RobsRealNews

2/16 The news of the day was the US pulled its ambassador to Syria after they suspect the Syrians for the assasination
of a Leboneese leader. Why is this news? Because it displays whats sick and twisted about US middle east policy. Israel
kills 10,000 Palestinains and we respond by giving Israel aid. Syria bumps off one person to assure Lebanon won't be
controlled by the jews who seem to enjoy killing everyone, and we withdraw our amabassador. It makes sick if your sick
warped twisted Jew running american foreign policy.

I wasn't going to address what one has called Rathergate because I could give a shit about Bush's military record. The
media missed the story. The real story was Bush is brain dead. Its all in John Deans book. He got to where he is because
his Dad ran the CIA so people helped the son in order to get special positions and favors from the father. Read Page 29
in worse than Watergate and see how William O. Dewitt Jr. helped Bush Jr make money off the baseball team in
exchange for his Bush senior appointing him to the sixteen member Foreign Intelligence Advisory board. This is the
board that keeps an eye on the intelligence community and makes sure they help morons like Bush get elected and
control the media and attack people like Rather for telling the truth.

CBS was just trying to say something about Bush's military record because conservatives where denegrating John Kerrys
record. They probably should have started with the story in John Deans book describing how Bush has sealed all his
previous records. Those as governor and those during his business career and military record. CBS got the information
for Bushs military record from the women who kept the records of Bush's participation in the National Guard. They put
her TV and she told the country that what Dan Rather said was true. So whats the story. Who really gives a fuck. The
story should have been destroying all records of Bush's past. How else could such a loser get elected. The following
explains why Rather had to take the word of people who kept records on Bushs failure to show up for guard duty without
presenting the actual documents.
Worse Than Watergate p56
56

WORSE THAN WATERGATE

Illegally Hiding Gubernatorial Papers
As his last act as governor of Texas, and one of his first acts as president-elect, George Bush demonstrated his utter
disregard for the law when it comes to secrecy. In December 2000, as the cliff-hanging Florida presidential vote recount
was sorting itself out and heading for the U.S. Supreme Court, Bush was in , Austin, Texas, away from the spotlight. As
soon as he got word
of the U.S. Supreme Court's favorable ruling, he arranged for his gubernatorial records to be gathered, placed on sixty
large pallets, shrink-wrapped in heavy plastic, and, with no announcement, quietly shipped off to his father's presidential
library at Texas A&M University. Actually, this effort to bury his records had started in 1997, 'when Bush sought and
obtaineda change in Texas law to permit a governor to select a site for his papers, within Texas, other than the Texas
State Library. But such an alternative site was permissible only after "consultation" with the state's library and archives
commission. This consultation was mandatory, obviously required to make sure any alternative arrangement satisfied the
state's stringent open-access law regarding the records. Bush, however, removed his papers with no         consultation
whatsoever; rather, he dispatched an aide to inform
head of the Library and Archives Commission that he was sending his records to his father's library, like it or not. Well,
she didn't like it. With one of the nation's strongest public information laws (much to Bush's chagrin), Peggy Rudd, the
director and librarian of the Texas State Library and Archives Commission, took exception to his unilateral action. Under
Texas law, gubernatorial papers are immediately indexed by archivists and then made publicly available. All requests for
these
       records must be answered within ten days under the Texas statute. Bush senior's presidential library is run by the U.
S. government's National Archives and Records Administration, however, which quickly advised those seeking access to
Bush's gubernatorial records that his papers were no longer subject to Texas law and that the federal archivists were too
busy with the father's papers to process the son's. Bush had effectively federalized his papers, hiding them in a legal
limbo in his father's library, where no one could have access to them. His handpicked successor, the newly installed
Texas governor Rick Perry, agreed, WIth Bush.' But Ms. Rudd did not cotton to being bullied by the former governor,
even if he was president of the country, and refused to accept Bush's designation of his father's library. It took her over _
a year, but in May 2002 she prevailed, forcing the Texas attorney         general, who would have been hard-pressed to
read the Texas law any other way, to rule against Bush, making his gubernatorial papers subject to the Texas Public
Information Act. Given the clarity of Texas law, Bush's claim that Ms. Rudd's office had no role other than the ministerial
one of recording the gover        nor's designation of an alternative location was beyond Philadelphia lawyering. It was a
flagrant violation of the law.
       News accounts reported ,that Bush's ploy had not violated the 'law,6 but a close reading of the attorney general's
formal opinion         shows that these reports are incorrect.? There are no sanctions
       for such a violation other than to make Papers available as \the law requires. No telling how much
scrubbing_Bush's- _gubanatoriaL papers received, both before he left office and while in limbo at his father's
library.        J

However, Bush appears to have the last laugh in this tale. His papers were sent to Austin, Texas, for processing - slowly.
And Governor Perry, along with a new attorney general (both Bush supporters), has found new exceptions in the state's
information law that give him the keys to the filing cabinets with Bush's records. In short, secrecy wins, and good luck to
anyone seeking Bush's gubernatorial records (as a few did before Perry got the keys; such access resulted in Bush's
embarrassment, like showing that Bush and his counsel Alberto Gonzales processed death-row commutations on
incomplete information and faster than Bush could say, "Execute her"). It is difficult to believe one, would go to so much
trouble to hide his records unless he had something he really did not want people to know about.

",.

Shrink-Wrapping the White House

Bush, once a leak chaser (and discipline enforcer) for his father's
campaigns and presidency, understood how leaks had hurt his
father's vice presidency, implicating him in the Iran-Contra
scandal, and his presidency, with rumors of extramarital infidelity. Bush's distaste for leaks and need for information
control, while great, was surpassed only by Cheney's, who had been
  burned badly by leaks when he first became Ford's chief of staff.
  His scars were deep. Surely it had to have been exceedingly unpleasant when charges of his incompetence erupted in
the New York Times, accusing him of running an "inept" "White House
operation, with a personal staff that was characterized for its"political naivete" by other Ford "White House insiders. 10
Then another leak to the Times reported that while life at the "White House was more relaxed and pleasant under Ford
and Cheney than under Nixon and Haldeman, the unidentified source said, "Sometimes I wish that we had some of the
old Haldeman discipline back. These days things are hardly ever ready on time and the staff work is often sloppy and
incomplete. There are just too, many mistakes. Even more serious public charges reported that Cheney (and Ford) had
no control over the National Security Councilor Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who was making foreign. policy
without informing the president. ! Cheney had been appalled as a member of Congress at leaks during the Iran-Contra
investigations, and when he took charge of the Pentagon in 1989, his fully developed anathema and his related
obsession for controlling information were quickly put into action. A week after he arrived as defense secretary, he
publicly reprimanded the air force's chief of staff for privately briefing influential members of Congress. A year later, he
fired another air force chief of staff for discussing contingency plans relating to the Gulf War without clearance. So tight-
lipped 'is Cheney that he seldom briefs his own aides about his activities, his dealings with others, or his knowledge on
given subjects.13 Not surprisingly, Cheney's strong feelings about information         m control are reflected in the
operational structure, functioning,
       and staffing of the Bush II "White House.
       To leak proof their new presidency, Bush and Cheney first selected a "White House chief of staff who not only
shared their '        views but, more important, understood how the place worked, Cheney recommended that Bush hire - a
longtime Bush family         friend, Andrew H. Card Jr., who had worked with Bush senior, and had known Bush since 1979,
when they met as Card was visiting the family's -compound at Kennebunkport. Card, a former, Massachusetts state
legislator and unsuccessful candidate for governor, ran the critical New Hampshire primary for Bush senior in 1988 and
then became the deputy chief of staff at senior's White House in 1989, under White House chief of staff _ John Sununu,
Card, nothing like the acerbic, high-profile Su

If the ruling jew parasites cared about the poor half of what the US spends on defense would go for
foreign aid to the poor. If they cared about the poor there would have never been any welfare cuts or
tax cuts for the rich. If they cared about the poor the US would be backing Chaves instead of
Colombia. If they cared about the poor they would have supported Castro instead of trying to kill
him. All the sanctions and invasion of Iraq has done is impoverish the Iraqi people in the name of
democracy on behalf oil interests and the Jews. If they cared about the poor they would nationalize
the healthcare industry and tax the rich to pay for it. If they cared about the poor they would increase
social security benefits for the poor and use wealth taxes instead of payroll taxes to pay for it. If they
cared about the poor they would assasinate the CEO's of the pharmaceudical industry.

Among all the cheats and false suppositions written into the legislation, the assumption that private
entities somehow might be induced to restrain spending should have been the easiest one to ferret
out, if by nobody else than by Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader. The good doctor knows, probably
better than any of his colleagues in the Senate and certainly as well as Ted Weicker's exemplary
surgeon in long-ago Teheran, how to inflate a drug cost, supply an unnecessary medical procedure,
pad a hospital bill. In 1968, established the Hospital Corporation of America (HCA), which has since
become the nation's largest consortium of for-profit hospitals and medical centers-252 of them in
twentythree states. For several decades the company required each of its hospitals to return a profit
of 20 percent a year and to "upcode" their patients by exaggerating the degree and severity of their
illnesses in order to receive, from Medicare, more generous reimbursements for the delivery of
imaginary goods and services. So skilled did the hospitals become in the arts of medical chicane
that in December 2000 HCA admitted to a defrauding of the federal government so massive that it
required the payment of fines in the amount of $840 million. Two years later, confronted with a
supplementary set of similar charges, the company negotiated a settlement for an additional $631
million. The agreement was reached on December 18, 2002, two days before Frist was elected
Senate majority leader.

2/6/05

Germany didn't have an unemployment problem until the US forced it to change it economic policies to promote
greater inequality. The way to increase employment in Germany is not to increase working hours, or to cutwages,
benefits or social welfare. The solution lies in the tax and spend policies of the post war era when Germany had so
little unemployment they needed to import workers. That would intail increased taxes on corporations and wealth.
The Swedish economy has been doing well because they have maintained high taxes and government spending on
things the people need. One January 14 there was an article in the Financial Times that indicated Germany had
higher growth and lower unemployment back in 1990 when it had higher corporate taxes and greater government
spending. Conservative planner in this country love to force their ideology on the world in spite of the fact that all
economic indicators prove they are hurting people and national economies.

I also believe the governments failure to control the cost of healthcare and the military is impoverishing many
working class americans.

It may be a positive development that the US invaded Iraq for it may enable Iran to development the
bomb and such a development would promote the common good in the middle-east.

I believe I am uniquely qualified to speak regarding economic issues because I only had an economics
course at the local community college whereas only a PhD is credulous enough to believe in supply side
trickle down econ after all statistics prove it has increased poverty and misery everywhere it has been
applied.

If I remember correctly from my high school history class, John D Rockefeller integrated the oil industry
horizontally and vertically in order to attain a monopoly position over both his suppliers and competitors.
Or should I say taking over his suppliers and competitors. He effectively nationalized the oil industry
inorder to make it more efficient and technologically advanced so that he could lower prices for the
benefit of all consumers of petroleum products and the US economy. During WW2 the British
government did the same thing accept the British government bought the British petroleum industry.
They nationalized it to make it more efficient for the good of the British people.

In the early 90’s GM had an executive that saved it billions of dollars by taking the profits out of GM’s
suppliers. He didn’t want to have anything to do with barbaric ignorant American CEO’s so he quit and
worked for Volkswagon. His strategy was a page out of the play book of that commie John D
Rockefeller. Rockefeller wouldn’t think of outsourcing in order to cut labor costs. He volunteered to head
Huey Longs program because he wanted every American to be able to afford a home, with free
healthcare and a college education.

The point I want to make is I believe if John D Rockefeller was running the country today he would
nationalize healthcare in a minute. Instead of adding more competition he would take all the profit out of
the industry, put everyone on a salary and have the government deliver healthcare at cost so all the
benefits would accrue to the American people. If he ran healthcare the way he ran Standard Oil, not a
single person in the healthcare industry would make a dime of profit. All the profits would go to
improving the healthcare industry and reducing costs. Any profit that went to him which he would be
spend in a manner he thought best for the American people. And he wouldn’t take a dime of profit till
every American had free quality healthcare paid for by taxing people like him.

This is how the US gained the most efficient oil industry in the world vs. the most inefficient healthcare
system in the world. Privatizing anything is the same as consumers paying over and over to reinvent the
wheel. Berle suggested during the great depression, it was much easier to resurrect the economy, put
people to work, modernize and improve a nationalized industry. For that reason he advocated
nationalizing large swaths of american industry in order to get the country out of the depression. The US
forced the opposite on a depressed Russian economy. To achieve the same objective as nationalization
FDR started giving loans that didn’t need to be repaid .to big business to get them to produce with no
hope of profit during the depresson.

Who inspired John D? George B Shaw of course. I can’t remember exactly but Shaw believed for certain
industries of certain size that the government should buy out the shareholders by taxing the rich. Kind of
like taxing John D to buy out John D if he didn’t do something productive with his profits. It was to force
capital to be innovative and start new business instead of feeding off monopolistic industry like occurred
in the 1920 and led to the great depression. Rockefeller nationalized oil to make it more efficient so that
the benefits of the industry would accrue to the consumers of oil. The same needs to be done with
healthcare for the benefit of the American people.
If you read the link above to Kuttner on healthcare you see no other industry can extract monopoly
profits like healthcare. It must be nationalized for the benefit of the American people and American
industry.

