michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Oct 24, 2006 14:35:54 GMT 4
"Broken Government"Upcoming "Broken Government" 6-part series on CNN with "tells it like it is" Jack Cafferty www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/broken.government/ In a year in which American voters will make critical decisions on issues from the war on terror to scandal in Washington to an exploding national debt, CNN’s "Broken Government" examines all branches of government and explores how much of the system may be broken beyond repair. The series premiered Thursday, Oct. 19 at 7 p.m. ET. A six-part series then airs Oct. 23, 24, 26, 27, 28 and 29 at 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. ET. Each day, I will be posting transcripts from this program. You still have time watch some of these shows as they air.......Michelle"There is one thing stronger than all the armies of the world and that is ‘an idea’ whose time has come."- Victor HugoCNN LIVE EVENT/SPECIAL Broken Government Aired October 19, 2006 - 19:00 ET PART 1 of 2JACK CAFFERTY, CNN ANCHOR: So I saw this great bumper sticker the other day, it read had enough? We're being bled to death, literally and figuratively in Iraq and Afghanistan. We have no border security to speak of, no port security fives year after 9/11, Social Security and Medicare well on their way to insolvency. Our national debt is staggering. China is kicking our butt. Like I said, had enough? Our leaders lie to us and steal from us, and do it all with a straight face. They don't think we get it. I think we do. I honestly think the upcoming midterm elections will be breathtaking in the message that deliver to Washington. It's my fervent hope that every single incumbent on the ballot will lose. It's time to start over.ANNOUNCER: This is a CNN election special, BROKEN GOVERNMENT. From our broadcast center in New York City, here's Jack Cafferty. CAFFERTY: Good evening. We're on the verge of what could well be the most important midterm election in this country's history. Look at these numbers. They're shocking. Sixty-eight percent think this country is headed in the wrong direction; more than two thirds. Sixty-four percent against the war in Iraq. Sixty-one percent disapprove of the job President Bush is doing leading the country. Oh and the war in Iraq was his idea. And then there's Congress, a joke. Seventy-one percent disapprove of the job Congress is doing. The other, what is it, 29 percent they just haven't read the paper. Our government is broke and Congress has failed to do anything meaningful. They vote on amendments for flag burning and gay marriage, but nothing on immigration, Social Security, health care, nothing that matters to the middle class in this country. The Bush administration has all but ignored the Constitution since 9/11, all in the name of national security and fighting terrorism. We're being overrun by millions of illegal aliens and Washington does nothing. There are serious questions about the integrity of our elections and our reputation overseas, well that's pretty much shot now, isn't it. We sent crews around the country to find out what you think about all this and here's some of what's on your mind. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What frustrates me to see our elected officials act like a bunch of second graders. And that's not even fair. Second graders have better discourse in the classroom than our representative does. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: How useful is this Congress when they can't do anything about immigration or the war, you know, bipartisanship. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Both parties, if they're not broken, they're in bad shape. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I don't think they're doing a good job. I think that they're not listening to people, they have their own agenda. They're not working as hard as they should be. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I think everything is running pretty smooth. I think with the gas prices dropping back down and everything, I think they're getting their act together. The president is going to get reelected again this -- next term I believe. (END VIDEO CLIP) CAFFERTY: Well, don't bet your lunch money. Joe Johns joins us now with a look not at what Congress has done for us, but rather what they're doing to us. Joe? JOE JOHNS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Jack, it's been called the do- little, do-nothing, dysfunctional Congress. We counted the black marks on the 109th Congress and it is a rough list. (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) JOHNS (voice-over): Number ten, all pay, no work. Every member of the House of Representatives makes at least $165,000 a year. So far, they have spent only 94 days in session. That's almost $1,800 a day. Nice work if you can get it. Nine -- what illegal immigrants? Wasn't immigration reform supposed to be about the most important issue this year? And what did they do about it? They voted to build a fence. Eight -- what are you wearing? The skanky way Florida Republican Mark Foley is reported to have talked to former congressional pages in electronic messages and when he got caught like a real a profile encourage, he announced he was gay, abused as a teenager by an unnamed priest, checked into alcohol rehab, and left his colleagues to sort out the mess. REP. DENNIS HASTERT (R-IL), SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE: And he deceived me too. JOHNS: Seven -- oh say can you thieve. Duke Cunningham, a former fighter jock turned jailbird, once seemed like a poster child for patriotism until it turned out the California Republican was on the take and getting paid with just about everything but the stars and stripes. Six -- the booze made me do it. The congressional pilgrimage to rehab that featured some household names this year, including Foley, Ohio Republican Bob Ney -- more about his later -- and Rhode Island Democrat Patrick Kennedy. People wished them well, but were left wondering if rehab isn't just an easy way out. Five -- addicted to pork? The Congress is going to have to face it, it's addicted to pork, bridges to nowhere, a museum to honor the folks responsible for the New Orleans levees that failed, emergency money for non emergencies, and at the end a record deficit. SEN. GEORGE ALLEN (R), VIRGINIA: The fellow over here with the yellow shirt... JOHNS: Four -- the macaca moment. Senator George Allen of Virginia called a guy of Indian decent who was shadowing him macaca, then claimed he didn't know what it meant. Well it means monkey. Three -- throwing in the towel. Texas Republican Tom DeLay, he was the House majority leader got indicted in Texas in a case that was far from water tight, denied wrongdoing and then up and quit. What's up with that? The Capitol's tough guy, "The Hammer", gave up before fighting it out in court. Two -- frostbite, the case of the cold-hard cash. The feds said they videotaped Louisiana Democrat Bill Jefferson accepting $100,000 then found 90 grand in his freezer. They claim they're investigating several allegedly shady deals. He hasn't been charged with anything and says he hasn't done anything wrong. And the winner is number one on the list of dubious accomplishments of the 109th Congress, Jack Abramoff and Bob Ney, the corrupt couple, the lobbyist and the mayor of Capitol Hill united by guilty pleas, things of value exchanged for official acts, plus a passion for golf, meals, tickets to sporting events and power. Jack is out of the lobbying group. But Ney is still a congressman, still cashing paychecks until his colleagues throw him out -- at $1,800 a day who can blame him -- a tip of the fedora to old Jack, Bob and a session that many would sooner forget. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: 2006. JOHNS: Now the truth is, obviously a lot of people ask, why can't Congress get anything done, and if you ask people in Washington, they'll say well, in the first place, Congress was set up to slow things down. The one thing of course they haven't been able to slow down is the allegations of corruption. CAFFERTY: One of my favorite things they pulled this year is they appropriated $20 million from the general treasury -- they've already reached in and taken this money out of our pockets for a victory celebration for the war in Iraq. If they would put that money in a C.D., by the time we win that thing in Iraq, they could pay off the national debt. (LAUGHTER) CAFFERTY: Good to see you. JOHNS: Thanks. CAFFERTY: All right. Joe Johns. Republicans bogged down by scandal, bloody war leading up to these midterm elections. We'll have more on that as we move through the hour. First the Democrats -- history suggests they're perfectly capable of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. The Republicans are doing everything they can to hand the Democrats the election. The question is, will they take it. Candy Crowley is in Asheville, North Carolina for us tonight. Candy, you could get rich selling tickets to people to watch the Democrats try to get their stuff organized. CANDY CROWLEY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Absolutely. Listen, Jack, before we start this piece, I want to ask you a question, ask you to do something I think is difficult for you. I want like a one-word answer here. I'm going the say something. You respond with one word -- Democrats. CAFFERTY: Huh? (LAUGHTER) CAFFERTY: Huh? CROWLEY: Well OK, that's not exactly the answer we got, but pretty close. (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) CROWLEY (voice-over): Free association. I say Democrat, you say... UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I don't know if it stands for anything now. