robertson with a surprise weapon - cheap oil for America's poor.

In an exclusive interview yesterday, the Venezuelan leader said his country will soon start to ship heating oil and diesel fuel at below market prices to poor communities and schools in the United States.

"We will begin with a pilot project in Chicago on Oct. 14, in a Mexican-American community," said Chavez, who was in town for the United Nations sessions. "We will then expand the program to New York and Boston in November."

The first New York neighborhood in the program will be the South Bronx, where Chavez was to speak today as a guest of Rep. Jose Serrano.

The Venezuelan leader revealed details of the new oil-for-the-poor program during a wide-ranging interview at the upper East Side home of his country's UN ambassador.

"If you want to eliminate poverty, you have to empower the poor, not treat them as beggars," Chavez said.

During the hour-long interview, he also blasted the Iraq war; accused Bush of trying to kill him to reassert U.S. control over Venezuela's oil; offered support for the victims of Hurricane Katrina; and lampooned the UN as out of touch with the world's poor.

Echoing his favorite American writer, radical linguist Noam Chomsky, Chavez warned that "Americans must reorder their style of life" because "this planet cannot sustain" our "irrational" consumption, especially when it comes to oil.

Much of what Chavez said he has expressed before.

But his novel oil-for-the-poor idea in this country is sure to make him an even bigger target of the Bush administration.

Those who scoff at this as a publicity scam should think twice.

With the price of oil at record levels, the Chavez government is swimming in cash.

Those sky-high fuel prices are bound to have a drastic impact on low-income neighborhoods here, especially since Congress redirected much of this winter's usual energy assistance program for victims of Hurricane Katrina.

Venezuela, on the other hand, owns a key U.S. subsidiary called Citgo Petroleum Corp., which has 14,000 gas stations and owns eight oil refineries in this country, none of which was damaged by Katrina.

Chavez said he can afford to sharply reduce Citgo's prices by "cutting out the middle man."

His plan is to set aside 10% of the 800,000 barrels of oil produced by the Citgo refineries and ship that oil directly to schools, religious organizations and nonprofits in poor communities for distribution.

The same approach, he said, has worked in the Caribbean, where Venezuela is already sharply subsidizing oil deliveries to more than a dozen nations.

Cutting oil prices must seem like the worst sort of radicalism to the Big Oil companies and their buddies at the Bush-Cheney White House.

But ordinary Americans fed up with price gouging by these energy companies could begin to look at Chavez in a different light if his oil-for-the-poor project works.

Still, Chavez, warns, we must all think about the future. Americans are 5% of the world's population, yet we consume 25% of the world's oil.

On his drive from Kennedy Airport to Manhattan this week, Chavez noted, "Out of every 100 cars I saw on the road, 99 had only one person in the car.

"These people were using up fuel," he said. "They were polluting the environment. This planet cannot sustain that mode of life."

That's the kind of message that can get a man killed these days - or at least labeled a dangerous madman by folks in the White House.

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FEMA takes many workers off hurricane duty

FEMA takes many workers off hurricane duty

Daily News Exclusive

By JAMES GORDON MEEK
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU

WASHINGTON - FEMA bureaucrats yesterday infuriated exhausted Hurricane Katrina responders and lawmakers with yet another blunder.

Federal Emergency Management Agency leaders ordered officials in the agency's Preparedness Division to stop all Katrina relief efforts and begin a long-planned move from agency headquarters to new offices in Virginia by Monday.

"They're no longer focused on the gigantic Katrina job and are putting their files into boxes instead," said one outraged FEMA insider. "This is simply incredible considering that the entire staff has been an integral part of the response effort."

Taking staff off hurricane duty is "disruptive when we need every single soul here to work on Katrina," the source said.

FEMA spokeswoman Nicol Andrews confirmed that workers from the agency's radiological emergency preparedness and chemical stockpile emergency preparedness programs were moving to Arlington, Va., in a reorganization, where they will be absorbed by a new division within the Homeland Security Department.

She said fewer than 100 of FEMA's 2,600 full-time employees are leaving the Washington headquarters to make room for an expanding Katrina response and recovery operation.

"Right now is the wrong time to disrupt any part of FEMA's operation," said Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-Manhattan), who chairs the Democrats' homeland security task force. "I'd like to know who's going to take responsibility for this move."

Originally published on September 17, 2005

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Youngest Son of Florida Gov. Bush Arrested for Public Intoxication and Resisting Arrest

wrko.com
Youngest Son of Florida Gov. Bush Arrested for Public Intoxication and Resisting Arrest

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) -- The youngest son of Florida Gov. Jeb Bush was arrested early Friday and charged with public intoxication and resisting arrest, law enforcement officials said.

John Ellis Bush, 21, was arrested by agents of the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission at 2:30 a.m. on a corner of Austin's Sixth Street bar district, said commission spokesman Roger Wade.

The nephew of President Bush was released on $2,500 bond for the resisting arrest charge, and on a personal recognizance bond for the public intoxication charge, officials said.

Wade said he had no further details about the charges.

Gov. Bush and his wife Columba appeared Friday evening at a museum reception in Miami.

"My son's doing fine. It's a private matter. We will support him. We're sad for him. But I'm not going to discuss it on the public square with 30 cameras," the governor told reporters.

It's not the first time Florida's first family has experienced legal problems with one of their children.

Noelle Bush, the governor's daughter, was arrested in January 2002 and accused of trying to pass a fraudulent prescription at a pharmacy to obtain the anti-anxiety drug Xanax. She completed a drug rehabilitation program in August 2003 and a judge dismissed the drug charges against her.

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