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June, 2004 |
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June 22, 2004 - Last spring Jack Ryan handily defeated his primary election opponents to become the Republican candidate to succeed maverick conservative Republican Senator Peter Fitzgerald who decided that he had enough of Washington and did not seek a second term. Ryan seemed to be the GOP’s best chance to hold on to the Illinois seat in an election in which every seat’s importance is magnified by the narrowness of the margin of control of the Senate. The Democrat candidate, State Senator Barak Obama, is a certified liberal in the State House who represents the Hyde Park area in Chicago the has sent liberals to Springfield and Washington for generations. Son of a Nigerian student and a Little Rock coed with an Arabic sounding name Senator Obama enjoys a 20 percent lead in the early polls.
Just when the Clinton book came out and gave the Republicans a renewed focus on Monica Lewinski to drown out questions about the justification of the War in Iraq, Halliburton contracts and the Abu Ghraib scandals the Republicans’ Great White Hope finds himself in the midst of his own sex scandal that tames the Lewinski tiger. There have been hints simmering since a Primary opponent questioned the contents of the sealed file of Ryan’s California divorce. Ryan responded by saying that the matters in the sealed file affected only the custody of the couple’s son and it would remain sealed to protect the child. The Chicago Tribune filed suit and yesterday the file was opened....click here for entire article June 21, 2004 - The Bush Campaign is gearing up in Illinois. Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) and former Illinois Governor Jim Edgar will meet the press today to anoint Edgar as the Chairman of the Bush campaign in Illinois. It is a felicitous choice, but just for which candidate is unclear. The State Republican Party was soundly thrashed in the 2002 elections in the throes of a bribery and corruption scandal that saw the then incumbent Governor, George Ryan decide not to seek a second term and who now faces trial on Federal corruption charges, Polls show Kerry with a substantial lead in Illinois. Edgar had his own brushes with scandal as Governor. During an investigation into overcharging on a no-bid contract to modernize Illinois’ Department of Revenue computer system it was revealed that shortly before the contract had been awarded the Governor had accepted a $4000 state of the art laptop computer from the contractor. Two high ranking Edgar administration officials and top company officers were convicted in the scheme but Edgar himself escaped indictment....click here for entire article June 15, 2004 - In 1991 President George H.W. Bush took us to war when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and threatened Saudi Arabia. That was necessary lest the western world’s supply of vital energy fall into the hands of an undemocratic regime. It was in America’s vital interest that Kuwaiti and Arabian oil remain in the hands of two absolute monarchs willing to do business with the United States. The war ended in three months when Saddam was pushed out of Kuwait, his army decimated, and his pernicious influence in the Persian Gulf was contained by the sanctions imposed on him in defeat. A decade later President George W. Bush took us to war in response to the September 11th attack against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, symbolic targets exemplifying America’s financial and military strength dominating the post Cold War world. The object of that war was to apprehend Osama Bin Laden to justice and to destroy his Al Qaida terrorist network. When the Taliban Regime refused to render the criminals up the Taliban was pushed out and Osama went on the run. With the mission partially accomplished, the Taliban and Al Qaida having taken to the hills, the President turned his attention to the unfinished business of Ba`athist Iraq....click here for entire article June 11, 2004 - Thinking about what I could write today that would show a proper respect for the solemnity of the day’s events I was struck by an image of a hedge fence pole where perpendicular fence lines meet, set at the corner and braced to resist the tension of two forces pulling in different directions with its foundation deep in the Illinois soil. A Stetson hat, pristine white, crisply creased, its band unstained by sweat as if the props manager had freshly fetched it from wardrobe, set cleanly atop the corner post at a jaunty angle. Ronald Reagan grew up in the same kind of Illinois town that I did and like my father before me did. It was a town of farmers. Like me, and like my father before me, he was a town kid whose father made a modest living selling the things that farmers need, providing for them that which they could not produce on their productive farms. We, he and I and my father, were not farmers but the strength and endurance of the farmer’s life filled the atmosphere in which we grew up. Our friends were farmers. Our teammates were farmers and we depended on farmers. They formed the core of our existence and yet we were just outside that fence looking over the barbed wire. We were of the land but not quite part of it....click here for entire article June 10, 2004 - We will preserve for our children this last best hope of man on earth or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. That last best hope of which Ronald Reagan spoke so eloquently four decades ago is still with us though our vision of it is fading in the first glimmers of the dawn of this new millennium. That hope does not lie in the might of America’s armies, their