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Losers. No, I don't mean that like, you know, they are losers. I mean it in a form of they're not standing up. CROWLEY: One may have something to do with the other. Democrats have been the minority in Congress for 12 years. When George Bush leaves the White House, Democrats will have occupied the Oval Office for 12 of the last 40 years, which brings us to the next question -- what's wrong with these people. Number one -- no backbone. DAVID "MUDCAT" SAUNDERS, DEMOCRATIC STRATEGIST: We do not fight back. This wuss factor in the Democratic Party is real. CROWLEY: Two -- all policy, no pulse. GOV. BRIAN SCHWEITZER (D), MONTANA: They keep talking about these issues in a very complicated way where all of the money's coming from, where it's all going to go, how long this program's going to last. And people are looking at their watch wondering how do I get out of here. DOUG HATTAWAY, FORMER GORE ADVISER: Democrats need to stop trying to sell people policy papers and start talking people's heart, as well as their head. CROWLEY: Every since the tumultuous early 70's when the Democrats got tagged as the party of acid, amnesty and abortion, they have been on the losing side of the values debate, the defense debate and oh yes, the guns debate. Al Gore and John Kerry lost every Southern state and most of the mid and interior West. BRUCE REED, DEMOCRATIC LEADERSHIP COUNCIL: Our biggest problem is that of late we've been losing elections. CROWLEY: Maybe this is the year that proves the exception and Democrats will sweep into power, so when I say 2008 Democrats running for president you say... UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Well, right now, they seem to stand for opposing George Bush, so I think they need to figure something else out. (END VIDEOTAPE) CROWLEY: If Democrats do sweep into power this year, Jack, it will be through no fault their own. This time, the fault, dear Jack, lies with Republicans. CAFFERTY: Candy, let me ask you something. You've been covering these weasels for a good long while, do you get the sense that Congress is aware that most of the people in this country simply cannot stand them and does it bother them at all? CROWLEY: Usually, let me tell you something. When you say to someone, you know this is a wrong policy or why are you doing this or why are you doing that, generally a congressman or a senator will say to you, well we just haven't been able to shape our message. They generally sort of lay it off on well we haven't communicated it correctly. CAFFERTY: Yes. Well, they're not doing a very good job. But you are and the next time you're in New York, I want a writing lesson. I think you might be the best writer in television. CROWLEY: Bless you. Thanks. CAFFERTY: Thanks Candy -- Candy Crowley, Asheville, North Carolina. E-mails, it's your program this hour and we got some. We begin with this from Maggie in Bensalem, Pennsylvania. The Democrats are gutless. The Republicans are amoral. We the people need to reclaim our power or we will find ourselves sliding down a slippery slope that steals our freedoms and our children's futures. Federica in Livonia, Michigan writes, my answer to the question regarding the broken Congress is simple. Throw out the baby, the bathwater, and the bathtub. And Jerry in Roswell, Georgia, I'll tell you Jack if there's something rotten in my refrigerator I throw it out and buddy there's a big stench coming from Washington, D.C. You can keep e-mailing us right through the rest of the hour. The address is JackBrokenGovernment@CNN.com. Let us know what's on your mind. Also check out the bottom of the screen. We did something no one else has been able to do at CNN. We have taken over the crawl and although it's not visible on my monitor -- I see one across the -- we're going to run your e-mails across the bottom of the screen during the entire hour. So if you don't hear your e-mail read, you might see it if you pay close attention. Scandal, corruption and a botched war, broken Republicans, how does Don Rumsfeld keep a job? We'll talk with one conservative who says the GOP deserves to lose control of the Congress. Also, hacking the vote -- find out how it's possible to rig an election. Princeton University says it's easy. A hard look at electronic voting machines and one governor who wants to go back to paper. And war, terror, politics playing on our fears in order to prey on our freedoms. It's your government and your vote. (COMMERCIAL BREAK) CAFFERTY: Christian conservatives the Republican base. They might not be so willing to vote Republican this time around. There's the Mark Foley scandal, of course, a Republican congressman hitting on teenage members of the page program, a real gem this clown. His disgusting behavior apparently well-known in Washington and yet the Republican leadership of the House chose to do nothing until Foley's behavior became public. And now comes an explosive new book by a former senior aide to President Bush named David Kuo. He talks about how members of Bush administration laughed at the evangelical Christians behind their backs, mocked them, all the while taking their money and their support. People in Karl Rove's office, according to the book, reportedly used to refer the evangelicals as the nuts. I talked to a conservative -- a good one -- about where the Republicans have gone wrong. Joining us now is Andrew Sullivan, who is the author of "The Conservative Soul" or what's left of it. Welcome. Nice to have you here. ANDREW SULLIVAN, AUTHOR, "THE CONSERVATIVE SOUL": Thank you Jack. CAFFERTY: How much trouble are the Republicans in over the Foley scandal and the way they have chosen to deal with it or not deal with it? We've got a month before the people vote and it's a big election. SULLIVAN: I think it shows that they have been in power too long and they're too full of themselves and think they can do whatever they want and get away with it. And it looks like they're getting away with it or try to blame it on some staffer here or staffer there. I mean Hastert, if he didn't know, should have known. CAFFERTY: Well there's reason to believe that four of his aides, four of them, were told at some point that long precedes his admission to having any awareness at all about it. (CROSSTALK) CAFFERTY: Could he have just bitten the bullet and walked out of town right away or... SULLIVAN: Well the Republicans are scared that would lose them the election all-together. But you know I actually believe in something called responsibility. And if you're the top guy and this is happening, you don't blame your aides. I'm tired of these people always chewing out their staff. (CROSSTALK) SULLIVAN: They're the ones that have to walk the plank. At some point -- and this starts from the top down. I mean if you're Bush, why have you not fired Donald Rumsfeld by now? CAFFERTY: Of course. SULLIVAN: I mean when you have screwed up a war so obviously... CAFFERTY: Well, two of them. You know Afghanistan's not exactly going well either, right? (CROSSTALK) SULLIVAN: ... Afghanistan, the Taliban... CAFFERTY: Yes. SULLIVAN: The violence in Iraq, which we're responsible for its security. Remember... CAFFERTY: Yes. SULLIVAN: ... Colin Powell, you break it, you own it. We own it and we have destroyed it. CAFFERTY: Well, in our foreign policy in other parts of the world we're trying to impose our will on Iran, on North Korea. They go blithely along doing their nuclear programs and paying absolutely no attention to George Bush. SULLIVAN: Well, because he's shown that his only real weapon is this military power and that he doesn't even know how to wield it competently. I mean, I was for the war, Jack. I believed what they told me. CAFFERTY: A lot of us were. I was too in the beginning. SULLIVAN: I was passionately in favor of it, but as soon as I saw they had to intention of winning it, they were only going to send enough troops to lose... (CROSSTALK) CAFFERTY: ... why are they there... SULLIVAN: ... our kids are out there, you know, putting their lives on the line and they don't have the manpower to support them. CAFFERTY: Why are we in there? Why do you think we're really there? SULLIVAN: I think we went in there for a multiple of variety of reasons. Mainly, we generally feared WMDs in the hands of terrorists. CAFFERTY: Right. SULLIVAN: And secondly, we realize that unless there's some Democratic space in that part of the world, the possibility of moderate Muslims fighting back against these extremists... CAFFERTY: Yes. SULLIVAN: ... was minimal. And we though Iraq would be a great place to do it. Well look what we have done, we've actually empowered the extremists, weakened the moderates, and the rest of the region is getting more extreme, not less. CAFFERTY: So what do we do now? SULLIVAN: We punish them. CAFFERTY: I mean is it time to get out... SULLIVAN: I think we have to make a decision. My view, given what I know, is that as long as Donald Rumsfeld is secretary of defense, I don't want any more troops in that sense. CAFFERTY: Sure. SULLIVAN: We need accountability at the top. And then my view is if the military can provide a real strategy, and they have on the ground changed a lot. They've understood better how to deal with this that we should provide them with more troops and a real strategy to win. (CROSSTALK) CAFFERTY: Either go in there and get it won or get out and let them figure it out on their own. SULLIVAN: Yes, the Rumsfeld grind... CAFFERTY: Yes. SULLIVAN: ... of failure, that has to go. We have to decide either out or really commit to win. CAFFERTY: Let me ask you about the role or the responsibility of the leadership of this Congress. They have done nothing but rubber stamp anything Bush has wanted since 9-12, whether it's NSA spying without warrants or going through people's financial records or telephone records or rewriting the War Powers Act and the Geneva Conventions. What responsibility do Bill Frist and Dennis Hastert, and Republican members of Congress, because the majority in both sides, what responsibility do they have for the state this country is in? SULLIVAN: Huge responsibility -- I give you one figure. The debt for the next generation inherited in 2000, was $20 trillion. By last year, it was $43 trillion. CAFFERTY: Now, you're including unfunded liability... (CROSSTALK) CAFFERTY: ... Social Security, Medicare, all that stuff... SULLIVAN: I'm talking about -- this is a number from the Government Accountability Office. CAFFERTY: Right. SULLIVAN: The amount they promised to pay out they have no way of paying for -- now that's conservative? CAFFERTY: Well we tried to reform Social Security so that it would be a bone to throw to the Wall Street guys, right... SULLIVAN: Yes, they never bit the bullet on being honest with people. You can't afford this indefinitely. They're not honest with people. CAFFERTY: Why are they lying to us, Andrew? They've lied to us about a lot of things. I don't remember that happening a lot. I know politicians aren't the most honest guys in town, whether it's Republicans or Democrats, but it seems to me we've been fed a pretty steady of diet of untruths and lies on a lot of these issues for a very long time. SULLIVAN: I'm afraid you're right. I gave them the benefit of the doubt until I couldn't. After 9/11, Jack, you tell me, if the president had asked the country, we need more troops. We probably need to have more taxes to pay for that. CAFFERTY: Like that. SULLIVAN: We need you all to sacrifice. CAFFERTY: Yes. SULLIVAN: And we're going to win this war, Americans would have given him anything he wanted. Instead he said I'll handle it. You go shopping. No sacrifices. And then, he carries on this policy, which has failed. CAFFERTY: You feel like you have been had? SULLIVAN: I feel really angry. (CROSSTALK) CAFFERTY: If Ken Mehlman called you, the head of the Republican National Committee and says you know what, I don't like what the Republican Party is becoming or has become in the last five years. What do I do to fix it? What would you tell him? SULLIVAN: I'd tell him remember what conservative is supposed to be about, balanced budgets, limited government, small government, and competence. If you're going fight a war do it well. Send enough troops... CAFFERTY: Yes. SULLIVAN: ... and take responsibility for your actions. If you have failed, admit your errors, fire the people who screwed up and start over. They're so incapable of admitting error. They think conceding a mistake is weakness. You know what, conceding a mistake honestly is strength. CAFFERTY: And the Americans are very forgiving. Anybody who stands up and they made a mistake and says I'm sorry, the American