The pharmaceudical industry and the tobacco industry need to be nationalized. Why do you think
conservatives added a prescription drug benefit to medicare without price controls? To garauntee that the
tax payers will be paying for the pharmaceudical industry to fund the campaigns of conservative
candidates in perpetuity. It's conservatives idea of public financing of elections except tax payers money
will only be going to the conservative party via the pharmaceudicals. The media never mentioned the fact
that the leader of the senate criminals, Bill Frist, has a father and brother that started HCA. The largest
chain of for profit hospitals in the country. HCA has already paid almost two billion dollars for defrauding
the government. Their objective is to assure that the conservatives special interests will be able to rob the
people in perpetuity. This sick fuck Bill Frist should be shot on sight. I'd also exterminate the people
behind Dennis Hastert who dreamt up the medicare prescription drug benefit which forces people out of
traditional medicare if they wish to receive the drug benefit. All the profits needs to be taken out of the
system. Why should taxpayer money subsidize the parasites who wish to feed off the ill? All benefits
need to pass through directly to medicare beneficiaries. Private plans should be outlawed for they waste
tax payers money. Whoever supported subsidizing private plans with tax payer money in order that it can
take patients from traditional medicare needs a bullet in their head immediately.

What needs to be done is to rescind all tax cuts for the wealthy passed in the past 25 years, social welfare
needs to return to the level of thirty years ago, the minimum wage needs to be raised a few dollars, trade
with east Asia needs to be managed, legislation needs to be passed to make it easier to unionize the work
force, national healthcare needs to be passed. In the previous comment I explained how anything that
comes out of the senate judiciary or senate for that matter is a fraud on the American people. Now the
senate judiciary wants class action law suits to go to the federal level where Bush appointed judges will
rob the people of social justice.

In secrecy the Bush Administration plotted the invasion of Iraq. Then they lied to congress to get a
declaration of war. They should be impeached for this yet the whole time the media was complicit in the
war and and even now in the cover up. If the media wasn’t complicit Bush/Cheney would be impeached
by now. In fact, the media is in on the scandal.

WORSE THAN WATERGATE
p184
Their other excuse, the need to protect the deliberative process, is even weaker. This canard, which has
become new presidential canon, deserves a burial. The so-called deliberative privilege was invented - out
of whole cloth - by the U.S. Court of Claims and has slowly spread to other courts.* At the presidential
level, it borders on being a hoax when invoked. New York Times columnist Bill Safire, a former White
House insider, has written (with regard to this Bush-Cheney excuse for secrecy) that "when it comes to
federal officials, the argument that only secrecy ensures candor is specious. Presidents record and blab;
speechwriters remember and tell all; most advisers want their 'private' advice to become known. When,
in a memoir, I protected a colleague by not mentioning his unpopular advice in an Oval Office meeting,
he objected furiously to having been left out of history."7
Law professor Gerald Wetlaufer looked at the contention that the privilege was necessary to prevent
chilling or inhibiting advice given to decision makers. He found exactly the opposite to be the case. It
chills neither advisers nor decision makers. "So far as I have been able to determine," he wrote, those
who claim such chilling effects. "have never offered any kind of formal empirical evidence in support of
its assertion." This is because there is none.

Evils of Excessive Secrecy

Lame excuses aside, excessive secrecy in any democratic government is inherently a problem. Because it
is so prevalent in the Bush-Cheney presidency, it is a serious matter that is being widely ignored at the
nation's (if not the world's) peril. Such secrecy is antithetical to democratic government and unworthy of
any modern presidency. Though they have been mentioned in passing, it is appropriate to recap and
summarize the innate evils of such government secrecy:

Secrecy Is Undemocratic
Our system is premised on citizens' having information about their leaders, including their actions and
their intentions, so they can express consent or dissent. For the president and vice president of the world's
greatest democracy to deny such basic information to Americans, merely to satisfy their own political
whims and aims, is unconscionable and inexcusable and should be unacceptable. "Democracies die
behind closed doors," Judge Damon]. Keith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit recently
reminded the Bush administration. So does liberty.

Secrecy Threatens Liberty
Patrick Henry presciently warned, "The liberties of the people never were nor ever will be secure when
the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them." This sentiment was echoed a century and a
half later when Woodrow Wilson advised that "the only truly self-governing people is that people which
discusses and interrogates its administration." People without information cannot question, influence, or
even understand secret government policy, and when they do, they no longer have any choice or voice.
Lack of government information worries many Americans; government secrecy frightens them. Thomas
Jefferson famously admonished: "When the government fears the people, there is liberty; when the
people fear the government, there is tyranny."

Secrecy Precludes Public Accountability
In 1980, political scientist John Orman concluded his study Presidential Secrecy and Deception by
expressing his concern about accountability. "If an individual controls the facts. . . , then that person
negates any system of accountability." In 1990, Orman returned to this subject in Presidential
Accountability: New and Recurring Problems, explaining the difficulty in holding presidents accountable:
"Presidents can lie, withhold information, and systematically try to manipulate public opinion." When
Congress fails to hold presidents accountable, as so easily occurs without divided government, the only
institution that can do so is the news media. If they give a president a pass and secrecy prevails, we have
unaccountable leadership, and nothing is more dangerous.

Secrecy Alienates
Noted Gerald Wetlaufer: "Secrecy operates to alienate - to create subjective distance between - the secret
keepers and one from whom the secret is kept. In the public sphere, such alienation between the
governed and the governors tends toward hierarchy and away from democracy and citizen sovereignty."
12 Public opinion polls show that the secrecy surrounding the Kennedy assassination, followed by the
secrecy surrounding Vietnam, and then Nixon's secrecy alienated much of the American public from its
government, and regaining trust has been slow. The extreme secrecy of Bush and Cheney will eventually
be noticed by the public and will further reduce trust in government, which is vital to democracy.

Secrecy Negatively Affects Character
Philosopher Sissela Bok has found that secrecy "allows people to maintain facades and conceal traits such
as callousness or vindictiveness - traits which can, in the absence of criticism or challenge from without,
prove debilitating." She said, "As secrecy debilitates character and judgment, it can also lower resistance
to the irrational and the pathological. . . . We know all the stifling rigidity that hampers those who become
obsessed with secrecy." That she wrote this more than a decade before the Bush-Cheney presidency
seems not only correct but prophetic. (That’s why Colin Powel said Rumsfeld cheney and Wolfowitz
were fuckin Crazies in that phone conversation in London)

Secrecy Is Dangerous-(only in secret with a complicit media could they have made such a bad decision
and invaded Iraq)
There is cause to fear secrecy. Bok has further found that "secrecy is central to planning of every form of
injury to human beings." In addition, "while not all that is secret is meant to deceive. . . all deceit does
rely on keeping something secret. And while not all secrets are discreditable, all that is discreditable and
all wrongdoing seek out secrecy," except in the case of open coercion. In a word, little good comes from
secrecy.

Secrecy Encourages Incompetence- (the media has always hidden Bush’s incompetence-subsequently the
world hates the US and the economy is fucked up and Americans are miserable)
When mistakes are easily concealed, there is no reason to take care. Sissela Bok ,has explained how
secrecy also hampers "the exerise of rational choice at every step: by preventing people from adequately
understanding a threatening situation, from seeing relevant alternatives clearly, from assessing the
consequences of each, and from arriving at preferences with respect to them."15 It also encourages (and
hides) "groupthink," a collective bad judgment that can easily occur behind, closed doors, when outside
input and critical analysis is missing because decision making is being hidden.16 Based on Bob
Woodward's reporting in Bush at War and Ron Suskind's The Price of Loyalty: George W Bush, the
White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill, there is ample evidence of group think at work in the
BushCheney presidency. The problems with the American occupation of Iraq have all the markings of
classic groupthink decision making. (and the fact that the Jew Alan Greenspan wants Bush to privatize
social security so he will cut benefits to pay for the tax cuts for the rich.)

Bush and Cheney's Potential Scandals

Secrecy is also an indispensable element of scandal, fostering it and, for a time, hiding the wrongdoing
that will become scandalous. Had there been no secrecy, it would not have been possible to accomplish
the misconduct. Having experienced Watergate firsthand and having studied virtually every presidential
scandal (out of personal curiosity), I have some understanding of the dynamics. But amazingly, although
there has been no shortage of historical, legal, and political examinations of political scandals, there has
been almost no analysis of their mechanics and dynamics, no "scandalology." For that reason, I found the
work of sociology professor John B. Thompson from the University of Cambridge and his book Political
Scandal: Power and Visibility in the Media Age fascinating. For me, his work confirms what I have
learned from my own observation about the biology, or anatomy, of modern scandals.

"Concisely stated: For a scandal, there must be "transgressions . . . sufficiently serious to elicit the
disapproval of others" but falling short of "heinous crimes." The misconduct must be concealed and then
revealed, with today's political-scandal revelations coming from the news media, (Not our corporate
media) making the media central players and actually part of the mechanics of a political scandal. The
media must also express their disapproval of the misconduct, doing so in a scornful, contemptuous, and
critical fashion that "reproaches and rebukes" or "scolds and condemns," not to mention often shaming or
stigmatizing those involved. If the media learn of a transgression and fail to so react, there is no scandal.
Finally, those involved in the scandalous misconduct must realize that their actions becoming public could
hurt their reputation (if not worse, such as job loss, criminal prosecution, or other sanctions. (The media
didn’t even report on how the election was rigged)
Scandalmongering holds no, appeal for me whatsoever. Bush and Cheney's removing the secrecy
surrounding the problem areas I discussed in previous chapters would eliminate the potential of any of
them becoming a scandal. If they don't, they have several inchoate scandals on their hands, since all the
underlying ingredients are in place, including the right climate.
, "
From the preceding chapters, let me flag eleven potential areas
of scandal: (1) Bush's character issues and (2) his prior business conduct - while the questions
surrounding Bush's business dealings do not loom as large as Cheney's, they are far more serious than the
Clintons' financial affairs, which were investigated for years and became a rolling scandal throughout his
presidency. Much graver (no pun intended) is (3) Cheney's health and the failure to provide complete and
truthful medical information. As for (4) Cheney's past business conduct, which the SEC is actively
investigating (as is' the French government), far more serious matters than Halliburton's accounting
practices under Cheney are involved.* (*At the time of this writing it is too early to tell whether the
French inquiry into Halliburton's involvement in bribing foreign officials to obtain business will directly
involve Cheney. But he is one of the targets of the inquiry.) The SEC inquiry may include his getting
rich, while other shareholders took a bath, because he knew about the financial problems with pending
asbestos claims but failed to report this information. As the financial misconduct of Spiro Agnew (Nixon's
vice president) has shown, unique problems arise with criminal wrongdoing at this level of government. A
vice president may not be indictable because of the office he holds, and he may not be impeachable
because it is not a high crime or misdemeanor under the constitutional standard. But whatever the case,
Cheney's financial problems with Halliburton are more serious than the public is aware.
The ACLU has filed a lawsuit alleging (5) civil rights violations in squelching dissent at presidential and
vice presidential appearances. This legal action may reach back .into the White House, with the civil
lawsuit also revealing criminal behavior. Another lawsuit involving (6) Bush's executive order dismantling
the Presidential Records Act may show that his illegal actions (presidents cannot overturn laws with
executive orders) were actually intended to cover up for his father or members of his own administration
who served in the Reagan or Bush I administration. Then there are all the big campaign contributors.
The distinction between bribery and gifts of money called campaign contributions is blurry at
best, and (7) extraordinary secrecy surrounds more than just the development of a national
energy policy that benefited contributors. There are also myriad , contributors who are benefiting
from the Bush II administration's concealing of business, environmental, health, and safety
information. Should a whistle-blower decide to stand up, scandal could follow.
Bush and Cheney failed in their efforts to block a 9/11 inquiry, and (8) if Cheney's stall in
addressing terrorism had an ulterior motive, or Bush and Cheney negligently ignored warnings, it
will be a horrid scandal, certainly worse than Watergate. Bush and Cheney's (9) failure to update
the existing continuation of government planning (including the presidential succession law) already
evidences nonfeasance, but if we learn they have improperly politicized the existing operational plans, it
too could result in a scandal. They cannot keep literally hundreds of lower-level government employees
from talking, and I can tell you a few of them are very suspicious. There are two other potential
scandaIs, both extremely serious. Discovering how Bush misled, Congress regarding war with
Iraq, and then turned around and violated the very law he had requested, can only be called what
it is - a high crime or misdemeanor under the Constitution. Will Republicans hold him
accountable? Of course not. But that does not change the reality of his actions, which history will not
treat kindly, nor will his Democratic opponent in 2004. Finally,
there is (11) the leaking of Valerie Plame Wilson's covert CIA identity, which is being investigated
and which, as I have explained, I have little doubt will be solved - but most likely not until after
the November 2004 election. Quite correctly, Hardball host Chris Matthews and Republican
National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie have both described the underlying offense as "worse
than Watergate," and given that the criminal leak has not been flushed out, it has the potential of
gathering other Watergate-like attributes.
John Thompson's study of political scandal resonates for me because of his appreciation, and explanation,
of the essential role of the news media in modern political scandals. The media (In this country the
corporate media is making sure none of the scandals are brought to life or kept alive before the public.
The last thing they want to do is uncover miss conduct on the part of another Republican administration
and the American people will pay dearly for the corrupt media in this country. Only with such a media
could a fool like Bush and a criminal like Cheney ever have gotten elected, even with a rigged election.)

