August 23–About ten minutes or a quarter to 2:00 p.m., my whole house shook. So did my neighbors’. This was a real earthquake. My house is brick; everything shook from basement to roof; heavy things fell off the mantel and a bookcase. I am sitting in the room I use for a home office–like most of the rest of the house–and behind me some books and papers are strewn on the floor that were more or less where they belonged, a short time ago. A first for me individually, and don’t let anyone tell you this is a small event. A four-story house (counting basement) does not shake lightly.

Little damage in my home–I’m about to go out to case the neighborhood.

If only the climate-change deniers would stop denying. These bouts of extreme drought, followed by serious monsoon-type flooding, are not much better for the earth’s crust than they are for farmers, or for ordinary people who would like to have their yards, flowers and trees flourish.

In simplest terms, our planet’s atmosphere is eroding. We need to think about how to slow down that process, and then how to reverse it. We need our atmosphere to protect us from being whipsawed by what are nowadays termed ‘weather events’.

No word yet on how the rest of the Washington, D.C., suburbs have fared.

more later

Update 2:13 p.m.:

This was bigger than I thought–my next-door neighbor felt the quake in her vehicle, in New Carrollton. She thought something was wrong with her car–got out to check to see whether a tire was flat, when her daughter told her, “Mom, the whole car is shaking.”

Walking around outside to view the neighborhood, no visible signs of damage, though my next-door neighbor had some breakage when objects fell. No trees seem to be down, fortunately, and no cracks in nearby streets or sidewalks so far. Plenty of sirens, though.

Update 5:50 p.m.:

For the sake of contributing a little to science, I tried to input my local (home) data for the U.S. Geologic [Survey] here. No luck: after filling out the form, when I tried to submit it, the server basically froze up. Either this was another communications snafu like our cell phones–can’t use those in a real emergency, America–or the usgs website was overloaded by too many people trying the same thing at once.

Would seem to be typical of an emergency . . .

I guess the all-destructo GOPers will be happy at that one. After doing everything they can do to harm the legitimate operations of government, to prevent responsible governance, and to defame anyone who sees the whole thing differently, they can point to ‘gummint failing.’

If I do laugh at any mortal thing, ’tis only that I may not weep . . .

Rick Perry in state office

A little humor helps. View video here:

Dear America

From the Great State, or more specifically The Democratic Party of Texas (n.b. not the ‘Democrat Party.’ Yellow Dogs tend to know the difference between a noun and an adjective.), comes this invitation:

“Dear Friend,

Rick Perry explains his previous reluctance to run

It’s too early to be writing about the White House race for 2012, but here goes anyway–

The GOP candidates line up in Iowa

The GOP field is shaping up, against all odds, to be interesting. Here’s the game:

Ron Paul

First, only one candidate, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.), stands out. Of all the possible Republican candidates announced and unannounced, Paul is the only one who combines genuine personal character, a genuinely conservative belief system, and the ability to connect with audiences because he says valid things—as far as they go—clearly. He does not equivocate; he does not backpedal on past positions; he does not characterize himself in metaphors. Michele Bachmann has called herself a “voice” probably dozens of times in interviews since winning the Iowa straw poll Saturday. Paul does not do that kind of thing; he tends to be given too little air time to waste any part of it in indirectness or vagueness. Paul also does not attack other candidates in personal terms, and he does not blame others for his actions—again unlike Bachmann, who as an attorney does not hesitate to blame her specialization in tax law on her husband. Paul is also consistent. For these and whatever other reasons, he is also a big money getter, in small donations, and has strong organization and widespread grass-roots support.

From those wonderful people who brought you the Iraq war

All the other GOP candidates, regardless of flavor, are essentially corporate mouthpieces. Differences in degree do not become a difference in kind. Huntsman and Romney may look the part more than do Bachmann and Palin, but the core fiscal hooey remains intact: whether the messenger is Gingrich or Giuliani, Perry or Palin, Santorum or Satan, the message is rich-get-richer. They don’t put it that way, of course. But it’s always there.

Undoubtedly Paul’s intense fiscal conservatism, or conservative libertarianism, would conduce to the same end. But with Paul, the inevitable benefit to the wealthy and to corporations from refusing to raise taxes is a by-product of policy. It is not an end in itself as it is for all the others. Opposition to the war in Iraq, opposition to the ‘war on terror,’ opposition to the ‘war on drugs’–he is not Wall Street controlled, though the anti-tax stand works that way. He represents a threat.

Second, all the other GOPers split the not-Ron-Paul vote. And all the others are weaker candidates individually, and there are a lot of them—Bachmann, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani maybe, Jon Huntsman, maybe Sarah Palin, Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum. Even with Tim Pawlenty’s unsurprising winnowing out, there are so many Republican candidates that nothing prevents the entry of yet more latecomers into the race.

So (as I was musing in notes last week, while away on family matters) we should see a lot of rightist commentators and pollsters, and a lot of corporate-media headline writers, working overtime to winnow the not-Ron-Paul field. The goal will be to shut out Ron Paul, and these are people who understand the logic of arithmetic–except when it comes to the benefit of issuing U.S. Treasury bonds at a lower interest rate, to pay off bonds with a higher rate. (The analogy is to refinancing your mortgage, and it would be illuminating to know which members of Congress have refinanced their own houses, but that information is not publicly available. Residences of congress members are exempted from financial disclosure.) The interim project will be to clear a path for someone they consider plausible as GOP nominee. That would be Romney, for most, or Perry, they fondly believe. Little do they know.

And who will be doing the path-clearing?–anyone who has been touting Tim Pawlenty for months as a likely starter. See examples here and here and here, among others.

As to tactics, the immediate tactics are simple. One, ignore or downplay Ron Paul. Paul’s near-win was a virtual tie with Bachmann in the Iowa straw poll, but that fact would be difficult to glean from the political reporting:

“A victory by Paul would have been a blow to Bachmann, who brought considerable momentum to the vote and needed the victory to validate her standing as the frontrunner in the state. It also would have hurt the credibility and future of the straw poll, a number of Republicans here said.”