public tends to say hey, you know what, give him another chance. That's fine. SULLIVAN: Yes. CAFFERTY: But we haven't even had that opportunity. Who's going to win the midterm elections? SULLIVAN: Well I don't know, Jack, and neither do you. I'm telling you this. If the mood in the country is what I think it is, and this Congress doesn't go to the other party... CAFFERTY: Yes. SULLIVAN: ... then there's something wrong with the system. My feeling is that gerrymandering is a big problem. CAFFERTY: What about these machines that nobody trust. Princeton says you can hack into them in an hour and make them do anything you want. SULLIVAN: Well they scare the bejesus out of me. (LAUGHTER) SULLIVAN: I want a piece of paper frankly... CAFFERTY: Yes, me too, right. SULLIVAN: ... a record, as simple as that. And so there's a paper trail. So we know what's going on. I feel I'm a refugee, like a lot of people. I'm not a Democrat. I'm not a liberal. But I sure am not a conservative like these guys. I don't believe in what they stand for. CAFFERTY: Andrew Sullivan, thanks for coming in and joining us. I appreciate it very much. Good luck with the new book. SULLIVAN: Thank you very much. CAFFERTY: Nice to see you. SULLIVAN: You too. CAFFERTY: Good guy. Coming up -- security breakdown, we're going to go to the Arizona Mexico border where terrorists or anybody else for that matter, can walk freely into these United States, an estimated one million illegal aliens a year do just that. Mexican border security is a joke. Plus, a congressional race in that part of the country, where immigration policy will decide the outcome. Also, a lot of people think the fix is in. We'll find out if we'll get an honest count when they total up the numbers on those electronic voting machines. And terror politics, using fear to get out the vote and take away our freedom, whether there's a reason to be afraid or not. Stick around. (COMMERCIAL BREAK) FREDRICKA WHITFIELD, CNN ANCHOR: BROKEN GOVERNMENT with Jack Cafferty continues in moment, but first these headlines. It's shaping up to be one of the deadliest months yet for U.S. troops in Iraq with 73 killed so far in October. That's raising questions about a phased withdrawal, but the White House is ruling that out, along with calls for dividing Iraq along sectarian lines. Israel's prime minister is issuing a strong warning to Iran about its nuclear ambitions. Ehud Olmert says the country would have quote, "a price to pay if it doesn't back down in its standoff with the West." He also says Iran should be afraid of the consequences. And a Wall Street record -- the Dow Jones Industrial Average closing above the 12,000 mark for the first time ever. Analysts say a combination of corporate profit, stable interest rates and cooling commodity prices are fueling a bull market. CONTINUED
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michelle
Administrator
I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
|
Post by michelle on Oct 24, 2006 14:38:33 GMT 4
Continued from aboveCNN LIVE EVENT/SPECIAL Broken Government Aired October 19, 2006 - 19:00 ET PART 2 of 2Now back to BROKEN GOVERNMENT with Jack Cafferty. CAFFERTY: Problems at the polls -- ballot box meltdown, computer glitches, human error and the possibility -- that's right Virginia -- the possibility someone could actually rig an election. Steal it, even. Find out if your vote's going to count. And war, terror, politics, the White House has used the fear of terror to hijack the Constitution and keep their party in power. Also, open borders, security breakdown -- we're going to live to the Arizona/Mexican border where some of you are absolutely fed up. It's your government, your vote. Stay with us. CAFFERTY: Welcome back to the second half of our "Broken Government" special. Two and half weeks we'll all vote. Might be the most important midterm election we've ever had. Two hundred and thirty years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and greatest democracy the world has ever known is in trouble. Like some banana republic, if you will, Americans will go to voting booth wondering if their vote will count, and recorded accurately. The integrity of the system by which we govern ourselves is in danger, and Zain Verjee is here now with more -- Zain. ZAIN VERJEE, CNN CORRESPONDENT (on camera): Jack, you want your vote to count for something, right? But it's actually not a sure bet that it will be. If you're voting electronically, beware. (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) (voice-over): Hanging chads and a hung election. The year 2000, and the paper ballot debacle. The disaster triggered a dash to go digital. Electronic voting machines, you touch, you vote. Easy, efficient, a paperless route. But that, it seems, is the problem. KEVIN ZEESE, MARYLAND SENATE CANDIDATE: You spend $100 million on machines where you can't do an independent audit. There's no way to know if the machine is right. It's pretty embarrassing. VERJEE: The September Maryland primary was an embarrassment. Systems crashed and had to be rebooted. AVI RUBIN, JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY: Software is always full of bugs. VERJEE: And election-day mess. Human error compounded the chaos. Election officials forgot to distribute cards needed to operate the machines. In some precincts, election workers didn't remove memory cards needed to count votes. Maryland's Governor Robert Ehrlich says, just take it low tech, back to good old paper. GOV. ROBERT EHRLICH, (R) MARYLAND: Let's ere on the side of safety, get an election everybody can count on, and then go higher tech next time. VERJEE: Too late, the election's just around the corner. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Just what the hell are people in America doing? VERJEE: Disputes over e-voting, coast to coast. Colorado, California, New Mexico, Florida, Ohio, Illinois. Voters are frustrated, fearful, too, that foul play could steal votes. Computer scientist Edward Felten at Princeton University says a bad guy can hack into a Diebold voting machine and rig a real election in under a minute. ED FELTEN, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY: Once the virus is there, it flips the votes within a few seconds. VERJEE: There's no way for election observers to know. It all happens in the software. Diebold says glitches have been fixed, and strongly rejects the Princeton study, saying, "By any standard - academic or common sense - the study is unrealistic and inaccurate." Diebold is not the only maker of e-voting machines. But none of the other manufacturers have been independently tested. Scientists say the security of their systems is a complete unknown. FELTEN: We want elections to be held accurately, so that people's votes count. VERJEE: So how you can be sure your vote will be count? RUBIN: Swallow hard if you don't like the technology that's being used. The one way that you can guarantee your vote won't be counted is not to go cast it. (END VIDEOTAPE) VERJEE (on camera): Experts say that the solution is simple, just get a printer and attach voter-verified paper trail to each of the machines. Now some states already have that, but not all. There's no national standard. In this election season, eight out of ten Americans will vote on an electronic machine. So Jack, let's see what happens. CAFFERTY: So the manufacturer of these machines says the study done by Princeton University that says they're vulnerable to being hacked and the totals being manipulated, their answer is, well, the study was no good? VERJEE: Yes. They're saying the study is just no good at all, they have absolutely no basis, and they don't have the common sense, and it's entirely inaccurate. One of the interesting things that one of the critics of the machines that I spoke to said, you know what the problem is here, in the software? It's kind of like an overdone steak, you know, no matter what tweaks you do to it, no turning back. You can't uncook an overdone steak. CAFFERTY: There you go. Based on your reporting then, do you trust the electronics, or should we go back to the paper ballots? VERJEE: Everyone we've spoken to, all the experts say, you know, trust, but verify. You know, have a voter-verified paper trail. CAFFERTY: And many of the states have nothing approaching that. VERJEE: No. CAFFERTY: Zain, thank you. VERJEE: Thanks. CAFFERTY: We talked to a leading Republican who says this whole e-voting thing, far from ready for prime time. Joining us now is Maryland's Governor Robert Ehrlich. Governor, welcome to the program, nice to have you here. The estimate is that up to 80 percent of the people in this midterm election are going to use the electronic machines. Based on the experience you have in Maryland and your knowledge of how these systems work, how much should we trust this stuff? EHRLICH: I'm not there. I'm not where I need to be. I'm not where I should be in America in 2006. That's for sure. CAFFERTY: You were -- within days of the primary and the problems were discovered, you said, wait a minute, this isn't working, let's go back to paper ballots. You were rebuffed on that. EHRLICH: Correct. CAFFERTY: Why? EHRLICH: I was rebuffed by the President of the Senate and a elections administrator that is very close to the President of the Senate. The bottom line here is, I don't know, I can't answer that question. I know this. What I saw on primary election day, if repeated on general election day, would be a disaster in the state of Maryland. CAFFERTY: How is it possible that we're sitting here, having this discussion in 2006? EHRLICH: It's embarrassing. CAFFERTY: It is embarrassing. EHRLICH: It's America in 2006. CAFFERTY: I mean, there is a suspicion among the people that write to me in the "SITUATION ROOM" every day that we're not getting a straight count on some of these election returns. And I suppose there's a fundamental question, can this democracy survive if people don't think the elections are honest, if they think the numbers are being fudged and fiddled with. EHRLICH: Well, I have not concrete evidence to back that up. There will always be, as you know, conspiracy theorists, so you kind of throw them out. I'm talking about the vast folks in the middle, both sides, both sides of the aisle, both parties, whatever. All parties, they want an accurate election. And the bottom line here is, one way to get in that direction, to secure at least what you think a verifiable result, is a paper trail. And that bill was killed in the Maryland Senate, by Maryland Democrats by the way, so it's a bipartisan thing. You would hope that at least when it comes to elections and being able to count the votes cast, it would be nonpartisan. But the stakes are very high here. CAFFERTY: The stakes are very high. And there are only 27 states in the union that are going to use a paper trail in conjunction with these machines. The rest of them don't have any. EHRLICH: And that is going to open, again, the door for conspiracy theorists. CAFFERTY: In 2003, a guy named Walden O'Dell, who was the head of Diebold, apparently told some Republican fund-raisers that he was going to try to make sure, that he was committed, that the state of Ohio was going to deliver its electoral