machines and manpower arrayed to sweep across a weakened world. It does not lie in America’s ability to impose its will on the people of a struggling world driving them as cattle into a pen guarded by America’s might. Mankind’s last best hope lies in America’s heart; in the willingness of its people to live by the credo that has been with us from America’s birth. All men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. At the moment of the nation’s birth; when the Constitutional Convention had completed its work Benjamin Franklin remarked that throughout that hot Philadelphia summer he had contemplated the carving decorating the back of the President’s chair speculating whether it represented a rising or a setting sun. We are called upon in this dawn of a new century; at the brink of a new millennium to engage in a similar speculation as we choose whether to turn to meet a sunrise or continue toward the gathering twilight of a setting sun....click here for entire article June 9, 2004 - The doctrine of sovereign immunity has its roots in the medieval common law of England. Under that doctrine which is now a part of the common law of each of the States and of the United States the sovereign cannot be hailed into court to answer for wrongs unless the state or the United States has permitted such a legal suit by appropriate legislation. In early 2003 a Pentagon working group commissioned by the Secretary of Defense to prepare a brief defending the treatment of people who might be detained under the authority of the President of the United States. The working group reported on March 6, 2003 just 13 days before the first strike opened the Second Iraqi War and opined: “In order to respect the President’s inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign, 18 U.S.C. § 2340A {the prohibition against torture} must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken pursuant to his Commander-in-Chief authority. Congress lacks authority under Article I to set the terms and conditions under which the President may exercise his authority as Commander-in-Chief to control the conduct of operations during a war. The President’s power to detain and interrogate enemy combatants arises out of his constitutional authority as Commander-in-Chief. A construction of Section 2340A that applied the provision to regulate the President’s authority as Commander-in Chief to determine the interrogation and treatment of enemy combatants would raise serious constitutional questions. Congress may no more regulate the President’s ability to detain and interrogate enemy combatants than it may regulate his ability to direst troop movements on the battlefield. Accordingly, we would construe Section 2340A to avoid this constitutional difficulty, and conclude that it does not apply to the President’s detention and interrogation of enemy combatants pursuant to his Commander-in-Chief authority.” In our system of constitutional representative democracy sovereignty does not rest in the President of the United States in any capacity. Sovereignty resides in the people. The person who temporarily occupies that high office has no higher legal status as President than the meanest homeless person sleeping on a subway grate wrapped against the cold in yesterday’s discarded newspaper. Both are equally subject to the sovereignty of the people expressed in their laws....click here for entire article June 8, 2004 - The Wall Street Journal broke the story yesterday. Before the Second Iraqi War was launched the Secretary of Defense commissioned a team of lawyers headed by Air Force general counsel, Mary Walker to prepare a war crimes defense brief. Building on the Justice Department’s Jan. 22, 2002 memorandum holding that the Geneva Convention did not apply in Afghanistan the working group produced a memorandum dated March 6, 2003 claiming that the President of the United States in his capacity as Commander in Chief is subject to neither international treaties nor United States laws against torture. It goes on to hold that military personnel who engaged in torture were not guilty under either international treaties or United States laws against torture if they believed they were acting on orders from their superiors. I am sure of one thing after more than 30 years of the practice of law. Lawyers don’t produce a defense brief before the fact unless they are asked for it and they are provided with the details of what their principle proposes to do. It is disturbing that the memorandum adopts Richard Nixon’s view of the Presidency, “If the President does it, it means that it is not illegal.” It is more disturbing that the Secretary of Defense asked for that opinion and that the Justice Department and White House legal staffs signed off on it. It gives the lie to the Administration’s few bad apples defense to the Abu Ghraib affair....click here for entire article June 7, 2004 - Medical science is neither Liberal nor Conservative. There is neither a Democrat nor a Republican way to find cures for disease. Medical science is advanced in the laboratory by painstaking research, not by political stump speeches catering to one or another ideology. There was a time when the world was a flat plain bounded by the horizon and covered by the dome of heaven; when the earth was the center of the universe around which all things; the sun, moon, and stars revolved. To believe otherwise was to court a horrible death as punishment for the crime of heresy. Human knowledge has advanced since then and it is no longer restrained by the current politically accepted religious orthodoxy – or at least so we thought. Whether the sun revolved around the earth or the earth followed its orbit around the sun made no