[emphasis added]

Two, anoint a very few candidates as instant ‘top tier.’ Already done. As of this week the putative top tier comprises Bachmann, Perry, and Romney.

And third, bring out the conservative troops—in politics and in the media–to ridicule and/or to disparate the cannon fodder. Paradoxically, Bachmann straddles both the top-tier category and the cannon-fodder category.

Space precludes a round-up of entertaining examples of the third tactic at this time. More later.

Update Aug. 16:

Validating any sensible person’s summation, Rick Perry came out swinging–in a way to prevent anyone’s thinking he is ready for prime time. Here is the putative future president, on the topic of the Federal Reserve:

““If this guy prints more money between now and the election, I dunno what y’all would do to him in Iowa but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas. Printing more money to play politics at this particular time in American history is almost treasonous in my opinion.”

You can put lipstick on a hog . . .

If Perry is actually going to run for the White House, rather than just being the pool stick to open the table for some media-anointed figure with more credibility, he will have to learn that he is addressing the nation, not a bunch of  half-drunks stumbling into the political remarks after a rib feast sponsored by the local savings & loan.

Should be a lesson, meantime, to all the pundits eager to attribute gravitas to any candidate with a proven ability to fund-raise while simultaneously being white and male.

–and the press missed the story.

In response to Republican so-called budget proposals, President Obama says it best: “There’s nothing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending a trillion dollars on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires.”

That has not stopped the GOP in Congress, of course. In between publicizing the offenses of Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.), as of this writing congressional Republicans, their allies in the media, and their lobbyists are still seizing every available moment to publicize the U.S. budget debt and the debt ceiling—even while calling for more tax cuts for the rich, resisting every effort to reduce health care costs, and adding to the cost of government by delaying needed confirmation votes. The Obama White House has a higher proportion of its judicial nominees and other nominees whose confirmation is being held up by the opposition party—that would be the Republicans—than any other White House in U.S. history. The immediate fiscal cost, setting aside any human costs if one could, is horrible: Every day that a judge is not confirmed is a day the docket in that court continues to backlog, with consequent loss of productivity even in the narrowest fiscal terms. That in itself is grist for GOP club-for-growth types and their henchmen, of course: They can then point to any failures of gummint, with a further view to discrediting the American form of government itself, while omitting to point out their own part in the failures.

They’re getting away with it, or getting away with it to some extent, largely because these shenanigans are not being adequately reported in the nation’s capital.

As with the justice system and other federal agencies, so with the federal budget deficit and the national debt: Just as the continuing refusal to confirm qualified appointees to judgeships costs the justice system, every day that John Boehner, Mitch McConnell and their henchmen dig in their heels and announce that they will refuse to raise the debt ceiling costs the U.S. Treasury billions of dollars.

This is no accident. This is the game plan. It is part of the over-all GOP strategy of breaking the middle class, breaking the national economy, to defeat President Obama, a strategy now so overt it is astounding that even the political press in Washington can still miss it. Let me repeat that: the GOP strategy to prevent the reelection of a Democratic president boils down, quite simply, to this: Break the middle class.

Part of the process is the passive-aggressive approach of simply refusing to adopt relatively simple measures that would improve matters.

Again, they’re getting away with it because the press in Washington is letting them get away with it. This is the part you would think no political reporter worth his salt could fail to mention, yet mind-bogglingly, it is going almost unreported.

At least in regard to the debt ceiling, for example, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has offered a simple solution to eliminate the destructive and costly delays, the waste-of-time disputes and the consequent toll on both the economy and ordinary people’s faith in our system of government: Eliminate the debt ceiling.

On April 17, on NBC’s Meet the Press, Greenspan had this to say about the perennial question of whether the raise the debt ceiling:

“I have a more fundamental question. Why do we have a debt limit in the first place? We appropriate funds, we have tax law, and anyone reasonably adept at arithmetic can calculate what the debt change is going to be.”

Greenspan went on to point out that Congress and the White House already have signed legislation predetermining what the budget number is, adding, “Why we need suspenders and belts is something I’ve never understood.” He also rebuffed threats by congressional Republicans to stop government, pointing out that most GOP leaders were simultaneously saying they would not allow the federal government to default.

The content of Sunday morning talk shows is often reported in newspapers the next day and sometimes through the following week, as in the months during the lead-up to invading Iraq, when the Bush-Cheney administration routinely used morning television on all three traditional networks as well as Fox to boost the idea that Saddam Hussein was a second Hitler, except with nukes this time. When shortly after April 15 the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Dr. Greenspan, the man whom John McCain famously said he would re-appoint even if he were dead, called for eliminating the debt ceiling entirely, surely that would seem to be a news story. Right? The headline almost writes itself: “Greenspan Calls for End to Debt Ceiling.” Sub-head: “Former Fed Chair calls for Bush tax cuts to expire.”
Inside sub-head: “Greenspan asks why we need ‘belts and suspenders’.”

Greenspan’s remarks were not reported in any major newspaper. The Washington Post, which is the morning paper this writer subscribes to, did not report Greenspan’s call for ending the debt ceiling. Not one word went to that interesting exchange between Greenspan and host David Gregory. Instead, the Post focused on arguments between Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Republican honchos in Congress over whether the debt ceiling would be raised. Other newspapers followed suit—and incredible as it might seem to say so, Greenspan’s unusual and sensible position went unreported in print. Online publications did pick up on it, including a blog at the Post by Ezra Klein—meaning that the print periodicals could also have caught it, had they wished to do so.

In the meantime, Greenspan also supports raising the debt limit. He also had this to say: “the country’s financial crisis is “so imminent and so difficult that I think we have to allow the so-called Bush tax cuts all to expire.”

Another headline, one would think: “Former Fed Chief says let Bush tax cuts expire.”

Not reported.