votes to President Bush. Ironically, is the state that by the narrowest of margins, delivered the presidency to President Bush. They got a lot of people's attention. Is that a coincidence, do you suppose? EHRLICH: Well, I'm not sure. I guess there's a partisan aspect to this, but I won't get into the partisanship. The bottom line here is, it's America in 2006, people have a right to expect a legitimate, accurate outcome. It's the reason Republicans and Democrats, like in Maryland, are asking people to cast absentee ballots, i.e. paper ballots, because they're certifiable, at least you can count them, it's a very transparent thing. CAFFERTY: And, I mean, can these elections be rigged? Can somebody go in and change the outcome? EHRLICH: You know what, I'm a lawyer, I'm a governor, I'm a former Congressman. I'm not a software engineer. We had Professor Avi Rubin, someone very familiar to you, testify in front of the Board of Public Works in Maryland, which is the comptroller, the governor, and the treasurer, and he talked about, you know, his experiences, the ability to manipulate this system, which would result in an inaccurate outcome. So, clearly some experts out there in the field, who do this for a living, believe the system can be manipulated. CAFFERTY: Governor Robert Ehrlich, the Republican Governor of the state of Maryland, thank you for being with us. EHRLICH: My great pleasure, Jack. CAFFERTY: OK. We're getting a lot of e-mail on this subject, as you might expect. Hunter writes this: "Without a verifiable paper trail, electronic voting machines are an open invitation to election fraud and manipulation of the democratic process." And Karl down there in Wagoner, Oklahoma: "Let's make this simple: Would you do business with an ATM that didn't you a paper receipt?" We invite you to check out the bottom of the screen because this was accomplished with great angst and struggle with the management of this place. We took over the crawl for this hour, no small feat, that, and we're streaming your e-mails for the entire hour of the broadcast, so if we don't read it, you might see it crawl across the bottom of the screen. Or, in the event that it wasn't interesting, you won't see or hear it at all. Still to come as we continue, war, terror, politics, playing on your fear to get out the vote. Will it work this time around? It's been golden for the Republicans for the last few years. Security breakdown, a wide-open border, and an angry electorate. Have you had enough? It's your government, it's your vote. (COMMERCIAL BREAK) (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) DONALD RUMSFELD, SECRETARY OF DEFENSE: It could last, you know, six days, six weeks. I doubt six months. DICK CHENEY, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We will, in fact, be greeted as liberators. I think it will go relatively quickly. But we can't count on that. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Weeks, months? CHENEY: Weeks rather than months. GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. CHENEY: I think they're in the last throws, if you will, of the insurgency. (END VIDEO CLIP) CAFFERTY: A look back on those old sound bites. It's just unbelievable. The events of 9/11 gave President Bush the perfect excuse for a power grab, the likes of which this country has never seen before: the NSA domestic spying program, trolling through financial and telephone records without permission or knowledge of private citizens, changing the War Crimes Act and the Geneva Conventions, establishing secret prisons in Eastern Europe, prisoner abuse, torture, allowing the government to hold people indefinitely with no right to a court hearing. We should be real proud of ourselves. This was all done in the name of the war on terror, and it makes you wonder if what we're doing to ourselves is a whole lot worse than what the terrorists are trying to do us. What's worse than what the president has done is the fact that Congress and the public -- all of us -- stood around, sat on our hands and allowed all this to happen. Suzanne Malveaux is here now with more on perhaps the most troubling aspect of this whole hour. SUZANNE MALVEAUX, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Well, Jack, clearly the White House is determined to keep the Republicans in power, and the one way that they know how to do that is to get you the voters to think about this. (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) G. BUSH: We're fighting an enemy that knows no rules. CHENEY: This is a hard fight. Terrorist. TONY SNOW, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: Terrorist. G. BUSH: Terror. LAURA BUSH, FIRST LADY OF THE UNITED STATES: Terrorism. CHENEY: Terrorist. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Terrorism. G. BUSH: The war on terror. MALVEAUX (voice-over): The Bush administration message is clear. Be afraid, very afraid. The threat of terrorism is real, and only the Republicans are suited to protect American people. VIN WEBER, REPUBLICAN STRATEGIST: There's an element of fear that properly ought to be instilled in people, and that has been in every previous world. G. BUSH: There's an enemy that still lurks, an enemy that still plans, and enemy that still plots, an enemy that still wants to hurt the United States of America. MALVEAUX: Democrats say it's fear mongering. HOWARD DEAN, DEM. NATL. CMTE. CHAIRMAN: What the Republicans bring you is fear and smear. MALVEAUX: Cut through both sides' spin, the strategy of focusing on this doomsday scenario is one that works. In 2002, Republican lawmakers successfully captured eight seats by making the fight against terror their party's platform. ANDREW KOHUT, PEW RESEARCH CENTER: It was before the war in Iraq and before the war in Iraq went badly. G. BUSH: I see a great day coming for our country and I'm eager for the work ahead. MALVEAUX: Two years later, President Bush successfully won reelection, despite the growing violence in Iraq, by painting his opponent, Senator John Kerry as weak on terror. WEBER: The theme is the Republicans are strong when it comes to security issues and the Democrats are not. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's vicious and dangerous. MALVEAUX: The late President Reagan hammered that theme in his drive for reelection with his famous bear ad, representing the Cold War threat. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: John Kerry and the liberals in Congress voted to slash America's intelligence operations. MALVEAUX: President Bush used a pack of wolves to illustrate the terrorist menace in his reelection bid. WEBER: If the people don't feel some sense of threat, they're not going to vote on national security issues. MALVEAUX: That's why analysts say the president and Republicans are constantly talking terror, now leading up to the congressional midterm elections. But pollsters warn it may not work this time. KOHUT: There's one word that explains it, and that is Iraq. (END VIDEOTAPE) MALVEAUX: And, Jack, really that explains a lot of things. You talk to political analysts, you talk to Republican strategists, and they say the Iraq war has really thrown the political equation off tremendously. It no longer allows the Republicans to have that same kind of advantage when it comes to national security. CAFFERTY: Do you look for them to try to do anything in the way of an adjustment of strategy? We've got two-and-a-half weeks until the people go to the polls, and all the polls indicate the Republicans are in big trouble. MALVEAUX: You know, you talk about broken government -- this is really a broken strategy, if you look at it, because it's evolved. It started off with stay the course, and then it kind of broadened to this broader war on terror. And then people said, well, you haven't acknowledged Iraq, the dangers. So they talk about Iraq being a part of it. Now it's really is -- instead of stay the course, it's more like mend the course. It's the White House trying to convey, look, we get it. We're still strong on terror. CAFFERTY: All right. Suzanne, nice to have you with us. Thank you very much. Suzanne Malveaux. I want to read you something I got from a fellow named James. Fort Jackson, South Carolina. He's the guy on the left in this picture with the moustache. "Dear Mr. Cafferty, I am proud to send you the photos that I have taken in Iraq. I was stationed in Samarra, Iraq and assigned to train and equip the 102nd Iraqi Army Battalion there. It worries me to think that my government is telling the American people that we need to stay the course, and my generals do not seem to be voicing their needs, when the reality of the whole war is really getting worse. I probably shouldn't be writing to you out of loyalty to my unit and the U.S. Army, but then again, I have a responsibility as a senior NCO to voice my opinion and to be heard." CAFFERTY: James, I'm happy to have gotten your note, and thank you for your service to this country. And we got this from Ray, my buddy down there in Lubbock, Texas. This is an I-Report. Check it out. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Considering how embarrassing it is to me for George W. Bush and Tom DeLay to be from Texas, thank heavens, Mark Foley is from Florida. (END VIDEO CLIP) CAFFERTY: That would be Ray from down there Lubbock, Texas. That was me in the background, by the way. He had me on the TV in his living room when he taped that. Turn the camera on yourself. You can send us your video to CNN.com/ireport. Straight ahead, from war and terror to a failure of security, open borders. We're going to go to Arizona. People are fed up with a broken federal policy. This is your government and it's your vote. (COMMERCIAL BREAK) CAFFERTY: There's no greater proof of our broken government than our broken borders five years after 9/11. We have done virtually nothing to stem the massive flow of illegal aliens into this country, mostly from Mexico. An estimated 3,000 a day cross into the United States. That's about a million a year, they're already an estimated 12 million of them already here. And yet the government looks the other way. Why? Because the corporations that own our government want it that way. They want the cheap labor, and the politicians want the Hispanic vote. You and I? We don't matter anymore on this issue. This single issue should be reason enough to vote every single incumbent out of office. It's a disgrace. Chris Lawrence is with us tonight from the border in Nogales, Arizona -- Chris. CHRIS LAWRENCE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Jack, you know, securing the border is the number one issue for Arizona voters. I mean, let's face it, it's not that hard to get across. There's some 400,000 undocumented immigrants living in this state. And the issue of what to do with them and how to keep their numbers from growing have caused so many divisions and defections among Republicans and Democrats, it's impossible to tell who's who. (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Well, good, good. LAWRENCE (voice-over): Don't be fooled by all of the handshakes and thank yous. GABRIELLE GIFFORDS, ARIZONA DEMOCRAT: Hey, how are you? Thank you for being here. LAWRENCE: This is not just another race for Congress. Take the issue of immigration. GIFFORDS: I stand exactly where Senator John McCain is, Governor Napolitano, and even President Bush. LAWRENCE: The woman praising prominent Republicans? She's the Democrat. RANDY GRAF, ARIZONA REPUBLICAN: Mr. Giffords just talked about supporting the president's comprehensive immigration reform plan of which it's not comprehensive. LAWRENCE: The President Bush basher? He's Republican. Randy Graf supports The Minutemen, and opposes a guest worker program. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: For the safety of our children and all Americans, vote for Randy Graf. It's a vote for a secure border. LAWRENCE: Graf didn't even get endorsed by Jim Kolbe, the returning Republican he's trying to replace. GRAF: I stood up to our congressman two years ago. I stood up to the establishment. I stood up to our president. LAWRENCE: And now they won't stand by him. Because of his immigration views, the National Republican Party has stopped spending money on his campaign. WILLIAM DIXON, POLITICAL ANALYST: Gabrielle Giffords has taken a broader approach, one that ironically is much closer to President Bush's approach and John McCain's approach. LAWRENCE: While Republicans across the country are running away from the president, this Democrat is stride for stride on immigration. GIFFORDS: If an idea is a good idea, it is a good idea. It doesn't matter whether or not it's a Republican idea or a Democrat idea. LAWRENCE: The thing is, John McCain a the chief sponsor of that very same immigration legislation, the one that includes a guest worker program. And who did McCain endorse? GRAF: Hi, Randy Graf running for Congress out here in the district. (END VIDEOTAPE) LAWRENCE: Yes, that's right, Randy Graf. You know, he and Gabrielle Giffords do agree on one thing. If you look at this fence, there's a problem, that more illegal immigrants try to get across into Arizona than New Mexico, Texas and California combined. Whichever candidates wins will take a strong, but very different immigration message to Washington -- Jack. CAFFERTY: All right, Chris. Let's just hope whoever winds up doing anything with this policy at all does something that's more effective than what they've done for the last five years. Chris Lawrence, reporting live from Arizona where the sun is still up. Some e-mails -- we get a lot of them on this issue every time we go near it. Allison in Middleburg, Florida: "Why if these enemies are so ruthless, violence, and determined are we Americans being spied on in our homes through the Internet and our telephones and violated through our travels, and yet the entire government seems to want to open wide all our borders to anyone and everyone?" Matt in Shonto, Arizona: "Jack, America is becoming a neo-feudal society. CEOs live as pharaohs, we the people as drones. We gloat in our power and diminish our nation's people and wealth. One day, we shall be on the History Channel." Janel in Federal Way, Washington: "I sent proof of my dog's voter registration to the nine Washington state congressman. No response. No paper trail. No people trail." Dick in Orlando, Florida: "The government is broken because we let it break and we did nothing to fix it. A pitiful number of Americans take the time to vote. We can't name our two United States senators, our Congressman, more than one or two of the Supreme Court justices. We can name all of the winners on "American Idol," tell you who won the last World Series and the Super Bowl. The government is broken because we don't care." And from an 8-year-old I got this: "If I do something bad in school I get a timeout or I have to say after school, and sometimes the school will even kick out really bad kids. All the way out of school. They're never allowed to come back. Why can't we do the same thing to all those people who do bad things in those two houses in Washington, D.C.?" I don't know. I wish I had the answer. We would like to hear your ideas. E-mail us at JackBrokenGovernment@CNN.com. Liars, weasels in Washington. If you ever wanted to speak your mind, this one is for you. It's your government, your vote. This is your program. Stay with us. (COMMERCIAL BREAK) CAFFERTY: So the time's come. We own this place, not the career liars and weasels in Washington. We elect these people in good faith to go to Washington and look out for us. They have sold us out. They look in us in the eye. They lie to us day after day after day. They scurry around behind our backs. They take money from the lobbyists and the corporations, then they give that money away to their friends to buy stuff we don't need. The legislation they do get around to passing isn't for us. It's to benefit their contributors. And they think they're entitled to sit there and do this stuff forever. Well, enough already. Want to have a little fun on Election Day? Go to polls and vote against every incumbent on the ballot. Throw them all out. Think about it for a minute. No matter who we replace them with, how much worse could it be? And what a message it would send. You have one term to prove to us your worthy of representing us, or you're gone. It's not as far- fetched as it sounds. I'm Jack Cafferty. Thanks for watching. SOURCE:transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0610/19/se.01.htmlTHIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.Tomorrow: Transcript from the 2nd show.....M
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
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Post by michelle on Oct 25, 2006 14:34:02 GMT 4
CNN LIVE EVENT/SPECIAL Broken Government: The Do-Nothing Congress Aired October 23, 2006 - 20:00 ET Second Show of the Series Part 1 of 2
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) ED HENRY, CNN ANCHOR (voice-over): About 1,500 miles separate Washington, D.C., and Colorado Springs, a distance Republican Congressman Joel Hefley has been crossing twice a week for nearly 20 years.
REP. JOEL HEFLEY (R), COLORADO: Stand up there and let me look at you.
HENRY: It's a part of the job he has never really gotten used to. And it's easy to understand why.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
NEWT GINGRICH, SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE: The House will be in order, and the prayer will be offered by the chaplain.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HENRY: The 1994 Republican revolutionaries encouraged lawmakers to leave their families back home, and not be seduced by the corrosive culture of Washington.
Today, most lawmakers can't seem to get out of town fast enough. This year, they will work less than any time since 1948, when Harry Truman famously blasted a do-nothing, good-for-nothing Congress.
(on camera): The ugly little secret is that today's Congress is no longer in the business of governing. In fact, it's hardly even in business at all. It may shock you to learn that Congress only works about two days a week.
I'm Ed Henry. And I covered Congress for more than a decade.
It's never been worse than it is right now. In the next hour, we're going to show you what members of Congress are really doing with their time on your dime, and how principled politicians, like Joel Hefley, just can't take it anymore.
TOM DASCHLE (D), FORMER U.S. SENATOR: Senator Lott and I used to joke that, if we really wanted everybody here for every important vote, the only time we could actually schedule it was Wednesday afternoon.
HENRY (voice-over): Congress has become the Tuesday-through- Thursday club, with lawmakers enjoying a work schedule most Americans can only dream of, pulling in $165,000 for what has essentially become a part-time job.
SEN. TRENT LOTT (R), MISSISSIPPI: You're looking good, girl. Keep those arms moving, now.
(LAUGHTER)
HENRY: Former Majority Leader Trent Lott recalls senators routinely lining up in front of his office, begging for their four-day weekends.
LOTT: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. They would just -- oh, please, let me get out of here on Thursday night. I would rather stay until midnight on Thursday, so I can catch the 7:30 flight out. Or, please, don't have votes after about 7:30, so, I can catch that.
And some of them would get pretty aggressive about it.
HENRY: A recent "New York Times" poll found most Americans can't name a single major piece of legislation that made its way through this Congress. Social Security reform? Didn't happen. Tougher immigration laws? Nope. Tighter ethics standards? Not a chance.
In the 1960s and '70s, Congress met an average of 161 days a year. In the '80s and '90s, that number dropped to 139 days. This year, Congress will probably end up working just about 100 days.
DAN ROSTENKOWSKI, FORMER U.S. CONGRESSMAN: It isn't a legislative process anymore. Work one day a week? Work a day-and-a- half a week? I mean, it's crazy. It's just crazy.
HENRY: Jim Cooper, a Democrat, grew up in the hardball world of political campaigns. His father, Prentice Cooper, was governor of Tennessee. In 1982, Jim ran for office himself, and won a seat in Congress.
REP. JIM COOPER (D), TENNESSEE: There was partisanship during the day. But, at night, you would go have a beer or dinner with a person on the other side of the aisle.
Just call me Jim, please.
HENRY: In 1994, the year of the Gingrich revolution, Jim Cooper put his House seat on the line to run for Senate. He lost, and was sent back home to Tennessee.
Then, in 2002, Cooper ran for Congress again. He won, and returned to a very different Washington.
COOPER: No party has completely clean hands. But we have seen such a rapid deterioration, it's shocking. There are very few real hearings today, very few real debates.
HENRY: And the atmosphere had changed. It has become raw, angry, so much so that Republicans and Democrats can barely stand to be in the same room together, something that became clear to Cooper at one late-night committee session. COOPER: Pizza was ordered. There were Coca-Colas. And people were sitting around eating pizza. But no Democrat was talking to a Republican. And, likewise, no Republican was talking to a Democrat. It was outrageous, because there you are, in a small room, eating pizza, taking a break, and there was no chitchat. It was like you were still at war.
ROSTENKOWSKI: I heard Dick Gephardt, who was then the minority leader, say on television, "I haven't talked to the speaker in six months." And Newt Gingrich was the speaker. I couldn't believe it. I called Gephardt. I says, "Dick, how do you govern?"
He says, "Danny, we just don't talk."
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: A man you can trust.
J. HEFLEY: Well, after 20 years, they can make the judgment about that.
(LAUGHTER)
HENRY: Joel Hefley was elected to Congress in November of 1986.
J. HEFLEY: The first time we were told was that, you're 23 month from the next election. And, if you haven't started now, you're behind. And I realized later that they're right. They're right.
HENRY: It's a permanent campaign, all about the money. And it has only gotten worse since Hefley arrived.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HENRY: The 1994 Republican revolutionaries mapped out a plan to keep their majority, outmaneuvering and outspending the Democratic opposition.