The stealing of the 2004 election

The odds against all these statistical anomoloies occuring together are 250 million to one

DID THE BUSH-CHENEY campaign engage in electronic vote fraud to ensure that George W. Bush
would be president for another four years? That is a question every small-d democrat should be asking.
Much has been written on the Internet alleging that the election was stolen. Some writers are members of
the tin-foil hat brigade, but others provide sober analysis of the election results that raise disturbing
questions.
Unfortunately, thanks to the herd instinct in our current media culture, anyone who publicly raises this
question is immediately labeled a conspiracy theorist.
In the December 6 Nation, Alexander Cockburn dismissed such speculation, writing, "As usual, the
conspiracy nuts think plans of inconceivable complexity worked at 100 percent efficiency:' Dan Thanh
Dang of the Baltimore Sun put it this way: "John F. Kerry barely had time to concede the presidential
race before the conspiracy theory began circulating:' The headline: "Election paranoia surfaces;
Conspiracy theorists call results rigged:'
On November 14, a New York Times editorial delivered the final verdict on what is now the
conventional wisdom:

There is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale. ... There is also no way to be sure that the
nightmare scenario of electronic voting critics did not occur: votes surreptitiously shifted from one
candidate to another inside the machines, by secret software.
It's important to make it clear that there is no evidence such a thing happened, but there will be concern
and conspiracy theories until all software used in elections is made public.

Suspend disbelief, buck conventional wisdom and suppose that "such a thing happened" -that the Bush-
Cheney campaign "won" the election through systematic electronic voting fraud.
Would the Bush-Cheney campaign have any qualms about stealing an election? Of course not. They did
it in 2000.
They had the motive, and they had the will. But is there any evidence that voting fraud was committed?

Circumstantial evidence
Among the most compelling circumstantial evidence are the independent exit polls that predicted that John
Kerry was destined to be the next president. Why were the exit polls, historically so accurate, so wrong?
"Exit polls are almost never wrong;' wrote Republican pollster Dick Morris in the November 4 issue of
The Hill. "So reliable are the surveys that actually tap voters as they leave the polling places that they are
used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries. ... To screw up one exit poll
is unheard of. To miss six of them is incredible. It boggles the imagination how pollsters could be that
incompetent and invites speculation that more than honest error was at play here:' So perplexed was
Morris by the data, he suspected a liberal media conspiracy to fix the exit polls so that the networks
would declare Kerry a winner and thereby discourage potential Bush voters in the West from going to the
polls.
Steven F. Freeman, a statistical analysis professor at the University of Pennsylvania, found some
disturbing anomalies when he examined the discrepancies between the predicted vote (exit polls) and the
tallied results in 11 battleground states-Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New
Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
The figures he used for the predicted vote came from the exit polls posted by CNN on its Web site. Due
to an apparent computer glitch, CNN posted "uncalibrated" data-exit poll data not yet "corrected" to
conform to the announced vote tallies-on its Web site until 1:30 a.m. (EST) election night.
In all of these states except Wisconsin, writes Freeman, the predicted margin of votes for each candidate
differed from the tallied margin of votes for each candidate, with all the differences going in favor of
Bush. For example, Ohio exit polls predicted that Kerry would win 52.1 percent of the vote to Bush's
47.9 percent. But the tallied vote had Bush winning 51 percent of the vote to Kerry's 48.5 percent.
The difference, then, between Ohio exit poll projections and the actual tallied vote for Kerry comes to 3.6
percent. Based on the size of the sample the exit polling firms were working with, the likelihood of this
happening is less than 1 in 1000. Doing a similar analysis with exit polls in Florida, Freeman found a less
than three in 1000 chance that the tallied results would differ as much as they did from the exit poll
projections. And while Kerry did carry Pennsylvania, the chance that he would receive only 50.8 percent
of the vote after exit polls indicated he would get 54.1 percent (a 3.3 percent difference) is less than two
in 1000. Finally, according to Freeman, the odds against all three of these statistical anomalies occurring
together are 250 million to one.
"As much as we can say in social science that something is impossible:' he writes, "it is impossible that the
discrepancies between predicted and actual vote counts in the three critical battleground states of the
2004 election could have been due to chance or random error:' ' What could account for this?
  Freeman examines various explanations that have been made in the media for the discrepancy between
the exit polls and the tallied vote, and finds all of them lacking.
"Neither the pollsters nor their media clients have provided solid explanations to the public:' Freeman
writes. : "Systematic fraud or mistabulation is a premature conclusion, but the election's unexplained exit
poll discrepancies make , it an unavoidable hypothesis, one that is the responsibility of the media,
academia, polling agencies and the public to investigate.

  Mystery votes
  Examining the election results from a different angle, a team of researchers at the University of
California, Berkeley analyzed the vote in Florida and found that, mysteriously, "electronic voting raised
President Bush's advantage from the tiny edge he held in 2000 to
a clearer margin of victory in 2004:' The researchers calculate that electronic voting machines may have
given Bush up to 260,000 more votes than he should have received. (Bush won Florida by 360,000
votes.) In the 15 Florida counties using electronic touch-screen voting systems, the number of votes
tallied for Bush significantly exceeded the number of votes he should have received based on voter
demographic and voter turnout data. This was especially true in the large, heavily Democratic counties of
Broward, Palm Beach and Dade. In Florida counties that used other voting systems, Bush received the
same number of votes that the data predicted.
Michael Hout, the chair of Berkeley's Sociology and Demography graduate program, told Kim letter of
Wired.com, "No matter how many factors and variables we took into consideration, the significant
correlation in the votes for President Bush and electronic voting cannot be explained:'
The Berkeley researchers did a similar study in Ohio, but found no such correlation.
Both Hout and Freeman caution that their research has not yet undergone peer review. Freeman writes,
"I have tried to be as rigorous as possible in my data collection, review and analysis. To hold it to an
academic standard of rigor, however, requires extensive peer review:'
  Nightmare scenario
Was it technically possible to steal the election through electronic voting fraud? As the New York Times
editorial noted, there is "is no way to be sure that the nightmare scenario of electronic voting critics did
not        occur. How secure were the electronic machines that were used to tabulate and count the vote?
Diebold, the country's largest voting machine company, made news in 2003 when leaked interoffice
memos revealed that company executives knew that their machines were poorly protected against
hackers. And in July 2003, researchers at the Johns Hopkins Information
Security Institute reported that an examination of one Diebold voting system revealed "significant security
flaws:' noting that "voters can trivially cast multiple ballots with no build-in traceability, administrative
functions can be performed by regular voters, and the threats posed by insiders such as poll workers,
software developers, and janitors is even greater:'
In Ohio, more than 35 counties used Diebold machines and nationwide, according to the company's Web
site "over 75,000 Diebold electronic voting stations are being used:'
So, somebody could have hacked the vote.
On November 5, Democratic Reps. John Conyers (Mich.), Jerrold Nadler (N.Y.) and Robert Wexler
(Fla.), noting widespread questions raised about the accuracy of the results of the 2004 election, asked
the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to investigate the "efficacy of voting machines and new
technologies used in the 2004 election:'
"The essence of democracy:' they wrote, "is the confidence of the electorate in the accuracy of voting
methods and the fairness of voting procedures. In 2000, that confidence suffered terribly, and we fear
that such a blow to our democracy may have occurred in 2004:'
Responding on November 23, the GAO agreed to examine "the security and accuracy of voting
technologies, distribution and allocation of voting machines and counting of provisional ballots:'
That would be a good place to start.

America Observed

Why foreign election observers would rate the United States near the bottom

BY ROBERT A PASTOR

FEW NOTICED, BUT IN THE YEAR 2000, MEXICO
and the United States traded places. After nearly two centuries of election fraud, Mexico's presidential
election was praised universally by its political parties and international observers as free, fair, and
professional Four months later, after two centuries as a model democracy, the U.S. election was panned
as an embarrassing fiasco, reeking with pregnant chads, purged registration lists, butterfly ballots, and a
Supreme Court that preempted a recount.
Ashamed, the U.S. Congress in 2002 passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), our first federal
legislation on election administration. But two years later, on November 2, more than 200,000 voters
from all SO states phoned the advocacy organization Common Cause with a plethora of complaints. The
2004 election was not as close as 2000, but it was no better and, in some ways, worse. This was partly
because the only two elements of HAVA implemented for 2004 were provisional ballots and ID
requirements, and both created more problems than they solved. HAVA focused more on eliminating
punch-card machines than on the central cause of the electoral problem,- dysfunctional decentralization.
Instead of a single election for president, 13,000 counties and municipalities conduct elections with
different ballots, standards, and machines. This accounts for most of the problems.
On the eve of November's election, only one-third of the electorate, according to a New York Times poll,
said that they had a lot of confidence that their votes would be counted properly, and 29 percent said
they were very or somewhat concerned that they would encounter problems at the polls. This explains
why 13 members of Congress asked the United Nations to send election observers. The deep suspicion
that each party's operatives had of the other's motives reminded me of Nicaragua's polarized election in
1990, and of other poor nations holding their first free elections.

RANKING AMERICA'S ELECTIONS
The pro-democracy group Freedom House counts 117 electoral democracies in the world as of 2004.
Many are new and fragile. The US. government has poured more money into helping other countries
become democracies than it has into its own
election system. At least we've gotten our money's worth. By and large, elections are conducted better
abroad than at home. Several teams of international observers-including one that I led-watched this US.
election. Here is a summary of how the United States did in 10 different categories, and what we should
do to raise our ranking.
1. Who's in Charge? Stalin is reported to have said that the secret to a successful election is not the voter
but the vote counter. There are three models for administering elections. Canada, Spain, Afghanistan, and
most emerging democracies
have nonpartisan national election commissions. A second model is to have the political parties "share"
responsibility. We use that model to supervise campaign finance (the Federal Election Commission), but
that tends to lead either to stalemates or to collusions against the public's interest. The third, most
primitive model is when the incumbent government puts itself in charge. Only 18 percent of the
democracies do it this way, including the United States, which usually grants responsibility to highly
partisan secretary of state, like Katherine Harris (formerly) in Florida or Kenneth Blackwell in Ohio.
2. Registration and Identification of Voters. The United States registers about 55 percent of its eligible
voters, as compared with more than 95 percent in Canada and Mexico. To ensure the accuracy of its list,
Mexico conducted 36 audits between 1994 and 2000. In contrast, the United States has thousands of
separate lists, many of which are wildly inaccurate. Provisional ballots were needed only because the lists
are so bad. Under HAVA, all states by 2006 must create computer-based, interactive statewide lists-a
major step forward that will work only if everyone agrees not to move out of state. That is why most
democracies, including most of Europe, have nationwide lists and ask voters to identify themselves.
Oddly, few U.S. states require proof of citizenship-which is, after all, what the election is supposed to be
about. If ID cards threaten democracy, why does almost every democracy except us require them, and
why are their elections conducted better than ours?
3. Poll Workers and Sites. Dedicated people work at our polling stations often for 14 hours on election
day. Polling sites are always overcrowded at the start of the day. McDonald's hires more workers for its
lunchtime shifts, but a similar idea has not yet occurred to our election officials. Poll workers are
exhausted by the time they begin the delicate task of counting the votes and making sure the total
corresponds to the number who signed in, and, as a result, there are discrepancies. When I asked about
the qualifications for selecting a poll worker, one county official told me, 'We'll take anyone with a
pulse." Mexico views the job as a civic responsibility like jury duty, and citizens are chosen randomly and
trained. This encourages all citizens to learn and participate in the process.
4. Voting Technologies. Like any computers, electronic machines break down, and they lose votes.
Canada does not have this problem because it uses paper ballots, still the most reliable technology.
Brazil's electronic system has many safeguards and has gained the trust of its voters. If we use electronic
machines, they need paper-verifiable ballots.
5. Uniform Standards for Ballots, Voting, Disputes. The Supreme Court called for equal protection of
voters' rights, but to achieve this, standards need to be uniform. In America, each jurisdiction does it
differently. Most countries don't have this problem because they have a single election commission and
law to decide the validity of ballots.
6. Uncompetitive Districts. In 2004, only three incumbent members of Congress-outside of House
Majority Leader Tom DeLay's gerrymandered state of
Texas-were defeated. Even the Communist Party of China has difficulty winning as many elections. This
is because state legislatures, using advanced computer technologies, can now draw district boundaries in a
way that virtually guarantees safe seats. Canada has a nonpartisan system for drawing districts. This still
favors incumbents, as 83 percent won in 2004, but that compares with 99 percent in the United States.
Proportional representation systems are even more competitive.
7. Campaign Finance and Access to the Media. The United States spent little to conduct elections last
November, but almost $4 billion to promote and defeat candidates. More than $1.6 billion was spent on
TV ads in 2004. The Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance in Stockholm reported that 63
percent of democracies provided free access to the media, thus eliminating one of the major reasons for
raising money. Most limit campaign contributions, as the United States does, but one-fourth also limit
campaign expenditures, which the Supreme Court feared would undermine our democracy. In fact, the
opposite is closer to the truth: Political equality requires building barriers between money and the ballot
box.
8. Civic Education. During the 1990s, the federal government spent $232 million on civic education
abroad and none at home. As a result, 97 percent of South Africans said they had been affected by voter
education. Only 6 percent of Americans, according to a Gallup Poll in 2000, knew the name of the
speaker of the house, while 66 percent could identify the host of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Almost
every country in the world does a better job educating citizens on how to vote.
9. The Franchise. The Electoral College was a progressive innovation in the 18th century; today, it's
mainly dictatorships like communist China that use an indirect system to choose their highest leader.
10. International Observers. We demand that all new democracies grant unhindered access to polling sites
for international observers, but only one of our 50 states (Missouri) does that. The Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe, a 55-state organization of which the United States is a member, was
invited by Secretary of State Colin Powell to observe the u.s. elections, yet its representatives were
permitted to visit only a few "designated sites:' Any developing country that restricted observers to a few
Potemkin polling sites as the United States did would be roundly condemned by the State Department
and the world.