As Greenspan said, “I think that what we have to become aware of is that if we allow taxes to fill in the holes here, we are going to find that we are getting ever closer to the type of economies that exist in Europe, which are very heavily laden and not rapidly growing the ways ours can.” He also warned that economic recovery is by no means as easy, quick and cheap as congressional Republicans and GOP presidential candidates are pretending: “there’s a lot of headwinds that are hitting the economy now and slowing it down, and we are in a soft patch.”

None of this made the headlines. Since the Meet the Press round table, Greenspan has continued to call for the debt limit to be raised, again with little reportage in newspapers.

The bigger picture, politically speaking, is bigger than the national debt: Regardless of the wishes of rank-and-file Republicans who vote for them, the strategy of Republicans in congress is quite simply to break the middle class. Every substantive policy proposal aggrandizes the few over the many. Each splashy ‘values’ struggle, over abortion or stem cell research or religious language in public buildings, is used as smokescreen—augmented by what seems to be an unending series of sex scandals involving politicians of both parties, playing out in the news media to maximum effect. Regardless of the values of their religious supporters, and regardless of the values of fiscally prudent people, GOP policy makers, their allies in the media, and their lobbyists always collide at some point with anyone working in any way for the public interest.

In this atmosphere of imaginary budget-cutting and real destruction, Orwellianisms abound. So-called ‘budget hawks’ and ‘deficit cutting’ are just more Orwellianisms.

For starters, anyone serious about trimming the budget would raise taxes on millionaires and billionaires. In March Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) introduced a good bill, the Fairness in Taxation Act, which would create new tax brackets for millionaires and billionaires. The law, which Republicans are fighting with all their might, would increase the income tax by one percent per bracket, for anyone with an income of a million or more a year. For people with incomes of one million to ten million dollars, income tax would be 45 percent. For people with incomes of ten to twenty million, it would be 46 percent. For people at $20 million to $100 million, it would be 47 percent. And for people bringing in income over $100 million, the tax rate would be 48 percent.

This, be it noted, is not only less than the top tax rates throughout the periods of our greatest economic growth in the postwar twentieth century, it is even less than the top tax rates during the Reagan years, as pointed out in a good analysis by Lawrence O’Donnell on last night’s The Last Word.

[note: I would have liked to link to the Last Word web site as a courtesy, but the MSNBC and Think Progress web sites both seem to have attached themselves to some kind of cyberspace bog. You go there, you don’t come back, at least not any time soon.]

On the question of tax fairness, a Wall Street Journal-NBC opinion poll shows that 81 percent of Americans support a surtax on the wealthiest individuals.

In the bigger picture, every reliable statistical survey since the 1970s has shown an increasing proportion of U.S. wealth and income going to the top percentiles. Wallace Peterson wrote in 1994 in his Silent Depression, which sounds like a psychology book but isn’t, that between 1983 and 1989—Reagan years—the share of household net worth owned by the top one percent of households jumped from 31.5 percent (already high) to 37 percent. The share of net worth owned by the next 9 percent of households near the top declined from 35.1 percent to 31.2 percent.

So as of 1983 the top ten percent of households owned 68.2 percent of U.S. net worth. Meanwhile, the share of net worth owned by the bottom 90 percent of households in the U.S. fell from 33.4 percent to 31.8 percent.

That was never a healthy economic situation to begin with. It has only gotten worse since then. Income inequality in the Land of Opportunity is not only worse now than in the Reagan years, it is worse than at any time since the lead-up to the Great Crash of 1929, and for analogous reasons. Today, the top 1 percent of America’s households own 34 percent of the nation’s wealth, as Schakowsky points out, while the bottom 90 percent own 29 percent.

As previously written, my own working definition of the term middle class is that phrase so lucidly used in the Oscar-winning documentary Inside Job–“the bottom 90 percent.” Benefiting the ‘bottom’ 90 percent of the population brings far greater economic gains than benefiting the top 10 percent, let alone (further) benefiting the top 1 percent.

That’s why the GOP in Congress will have none of it. Their goal is not to benefit the middle class but to break it, partly by cutting Social Security, Medicare, and every other social service–“if you can google, cut it”—as the ludicrous Tim Pawlenty says. Needless to say, every federal, state and local agency can be googled, so that doesn’t leave out anything. Isn’t he cute. But then these are the people who refer to teachers, police and firefighters as—any guess?—“government jobs.” My darling rightwing high-school English teacher, whom I loved, must be rolling over in her grave.

They are trying to drown the middle class in the bathtub.

To be continued

” . . . shortly after taking office, I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of our war against al Qaeda, even as we continued our broader efforts to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat his network.

Then, last August, after years of painstaking work by our intelligence community, I was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden. It was far from certain, and it took many months to run this thread to ground.  I met repeatedly with my national security team as we developed more information about the possibility that we had located bin Laden hiding within a compound deep inside of Pakistan. And finally, last week, I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action, and authorized an operation to get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice.”

Slightly after 1:00 a.m. Sunday, a U.S. Joint Special Operations Force attacked, and almost ten years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the man who served as icon for violent networks is gone. From an intelligence standpoint, it is regrettable that bin Laden was not captured alive. He could have been a useful intelligence source. But the pursuit and its conclusion still demonstrate what rational, effective intelligence looks like.

After bin Laden went missing in late 2001, Bush and Cheney publicly downplayed bin Laden. Bush administration emails also show little interest in bin Laden behind the scenes.

Prolonged inquiry under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) has produced emails between the Bush White House and offices in the Bush Justice Department. The FOIA search included email records from former Attorney General John Ashcroft; Michael Chertoff, previously assistant attorney general in the Criminal Division and later secretary of Homeland Security; former Deputy Attorney Gen. James Comey; former Deputy Attorney Gen. Paul McNulty; Philip J. Perry, acting associate attorney general and son-in-law of Vice President Dick Cheney; former Associate Attorney Gen. Jay B. Stephens; and David Ayres, Ashcroft’s chief of staff.

The Office of Information Policy, which handles FOIA requests, found emails mentioning bin Laden in the Bush administration only in Attorney General and Office of Public Affairs records. Alberto Gonzales, Bush’s first White House counsel and then Attorney General, did not use email.