LINDA KILLIAN, AUTHOR, "THE FRESHMEN: WHAT HAPPENED TO THE REPUBLICAN REVOLUTION?": Literally from the first year that they were in office, the leadership would talk to them about, "How much money did you raise this week?" and keep a tally.
HENRY: Tom DeLay was the architect. Known on the Hill as the Hammer, the Texan pushed members to raise ever more money. Committee assignments and chairmanships, the currency of congressional leaders, were essentially auctioned off, going to those who raised the most money for the party.
J. HEFLEY: You almost have to run a campaign for chairmanship, rather than letting your hard work speak for itself.
HENRY: The permanent campaign kept lawmakers on the road, raising checks like these pouring into a major political lobbying group, and it elevated partisanship above personal relationships.
In 2004, on a trip home to South Dakota, Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle got a big surprise.
DASCHLE: And somebody said, "Well, You know, I hope you will talk to Senator Frist, who is coming out here in a few weeks."
And I said, "Senator Frist is coming out?"
And he said, "Yes, yes."
So, I came back and asked Senator Frist if there was any truth to that, and he said that -- that he wasn't sure yet.
SEN. BILL FRIST (R-TN), MAJORITY LEADER: Bobby (ph), good to see you, sir.
HENRY: Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist did indeed go to South Dakota that year, and campaigned against the leader of the Senate minority.
Trent Lott, who seethed when Frist took his job as Republican leader, was stunned.
LOTT: I understand why he did it, but I wouldn't have done it. And maybe -- maybe I would have been wrong. You know, maybe you should be able to campaign against a colleague and say, hey, nothing personal.
NORMAN ORNSTEIN, AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE: Just imagine what the atmosphere in the Senate would have been like if Frist's gamble had failed, Daschle had come back, and the two of them, guardians of Senate institution, would have to work together on a daily basis?
HENRY: Frist defended his decision, and the gamble paid off. Come November, Tom Daschle was out.
One brisk autumn morning, on the campaign trail, Democratic Congressman John Murtha is rolling down I-25. What America needs, he says, is a Congress willing to speak truth to power.
REP. JOHN MURTHA (D), PENNSYLVANIA: A Congress who will confront and -- and -- and have hearings, and -- and -- and do the things we need to do, in order to change the direction of the country.
HENRY: But, with a White House set on expanding the power of the executive, Capitol Hill has become little more than a rubber stamp for President Bush.
And, in a moment, you will see how some people are working hard to keep it that way.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK) (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
HENRY: Colorado Springs, an all-American town, and one of the most conservatives one, at that, it's home to several influential Christian organizations, like Focus on the Family, and no fewer than five military bases.
J. HEFLEY: If you're a representative of this district, you better also be tuned into God and country.
HENRY: It's reliably Republican territory, but, this year, with the Republicans on the ropes, Democrats believe they can win in traditionally red states like Colorado.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We have a real chance this year. We have the best candidate.
(APPLAUSE)
HENRY: Making the rounds on the campaign trail, Congressman John Murtha, who burst into the spotlight with his searing rebuke of the Bush administration's Iraq policy.
MURTHA: The military has done everything that has been asked of them. The U.S. cannot accomplish anything further in Iraq militarily. It's time to bring the troops home.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It's nice to meet you.
(CROSSTALK)
MURTHA: Am I going to get a hug, too?
HENRY: As the election approaches, Murtha has become a cheerleader for Democratic candidates around the country.
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
HENRY: This Saturday, he holds court in a packed diner, making his case for change.
MURTHA: When I spoke out November of last year, I was way behind the American public. The public was way ahead of me. They understood that something was wrong, that -- and the Congress was not standing up to this president.
HENRY: Murtha, a highly decorated former Marine, thinks voters are tired of timidity.
MURTHA: They want somebody that is willing to speak to power, they're willing to stand up and speak to power, not sit back and just rubber-stamp what -- whatever the administration wants.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, 2001)
CHIEF JUSTICE WILLIAM REHNQUIST, U.S. SUPREME COURT: Congratulations.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HENRY: In 2001, for the first time in nearly 50 years, Republicans controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress. And it's become clear, the president runs the show.
ORNSTEIN: The Republicans in Congress fundamentally see themselves as lieutenants in the president's army.
HENRY: Congress gave the president a free hand and an open checkbook to launch the war in Iraq.
J. HEFLEY: I don't think the administration or Congress asked the questions or had any idea what the extent of the insurgency would be.
HENRY: And, virtually overnight, congressional leaders pushed through the president's plan to create a sprawling Department of Homeland Security...
GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: ... thank Tom DeLay for making sure the bill got passed.
HENRY: ... folding FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, into a huge bureaucracy. Too much too fast? The bungled response to Hurricane Katrina suggests it was.
LOTT: We, in the Congress, have abdicated our responsibility, in certain respects. It's not that the executive branches have necessarily taken it. We just left the field.
ROSTENKOWSKI: The two years under Clinton were magnificent. He was like a kid brother to me.
HENRY: Former Congressman Dan Rostenkowski remembers a time when a Democratic Congress was willing to put the brakes on a Democratic White House.
ROSTENKOWSKI: The whole attitude of -- of governing was different then. There was an independence in the legislative branch.
HENRY: Ronald Reagan, says Rostenkowski, understood the balance of power, forging landmark compromises with Democrats.
ROSTENKOWSKI: The secret of my success, I think, is that, the 14 years that I was chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, 12 of them were under Republicans.
HENRY: It seems logical that divided government, Democrats in charge of one branch, Republicans running the other, might cause gridlock. But, when you think about it, it actually seems to produce better results.
ORNSTEIN: I have come to the conclusion, reluctantly -- and I don't have a partisan dog in the fight -- that divided government now may be a better way to go, simply because the incentive, if you're leading an institution that you -- in which you share the responsibility for governing, is to try and make your institution work, because the onus is going to be on you to do so.
HENRY: Trent Lott learned that during Democrat Bill Clinton's second term, when they balanced the federal budget, and cut deals on welfare reform and the minimum wage.
LOTT: I can remember saying to him: "Mr. President, you are the president. And I am the majority leader. Without you, we're not going to get any bills signed into law. And, without me, you're not going to get any bills passed."
HENRY: Democratic Leader Tom Daschle had a very different experience with George W. Bush. Early in his first term, the president invited Daschle and his wife for dinner at the White House.
DASCHLE: It was a nice -- nice evening. Unfortunately, the -- the great chemistry we had that evening didn't last very long.
CONGRESS (singing): Stand beside her and guide her...
HENRY: After the attacks of 9/11, there actually was a burst of genuine bipartisanship. But the goodwill evaporated quickly.
DASCHLE: It's my view that the president and the vice president both are uncompromising.
HENRY: Republicans branded Daschle an obstructionist.
DASCHLE: I wish now we would have been more questioning. I wish now we would have -- we would have not been as -- as embracing.
J. HEFLEY: I'm a cowboy by nature. I -- I rodeoed, and still rodeo.
HENRY: Joel Hefley says Congress does have to rein in presidential power, but it also has to rein itself in, especially when it comes to out-of-control spending.
J. HEFLEY: They act like it's free money, somehow.
HENRY: As a diehard conservative, Hefley was shocked to see the spending spree explode under Republican rule.
And it's only getting worse.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Good afternoon. Congressman Hefley's office. HENRY: For all the change on Capitol Hill, one thing has remained constant. Seniority has its privileges, especially in the majority...
J. HEFLEY: It took me 16 years to get on this side of the building, where I could get a view.
Give that to Kelly (ph), please.
HENRY: ... the best office space, and the ability to call the legislative shots.
J.C. WATTS, FORMER U.S. CONGRESSMAN: I had a guy tell me once, he said: "You know, the -- the lobbyists tell you how smart you are. Your constituents tell you how stupid you are." He said, "You have to find, you know, the balance in there somewhere."
HENRY: But the 1994 Republicans, like the Democrats before them, were seduced by their newfound power, and became desperate to keep it.
KILLIAN: They did think they would do some good things with that power. But it became, over the years, more just about the power.
HENRY: Eventually, even the leader of the Republican revolution, Newt Gingrich, was shoved aside. And Tom DeLay became the power broker on Capitol Hill. DeLay installed, as House speaker, Dennis Hastert. And Hastert leads by the principle that he can forget about the opposition. Only Republican ideas matter.
DASCHLE: Majorityism is, winner take all, that, if you're the winner, you don't really have to include the minority. And, if you're the minority, you really don't have any stake in what's (AUDIO GAP) governance.
HENRY: In the late '90s, the Republican margin in the Senate was razor-thin, so thin, Daschle and then Majority Leader Trent Lott had to share power.
LOTT: Sometimes, I would say to him, or he would say to me, look, if we get this done, there's going to be credit for both of us. Do we always have to drive each other down? (AUDIO GAP) help each other move up.
HENRY: Lott and Daschle even installed hot lines in each of their Capitol offices, like those between Washington and Moscow during the Cold War, to keep a line of communication open in times of crisis. That trust served them well during one of the most bitter periods Congress has ever known.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REP. TOM DELAY (R), HOUSE MAJORITY LEADER: Believe it or not, I have been very depressed about this whole proceeding.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HENRY: The impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REP. DICK ARMEY (R), TEXAS: The president of the United States has committed serious transgressions.