ON ALL 10 DIMENSIONS OF ELECTION ADMINISTRATION, the United States scores near the
bottom of electoral democracies. There are three reasons for this. First, we have been sloppy and have
not insisted that our voting machines be as free from error as our washing machines. We lack simple
procedure most democracies have: a log book at each precinct to register every problem encountered
during the day and to allow observers to witness and verify complaints.
Second, we lack uniform standards, and that is because we have devolved authority to the lowest,
poorest level of government. It's time for states to retrieve their authority from the counties, and it's time
for Congress to insist on national standards.
Third, we have stopped asking what we can learn from our democratic friends, and we have not accepted
the rules we impose on others. This has communicated arrogance abroad and left our institutions weak.
The results can be seen most clearly in our bizarre approach to Iraq's election. Washington, you may
recall, tried to export the Iowa-caucus model though it violates the first principle of free elections, a secret
ballot. An Iraqi ayatollah rejected that
and also insisted on the importance of direct elections (meaning no Electoral College). Should we be
surprised that the Iraqi _election Commission chose to visit Mexico instead of the United States to learn
how to conduct elections? TAP

lobertA. Pastor is director of the Center for Democracy and Election Management and a professor at
American Univerity .At the Carter Center from 1986-2000, he organized election-observation missions to
about 30 countries, including the United States.

2004:A Report Card
The appearance of a disaster averted obscures an election system that’s still badly broken.

BY TOVA ANDREA WANG

AMERICANS KNOW THE 2000 ELECTION WAS A    fiasco. What they don't know is that the 2004
election, in many ways, might have been even worse. The purported margin of victory in November has
led many to believe that the process went relatively smoothly. But the appearance of a smooth election
obscured troubling developments, from simple human errors to likely felony violations of federal law. In
addition to the ineptitude and faulty machinery that led to the problems of
2000 (both of which persisted), 2004 should be remembered as the year that a number of partisan
election officials and party leaders usurped the process and manipulated the new federal voting law in
ways that disenfranchised voters.
When Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in 2002, Americans rightly believed it
represented a step forward in improving our broken voting process. We now realize that the combination
of flaws and gaps in that law, plus a highly charged campaign season, led in many ways to more obstacles
to voting. In fact, had the popular vote been closer in just one state, 2004 could have been a legal battle
royal that would have made 2000 look like a court hearing for a traffic ticket.
At every step of the way, election officials in key states threw up unnecessary barriers to voting. Voter
registration was made more difficult than ever. Officials misconstrued and abused identification and
provisional-ballot rules. There were far too few voting machines in some places, leading to unacceptable
wait times, and there were suspicious voting-machine "errors." And not surprisingly, given the
atmosphere, there were numerous allegations of voter intimidation and vote suppression.
That is not to say that nothing in the system went right. But credit for what did go well goes mostly to the
voters themselves, and to volunteer lawyers, monitors, and poll workers.

VOTER REGISTRATION
Long before 2004, the process of voter registration was unnecessarily onerous in this country. It was
made an even bigger barrier to participation this time, with election officials using various technicalities to
keep people off the rolls.
For example, HAVA required that mail-in voter-registration forms include a check-off box verifying that
the voter is a U.S. citizen. It required states to notify voters who failed to "answer _ [citizenship]
question" and provide them with an opportunity to correct the form prior to the next federal election.
Under existing federal statute (the "Motor Voter" law), registration forms already include language above
the signature requiring the applicant to affirm his or her citizenship, taking the new citizenship box
redundant. Nonetheless, some election officials last year decided to reject the applications of thousands of
people who signed the affirmation but failed to check the citizenship box. To complicate matters, they
insisted late registrants correct their forms before the original voter_registration deadline-a month before
the election. As a result this double-barreled mandate in Florida, for example, thousands of registrations
were rejected and those voters were disenfranchised. It should surprise few readers to learn that the
burden fell heavily on minority voters. In Miami-Dade County, for instance, 35 percent of the
applications rejected as incomplete came from African Americans, who comprise 20 percent the county's
population.
Other technicalities were invoked to disqualify voter registration forms. Most notorious was a directive
(since rescinded) from Ohio's secretary of state that all voter-registration forms be on 8O-pound paper
stock, because lightweight cards could be shredded by postal equipment. This meant that if someone
downloaded an application from the Ohio Board of _elections' Web site and submitted it, that registration
may have been rejected.

VOTER IDENTIFICATION
HAVA states that beginning in 2003, first-time voters who register by mail must present identification (a
current and valid photo ID, utility bill, bank statement, or government document with name and address)
when registering or voting. Advocates of such measures argue that they are necessary to prevent fraud,
though there is no evidence that such election fraud is a serious problem. Indeed, voting experts agree
that the real problem in America is that far too few of us vote, not too many.

Civil-rights advocates, meanwhile, predicted that the new requirement would chill the exercise of voting
rights and would especially burden minorities, the disabled, young people, and the poor, who too often
lack driver's licenses or other forms of identification the law requires. A Latino family I met while doing
nonpartisan get-out-the-vote work in Pennsylvania was a case in point: Although family members had
received valid voter-registration cards, they were still afraid to vote because they had no other ID and all
their household bills came in the name of another family member.
Sadly, some state legislatures saw this new HAVA provision as a great opportunity to go even further. As
a result, 17 states now have laws that require all voters-not just new ones-to show identification at the
polls. And four of those states require photo identification, according to electionline.org.
Troubling anecdotal evidence suggests that these new requirements have indeed led to some being denied
the right to vote; lacking ID, they were either-wrongfully turned away or forced to cast provisional ballots
that may or may not have been counted. Several reports of abuse during the presidential primary
elections foreshadowed the problem. In South Dakota, for example, primary voters at heavily Native
American polling sites were turned away because they lacked photo identification. And during Ohio's
primary, the NAACP and other voting-rights groups received numerous complaints from African
American voters in Cleveland who said that they were wrongfully asked for ID.
Similar grievances arose in the general election. In New York City, for instance, some Asian American
voters were "subjected to racial profiling at the polls, since they were routinely asked for identification in
order to establish their eligibility to vote, even when it was not required;' reported Margaret Fung, head of
the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund. As a New York Times editorial put it on
November 4, "Voter identification requirements were arbitrarily, and often incorrectly, enforced:' All of
the organizations running voter hotlines received complaints about ID enforcement.

As WITH EVERY OTHER ASPECT OF THE PROCESS, ELECtion officials aggravated the possible
disenfranchising effects of the law. In Ohio, officials decreed that if a first time voter who registered by
mail lacked identification when he or she showed up to vote and cast a paper provisional ballot, the ballot
wouldn't count-unless he or she somehow produced ID by the end of election day. HAVA states that
provisional ballots are to be verified and counted after the election according to the state law, which in
Ohio does not require identification. A month before the election, the League of Women Voters and
others challenged Ohio's directive in court-and lost. Elsewhere, according to Demos, a research and
advocacy group, two states refused to give provisional ballots to voters who could not provide ID, and 10
others gave such voters provisional ballots but automatically threw them out if the voter could not present
identification by he end of election day.

PROVIS'ONAL BALLOTS
The 2002 election reforms under HAVA included an important new protection: the right of a voter who
was not on the regisration list to cast a provisional ballot that would be counted once election officials
could confirm its validity. This fail-safe measure was designed to avoid a repeat of the terrible scenes of
2000, in which many eligible voters were turned out of polling sites because their names did not appear
on the rolls.
Specifically under HAVA, the right to cast a provisional ballot and to have it counted depends on being a
registered voter in the jurisdiction. As defined by the National Voter Registration Act, jurisdiction means
the geographic area responsible for voter registration (usually the county), and not the precinct or pol1ing
site. Sadly, that's not how many state officials interpreted the new rules, and in this area they misused
their powers to great effect. Several state election officers ordered counties to reject provisional ballots
cast in the wrong polling place. According         to electionline.org, 28 states threw out provisional votes
cast in the wrong precinct-even with respect to selection of candidates for statewide offices such as
_governor or u.s. senator. And only 17 states counted partial ballots cast by voters in the wrong
precinct.
In Ohio, Missouri, Colorado, Michigan, and Florida, Democrats and voting-rights organizations
challenged these directives in court. In many cases, the u.s. Department of Justice took the unusual step
of intervening and te1ling the judges that provisional ballots cast in the wrong place should not count for
any office, leading the chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party to say, "The Department of Justice's
eleventh hour request reeks of partisan mischief and is an abuse of our justice system:' After several
rounds of litigation, the courts re buffed the challenges and upheld the directives in everyone of these
states.
There are many legitimate reasons why a voter might appear in the wrong polling location, especially in
an election like 2004 with its millions of first-time voters. Voters who have moved recently may show up
at their old site, polling locations change and voters aren't notified, or a voter's registration is filed in the
wrong place through administrative error. Moreover, it's not as if provisional ballots are sorted and
counted at the precinct; that happens at the board of elections.
Nonetheless, many election officials were successful in their mission. For example, according to the Palm
Beach Post, the vast         majority of provisional ballots cast in Florida were disqualified, many because
the voter was at the wrong polling site. In the Cleveland area, one-third of the provisional ballots were
invalidated in 2004, compared with only 17 percent in 2000. And
in that decisive state, fully 155,000 provisional ballots were cast last November. We can only wonder
how many of those weren't counted because they were cast in the wrong place. Multiply that across 50
states and the number of votes cast provisionally and tossed out might have been enormous.

VOTING MACHINES
Although worries about the security and accuracy of electronic voting machines were the focus of pre-
election anxiety, the biggest machine problem on election day ended up being simply the number of
machines employed. Although they knew to expect extraordinarily high turnout, election officials in many
jurisdictions nationwide failed to supply adequate numbers of voting machines, leading to lines and wait
times that were not just unacceptably high; they were possibly an unconstitutional denial of voting rights.
In many places, voters had to wait in line for five, six, or even 10 hours. Observing early voting in a
Broward County, Florida, shopping mall, I encountered numerous voters, some elderly, who had waited
six hours to vote. Those I talked to were undeterred, but who knows how many others gave up and went
home?
As closing time approached on election day in Ohio, a federal judge ruled that the continuing long waits
were an abridgement of the right to vote and ordered paper ballots distributed to voters still in line. The
judge said, "Participation in this democracy should not be as onerous as it is being made today."
According to The Columbus Dispatch, thousands of voters remained in line when the polls closed at 7:30
p.m.
The worst of it evidently was on the campus of Kenyon College, where there were only two voting
machines, and at least one student reportedly waited 10 hours- until 2 a.m. - to vote. When the federal-
court ruling came down, the students demanded to vote on the machines, chanting, "No paper!" Educated
as they were, they feared that paper ballots would not be counted. "The students understood right away
that this was
a partisan effort to suppress voting," said Lincoln Mitchell, an election observer.
Notably, the distribution of voting machines within states and even within counties varied widely. Huge
disparities in the number of voting machines per capita might even present an equal-protection problem
under Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court's final verdict on the 2000 election. The Court there said that
equal protection applies not only to who is allowed to vote but also to the manner in which people vote.
According to Ned Foley of the Moritz 'College of Law at the Ohio State University, "This principle would
seem easily to cover voting-machine disparities that have the effect of imposing differential barriers to the
voting booths for citizens in different parts of the state."
In the months leading up to the 2004 election, computer scientists, politicians, and concerned citizens
warned that new _computer voting machines might be vulnerable to hacking, manipulation, or
malfunctions. Many called for a voter_verifiable paper trail allowing voters to double-check their
_computer vote and election officials to manually audit them. But only Nevada managed to implement
this technology in
time, and just two states have vowed to require a verifiable paper trail by 2006.
The security and effectiveness of the computer machines remains a huge question mark-and a source of
furious _speculation on the Internet in the election aftermath. Unquestionably there were mechanical
problems on election day, including allegations of voters' choices being switched by the computer. In one
such case, nearly 4,000 computer votes in suburban Columbus, Ohio, were mistakenly given to
president Bush.
Meanwhile, pervasive mistrust of the computer systems caused another problem:' States and localities
that had planned to get rid of the notoriously unreliable punch-card machines stopped in their tracks,
leaving tens of millions of voters dependent on them yet again in 2004. Of the 93,000 votes lost by
machines in Ohio last November, 76,000 were from punch-card machines, according to The Columbus
Dispatch. It remains a national outrage that different voters, depending on where they live, use different
voting machines If widely varying accuracy and efficacy. It is not just a fairless question; it is now, in
light of the Bush v. Gore ruling, a potential constitutional question.