difference at all in the lives of the people of the 15th Century. The sun still rose in the east each morning and set in the west each evening. The seasons still passed from winter’s chill through spring’s blossoming to summer’s heat and autumn’s harvest. That the Church and secular authorities stifled the expansion of human knowledge did not have a direct impact on the lives of the men in the fields or the families seeking their daily bread in the cities. We have come a long way since then. Our vision has extended to the stars and galaxies in their pirouetting dance through our boundless universe. We have plumbed the depths of the ocean to discover new living neighbors on our own planet and we send to learn if life once flourished on our neighboring world. We have come a long way since Galileo stood accused before the Inquisition for daring to publish a scientific truth....click here for entire article June 7, 2004 - This week will be devoted to memorializing Ronald Wilson Reagan, the 40th President of the United States. On television the men and women who knew him and worked closely with him will share their memories of his life and career. Our newspapers will be filled with column inch after column inch describing his contribution to America’s political fabric accentuating his vision of a young nation eternally greeting the promise of a new dawn. Ironically he died at the beginning of the week when Bill Clinton’s 900 page memoir hit the book sellers’ shelves. There will be no memoir from Ronnie Reagan’s pen and that is a tragedy. His death also came on the eve of the 60th anniversary of D-Day, an occasion filled with the shared memories of the men who created that watershed of history with their own lives. June 6, 2004 - The sun has set on an American icon. Ronald Wilson Reagan, 40th President of the United States and the eleventh of twelve to serve two full terms, completed his journey through history on June 5th, 2004. Even those of us who found many of the policies he championed abhorrent to American principles and others foolhardy and destructive of the nation’s strength and purpose could not muster dislike for the man. At his best he called upon us to return to the traditional values of an America that had existed only in the scripts for movies in which he appeared. At his worst he permitted a shadow government in the White House basement to violate America’s laws and principles in the scandal that became Iran-Contra. Through it all he commanded the world’s respect and our affection. In his campaign speeches he called on us to see the dawn of Morning in America. He was at his best when he spoke with confidence and conviction. “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” became a ringing slogan while his renewal of the Arms race both pushed the USSR over the edge of bankruptcy while America kept its balance at the edge of the precipice. He left his successor with an economy in crisis and a foreign policy that left a tyrant astride the Euphrates, a radical theocracy implacably opposed to America stretching from the Caspian to the Persian Gulf, and client guerillas who would become Al Qaida stalking Russian soldiers in the mountain passes of Afghanistan...click here for entire article June 4, 2004 - George Tenet, citing the usual “personal reasons”, resigned less than 24 hours after the White House announced that the President was consulting with a private outside attorney to represent him in connection with the Grand Jury investigating the public exposure of Valerie Plame as a clandestine CIA operative. That the President feels that the prudent course is to seek the advice of a lawyer indicates that the grand jury’s probe is getting closer to the Presidential posterior. Washington, more than anywhere else in the country, is a place where actions are often driven by rumor and Dame Rumor has been very active in DC social circles of late. Some of her tales are making it onto the internet. One found a wider currency on Capitol Hill Blue, the self described oldest, established, news site on the World Wide Web. It claims that grand jury testimony indicates that Karl Rove engineered the leak of Ms. Plame’s identity and the President knew of the planned leak in advance. Now before you dismiss web exclusives based on Washington rumor and appearing on obscure web-sites out of hand you should recall that it was just such a web publication on of Dame Rumor’s tales on The Drudge Report that set in motion the Monica Lewinski scandal and brought President Clinton before a Washington Grand Jury on the road to impeachment. Rumor, even if unsubstantiated, is sometimes quite accurate. This one is at least circumstantially substantiated by the President seeking legal advice...click here for entire article June 3, 2004 - When Kenneth Starr compelled President Clinton to testify before a Federal Grand Jury it opened a can of worms to confound his successor. The majestic thing about the rule of law is that it is non-partisan. Rules that apply to a Democrat President apply with equal vigor to a Republican Chief Executive. There is a new Grand Jury investigating what may be a Federal crime unrelated to the President’s duty and their investigation seems to be edging toward George W. Bush. Edging so close, in fact, that the President has found it prudent to retain outside counsel to represent him in the matter. That is another lesson that the Starr investigation taught us. White House counsels aren’t covered by attorney-client privilege. White House counsels, or any other government paid attorney, can be hauled before the Grand Jury and compelled to testify as to their boss’s conversations. In light of that the President’s prudent course is to hire an outside