White House emails from 2001 through 2008, generally reported as missing, numbered in the millions. Thousands went between the White House and top Justice officials, through government accounts and private accounts including some at the Republican National Committee.

The FOIA requests produced 26 emails pertaining to Osama bin Laden. The 26 emails between Bush’s White House and his Justice Department that mention bin Laden break down as follows:

Seven insider emails referred to bin Laden in 2001. Five were press releases from White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, between Sept. 24 and Dec. 17. One was a copy of Bush’s address to the Joint Session of Congress a week after 9/11 sent around by Kenneth B. Mehlman, later chairman of the Republican National Committee, in which Bush mentioned “a person named Osama bin Laden.” The other email mention of bin Laden in 2001 occurred in a forwarded newspaper article about Ashcroft.

In 2002, one email referred to bin Laden—a bogus claim, forwarded under the heading “Do you remember?,” that Oliver North warned Congress about bin Laden in the Iran-Contra hearings but was shut off by then-Sen. Al Gore. North himself denied this claim, which is debunked on Snopes.com.

Three emails referred to bin Laden in 2003—one press briefing, one forwarded newspaper article, and a statement from Director of Public Affairs Mark Corallo criticizing a records access study.

In election year 2004, fifteen internal emails mentioned bin Laden–again, only forwarded press releases, newspaper articles, or talking points, some reacting to disclosure of the famous Aug. 6, 2001, Presidential Daily Briefing titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”

In short, no email archives indicate that Bush’s inside circles were interested in capturing Osama bin Laden (or Mullah Omar of Afghanistan). A talking point, not a target–bin Laden became chiefly, as we now know, a public relations tool to gear up the invasion of Iraq.

“Yet Osama bin Laden avoided capture and escaped across the Afghan border into Pakistan.  Meanwhile, al Qaeda continued to operate from along that border and operate through its affiliates across the world.

And so shortly after taking office, I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of our war against al Qaeda, even as we continued our broader efforts to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat his network.

Then, last August, after years of painstaking work by our intelligence community, I was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden.  It was far from certain, and it took many months to run this thread to ground.  I met repeatedly with my national security team as we developed more information about the possibility that we had located bin Laden hiding within a compound deep inside of Pakistan.  And finally, last week, I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action, and authorized an operation to get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice.

Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.  A small team of Americans carried out the operation with extraordinary courage and capability.  No Americans were harmed.  They took care to avoid civilian casualties.  After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.”

Almost ten years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the man who served as icon for violent networks is gone.

From an intelligence standpoint, it is still regrettable that bin Laden was not captured alive. He would have been a source of useful information.

But the pursuit and its conclusion demonstrate what a rational, effective intelligence project looks like.

“Missing” White House emails retrieved from Bush administration records indicate that top Bush Justice Department officials had little interest in the pursuit of Osama bin Laden or Mullah Mohammed Omar, head of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), prolonged correspondence has pursued “missing” emails between the Bush White House and Bush’s attorney general, deputy attorney general, associate attorney general, Office of Public Affairs, Office of Legal Counsel and Office of the Inspector General, in the Justice Department.

After a lengthy search, President Obama’s Office of Information Policy, which handles FOIA requests, found emails pertaining to Osama bin Laden or to Mullah Omar only in Attorney General and Office of Public Affairs records from the Bush administration. Alberto Gonzales, previously Bush’s White House counsel and then Attorney General, did not use email.

White House emails from the Bush years, often reported as missing, numbered in the millions. Thousands of emails were sent between the Bush White House and top Justice Department officials, through both government email accounts and private accounts including the Republican National Committee.

FOIA inquiries have produced two emails, totaling four pages, between the White House and Justice under the former administration relating to Mullah Mohammed Omar.

The FOIA requests produced 26 emails, totaling 119 pages, relating to Osama bin Laden.

The first internal reference to Mullah Omar, according to email records, occurred Dec. 7, 2001. White House staffer Edward Ingle forwarded a series of talking points titled “Meet Mullah Omar” from Deputy National Security Adviser James R. Wilkinson to a distribution list of several dozen government personnel in Cabinet offices and the Pentagon including Paul Wolfowitz. Omar has continued to evade capture and is believed to be living in neighboring Pakistan. There is no reference in the emails to Omar dating from the period when he was evading US forces. The next, and only other, mention of Omar’s name was an incidental reference in a Sept. 23, 2004, New York Times article on Afghanistan forwarded the same day by White House staffers.

The 26 emails that mention Osama bin Laden in correspondence between the Bush White House and Justice Department break down as follows:

There were seven email references to Osama bin Laden in 2001. Five occurred in press releases from White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer forwarded by Ingle — one Executive Order, two transcripts of press briefings and two sets of talking points — dating from Sept. 24 to Dec. 17, 2001. Kenneth B. Mehlman, then in the Executive Office Building and later chairman of the Republican National Committee, sent around a copy of Bush’s address to the Joint Session of Congress Sept. 21, 2001, in which Bush briefly mentioned “a person named Osama bin Laden.” The other mention of bin Laden in 2001 comes in an Oct. 15 St. Louis Post-Dispatch article about John Ashcroft and terrorism, forwarded by David Israelite.

One email reference to bin Laden occurred in 2002, also forwarded by David Israelite. Under the heading “Do you remember?,” Israelite distributed to colleagues, including Barbara Comstock, a description of a purported 1987 video clip saying that Oliver North warned Congress about Osama bin Laden in the Iran-Contra hearings but was shut off by then-Sen. Al Gore. This claim had already been debunked by North himself (see www.snopes.com). Comstock went on to chair Scooter Libby’s defense fund in 2007 and in 2008 ran for Congress from Virginia.

There were three email references to bin Laden in 2003 — a press briefing, a forwarded newspaper article, and a December statement from Director of Public Affairs Mark Corallo criticizing a Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse study.

Fifteen emails mentioned bin Laden in 2004. Some were in response to criticism of the White House after disclosure of the famous Aug. 6, 2001, Presidential Daily Briefing, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” All email references are forwarded press briefings and other press releases, forwarded newspaper articles, or talking points related to bin Laden.