VOTE SUPPRESSION
As Steve Carbo details in this report, cynical efforts to block certain groups from voting-through
manipulation of rules and less subtle means-re-emerged in this election. One tactic was the aggressive use
of previously obscure rules allowing for "challenges" of a person's right to vote. In Ohio, GOP officials
got an early start, preemptively challenging 35,OO0-plus new registrants-in mainly Democratic and
minority communities-solely on the grounds that a postcard mailed to them was returned as undeliverable.
Challenged registrants were required just days before the election to attend a hearing and to prove their
eligibility. This went on in some areas until the courts put a stop to it.
The Ohio GOP also announced that it would hire people to go to the polls on election day to challenge
the rights of pre selected registrants to vote. Technically, a voter can only be challenged on specific
grounds such as age or citizenship. Knowing this, partisan officials surely had an additional motive: tying
up the lines to make wait times unmanageable for many working people. The plan set off a rush of last-
minute
lawsuits, conflicting rulings ""and appeals, leading to great uncertainty about what would happen on
election day. In one case the plaintiffs called Ohio's law a "Jim Crow-era statute" being used to
disenfranchise african American voters again.
The Justice Department intervened, telling the court in one case that challengers should be allowed. While
the district court judges said that the challenges were unconstitutional one saying that they were meant to
intimidate black voters-a federal appeals court ultimately ruled the challenges lawful. The Democrats
made plans to post their own people at the polling sites to challenge the challengers.

In other key battleground states, Republican officials purued similar plans, filing challenges or deploying
challengers. In Florida, the GOP developed a database of thousands of voters it wanted to challenge on
election day. And in Wisconsin, Republicans tried to challenge thousands of registrants-but only in heavily
Democratic Milwaukee. While party officials claimed that this new level of scrutiny was needed to thwart
possible fraud, at least one Republican strategist was more candid after election day, telling TheNew
York Times that the challenges '_were "a big head fake;' a way to distract Democrats from getting out the
vote at the crucial last hours.
Another way in which partisan officials sought to suppress legitimate votes was through felon "purge lists:'
In most states, felons are not allowed to vote, and even after they have fully served their time, many
states make it prohibitively difficult to regain voting rights. Florida officials, charged with gross
malfeasance in this area in 2000, were forced to withdraw their list when media investigations revealed
that, as in 2000, the list included thousands of eligible voters. The list of "ineligible" voters provided by
the state would have disqualified 22,000 African Americans (likely Democrats) and only 61 Hispanics
(likely Republicans).
In Nevada, a private canvassing company funded by the Republican National Committee had its
employees rip up and discard forms filled out by Democrats-a potential crime. In Milwaukee, a flier
purportedly from the "Milwaukee Black Voters League" was distributed in African American
neighborhoods. It read, in part:

SOME WARNINGS FOR ELECTION TIME
IF YOU'VE ALREADY VOTED IN ANY ELECTION THIS YEAR YOU
CAN'T VOTE IN THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION.
IF YOU [OR ANYBODY IN YOUR FAMILY] HAVE EVER BEEN FOUND GUILTY OF
ANYTHING, EVEN A TRAFFIC VIOLATION, YOU CAN'T VOTE IN THE PRESIDENTIAL
ELECTION.
... IF YOU VIOLATE ANY OF THESE LAWS YOU CAN GET TEN
YEARS IN PRISON AND YOUR CHILDREN WILL BE TAKEN AWAY FROM YOU.

According to local media reports, Pennsylvania officials received calls regarding leaflets on "official"
county letterhead distributed in a Pittsburgh mall. The leaflets said that "due to immense voter turnout
expected Tuesday," Republicans vote on Tuesday November 2, and Democrats should vote on
Wednesday, November 3. And in Lake County, Ohio, some voters received an "Urgent Advisory" on
fake Board of Elections letterhead warning that any voter registered through the Kerry campaign,
America Coming Together, or the NAACP could not vote.

WHAT NOW?
In 2006, two of the most important HAVA mandates will go into effect: technological and accessibility
standards that voting machines must meet and a requirement that every state have a computerized,
interactive, statewide voter-registration database. Both measures can potentially solve some of the
problems we saw last year.
For their part, states will hopefully use this as an opportuIlity to carefully find the best machines and
deploy them statewide. And the statewide registration databases should help them avoid further incidents
of alleged fraud, felon purge lists, and the disputes over counting provisional ballots. What's more, over -
the next several months, the agency created by HAVA to oversee implementation and funding of election
reform, the Election Assistance Commission, should finally get the money it needs from Congress to
actually function and i!;ive meaningful guidance.
But as Miles S. Rapoport details in this edition of the Prospect, there is much more the federal
government must do, too. Voter registration should be made easier, not harder. Provisional voting rules
must be clarified. Voter-identification requirements must not serve to disenfranchise. Congress must
_ensure that the felon purge lists are not abused. Electronic voting machines must incorporate technology
that allows for independent audits and individualized voter verification, and we must insist on greater
transparency on the part of machine manufacturers and in the testing system. Federal funding to ensure
that our democracy functions fairly and effectively should be ensured in advance and not subject to the
vicissitudes of annual appropriation, as it is today. And, very importantly, the system cries out for some
sort of nonpartisan governance of election administration. This alone would go far to restore the public's
faith in our treasured democracy and to reduce manipulation of the process for political ends.
Americans cannot go through this crisis of confidence in the election system every four years. Voters
have done their part. Now it is time for our "elected" leaders to do theirs.

Tova Andrea Wang is a Democracy Fellow at The Century Foundation in New York and was a staff
member of the National Commission on Federal Election Reform, co-chaired by former Presidents
Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.

Instead of fucking up the world our illegitimate fool in the White House could do whats in the article
below in order to stay out of trouble

Good Medicine

Medicare does need changes. But its expansion is the key to eventual universal coverage.
BY JACOB S. HACKER AND MARK SCHLESINGER

Across the political spectrum alarm bells are ringing about Medicare, America's giant health program for
the aged and disabled. To conservatives, Medicare is a huge, Kremlin-esque bureaucracy destined to soak
up more and more of the American economy. To critics on the left, it's an inadequate program that
nonetheless siphons off increasingly limited funds that could be used to broaden coverage for children and
working families.
The White House-backed Medicare reforms passed late last year only confirmed each side's worst fears,
promising a meager and ill-designed drug benefit at a hugely inflated price. While millions go without
basic coverage and budget deficits explode, critics asked how we can countenance pouring hundreds of
billions of dollars into a system for the aged that already provides pretty decent protection.
Here's how: Make improvement and expansion of Medicare the route to universal health coverage in the
United States. Medicare does badly need upgrading. Medicare does do too little to help the non-elderly.
But the solution isn't to tear down Medicare; it's to build up the program to make it a stable foundation
for providing health care for all Americans without access to good workplace coverage. In all the talk
about skyrocketing health costs and the uninsured, everyone seems to have forgotten about the one
program that can realistically get America to affordable universal insurance in the coming decades.
Ironically, the potential for expanding Medicare to all Americans owes much to past initiatives-mostly
pursued by conservatives-that have enhanced beneficiaries' enrollment in private health plans. For all their
shortcomings, these proposals have made it possible for Medicare to offer a broad array of private plans,
as well as traditional fee-for-service insurance, to young and old alike. But this strategy will succeed only
if Medicare also continues to provide the broad risk sharing that is vital to the program's long-standing
success and to the future of American health insurance.

FOR A PROGRAM SO LOVED BY THE PUBLIC THAT EVEN anti-government ideologues tread
lightly around it, Medicare has come in for a surprisingly heavy critical barrage. The fusillade consists of
two main volleys; that America can't afford Medicare and that the program is built on an irremediably
antiquated model. Each of these claims is arresting and superficially attractive. Yet each is wrong, both in
its diagnosis and in its prescriptions.
Affordability is the more bipartisan concern-and the one with the stronger basis in fact. The aging of
America and the rise of health costs promises to make Medicare much more expensive in the future.
According to some estimates, Medicare could represent as much as7 percent of the economy in 2050, up
from about 3 percent today.
All of this is cause for concern, but by no means despair. In the last half-century, the United States has
experienced swings in social spending much larger than those predicted by even the direst estimates, with
nothing like the crises now prophesied. More important, while Medicare will cost more in the future,
Americans will also be much richer, allowing them to devote a larger share of income to it. The issue isn't
whether we can pay for Medicare; it's whether we want to. And polls resoundingly indicate that nearly all
Americans do.
What's more, the frightening image of Medicare sucking away nearly a tenth of the national income isn't
likely to materialize. Every previous Medicare spending "crisis" has prompted serious and effective efforts
to rein in costs without cutting benefits. A number of European countries, moreover, are much farther
along the demographic road to gerontocracy than is the United States, yet have still sustained their
publicly funded health benefits without having medical spending take a larger share of the national income
or restricting access for older patients to a level below Medicare's current coverage.
Lurking beneath claims about affordability is the seemingly fixed American belief that all government
programs are less efficient and more costly than their private counterparts. That's simply not true of
Medicare. In fact, Medicare has contained its spending better than has private insurance over the past two
decades. Nor have politicians given away the bank to older Americans. Medicare is remarkably less
generous than typical private health plans. A private plan with Medicare's current benefit package would
cost about $2,300 for a single non-aged adult, compared with a current average for private plans of about
$3,600 with the sort of benefits negotiated at the typical workplace.
Of course, to some, this is the real problem: Medicare is just an outdated model, period. The complaints
take many forms-Medicare has an antique payment policy, it doesn't effectively "manage" care, it makes
patients pay too much out of pocket-but most of these criticisms boil down to a simple battle cry:
Medicare needs radical modernization to encourage competition and incorporate the private sector more
fully.
This call was most alluring during the mid-1990s, when managed-care enthusiasts promised that their plan
would decisively rein in costs and stimulate innovative service delivery. Of course, that was before the
managed-care backlash sent private insurers scurrying back to arrangements that allow free choice of
providers and require cost sharing by patients-in short, the very model that old-fashioned Medicare has
retained all along.
Medicare could certainly be a more effective insurance program. It should better manage chronic medical
conditions, for example, and provide more extensive preventive outreach and better coverage of
rehabilitative services. But there is nothing inherent in the Medicare model that makes these innovations
less possible than in the private sector. And when it comes to providing timely access to care and financial
security, recent surveys of Americans' health-care experiences suggest that conventional Medicare
considerably outperforms the average private insurance policy.
Indeed;- it's crucial to recognize that today's Medicare is very different from the model of 30 or 40 years
ago. That's because Medicare now allows beneficiaries to choose among a growing variety of private
managed care and fee-far-service options. And these choices meet with overwhelming popular approval:
Two-thirds of all Americans favor giving Medicare beneficiaries a chose among insurance plans so long as
this does not increase the cost of staying in the conventional program.

BUT WAIT, HAVEN'T PRIVATE HEALTH PLANS fAILED Medicare? Stories of them pulling out in
droves and increasing deductibles certainly suggest so. But the disruptions of recent years can be
exaggerated. At its peak, the turnover rate of plans in Medicare was about the average experienced in the
much-lauded Federal Employees Health Benefits Program. Meanwhile, the rewards that private plans
have delivered to the program are often neglected. For many beneficiaries who have enrolled in private
plans, the broader coverage and coordination of care that private plans can offer has been a boon.
Still, private plans have caused special problems for Medicare's beneficiaries. The aged are an especially
difficult group to offer a choice of health plans, not so much because their average costs are higher but
because those costs are especially concentrated and catastrophic. This creates a powerful incentive to
"cream skim" the healthy and exclude those with more serious and costly health-care needs.