lawyer. The White House is playing coy on the question of whether the President has been summoned to appear before the Grand Jury dodging the question at today’s press briefing while acknowledging that the President had hired a lawyer. It is not fair to infer from that fact that the President has something to be worried about with respect to the Novak leak. He is not a lawyer and may be simply consulting with one to advise him as to Grand Jury procedure. He may be simply asking assistance in framing his testimony to carefully reveal the truth without revealing too much of it. What ever the reason his is employing a lawyer it is fair to infer that the Grand Jury has given him some reason to do so...click here for entire article June 2, 2004 - It would be the stuff of a political comedy if it were it not so serious. A top ranking official with access to the nation’s most secret intelligence coups gets drunk one night and spills the beans about an intelligence coup to a shady international operator. We have broken the code and are reading the Iranian diplomatic mail. The operator is former Pentagon favorite Ahmed Chalibi, the Iraqi exile who was Donald Rumsfeld’s choice to head the government of Free Iraq. Who is the high ranking Administration official? We don’t know yet but somebody in Washington knows and most probably several somebodies. What we do know is that Chalibi; who opened a Teheran office and cultivated Iranian contacts with Pentagon approval and encouragement; let the Iranians know that someone in Washington was a talkative drunk. What we do know is that the Iranians started slipping test messages designed to discover whether their codes had been compromised into their coded diplomatic transmissions. One such message falsely claimed that a secret cache of weapons had been discovered at a specific site in Iraq. What we now know is that the CIA is working on a short list of people who both had contact with Chalibi and knew that the code had been broken. The list includes Wolfowits, Feith, Perle and Rumsfeld himself at the Pentagon and the Vice-President and his staff, all of whom have been stalwart Chalibi champions and who had access to the information that Chalibi passed on to the Iranians. We have a big problem when somebody high in the administration with access to the folder of our deepest national security secrets has a tongue too easily loosened with alcohol and a less than circumspect selection of drinking partners...click here for entire article June 2, 2004 - The price of a barrel of crude oil has soared to record levels dragging the pump price of a gallon of gasoline along with it. Oil company profits have climbed with the price of crude. The Bush administration continues its policy of buying oil on the spot market, diverting it from the stream of consumption into the nation’s strategic oil reserve. At the same time the military, fighting two wars in the Middle East is soaking up millions of gallons of fuel every day as it patrols the roads and highways of Afghanistan and Iraq, flies combat air support missions and patrols the seas. As the price of crude rises the analysts tell us that it is a result of increased global demand, citing the massive increase in Chinese consumption coupled with uncertainty of supply raised by unrest in the Middle East. What is not mentioned is the consumption dislocations resulting from combat and patrol operations. The effect of sudden fuel price increases are being felt across the economy and having an impact on every segment of it. Fuel cost increases raise the cost of bringing goods of every description to the market place and, ultimately, the consumer price of those goods. The construction industry, a bright spot in the uneven economic recovery, will feel the price rise in the costs of getting building materials to the jib site. The troubled airline industry, barely recovered from the effects of 9-11 on its market, is being forced into market depressing fare increases and fuel surcharges. Price inflation, kept under control with 15 years of fiscal discipline and enlightened monetary policy, is looming as a result of energy costs that the Federal Reserve’s Alan Greenspan cannot control and that the Republican Administration and Congress lack the political will to tackle...click here for entire article June 1, 2004 - It is June 1, 2004 and the transfer of what President Bush calls “full sovereignty” is only 29 days away. Apparently the Iraqi people or at least the people of the Iraqi Governing Council are taking the President at his word. For a week now the United States as represented by L. Paul Bremer, has been pushing the IGC to name Adnan Pachachi, the US choice, as Iraq’s interim President. But the IGC had its own choice, Sheik Ghazi al-Yawar. Bremer, presumably speaking for the President of the United States, threatened to veto the IGC choice if it did not choose Pachachi. Having already acquiesced in the choice of Dr Allawi, a CIA asset, as the Interim Prime Minister of Free Iraq the IGC balked. Today the Bush Administration backed down. Mr. Pachachi announced that he did not want the job – saving face for Ambassador. Bremer and President Bush. The IGC met and anointed Sheik Yawar as its nominee as Interim President of Free Iraq and Bremer apparently approved the choice. As the IGC met the air was rent by the rattle of gunfire, the crash of explosions and the roar of American warplanes as the US fought off an attack on the Green Zone. The military insurrection rumbled on as the Administration surrendered to the political insurrection as the IGC called Bremer’s bluff and America’s Viceroy folded his hand...click here for entire article |
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