The Department of Justice represents the US government in enforcing the law in the public interest. According to the official definition of responsibilities printed under a photograph of then Attorney General Ashcroft, “Through its thousands of lawyers, investigators, and agents, the Department plays the key role in protection against criminals and subversion … It represents the government in legal matters generally, rendering legal advice and opinions, upon request, to the President and to the heads of the executive departments. The Attorney General supervises and directs these activities, as well as those of the U.S. attorneys and U.S. marshals in the various judicial districts around the country.”

Either top Justice Department personnel under the previous administration were not a set of bloodhounds, or documents have been suppressed. The email archives contain no indication that inside circles in the Bush White House and DOJ were paying attention to capturing Osama bin Laden or Mullah Omar. Mentions of bin Laden and Omar come strictly in the context of public relations.

There are no records of emails to or from Alberto Gonzales, presumably because he did not have an email account.

Email records searched under FOIA include those of previous Attorney General Ashcroft; Michael Chertoff, previously assistant attorney general in the Criminal Division and later secretary of Homeland Security; former Deputy Attorney General James Comey; former Deputy Attorney Paul McNulty; Philip J. Perry, acting associate attorney general and son-in-law of Vice President Dick Cheney; former Associate Attorney General Jay B. Stephens; and David Ayres, Ashcroft’s chief of staff.

After leaving Justice, Ayres co-founded The Ashcroft Group. His corporate biography describes Ayres thus:

“After the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Mr. Ayres managed the Department’s crisis operations and restructuring of the FBI to focus on preventing terrorist attacks. As the Attorney General’s principal counter-terrorism advisor, Mr. Ayres oversaw numerous counter-terrorism operations, program reorganizations and policy reforms to prevent additional terrorist attacks.”

Many persons in the Department of Justice and the executive offices of the White House had responsibilities in the “war on terror,” at least according to public pronouncements. Given all the public emphasis on “information sharing” and cooperation among law enforcement and security entities, and the speechifying against a purported “wall” between domestic and foreign information gathering, one would think there would have been extensive correspondence about bin Laden and Omar among others.

Again, either there was such extensive correspondence, and it is being suppressed; or there was no such interest in bin Laden at the highest levels of government, meaning that indeed the previous administration viewed bin Laden chiefly as a public relations tool.

What did they know about bin Laden that they did not share with the public? Were they confident, for undisclosed reasons, that he posed no threat? Why are there no expressions of concern about his whereabouts?

With this plate handed to him, it is a wonder that President Obama’s hair has not turned white already.

Margie Burns is a Texas native who now writes from Washington, D.C. Email margie.burns@verizon.net. See her blog at www.margieburns.com

From The Progressive Populist, December 15, 2009

Let’s say this clearly, just once: Part of the unnecessarily prolonged failure to catch bin Laden, and a very large part of the tragic diversions of two bloody wars, can be laid to the account of the large media outlets in this country. Foreign policy under the Bush administration was dictated by selfish concerns, and corporate media outlets almost entirely went along. Foreign policy was influenced—to put it nicely—by politics, and politics was influenced—again, to put it nicely—by money, and the big media almost entirely went along.

Indeed, it would be more accurate to say that foreign policy, like domestic policy, was determined by political advantage—in simplest terms, money to get position, position to get money. Thus the previous administration (like others before it) bound the full faith and credit of the American public, largely without its consent and often without its knowledge, to a series of repressive regimes in the Middle East perpetually at odds with their own populations.

That this strained and upside-down affiliation was not in the best interest of the American public was spectacularly demonstrated by the official response to 9/11. Just a few outstanding and (by now) widely known facts in the public record reflect the discrepancy between Bush policy and public interest:

• Most of the skyjackers were Saudis, yet members of the Saudi ruling family were permitted to fly out of the U.S.—actually, helped to fly out of the U.S.–immediately after the 9/11 attacks.
• Foreign affairs experts and security experts knew that the Saudi regime was financing terrorism, yet the Bush administration enabled some of these special flights with Saudis aboard, just after 9/11, to leave from Las Vegas. Their luggage and cargo were not even searched, according to people I have interviewed.
• Similarly, anyone with expertise in pertinent fields knew that training for violent Islamist partisans took place in Pakistan, with collusion in the Pakistani military and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), its secret service. Furthermore, some of the money that went to skyjacker Mohamed Atta was quickly traced to an account in Pakistan. Yet Gen. Musharraf, Pakistan’s dictator, was swiftly photographed sitting next to President Bush in the White House, a “partner” in the ‘war on terror.’
• There were no Afghanis among the skyjackers. Yet in spite of the key facts of Saudi finance and Pakistani training, White House emphasis and rhetoric in late 2001 was all about “harboring.” Pitiful Afghanistan, whose people had little to no say in Osama bin Laden’s having been harbored there, bore the brunt of a massive U.S. assault ostensibly in response to 9/11—until the Iraq war.
• There were no Iraqis among the skyjackers, and there was no affiliation between Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and Islamist partisan networks. Quite the contrary. Yet from at least 2002, the Bush-Cheney was obsessively focused on invading Iraq.

As someone said, “Why didn’t we lash out at Saudi Arabia?”

Instead, we got a narrative from the then-White House that was all about a Dr. No-type ‘mastermind,’ later enriched with anthrax—until the source of the anthrax mailings was determined to be domestic rather than exotic—and spiced up with ‘caves’ and mountain wilderness impenetrable to anyone but National Geographic photographers. And the largest media outlets, with few exceptions, went along with this Aladdin-influenced narrative every step of the way.

This is a spectacular demonstration of what can happen when news outlets (television) pay more attention to production values than to research, evidence and investigation. I said in a radio interview years ago that if just one, just one, of our three traditional television networks had had a division dedicated to research, data and investigation, the entire history of America following 9/11 would have been different. (Ted Koppel, then at ABC, soon afterward at least devoted an hour or so to reading the names of American troops killed in the war.)