Churning of private plans in and out of Medicare also hits the elderly and disabled particularly hard
because it tends to disrupt the continuity of care that is essential for effective treatment of chronic
problems. And most of-the elderly now in Medicare have little familiarity with private plans, limiting their
ability to anticipate these sorts of problems.
Fixing Medicare's system for paying private plans would help considerably. Currently, Medicare
essentially pays all plans that want to participate in each region the same amount pegged to the average
cost of seniors in the traditional fee-for service program. The incentives for plans are clear: attract
healthier patients, and enter only regions where payments are high. The goal should instead be a level
playing field in which plans attract patients only by delivering things that beneficiaries find of value-
convenience, coordination, integrated benefits, low cost sharing-not by gaming the system.

A level playing field is decidedly not, however, what the 2003 Medicare legislation contained. It's
already clear that the 2003 reforms will be a disaster when it comes to providing drug coverage.
But as bad as the drug benefit is, the way in which the bill coddles the private sector is even more
troubling_ Under the legislation, private _plans will get huge new subsidies to encourage their
participation in the program,
even though recent studies indicate that private plans continue to be overpaid when the healthier
mix of patients they enroll is taken into account.
If that weren't enough, drug coverage under the bill must be provided by private insurers. Except
in regions where private plans don't emerge, beneficiaries cannot get drug coverage through
Medicare itself. And even in such regions, Medicare is prevented from actually serving as a
purchaser-it bears the risk, but farms out management to the private sector. This also means, of
course, that Medicare has no bargaining power under the bill to hold down skyrocketing drug
costs.
Fixing Medicare to correct these egregious overpayments and to allow it to provide drug coverage
directly is essential. But there's another important step that could and should be taken to make
private plans in Medicare work better: Expand it to the non-aged. Doing so would greatly even
out the costs among subscribers by bringing in healthier younger Americans. It would reduce the
prevalence of chronic illness among enrollees and introduce into Medicare a group of
comparatively savvy consumers. Above all, it would make insurance more secure and affordable
for all Americans, ensuring that workers and their families have access to a low-cost policy
providing free choice of doctors and an effectively regulated system of private health plans.

IF THE GOAL OF EXPANDING MEDICARE SEEMS RADICAL OR strange, remember that when
Medicare was enacted in 1965, almost everyone saw it as the first step to universal coverage. That didn't
happen, of course, and now advocates of expanded insurance hardly talk about the program-or even see
it as an obstacle. Yet, just as in 1965, Medicare remains today the most effective, most attractive, most
viable avenue to reach universal health insurance in the United States.
It's also a big and costly federal program, which may be why advocates of universal coverage seem so
reluctant to seize on its untapped potential. But this is exactly backward: The size and federal character of
Medicare are its greatest assets as a platform for expanded coverage. State insurance programs vary
greatly from state to state. Worse, they're "pro-cyclical," meaning they increase their spending when the
economy is good and cut it back precisely when the need is greatest. These are not attractive features
when trying to ensure health security, and neither would be true of a national program.
The assumption that Americans wouldn't accept a huge federal program called Medicare seems
convincing-until one realizes that there already is such a program, it's called Medicare, and Americans
absolutely love it. Medicare is among the most consistently popular programs in the United States, and its
popularity has been enhanced by the addition of private-plan options, despite the evident problems with
their implementation.
Indeed, many Americans don't even think of Medicare as a government program, as is suggested by the
story of an elderly constituent who reportedly jumped up at a congressional town-hall meeting and
declared, "Keep government out of my Medicare." Which is precisely why the program is such a good
institutional route for expanding health coverage. Public-opinion postmortems suggested that Americans
turned against Bill Clinton's health plan because Republicans were able to portray it as unfamiliar,
unpredictable, and threatening. Medicare would not be vulnerable to the same attack.
But isn't Medicare the sort of dreaded single-payer plan that would place the government in charge of the
entire health system? That might have been an effective retort a decade or two ago, but it's hardly
relevant to the program that exists today, with its extensive private-plan options. Since polling on health
care began during the 1930s, the public has been fairly evenly divided between approaches that rely on
public and private insurance. Medicare, in its contemporary form, offers a balance between the two.
Essentially, the reform policy we have in mind would give employers the option of either providing basic
coverage on their own or paying a premium based on their total payroll to purchase Medicare coverage
for their workers. With the premium set at 5 percent of wages, estimates show that about 40 percent of
Americans would be enrolled in Medicare, with the rest in employment-based health plans. The net cost
would be roughly $85 billion. This compares favorably to John Kerry's plan, which would cover
substantially fewer Americans for about $70 billion.

MAKING MEDICARE AVAILABLE TO ALL AMERICANS WOULD,
in a single stroke, address many of the complaints that critics have raised. Though requiring new
financing up front, this would greatly lessen Medicare's long-term cost problem because it would make
program spending less sensitive to the demographic distribution of the American population. By increasing
the share of health spending financed by Medicare, it would also give the government greater leverage to
control costs. And by bringing in younger Americans, it would make it much easier to improve the
program's reliance on private health plans.
But perhaps most crucial, expanding coverage to the uninsured through Medicare would powerfully link
the health security of the aged and non-aged. No longer would young workers without insurance shell out
payroll taxes to support elderly citizens with good coverage. And no longer would advocates of expanded
insurance coverage feel that improving Medicare was at odds with their ultimate aims. Instead of simply
making Medicare more like insurance for workers, this Medicare reform strategy would also make
insurance for workers more like Medicare: secure, affordable, and simple.
To be sure, none of this would be easy. So far has Medicare drifted from the larger goal of universal
coverage that advocates rarely mention the two in the same sentence. But the two should be spoken of
together, for Medicare's future and the future of American health insurance are necessarily intertwined.
The only question is whether Medicare and universal coverage will hang together or hang separately. We
can preserve and improve Medicare for future generations and finally make health insurance secure for all
Americans. Or we can leave each bobbing separately in a sea of hostility to the ideal of a shared fate that
once fired enthusiasm for Medicare-and could do so yet again.

_JACOB S. HACKER is Peter Strauss Family Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale and a
fellow at the New America Foundation. He is completing a book on economic insecurity, The Great Risk
Shift. MARK SCHLESINGER is Professor of Public Health at Yale and editor of the Journal of Health
Politics, Policy and Law. In 2°°3, he directed a study of private plans in Medicare for the National
Academy of Social Insurance. Details of the proposal for Medicare expansion described in this piece can
be found at pantheon.yale.edu/-jhacker.

Bad Medicine
By Lewis H Lapham

Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.