REP. DICK GEPHARDT (D), MISSOURI: Stop destroying imperfect people.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And he lied again under oath. He lied again to Congress.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We must stay together as a family, one House, one family.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
DASCHLE: We both watched with dismay at what was going on in the House, and the bitter partisanship and the extraordinary hyperbolic tone that was taking place.
He called me -- in fact, it was my birthday, December 9 -- and he said, "We're not going to let that happen in the Senate."
ROSTENKOWSKI: 1879, here.
HENRY (on camera): Ah, there it is, 1879.
ROSTENKOWSKI: That building -- that building was there.
HENRY: Mmm-hmm.
ROSTENKOWSKI: My grandfather moved it from there to where it is, and then built this building.
HENRY (voice-over): Dan Rostenkowski lives in the same Polish neighborhood in Chicago where he grew up, in the house his grandfather built.
ROSTENKOWSKI: Well, you know, what the hell? My -- my kids will sell this in a minute.
(LAUGHTER)
HENRY: Rostenkowski subscribes to the old-fashioned notion that lawmakers get paid to put in long hours and make tough decisions.
ROSTENKOWSKI: I don't know what Congress has accomplished in the last five years. I -- I really don't know. Cutting taxes is so easy. Raising taxes is what the genius of Danny Rostenkowski and Ronald Reagan worked.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Ronald Reagan, Tip O'Neill would duke it out during the day. But everybody says, at the end of the day, they might have a beer. They might have dinner. They still respected each other. J. HEFLEY: Tip would go down, and they would sing together old Irish songs around the piano, and I think genuinely liked each other.
HENRY: On the day Tip O'Neill retired from Congress, he made one last call to his old friend, the president.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, OCTOBER 17, 1986)
TIP O'NEILL, FORMER SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE: We drew down the curtain. I'm walking off the stage. May God be with you all the way. And it was great working with you. Now, while we had our differences, there was never any rancor. And, as an individual, you're a beautiful man.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
J. HEFLEY: I'm a great fan of Ronald Reagan. He's a hero to me. And -- and I got to serve with him for two years.
HENRY: That was in the late '80s, when Joel Hefley was just starting out. But his experience with congressional Democrats wasn't as positive as the president's.
J. HEFLEY: There certainly was not a -- any sweetness and light, in terms of the way they treated Republicans then. I mean, it -- I -- I thought it was the most arrogant, run-roughshod-over-you atmosphere you could possibly have.
HENRY: Dan Rostenkowski ran the powerful House Ways and Means Committee.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ROSTENKOWSKI: There's a time to take flight and a time to be right.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HENRY: Joel Hefley went to visit "Rosty" shortly after arriving in Washington, bringing with him another congressman in the freshman class, a young man named Dennis Hastert.
J. HEFLEY: We went in to see Dan Rostenkowski. And he looked at us like we had lost our mind, that here were two freshmen Republicans, for crying out loud, who were coming in and asking to actually pass something.
HENRY: Rostenkowski, a Democrat through and through, had little time or patience for rank-and-file Republicans, like Hefley and Hastert.
ORNSTEIN: Over time, the majority becomes arrogant, high-handed, condescending towards the minority.
HENRY: Arrogance bred complacency. Democrats were about to be trounced, but many never even saw it coming. ROSTENKOWSKI: They walked around with this Contract With America. But it was more, get the rascals out. And we were the rascals. And I remember Tom Foley saying, "Danny, we're in trouble."
I said: "Oh, no. Republicans are lazy. They're not going to -- they're not going to beat us."
And, of course, I was wrong.
(LAUGHTER)
J. HEFLEY: And I think, at that time, they didn't think the Republicans would ever be in charge.
HENRY: After 40 years in the political wilderness, the Gingrich Republicans weren't rushing to reach out to Democrats.
These days, compromise is a dirty word on Capitol Hill, camaraderie, a thing of the past.
J. HEFLEY: You elect Nancy Pelosi, an extreme left-wing, San Francisco -- and we elect Tom DeLay. And he is right-winged, antagonistic, a battler. Sometimes, I think he hates Democrats. I don't know. And, so, when you create that at the top, then, the animosity, I think, is worse today maybe than it was back then.
HENRY: With less and less power in the hands of committee chairmen, congressional leaders have a tighter grip on the agenda. In the precious little time that Congress is actually in session, Republican leaders increasingly focus on hot-button issues...
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Marriage is the union of a man and a woman.
HENRY: ... debates that are not intended to get legislation passed...
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Protecting the flag is an essential thing for us to do.
HENRY: ... but simply to fire up partisans, in advance of the next election.
J. HEFLEY: Many of us scratch our heads and wondered, why in the world is this coming up, or, haven't we voted on this every year for the last five years? Why do we have to vote on it again this year? CONTINUED.....
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michelle
Administrator
I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Oct 25, 2006 14:35:53 GMT 4
....continued:CNN LIVE EVENT/SPECIAL Broken Government: The Do-Nothing Congress Aired October 23, 2006 - 20:00 ET Second Show of the Series Part 2 of 2HENRY: As a young congressman in the late '80s, Joel Hefley showed he was willing to buck the powers that be. A small-government Reagan Republican, he railed against runaway pork-barrel projects, like the now infamous $231 million bridge to nowhere in Alaska. J. HEFLEY: One of the basic driving forces among people in Congress is to spend money, and show people back home, look what I brought you. HENRY: Hefley began giving out a dubious award, "Porker of the Week." When Republicans took power, they pledged to put the brakes on the reckless spending. In fact, the amount of pork has tripled since Republicans took over, from about 4,100 projects in 1994 to over 14,000 now. (on camera): Didn't they think that the Democrats had been spending like drunken sailors, and they were going to stop it? What happened? KILLIAN: They have absolutely turned into the people that they replaced, on steroids. They're in power. The kind of spending they want is good. They see it as an incumbency protection plan. HENRY (voice-over): That plan has actually landed some lawmakers in deep trouble for trading these special projects for outright bribes. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) REP. RANDY CUNNINGHAM (R), CALIFORNIA: The truth is, I broke the law, concealed my conduct, and disgraced my office. (END VIDEO CLIP) HENRY: It's been called a culture of corruption. And, one day, Joel Hefley decided to do something about it. And that would put him on a collision course with the most powerful Republican on Capitol Hill. (END VIDEOTAPE) (COMMERCIAL BREAK) JOHN KING, CNN ANCHOR: I'm John King in New York. "Broken Government" continues in a minute, right after a quick update of the hour's top stories. A search is under way for a U.S. soldier who may have been kidnapped in Baghdad. The soldier was reported missing about ten hours ago. A new CNN opinion research poll shows only 20 percent of Americans think the United States is winning the war in Iraq. It was 40 percent last December. The White House confirmed today President Bush has stopped using the term "stay the course" to describe U.S. strategy in Iraq. Former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling will be going to prison for 24 years and four months. It's the harshest sentence in the fall of the giant energy trading company. Skilling was convicted of fraud, conspiracy, insider trading, and lying. At his sentencing today though, he told the judge he's innocent. The stock market set a new record today. The Dow Jones Industrial closed up more than 114 points and a shade under 12,117. I'm John King. Now back to "Broken Government". (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) HENRY: In 1994 Dan Rostenkowski's world came crashing down. ROSTENKOWSKI: I have no comment to make. HENRY: Federal prosecutors accused him of charging tens of thousands of dollars in personal gifts to his personal account at the Congressional store and padding his payroll with phantom employees. ROSTENKOWSKI: I have committed no crime and have engaged in no illegal or unethical conduct. HENRY: The Congressman was indicted, and the Gingrich revolutionaries held him up as a symbol of all that was corrupt in the Democratic majority, and that November voters threw Dan Rostenkowski out of Congress and the Democrats out of power. Two years later Rostenkowski took a plea bargain and was sentenced to 17 months in prison. ROSTENKOWSKI: I mismanaged the funds that I had, and, you know, it was that I was giving things away. But listen, that's history. HENRY: Now history is repeating itself, but this time on a much grander scale. A growing number Congressmen are facing a charge never leveled against Dan Rostenkowski. ROSTENKOWSKI: These people knowingly took money to pass legislation. I remember a lobbyist coming and says, if we thought you took money, oh, my God, we would have been here with a satchel. HENRY: Joel Hefley learned the value of a vote as a local lawmaker when he shot down a bill in the Colorado State House. J. HEFLEY: The lobbyist for the group that wanted it killed came to me afterwards and said, boy, they are really excited. They think you're really great. They'd like to do something for you. They'd like to buy you a Cadillac. And I said oh, no, no, no. HENRY: By the time Hefley got to Capitol Hill, he was prepared to resist temptation. A quiet, loyal Republican, he blended into the background, so much so that in 1993 a newspaper named him one of the ten most obscure members of Congress. Then one day Hefley heard he was going to be assigned to a vacant seat on the House Ethics Committee. For the Congressman and his wife Lynn, it was hardly good news. LYNN HEFLEY, WIFE OF REP. JOEL HEFLEY: I thought well, Joel, it's a very big honor that your colleagues would like you to be on there, but it really, really, really puts the pressure on you. And it really is a difficult thing, and I felt bad for him. HENRY: (on camera): Did you tell him not to take it? It sounds like a yes. (voice-over): The Congressman tried to stall. J. HEFLEY: I started getting calls from Newt Gingrich, and I knew what he was calling about, so, you know, we have T.V.'s in our offices so that when we're in offices we can watch what goes on the floor. I would wait till I saw Newt and I would return his call, put it in his court. Finally he captured me on the floor of the House. HENRY: Joel Hefley joined the Ethics Committee in 1997 and became its chairman in 2001. And as we'll see later, it was the beginning of the end of his Congressional career. ORNSTEIN: There's so much money sloshing around Washington that it's astonishing. HENRY: That river of money flows largely from the lobbying industry on K Street. There are over 30,000 lobbyists in Washington, a number that's ballooned since Congressman Jim Cooper's first tour of duty in the 1980s.