This whole bloody, tragic exercise in futility is also a demonstration of what can happen when news outlets (print) pay more attention to who’s who than to research, evidence and investigation. I have always loved newspapers, but there was remarkably little appetite in the political press in our nation’s capital for close scrutiny of the Bush administration or of its policies, domestic or foreign. Access uber alles.

It’s not like they didn’t have some hints, either. Back to Pakistan and some known facts about Pakistan:

• Gen. Musharraf, universally regarded as a dictator by any standard, attained his office in the first place through a coup d’etat.
• Pakistan’s military and ISI openly supported partisan networks during and after the Afghani ouster of the Soviet Union from Afghanistan, receiving CIA support to do so.
• Pakistan’s Lt. Gen. Mahmud Ahmed resigned his position at the ISI immediately after 9/11. So complete was the ISI’s lack of oversight and lack of help (for the U.S.) regarding the 9/11 attacks that Ahmed had been in the United States, visiting members of the Bush administration, on Sept. 11.

But in the major media outlets, virtually none of the information above was allowed to dilute the central Bush-Cheney narrative “We’re at war”—first with Afghanistan, next with Iraq, next if they’d been able to manage it with Syria and Iran. The narrative remained almost unquestioned, and of course actively supported by neo-cons in PNAC and elsewhere, even when Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan.

Things could have been different. I am far from being an expert on the Middle East and have spent only one month there, but even I could provide a short overview in 2001 on Pakistan’s sponsoring terrorism.* Strange how little we heard of that from Bush or Cheney, I always thought. But anyone who mentioned it in Washington was persona non grata.

Needless to say, we all make mistakes. So completely did Bush-Cheney obviate bin Laden’s existence that even I thought at one point that bin Laden was dead. Gen. Musharraf was among those who said bin Laden had been killed at Tora Bora:

“Musharraf, a Bush ally, made some of his comments on CNN. The FBI speculated openly around the same time that bin Laden was dead. So did the Pentagon.

According to “The News,” Islamabad’s main newspaper, “Fed up by the questioning [about bin Laden], the U.S. military authorities announced finally that they would stop chasing shadows and instead focus on other aspects of the so-called war on terrorism.” (“Musharraf Advised to be Less Forthcoming While Commenting on bin Laden,” Jan. 20, 2002).”

A security and intelligence expert I interviewed, Theodore Pahle, thought the same, and said so. Shortly after that, bin Laden surfaced in another video, all but explicitly displaying as an icon. This was immediately before the 2004 election. (I have thought for years that bin Laden was reading his own press. Current news on information cached at bin Laden’s hideout is reporting some heterodox schemes for attacks on anniversaries, etc.)

Daniel Pearl was killed in Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto was assassinated when she returned to Pakistan, Abu Zubaydah was captured in Pakistan. Yet the focus was always on Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Iran—anywhere, anywhere but Pakistan (and Saudi Arabia). Follow the little bouncing ball. President Zardari of Pakistan also speculated publicly that bin Laden was dead.

And in connection with the Bush-Cheney never-ending war, those imaginary glittering caves in Afghanistan—“poor as field mice” said a man who was kidnapped there, describing the actual inhabitants of that terrain–were replaced only with imaginary rustic huts in the mountainous border region. Aladdin replaced by Indiana Jones. This although the production values in bin Laden’s videotapes made it highly unlikely that they could have been produced in such a venue.

*A version of this article ran in the Prince George’s Journal. It, like the other Journal newspapers—a local chain in metro D.C.—no longer exists. The chain was bought out by the barking-dog rightwing Examiner company in 2004. (All the columns I had published in various Journals from 1996 to 2004 disappeared except in some sheets I saved. I was barely able to print out most of the titles before the web site was wiped by the publishers.)

• Regardless of the individual views of ordinary Republicans as citizens, the national party apparatus of the GOP has never ceased trying to undo Social Security;
• The GOP-and-finance-sector daisy chain indicated below, potent as it has been in some elections, is dwarfed by current use of the federal budget deficit as a pretext to gut Social Security.

As to the budget deficit, Think Progress posted a good overview of the size of U.S. military spending. Genuine, sober-minded fiscal conservatives would be looking there for cuts.

Instead, the self-proclaimed deficit hawks of the right have, for at least the past twenty years, taken other political routes:

“USA Next,” a political interest group formerly called “United Seniors Association,” targeted seniors by hiring the same people who made the infamous Swift Boat ads of the 2004 election to make ads attacking the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) in 2005. The hiring was reported in the New York Times Feb. 21, 2005:

“Taking its cues from the success of last year’s Swift boat veterans’ campaign in the presidential race, a conservative lobbying organization has hired some of the same consultants to orchestrate attacks on one of President Bush’s toughest opponents in the battle to overhaul Social Security.

“The lobbying group, USA Next, which has poured millions of dollars into Republican policy battles, now says it plans to spend as much as $10 million on commercials and other tactics assailing AARP, the powerhouse lobby opposing the private investment accounts at the center of Mr. Bush’s plan.”

As we know, the plan of private (Wall Street) investment accounts as a substitute for Social Security went nowhere. Public opinion of the plan was one problem; of Mr. Bush another; of Wall Street and the stock market a third.

But the campaign launched against Social Security in the blatant Bush years did not actually end.

“Though it is not clear how much money USA Next has in hand for the campaign–Mr. Jarvis will not say, and the group, which claims 1.5 million members, does not have to disclose its donors–officials say that the group’s annual budget was more than $28 million last year. The group, a membership organization with no age requirements for joining, has also spent millions in recent years vigorously supporting Bush proposals on tax cuts, energy and the Medicare prescription drug plan.

“So far, the groups dueling over Social Security have been relatively tame, but the plans by USA Next foreshadow what could be a steep escalation in the war to sway public opinion and members of Congress in the days ahead.” [emphasis added]

Make that years, and you’ve got yourself a prognostication.