E-Henry David Thoreau
Forty years ago I was not yet thirty, and my father still held to the hope that I would come to my senses,
abandon the practice of journalism, and follow a career in one of the Wall Street money trades. As a
young man during the Great Depression he had labored briefly as a city-room reporter for William
Randolph Hearst's San Francisco Examiner, and he knew that the game was poorly paid and usually
rigged, more often than not a matter of converting specious rumor into dubious fact. Having escaped the
sorrows of Grub Street and gone east to become
an eminently respectable New York banker, also the director of Fortune 500 companies and a member of
long established clubs, he understood the principle on which the society arranges its socioeconomic
seating plan, and for his son he wished a place on the dais, preferably with a view of both the mountains
and the sea.
The lesson was not one that my father knew how to teach in words of his own choosing-possibly because
he believed, and couldn't avoid saying, that even the most successful journalists sit well below the salt-
and so he made a point of introducing me to various captains of industry and finance in whose lives and
works I might discover the happy result of a properly schooled ambition. Over a period of three or four
years in the middle 1960s I found myself in golf foursomes with oil-company presidents, at lunch or
dinner with the senior partner of an investment bank, present in a box at "Yankee Stadium with the
director of a trust, a real estate and a pension fund. None of the instruction led to the desired
consequence, but among all the fond reflections on fortunes won or lost, I remember best the cautionary
tale told by Theodore Weicker while walking on a beach at East Hampton.
A man then in his late sixties, as rich and well-groomed as he was wise in the ways of the world, Weicker
had inherited, together with his brother, the controlling interest in the Squibb pharmaceutical company,
and shortly after the Second World War, divining the possibilities implicit in what subsequently has come
to be known as "globalization," he traveled to the poorer countries of the earth to set up factories
producing drugs for the local pharmacies and hospitals. He learned early in the proceedings that it was
better to deal with dictators than with democracies. Doing business in a democracy necessitates the
bribing of too many people, most of them more than once. "Nobody stays bought," he said. "When
anything goes wrong, somebody to whom you just paid $10,000 stands up in whatever they call a
congress in those places and makes a speech about American exploitation."
The Shah of Iran appreciated the difficulties, and by way of illustration, Weicker told the story of the
Iranian health minister who objected, "on humanitarian grounds, no less," to a widening of the profit
margin on the manufacture of aspirin. For some years Squibb and the Iranian government each had been
content with markups of 100 percent over cost, but then it occurred to the government to rub Aladdin's
lamp for another 100 percent. The health minister refused to approve_the request, and for a period of
several months nothing could be done. The chances for negotiation improved when the health minister
checked into a hospital for a routine appendectomy. As soon as he had been settled on the operating
table, the nurses informed him that the hospital had exhausted its supplies of anesthetic. The surgeon
apologized for the inconvenience while holding a scalpel to the minister's shaved and trembling belly,
explaining further that the pain of incision would be so great as t9 deliver the minister into a state of
shock, which, although momentarily unpleasant, would serve as a kind of anesthetic. The minister
consented to the rise in price.
Weicker delighted in the elegant simplicity of the transaction. No
lawyers, no environmental-impact statement, no waiting around for a report from the ethics committee.
The true nature of the free market revealed with a clarity and precision seldom attained by the professors
of economics at Harvard or Yale. "There you have it," he said. "What business is all about. Building a
better world."
_The cautionary and uplifting tale came to mind in early December last year when President Bush signed
the amendment to the Medicare legislation that delivers 40 million elderly and disabled American citizens
into the custody of the good-hands people operating the nation's insurance and pharmaceutical factories.
The new authorization purports to reduce the cost of prescription drug_
for every needful American, and the White House staff dressed up the photo op in Washington's
Constitution Hall to look like a scene of joyful thanksgiving-a vast throng of well-wishers, military band
music, a bright blue banner emblazoned with the physician's comforting
"Rx," grateful invalids and smiling congresswomen, President Bush in the part of a merry Santa Claus
bestowing upon the multitude the gifts of Christmas yet-to-come. Hats off gentlemen, send for the
champagne. Great, good news; bread upon the waters; pennies raining from heaven and stars falling on
Alabama.
Looked at a little more closely, the scene acquired a somewhat different character and tone. Still
celebratory and festive, of course, but the rejoicing of bandits and thieves as opposed to the thankfulness
of survivors rescued from a shipwreck. It was hard not to think of Eskimos contemplating the bonanza of
a beached whale, the faces in the crowd those of K Street lobbyists eager to congratulate the politicians
(chief among them J. Dennis Hastert, speaker of the House of Representatives, and Dr. Bill Frist, the
Senate majority leader) who had worked so long and hard to unblock the river of government money
now free to water the plains of avarice. It was the genius of Hastert that had formulated the legislation in
681 pages of stupefying prose (and strong-armed the rules of parliamentary procedure in the House to
secure the winning vote at 6:00 A.M. on November 22), and it was the calm and morally anesthetized
composure of Frist that in the Senate on November 25 had placed the scalpel of extortion against the
shaved and naked flesh of the American body politic.
Few or none of the politicians who voted either for or against the bill took the trouble to read it; like
them, I rely for my understanding of it on what I've seen in the newspapers and what I've been told by
informed medical practitioners, but I think it safe to assume that the particulars speak to Weicker's ideal
of free-market perfection. The principal author of the legislation, Thomas A. Scully, set about the task of
writing it in June of last year, while he was employed as the federal administrator of Medicare. At the
same time he expressed the wish to enter the private sector, putting his services up for auction to five
high-priced Washington influence brokers representing the insurance companies, the drug manufacturers,
and the health-maintenance organizations. Eight days after the happiness in Constitution Hall, Scully
resigned his government post to await bids for his tour guide's knowledge of the small print that allots as
little money as possible to individual citizens and as much money as possible to the vested commercial
interests.
Although the government must provide drugs to 40 million people, it may not negotiate a bulk discount; it
must pay whatever price the manufacturer sets or asks-prices that in the recent past have been rising at a
rate of 12 percent a year. The legislation forbids the importing of less expensive drugs from Canada,
prohibits beneficiaries from buying supplemental insurance for drugs unacknowledged by Medicare,
reduces or eliminates payments to as many as 6 million people for whom Medicaid now defrays at least
some of their prescription costs, declares a suspension of payment at precisely the point when most
people might need the most help. An annual premium of $420 covers 75 percent of drug expenditures up
to $2,250; from that point upward the beneficiary must pay, with his or her own money, 100 percent of
the next $3,600 in costs; once the expenditures reach a total of $5,850, the government pays 95 percent
of the subsequent bill. The actuarial tables assume that relatively few people can afford (or will live long
enough) to pay the toll on the bridge across the river of public money flowing out of Washington into the
privately owned catch basins of the medical-industrial complex. As a further means of implementing the
shift of the nation's healthcare burden from the public to the private sector, the legislation offers various
inducements to the life-enhancing profit motive:
A. A $12 billion slush fund from which, over the next ten years, the secretary of health and human
service_ may payout bribes to HMOs otherwise reluctant to accept patients whose illnesses cannot be
prepped for a quid and certain gain.
B. A windfall of $70 billion, also to be provided over the next ten years, to those corporations willing to
continu( prescription-drug coverage for their retired employees, the money to be paid in the form of both
tax deductions and tax-free subsidies.
C. The guarantee of "maximum flexibility" to the private entities seeking to recruit customers from the
general population now served by Medicare. The private entity may exercise the right to "cherry pick"-i.
e., to offer its services only to those individuals not likely to require expensive treatment. The government
must provide for everybody else, for the hopelessly enfeebled and the terminally indigent.
D. The legislation's reliance on the drug companies and the private insurers to curtail spending and control
costs. The provision serves a dual purpose. It assures the eventual destruction of the entire Medicare
apparatus, and it relieves the government of any responsibility for what will be reported as an act of God.
Even the dimmest of Republican congressmen knows that the government doesn't have the $400 billion
that the drug-prescription benefit presumably will cost over the next ten years-doesn't have the cash on
hand or anywhere in anybody's budget projection. The money must be borrowed, at rates of interest yet'
to be determined. In the meantime, while waiting upon possibly unhappy financial events (wars, revenue
shortfalls, stockmarket downturns, sustained recession, etc.) the government retains no control of the fees
charged by the health plans or the prices that the pharmaceutical companies demand for drugs. Let
Mother Nature take her course, and the expenditure estimated at $400 billion easily could become an
invoice presented for $1 A trillion.
Among all the cheats and false suppositions written into the legislation, the assumption that
private entities somehow might be induced to restrain spending should have been the easiest one
to ferret out, if by nobody else than by Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader. The good doctor
knows, probably better than any of his colleagues in the Senate and certainly as well as Ted
Weicker's exemplary surgeon in long-ago Teheran, how to inflate a drug cost, supply an
unnecessary medical procedure, pad a hospital bill. In 1968, established the Hospital Corporation
of America (HCA), which has since become the nation's largest consortium of for-profit hospitals
and medical centers-252 of them in twentythree states. For several decades the company required
each of its hospitals to return a profit of 20 percent a year and to "upcode" their patients by
exaggerating the degree and severity of their illnesses in order to receive, from Medicare, more
generous reimbursements for the delivery of imaginary goods and services. So skilled did the
hospitals become in the arts of medical chicane that in December 2000 HCA admitted to a
defrauding of the federal government so massive that it required the payment of fines in the
amount of $840 million. Two years later, confronted with a supplementary set of similar charges,
the company negotiated a settlement for an additional $631 million. The agreement was reached
on December 18, 2002, two days before Frist was elected Senate majority leader.
Another cautionary tale, but not one supportive of the hope that the cost of the prescription-drug benefit
will be contained by the people dispensing it. The corporate health-care systems that currently hold
captive 160 million Americans (in return for an annual ransom of $952 billion) can't afford the luxury of a
conscience or a heart. They're set up to make money, not to care for sick people, and even if the
managers sometimes might wish it otherwise, how then would they pay themselves life-enhancing
salaries, and what might happen to their faith in the free market? Before investing in private health-care
organizations, the Wall Street financial analysts like to see a low "medical-loss ratio" (Le., that percentage
of the yearly revenues actually allotted to patient care) sufficient to offset the administrative costs (9.5
percent in the private sector as opposed to 1.4 percent in the public sector) as well as fund the annual
compensations awarded to the chief executives-an average of $15.1 million in 2002 at the country's
eleven leading health-care companies. Even in the best of circumstances the miracle of the free market is
never easy to maintain, but over the last few years healthy numbers have become more difficult to find,
and if not to their friends in the Congress and the White House to whom else does a good American turn
for a little help with the building of a better world?
Two days after the House of Representatives passed the legislation by a vote of 220 to 215, Speaker
Hastert's spokesman named the reward expected in return for so handsome an act of friendship. "This is
the thing," he said, "[Hastert] thinks will keep us in the majority for a while." Not forever, not after the
legislation takes effect in 2006, but at least until next November's elections, for as long as the specious
promise can be promoted as an authentic fact and before too many people open their Christmas presents
to find nothing in the box except a card wishing them a happy New Year and hoping that they get well
soon.
Proud of its plundering of the American commonwealth on behalf of its corporate sponsors and political
accomplices, the Bush Administration follows a practice well established by both its near and distant
predecessors. The raids on the federal treasury encouraged by the Reagan Administration took place
under the cover of a darkness represented as ideological enlightenment. Deregulation was the watchword
for the transfer of wealth from the public to the private sector, the $500 billion savings-and-Loan swindle
an exemplary proof of what could be done with the theory that big government (by definition wasteful
and incompetent) deserved to be sold for scrap to the entrepreneurs in our midst (by definition innovative
and efficient) who know how to privatize the profits while socializing the risk and the cost. Wonderful
news, said the Wall Street Journal, pennies falling from heaven and stars on Alabama, more swill for the
pigs. Diligently applied by a succession of industrious thieves over the last twenty-five years, the theory
has resulted in the wreckage of the deregulated airlines, the degradation of the environment, the
monopolies strangling the wit and sense out of the news media, the Enron debacle, most recently the
Haliburton company's theft of $61 million (configured as a 100 percent markup on the price of gasoline)
from the American army in Iraq.
The looting is traditional, the rule of capture as firmly rooted in the country's history as the belief in
angels. Emblazoned with the mottos "Boom and Bust," "Settle and Sell," "Get In, Get Rich, Get Out,"
the winning of the nineteenth-century American West was a public-works project paid for with federal
subsidy. By 1850 everybody traveling west of the Mississippi understood that the country was ripe with
four primary resources-land, minerals, timber, and the government contract and that of these, by far the
richest was the government contract: The trick was to know the right people in Washington, at the state
capitol, and at the county courthouse. When the two sections of the transcontinental railroad were joined
with a golden spike in May of 1869 at Promontory Point, Utah, the patriotic ceremony in the desert
(band music, red, white, and blue bunting, hats in the air) glossed over the swindling mechanics of the
prototypical government cost overrun. The work was so shabby that much of it had to be replaced within
a year, the railroad setting up dummy corporations that rigged the prices of reconstruction, and the
bipartisan majority in Congress content to sell its ethical interest for a percentage' of the gross.
The Medicare drug benefit fits the job description understood not only by the treasury officials in the
Grant Administration but also by the ambulance drivers who picked up Andy Warhol on the summer day
in 1968 when he was shot twice in the stomach by a deranged movie actress. The drivers found Warhol
on a dingy street in SoHo, and on the way to the hospital, not recognizing him as a celebrity and thinking
him as worthless as everything else in a neighborhood not yet trendy, they didn't feel compelled to hurry.
Warhol noticed that the ambulance was stopping for red lights and mumbled something about the urgency
of his wound. The drivers looked at him as carefully as an HMO accountant looks at the pre-
authorization request for a mammogram or a crutch. "For fifteen bucks," one of them said, "we'll turn on
the siren."

Judicial Chainsaw Massacre

By the end of Bush's second term, close to 50 percent of all federal judges could thank him for their
positions.

BY STEPHEN J. FORTUNATO, JR. is an associate justice with the Rhode Island Superior Court.

PLAGIARIZING FROM HIS DEFEATED RIVAL, ON November 3 George W. Bush promised the
nation "a season of hope." For those who view the U.S. Supreme Court and the federal judiciary as
protectors of minorities from unlawful discrimination and as guarantors of civil liberties and constitutional
rights, the reality that lies ahead is more aptly described by Rimbaud: "a season in hell"
Bush is poised, chainsaw in hand, to redefine the meaning of justice and fairness through the nominations
he will be making to the federal bench. With Chief Justice William Rehnquist ailing, his first appointment
is probably not far away, and Justice Antonin Scalia is the likely replacement. Bush repeatedly has
praised Scalia and Justice Clarence Thomas for embodying the judicial philosophy he admires. The short
translation of these endorsements is that Bush wants judges who will not locate in the Constitution any
rights not expressly enumerated, despite the Ninth Amendment's declaration that the lack of an exhaustive
list "shall not be construed to deny or disparage [other rights] retained by the people:'
Given the age and health of the Supreme Court members, Bush will likely appoint three or four justices
during his second term. But because the Supreme Court considers only 90 or so cases a year that go to
full decision, he will do his greatest damage in the lower courts. The federal judiciary of about 800 judges
turns over 20 to 25 percent every four years. Bush already has appointed 22 percent of all sitting federal
judges, and by the end of his second term, close to 50 percent of all federal judges could thank him for
their positions.
Bush screens his appointments primarily for their right-wing ideology in matters of civil rights, civil
liberties and criminal law. A study published in July by law professors Robert Carp, Kenneth Manning
and Ronald Stidham in the respected legal professional journal Judicature evaluates the decisions of Bush
appointees and compares them to those made by other federal judges dating back to the Johnson
administration. Not surprisingly, the George W. Bush judges were rivaled only by those of Ronald
Reagan, siding 65 percent of the time with the government against
claims by individuals seeking to vindicate or expand constitutional rights. This was as true for Bush's
female and minority appointees as it was for his white ones.
Bush's ideological litmus test compounds a longstanding problem with federal judicial nominations: a lack
of relevant experience. For instance, in the domain of criminal law, according to annual studies published
by The Harvard Law Review, 20 percent to 25 percent of the Supreme Court's full opinions address
criminal matters in each term, yet no present member of the High Court ever defended a person accused
of a felony during their pre-judicial careers. On the other hand, while only 5 or 6 percent of the Court's
opinions involved appeals of administrative decisions, four of the Court's members-Rehnquist, Scalia,
Thomas and Breyer have backgrounds in the area of government regulation. Overall, the federal bench is
no different, with 40 percent of the judges drawn from the ranks of prosecutors and many others from
corporate law firms.
Many groups are in jeopardy, but perhaps those most in peril are young African-American males. It is not
hard to make the argument that the u.s. criminal justice system is systemically racist, given African-
Americans account for nearly 45 percent of more than 2 million in jail or prison, while comprising only 12
percent of the general population. Six of 10 juveniles presently confined are minority youth. This state of
events is decimating communities of color, and Bush's appointments, driven by right-wing ideology and
lacking any experience working on behalf of people from poor communities, will only exacerbate this
problem.
The most that progressives can hope for is that a stealth moderate will slip through the vetting process.
Some shrewd candidates have been positioning themselves already. Take Professor Cass Sunstein of the
University of Chicago Law School, a prolific author often described as a moderate, or even a
"liberal:'Writing in the fall issue of Dissent, he pandered to the Bush administration: "By historical
standards, the Bush administration has acted with considerable restraint and with commendable respect
for political liberty. It has not attempted to restrict speech or the democratic process in any way:' As I
said: a season in hell. .

Make Judicious Appointments
BY HANS Johnson

THE MOST DANGEROUS OBSCENITY SPEWING
from the seat of government of late is not the vulgar outburst of Dick Cheney, displacing onto Pat Leahy
his pique at a national electorate numbering his days as veep. Instead it takes the form of an interoffice
memorandum. Leaked nearly two years after its delivery to White House counsel Al Gonzalez, Jay
Bybee's August 2002 blueprint on how to beat a torture rap under international law is the one permission
slip Bush sought from the rest of the world. Seldom has a white paper written on the public's dime given
carte blanche to such cruelty.
Yet unlike Cheney, Bybee cannot be rousted from the public payroll. Even after flouting conscience and
case law to excuse abuse of detainees based on "complete discretion" of "executive power:' he has
political immunity. Why? In March 2003, long before his torture memo saw the light of cyberspace, Bush
succeeded in appointing Bybee to the federal bench, one promotion away from the Supreme Court.
How Bybee gained this seat on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals says as much about this
administration's degraded standard of jurisprudence as it does about its dogged funneling of far-
right ideologues into lifetime slots on the bench.
Don't let Michael Moore's depiction in Fahrenheit 9111 fool you: Getting Caspian crude across
Afghanistan isn't the only pipeline Bush has pushed. In less than four years, the White House has fine-
tuned a system to ram through a slew of judges deferential to corporations and who hold a dim view of
privacy rights and nondiscrimination, particularly as they pertain to gay people.
To do this, Bush and Co. exploited a far-reaching and well-oiled machine of law-school alums and chums
manufactured by the Federalist Society. The National Center for Responsive Philanthropy recently
reported how much the wealthiest right-wing foundations lavished on the club ($4 million in the waning
days of the Clinton era alone). More than previous Republican regimes, Bush has counted on this
network for judicial candidates like Bybee, and then on the airwaves of Big Intolerance Inc. (radio and
TV moguls like James Dobson and Pat Robertson) to tout his chosen nominees. It's working, with
Prussian efficiency.
This black-robed vanguard and its claque have stoked a bonfire beneath each rightsbased interpretation of
the Constitution since the Warren court's obit of Jim Crow in 1954. Given the records and relative youth
of several Bush appointees, plentiful and explosive opinions from these judges are poised to detonate like
land mines far into the future.
The most recent cause for alarm is James Leon Holmes. Holmes' views smack of Christian
Reconstructionism, a strand of austere theology that advocates replacement of secular law with strict
readings of scripture. "The final reunion of church and state will take place at the end of time," Holmes
told a gathering two years ago. "Christ will claim a definitive political power of all creation, inaugurating
an entirely new society based on the supernaturaI:' From a federal judge?
"This is one of the most divisive nominations put forth by the Bush administration, and that is saying a
lot:' said Barry Lynn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
"Holmes' proper place is nowhere near the authority of the federal bench:' said Gloria Feldt, president of
Planned Parenthood. "His infamous comment that rape exceptions to abortion bans are unnecessary
because conception from rape happens 'as often as snow falls in Miami' demonstrates both his blatant
disregard for the facts and his appalling lack of compassion for the 300,000 American women who are
raped each year and the 25,000 of those women who end up pregnant as a result:'
Given the green light to extremism created by one-party rule along Pennsylvania Avenue, it's no wonder
the delusional reactionary Sun Myung Moon received such a warm welcome on Capitol Hill earlier this
year. Yet Moon's emergence is a sideshow next to Bush's exploitation of religion to foment the judicial
juggernaut and feed his own reelection.
This Bush strategy has been a boon to the GOP's corporate contributors, who exported jobs and
lined their pockets while his evangelical base was distracted by a steady stream of anti-gay
propaganda.
GOP leaders pressed for a July Senate vote on a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. And
the Bush-Cheney campaign has sought to extend the sugar high of hate in swing states using petition
drives to trigger votes this fall on similar bans in state constitutions. As of mid-July, eight such proposals
were headed before voters, with one, in Missouri, to be decided on the August 3 primary ballot.
    By making all this possible, GOP fund raisers really live up to the "pioneer" label         the
campaign has proudly pinned on them: They are carrying the country into an uncharted no-man's
land of lower wages, diminished opportunity, snipped-away safety nets, and little recourse
through the courts for anyone at risk. And now they have one more foot soldier doing their bidding
from the bench. On a largely party-line vote July 6, Republicans won Holmes' confirmation by the
Senate, 51 to 46.
Democrats must make a campaign issue of Bush's full-court attack on basic values, such as liberty and
equal protection. They must do two things.
First, progressives must take the Kerry campaign slogan to heart and realize that restoring balance to the
federal judiciary is at the core of "letting America be America again:' It means discarding the paralyzing
presumption that court appointments are so

much esoterica, or "inside baseball;' as one dismissive Washingtonian said.
It means turning nominations like the privacy-phobic Holmes and the gay-baiting Claude Allen into
millstones on the necks of faux-conservative politicians like the radical Bush. Having taken a far- right
detour from their libertarian rhetoric, these Ashcroft-like acolytes want a government so small it can fit in
your bedroom.
And the judiciary's traction as a campaign issue is not limited to sexuality politics. As the case of
wrongfully detained terrorist suspect Brandon Mayfield of Portland, Oregon, illustrates, many Americans
stand to lose when the u.S. government gets all gimlet-eyed toward its citizens. The FBI subjected
Mayfield, an attorney, to an investigation so probing it would make a proctologist wince. Suspecting him
of involvement in the March subway bombings in Madrid, they took loads of evidence from Mayfield's
office and home. Among the latter were "miscellaneous Spanish documents;' which as the New York
Times noted with restraint, "turned out to be Spanish homework belonging to Mr. Mayfield's children:'
For progressives, bringing the issue of the bench home to voters also means articulating the stakes
involved in concrete ways that play in Peoria. Such was the impact of the simple question framed by
NARAL-ProChoiceAmerica in the early '90S, "Who Decides?" That message has proved its staying
power, echoing down the Mall in Washington again this April when a million abortion-rights backers came
to put the issue of Supreme Court appointments front and center in the election-year debate.
Second, progressives must build an infrastructure to promote qualified liberal candidates for the bench.
This network has strong existing foundations to build on, from the American Constitution Society to the
wise and determined advocacy clearinghouse Alliance For Justice. The lesson for progressives in the
rehashing of Reagan's legacy is that at the dawn of the GOP's 12-year reign, Reagan's team created a
delivery system for moving rightwing ideologues from classrooms, faculty offices, think tanks, and the
temples of commerce onto the bench and then up the judicial food chain. For every extremist like Robert
Bork who got bounced, several" others made it through without meaningful public scrutiny or Senate
criticism.
Beyond electing Kerry-Edwards, progressives must help to restore a Democratic -majority in the Senate.
The party can pick up two or more seats this year, which would limit foot-dragging over Kerry nominees.
'In tactical terms, retaking the Senate could prevent derailing of liberal and moderate appointees by
denying GOPers the bully
_pulpits possessed by committee chairs. And it could deaden demands, like those of the last six years of
the Clinton administration, that Democratic aspirants be paired or packaged with reactionary counterparts
in order to proceed,
Since the Republican takover in 1994, Democrats have made feasts of such halfloaves. But with the
political landscape shifting in our favor this year, we need to raise our standards and seize the day when it
dawns for us next year.

Blocking Mr. Torture
By James Schamus
As PROGRESSIVES WONDER AT HOW BEST TO direct-and revive-the struggle to return America to
its basic values, a dizzying number of worthy causes, coalitions and strategies present themselves. But
one immediate issue must be engaged: America has become a country that tortures its prisoners.
The mainstream media uses the word "torture" to describe those (hundreds of) documented cases of
"isolated" incidents, performed by those "few bad apples" at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. When it comes
to the pervasive use of torture at Guantanamo's Camp XRay and scores of other secret military prisons
around the globe, the media has preferred the term "abuse:' It's a word that takes the edge off.
That may be changing with the leak late in November to the New York
Times of a confidential report by the International Committee of the Red
Cross that said the Bush administration had institutionalized a system
that uses "refined and repressive methods "tantamount to torture" to
extract information from prisoners at Guantanamo. "The construction of
such a system, whose stated purpose is the production of intelligence, can
not be considered other than an intentional system of ( cruel, unusual and degrading treatment and a form
of torture:' said the report.
The show trials of low-level military personnel have allowed the administration to evade political
responsibility for the systematic torture, rape and murder of American-held captives. In the lull between
sentencings (which look like traffic citations compared to what the average perp gets for holding an ounce
of crack), the public is reminded that military"investigations" are happening, have been happening, or will
be happening. Donald Rumsfeld took "full responsibility" on May 7-though he has been too busy leveling
Fallujah and torpedoing the intelligence reform bill to serve hard time.
Against this background noise, George Bush is grooming Alberto Gonzales, White House legal counsel
and a long-time political ally from Texas, for the Supreme Court. The first step in this process is to install
him as attorney general. As White House sources told the New York Times, his Senate confirmation
process for attorney general will be a dry run for a future Supreme Court nomination.
In addition to serving as the president's lawyer, Gonzales is, in fact, Mr. Torture himself: the man who
laid out for the Bush administration the arguments for voiding the Geneva Conventions and end-running
the War Crimes Act, thereby providing legal cover for the horrors inflicted on those unfortunate enough
to disappear into the new American global gulag.
Gonzales' January 25, 2002 memorandum sanctioning the Bush administration's torturing ways has
become an infamous addition to the post-Orwellian canon. In it, he argues that President Bush runs the
risk of being prosecuted as a war criminal-unless he decrees through an executive order that what
Gonzales termed the "quaint" Geneva Conventions don't apply to his own behavior. To put it another
way, Bush doesn't break the law if he decides that he's above the law.
Gonzales doesn't appear to have a predilection for inflicting pain. He'd rather simply kill people. As death
penalty expert Alan Bedow wrote in the Washington Post, before Bush promoted him to the Texas
Supreme Court, Gonzales penned the first 57 of the "execution summaries" of the 152 men and women
whose state-sponsored death Governor Bush then signed off on. Some of Gonzales' summaries are
infamous, like the one that helped send Terry Washington and his 58 IQ points up to heaven.
The fight to defeat Gonzales' appointment will be a tall order. Just days after his nomination, Sen. Patrick
J. Leahy (D- Vt.) finally got around to taking the famously obscene advice Dick Cheney gave him on the
floor of the Senate last June- "Go fuck yourself' Standing side by side, Leahy told reporters that Gonzales
is "a uniting figure:' "I like him:' said Leahy. "Judge Gonzales is no Attila the Hun:'
Although the Democrats have lost seats in the Senate, they still have the numbers to support a filibuster.
If the Democratic Party is to mean anything to the millions of activists who kept it alive this year,
Democrats in Congress should be put on notice that Gonzales' confirmation is a fight they cannot skip. It
is time to play Eminem's new CD, Encore-at 125 decibels, 24 hours a day-until the Democrats pledge
to filibuster.        .

Take Back America
The first thing Bush should have done is raise wages, regulate energy and pass a national healthcare
program with price controls. As a general rule, any politician opposed to national healthcare with price
controls should be shot dead on sight. You name it, Bush has made it worse. For that reason he is
Wanted
Dead
along with the following:
Karl Rove
Douglas Feith
Paul Wolfowitz
Newt Gingrich
Ahmed Chalabi
Naor Gilon of the Israeli Embassy
Morris Amitay at AIPAC, JINSA vice chair
Raymond Tanter
Frank Gaffney at CSP
Ariel Sharon and leaders of the Licud Party
David Steinmann, chairman of JINSA
Dore Gold, adviser to Sharon
Natan Sharansky, Chairman of One Jerusalem
Gary Bauer-American Values, Christian Zionists
Roberta Combs-Christain Coalition,
Daniel Pipes-Middle East Forum
Mort Klein -ZOA
Members of ZOA-Zionist Organization of America
all those at AIPAC
Sharansky
Rob Sobhani
Meyrav Wurmser
Uri Lubrani
Joshua Muravchik
John Bolton
Law Firm of Feith and Zell
Those at CDI, Center for democracy in Iran
George Will
Richard Harwood
Meg Greenfield
Richard Scaife
Bill OReilly
Matt Drudge
Milton Freidman
Charles Murray
Samuel Huntington
Henry Kissinger
William O. DeWitt
Bushs recent choice to head the CIA
Elliot Abrams
Richard L. Armitage
William Bennett
Jeffrey Bergner
John Bolton
Paula Dobriansky
Francis Fukuyama
Robert Kagan
Zalmay Khalilzad
William Kristol
Richard Perle
Peter W. Rodman
Donald Rumsfeld
William Schneider Jr.
Vin Weber
R. James Woolsey
Robert B Zoellick
George Gilder
Michael Novak
William Tucker
Philip Terzian
Peter Weyrich
Paul Weyrich
Irving Kristol
Plutarch
Gibbon
Edmund Burke
Jerry Falwell
Norman Podhoretz
Rupert Murdoch
Gordon Liddy
Ralph Reed
Oliver North
Peggy Noonan
David Gelernter
Robert Bork
Marvin Olasky
Pat Robertson
Richard Mellon Scaife
Richard John Neuhaus
Myron Magnet
Dinesh D'souza
Tom DeLay
Allen Greenspan
Lawrence Franklin
Harold Rhode
Michael Ledeen
Members of the following organizations:
Business Roundtable
The Bradley Foundation
Smith Richardson Foundation
Scaife Family Foundations
John M Olin Foundations
Koch Family Foundation
Castel Rock Coors Foundation
JM Foundation
Philip M McKenna Foundation
The Federalist Society
The American Spectator
The Heritage Foundation
Accuracy in the Media
Center for the Study of Popular Culture
The CATO Institute
Jewish Institute for National Security
The Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies
Center for Security Policy
The Zionist Organization of America
AIPAC
CSP
Project for the New American Century
American Enterprise Institute
Hoover Institute
Hudson Institute
Manhattan Institute
Citizens for a Sound Economy
Center for Democracy in Iran
Reason Foundation
National Center for Policy Analysis
Competitive Enterprise Institute
Free Congress Foundation
Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis
Those responsible for forcing Bill Clinton to cut welfare, AFDC, corporate taxes and Capital Gains Taxes
Everyone at Fox News and the Rush Limbaugh Show
Bush and his adminstration
All those who supported Bushs tax cuts for the wealthy
Kenneth Star and all those responsible for the attempt to impeach Bill Clinton
All those reponsible for forcing Europe to cut social welfare and taxes on the wealthy
All those who deregulated american industries
The CEO's of america's oil companies
All those responsible for manipulating the energy market in California in order to force the state to sign
energy contracts at inflated prices
All those who prevented them from renegotiating those contracts
All those who prevented the Clinton administration from passing national healthcare
All those opposed opposed to complete regulation or nationalization of the healthcare industry including
the pharmaceudical industry
All those opposed to making the healthcare not-for-profit
Those reponsible for shock therapy anywhere
Those responsible for privatizations anywhere
Those responsible for telling any country to cut social welfare and cut taxes for the wealthy
The people who forced Dan Rather to retire because he told the truth
All conservative judges
MSNBC Scarborough Country
Cal Thomas Commentary

You may contact Robert Jastrebski at:
Rjastrebski@peoplepc.com

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