As so often happens in these matters, the epicenter of evil in the known universe was northern Virginia, the hidey-hole of those gummint-hatin’ redneck-exploiting good ol’ boys who do their best to turn elections into foreordained conclusions while simultaneously turning the world of finance into a rodeo:

“To help set USA Next’s strategy, the group has hired Chris LaCivita, an enthusiastic former marine who advised Swift Vets and P.O.W.’s for Truth, formerly known as Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, on its media campaign and helped write its potent commercials. He earned more than $30,000 for his work, campaign finance filings show.

Officials said the group is also seeking to hire Rick Reed, a partner at Stevens Reed Curcio & Potholm, a firm that was hired by Swift Vets and was paid more than $276,000 to do media production, records show.

For public relations, USA Next has turned to Creative Response Concepts, a Virginia firm that represented both Swift Vets–the company was paid more than $165,000–and Regnery Publishing, the publisher of “Unfit for Command,” a book about Senator John Kerry’s military service whose co-author was John E. O’Neill, one of the primary leaders of Swift Vets.”

Chris LaCivita, for now somewhat submerged, is the political consultant perhaps most notable for making an anti-John Kerry ad that even Fox would not air. His firm LaCivita Consulting LLC is located in Richmond, Va.; his Advancing Strategies LLC in Midlothian. Stevens Reed Curcio is in the Washington, D.C., suburb of Alexandria, Va., as is Creative Response Concepts, Inc. Republicans for Choice (former advisor, Pres. Gerald R. Ford) and its PAC are or were headquartered at the same Eisenhower Avenue address, along with least one federal contractor, Logistics Applications, Inc.

As ever, an uneasy coalition of silk-stocking Wall Street-leaning Republicans, barking-dog demagogues, and the Christian right rubs shoulders together financially while fighting internally for market share, with the sincere losing every fight.

Filings for Creative Response Concepts during the Bush years were available only for 2000 and 2004—election years. Company basics: 2760 Eisenhower Av Ste 402, Alexandria, VA  22314; Pres. Gregory Mueller, Chairman Leif E. Noren, Dir. Justin D. Dudley, Dir. Curtis J. Herge.

Herge was also Registered Agent (RA), the person legally empowered to receive mail and papers for the firm. Herge’s previous business at 8201 Greensboro Drive, is located in McLean, Va., along with the more recent Elm Street address c/o Herge, Sparks & Christopher LLP, now partly morphed into the more respectable Sparks & Craig LLP.

Creative Response Concepts (CRC) had another location at 1150 S. Washington St, Alexandria 22314, where one of its neighbors was the International Brain Injury Association, which also keeps turning up in the same neighborhoods, the American branch of the association at 8201 Greensboro. (Herge is now in private practice as an attorney.)

The Virginia corporate database system listed only one officer for Stevens Reed Curcio & Potholm, RA Greg Stevens. (Stevens died in 2005 at age 58.) Stevens Reed began filing in August 1993, suggesting that its raisonne d’etre, or anyway its donor base, was connected to the hated Clinton presidency. The firm’s web site listed Greg Stevens as founder and president, with partners Rick Reed, Paul Curcio, and Erik Potholm. Potholm’s clients have included Wal-Mart, former congressman Tom Davis, and health insurance company Anthem BCBS. Anthem has since merged with WellPoint, where GWBush uncle William H. T. Bush was a director. Clients of Betsy Vonderheid, Director of Advertising, included Vornado Realty.

The entity names, be it noted, have changed with some frequency over the years. But the key personnel kept being re-mixed. Before the Bush years, Greg Stevens had already surfaced in connection with an entity called “Citizens for the Republic Education Fund,” which in 1996 raised some $2 million for GOP interests through a public relations campaign. As reported by the Annenberg Center, the tax-exempt group was among other things a client of Triad Management Services, with Stevens as a consultant. ‘Citizens’ was incorporated in D.C. by Lyn Nofziger June 20, 1996. Contact information included Angela Buchanan–sister of sometime pundit and presidential candidate Pat Buchanan–6862 Elm St, Ste 210, McLean 22101.

In 1995 Stevens worked with another likeminded group, this one called “Coalition for Our Children’s Future,” also with hdtrs address at 8201 Greensboro Drive, McLean. One of the political consultants working for the Coalition was Houston-based Denis Calabrese. The source of the funds ($700,000) for the 1996 ads was kept confidential by agreement with the donor. J. Curtis Herge was also listed as a principal in the ‘Coalition,’ which began in 1995 but went dormant until weeks before the 1996 election and then ran ads–apparently without the knowledge or consent of some principals–spending $4 million in 1995 and over $700,000 in 1996.

The Coalition for Our Children’s Future is among almost innumerable entities listed as ‘Terminated’ in the Virginia state database system: former address 7704 Leesburg Pike, Falls Church 22043; Robert P. Odell Jr, P/T; J. Curtis Herge, Secretary. Herge was also given as the RA, current at the 6862 Elm address, old at the 8201 Greensboro address (as of 10-23-97). Annual reports were filed through 2001; the firm dissolved apparently owing the Commonwealth of Virginia $35 (“Fee delinquent”).

It should be obvious from the numbers included above that such networks developed sub rosa in the nineties, reached mega-proportions in electoral influence in 2000 and 2004, went farther than ever—unsuccessfully—in 2008, and will, to say the least, try again (on steroids) in 2012. Referring to this mutual-back-scratching, one-hand-washes-the-other, one-face-to-the-public and another-to-each-other fundraising and propaganda mill populated by slick lobbyists and corporate mouthpieces as “free speech” is like using some sort of code to which only a selected few have been given the key.

Meanwhile, the fact that groups with names like ‘coalition for children’s future’ turn out to be aimed against organized labor—and to be funded by interests invested in destroying organized labor–goes almost completely unreported in the political press in the nation’s capital.

Until it’s too late.

To be continued

Following up previous posts, again on the recent legal argument that money, in the context of political donations, is speech; that huge political donations are a form of political participation like other ways of participating; and that corporations are persons and can contribute just like any other persons–

As previously written, one problem is that in the context of elections, money is being treated as ‘speech’ in the courts, selectively, but speech is not being treated as money. Even celebrity endorsements, appearances by movie stars and sports figures—like Chuck Norris’s appearances for Mike Huckabee in 2008–are not treated as contributions in the sense that money is a contribution, even in the sense that an entertainment for a fundraiser event might be a contribution.

Another problem is the selectiveness with which money in politics is treated as speech or political participation. Since Buckley v. Valeo,* effectively only individual contributions of some kinds are limited by law. Money the candidate receives from someone else is a contribution, and limited; money received from self is an expenditure, and not limited.

Note: That’s in spite of the fact that contributions treated as protected expression or participation still have to be reported as if they were money.

These un-bookkeeping partitions between some kinds of receipts and others were, of course, extended by Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which removed limits on political funding of ‘independent’ broadcasts by corporations. Money given by an individual is limited; money given by a corporation is not limited in this context. (It might be added that few individuals could afford to fund a movie anyway; see below.)

Note: That’s in spite of the fact that a corporation can be considered a ‘person’ under the law.

Short background here, condensing for brevity—

The Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United struck down a McCain-Feingold Act provision that prohibited unions and corporations from broadcasting “electioneering communications,” i.e. a broadcast that mentions a candidate within 60 days of an election or within 30 days of a primary. The rightwing Citizens United group used this well-meant but inartful provision to attack Michael Moore. The attack on Moore failed, but the group ultimately succeeded in sweeping away some protections of the individual against corporations in our elections.

To a non-lawyer, that unique provision looks in hindsight somewhat like the regrettable incident at Brown University when a student got expelled for drunk-and-disorderly, and the right seized on the expulsion as an instance of ‘thought police’ and infringement on someone’s protected expression. The student newspaper among other sources reported what the student yelled—slurs and hate language. That content became the focus of wider reporting, and thus shifted the emphasis from the student’s conduct to the university’s purported policies. Similarly, in McCain-Feingold, we needed legal limits on money in campaigns, straight out. Instead we got limits on films. They were asking for trouble when the provision, however well-meant, got passed. The student’s misconduct got mistranslated into ‘free speech’; undue influence in our elections got mistranslated into freedom of expression and ‘political participation.’ The last refuge of the scoundrel.

In argument about campaign finance reform, the fundamentals recapped even in Buckley, which weakened reforms, are seldom quoted:

“(a) The contribution provisions, along with those covering disclosure, are appropriate legislative weapons against the reality or appearance of improper influence stemming from the dependence of candidates on large campaign contributions, and the ceilings imposed accordingly serve the basic governmental interest in safeguarding the integrity of the electoral process without directly impinging upon the rights of individual citizens and candidates to engage in political debate and discussion.” [emphasis added]

The entire history of judicial decisions in the United States upholds the valid proposition that there is such a thing as improper influence, and that it threatens the integrity of the electoral process.

This core point is too often overlooked—intentionally, by the well-paid op-ed neo-cons who brought about, for example, the invasion of Iraq and ‘deregulation’ of public utilities.

Unlike some other writers, I think that both public financing of campaigns and genuine limits on money in campaigns can be enforced. Money leaves a trail.

To be genuine, the limits have to be direct and unequivocal:

• Limit the individual donation, total, to a flat sum per person;
• The limit applies, regardless of what purposes the money is specified or not specified for, in a campaign;
• All donations have to be made by the individual as a person, regardless of whether the individual is also a candidate or a member of a group;
• Any and all donations by a corporation acting as a ‘person’ have to be made the same way as donations by any other individual, with the same limits.

All legal donations, in short, are individual donations. And all individual donations are a constant: One person, one amount.

Movies or no movies, corporations or no corporations, the ultimate sticking point here is probably the suggested limit on individual donations. Under current election law, an individual is limited to $2,500 per election, per candidate. So a young person facing the current job market, hard-pressed to come up with $25 for a candidate he really likes, is out there ‘participating’ with the Scaife and Koch types, who could donate the $2,500 maximum to every federal candidate running in every state, in a calendar year, or who could just for fun restrict their donations to Republicans running in Texas and Florida, or to white male candidates, or to on-the-record birthers, etc.

You’d think this alone would be enough inequity to content the hard right. A poor person can vote in more elections than s/he could possibly afford to donate to; a wealthy person can donate in more elections than s/he could legally vote in. Thus, already, even setting aside all the highly relaxed limits on other kinds of campaign donations, the electoral system is tilted inexorably in favor of individual donors who can afford to give to every likely candidate for U.S. Senate and House, as did members of the Koch family in 2009-2010–and to hedge their bets, the way Goldman Sachs always used to do, by donating large sums to both major parties. A funny kind of ‘expression,’ when you think about it, not much resembling sincere and heartfelt belief . . .

Again, wealthy individuals have the massive political advantage of being able to donate thousands of times more, if they wish, than do ordinary individuals. Why isn’t that enough social inequity, even for someone politically to the right of Louis XVI?

This brings us back to that freedom-of-expression argument. Certainly, as you point out, Mr. Scalia, an individual can vote in more than one election. But there is such a thing as voting improperly, as when an individual tries to vote more than once in the same election. Allowing selected individuals to vote more than once in the same election would violate equal protection.

If political donations are a form of political expression and thus protected, then limiting them unequally is protecting them unequally. Allowing and indeed enhancing the possibility of skewed donations and influence, through expression, must be a violation of equal protection.

To be continued

* Re-post: the Supreme Court ruling that political money is in some ways speech came in Buckley v. Valeo (1976). Post-Watergate provisions of federal election law restricting campaign expenditures were challenged in court, on grounds that limits on campaign expenditures violated First Amendment clauses on freedom of speech and of association. In Buckley, the Court ruled that “The contribution provisions, along with those covering disclosure, are appropriate legislative weapons . . .”

However,

“The First Amendment requires the invalidation of the Act’s independent expenditure ceiling, its limitation on a candidate’s expenditures from his own personal funds, and its ceilings on over-all campaign expenditures, since those provisions place substantial and direct restrictions on the ability of candidates, citizens, and associations to engage in protected political expression, restrictions that the First Amendment cannot tolerate.”