COOPER: That's 66 lobbyists for every congressman. That's way out of control. HENRY: Lobbyists fuel the permanent campaign, pumping money into the coffers of lawmakers under constant pressure to raise more and more cash. LOTT: I am highly offended when people say, oh, you went to eat with a lobbyist. First of all, I don't like going out to eat with anybody. So to infer that I can be had for the price of a meal just chaps me. HENRY: Trent Lott's approach isn't shared by all his colleagues. FMR. REP. JAMES TRAFICANT, (D) OHIO: Beam me up. HENRY: Democrat Jim Traficant, convicted for taking bribes. J. HEFLEY: I liked Jim Traficant. In this world of buttoned up blue suits in the Congress, you had Jim Traficant, who was a lot of fun and funny. And I liked the guy, and all of the sudden I'm the chief judge and the chief prosecutor of Jim Traficant. And we threw him out of Congress. CUNNINGHAM: In my life I have had great joy and great sorrow and now I know great shame. HENRY: Republican Duke Cunningham, who actually drafted a bribe menu. He'd secure a :16 million government contract in exchange for a $140,000 boat. J. HEFLEY: Duke had gone out of his way to convince me that he didn't do anything wrong. And then I pick up the paper when we're here for a Christmas break and he's confessed to all this stuff. It breaks my heart. HENRY: The list went on and on. Lawmakers from both parties traded influence for cash, trips, and other luxuries, all offered up by lobbyists, like the infamous Jack Abramoff.
Stunningly after Speaker Hastert vowed to tighten the rules in response to these scandals, Congress has still done nothing to clean up the system. The Republican revolutionaries had been sucked into the very culture of corruption they railed against, and Tom DeLay was the man most associated with the new atmosphere. DeLay never had much use for Joel Hefley. But in the end, it was the mild mannered cowboy Congressman who would hold the Hammer's feet to the fire. (COMMERCIAL BREAK) J. HEFLEY: We do pray for wisdom and courage. HENRY (voice-over): On his way home from work on October 6, 2004, Joel Hefley did some serious soul searching. He had just thrown down the gauntlet before House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, the powerhouse known for squashing anyone who dared stand in his path. On this night, Hefley's ethics panel had voted unanimously to rebuke DeLay yet again for the third time in one week for trying to pressure a congressman to changing his vote in exchange for political support. For holding a fund-raiser with a top energy company around the same time Congress was considering energy legislation. And for pressuring federal officials to intervene in a Texas political matter. J. HEFLEY: We followed the evidence where it led, and we voted a unanimous vote, Democrats and Republicans. HENRY: It was an audacious move. House leaders were caught off guard and Hefley knew he was about to feel their wrath. Still, he was surprised when one of his long-time friends was the first to attack. J. HEFLEY: He grabbed me on the floor of the House immediately after that happened, and jumped me, and told me what, quote, "a crappy job I had done on that." And I knew if this particular guy was mad at me for what I'd done, that I was sure enough in trouble. HENRY: It was like Hefley was back in high school, the neighborhood bully had kicked him out of the cool kids club, and his classmates wouldn't even be seen with him. J. HEFLEY: I'd sit on the floor by myself, and people were reluctant to come and sit with me. You know because they might be identified with Joel, and -- but I accepted that. HENRY: The message was clear. Politics is a team sport and Joel Hefley was no longer on the team. (on camera): What did that say about the state of the Republican revolution? KILLIAN: Well, it obviously had an incredibly chilling effect on any Republican that wanted to say anything about the leadership or on any Republican that wanted to be critical in any way. It was tow the line or you're going to be punished.HENRY (voice-over): When Joel Hefley tried to clean up politics, he was prepared to pay the price, and as you'll soon see, the man who would hand down his punishment was none other than his old friend Speaker Dennis Hastert. (COMMERCIAL BREAK) HENRY: If Joel Hefley's 20 years in Washington taught him anything, it was you don't slap down Tom DeLay and get away with it. J. HEFLEY: They have all kinds of little ways to punish you. HENRY: Under attack by the Republican leadership, rejected by his colleagues, Hefley knew the worst was yet to come. Finally around Christmastime 2004, he sat down with his old friend, the congressman he had begun with two decades ago, Speaker Dennis Hastert. J. HEFLEY: I said, "You know, Denny, I've been there long enough, and I've done my duty, and I'm perfectly happy to be out. I think you're making a mistake, though, if you throw me out because I think you'll make a martyr out of me," and that's exactly what happened. HENRY: Hastert ousted Hefley to the ethics committee. His replacement, Doc Hastings, a Hastert loyalists. ORNSTEIN: Many things have made me angry over the last several years. Nothing's made me more indignant than Joel Hefley and other Republicans on the ethics committee being fired for doing their job. Joel Hefley is a very conservative Republican. But an institutionalist, and when he took on the thankless task of being chairman of the ethics committee, he was going to do his job and do it effectively. And as a result, he got unceremoniously booted from the position.HENRY: It turns out mild-mannered Joel Hefley outlasted Tom DeLay. The Hammer resigned from Congress earlier this year under an ethical cloud and now after two decades Hefley himself is saying goodbye to the House of Representatives. J. HEFLEY: It was simply that I felt it was time. I finally decided enough's enough, there might be something else to do out there. HENRY: December 2000 on the north side of Chicago, Dan Rostenkowski gets a Christmas present from Bill Clinton, a full pardon. ROSTENKOWSKI: The fact that the chief executive of this country recognized that I'm making a contribution is very rewarding. HENRY: After all those years, the neighborhood embraced the old rascal again. ROSTENKOWSKI: I walked down the streets, and people always give me a thumbs up, which is heartwarming. Thank you very much. HENRY: And Rostenkowski walked on, knowing that in the book of Congress, he's but a chapter and a new one will soon be written. ROSTENKOWSKI: The shoe is now on the other foot. The rascals are the Republicans, and I think you're going to see a change. BUSH: Colorado is going to lose a really fine congressman in Joel Hefley. HENRY: Despite his clashes with Republicans leaders, Joel Hefley was standing by the president this fall. J. HEFLEY: I never have nor never would distance myself from this president. Colorado does not distance itself from this president. HENRY: With Hefley's retirement, Colorado's Fifth Congressional District is now up for grabs. ORNSTEIN: It is very unsettling. We have a few prizes, like Hefley, who put concern about the institution and the regular order above their ideology and above their party. They're leaving. Who's going to replace them? HENRY: District Five has never before elected a Democrat, and Joel Hefley had hoped to endorse his party's nominee to succeed him. But when the Republican primary grew nasty, the congressman's thoughts turned to his political idol, Ronald Reagan, and the president's famous 11th Commandment. RONALD REAGAN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican. HENRY: And Hefley had an epiphany. J. HEFLEY: I will never, ever again support a Republican candidate who runs an attacking, negative campaign on his Republican opponent. HENRY: And that decision put Joel Hefley on yet another collision course with his own party, a battle that could put his seat, and ultimately control of Congress itself, into Democratic hands. (COMMERCIAL BREAK) HENRY: For as long as anyone can remember, Colorado Springs has been a town of hard-core Republicans, God and country folks, more likely to elect deer than Democrats. That could all change this year, when Congressman Joel Hefley's name won't be on the ballot. Now, two candidates are battling to take Hefley's place. DOUG LAMBORN (R-CO), CONGRESSIONAL CANDIDATE: Folks, I'm a Ronald Reagan Republican. JAY FAWCETT (D-CO), CONGRESSIONAL CANDIDATE: You want to talk about what it's like to be in the southwest desert of Iraq with a rifle in a rucksack? I've been there. HENRY: For the first time in a generation, the Fifth Congressional District has a real battle on its hands. One autumn weekend, the Republican candidate, state Senator Doug Lamborn, dropped by the monthly meeting of the Sunrise Women's Republican Club. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The people who trust in the Lord will become strong again. HENRY: Lamborn's brand of conservatism goes over well here. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Protecting God's greatest gift, Senator Doug Lamborn sponsored more pro-life bills than anyone in the legislature. HENRY: In the Republican primary, Lamborn's allies sent out mailings accusing several of his opponents, including one former Hefley aide, of promoting the, quote, "homosexual agenda." For Joel Hefley, that crossed the line. He branded Lamborn's campaign "sleazy and dishonest." J. HEFLEY: If we keep rewarding people who run the dirty, attacking, dishonest campaigns, then you're going to get more dirty, attacking, dishonest campaigns. HENRY: The congressman has refused to endorse Lamborn, a decision that's creating quite a stir. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Hefley said that he's not supporting you, despite the fact that you're in the same party. LAMBORN: Most Republicans are supporting me because they're good, loyal team players. HENRY: Hefley's move caused a political earthquake in Colorado Springs and breathed life into the campaign of the Democratic candidate, a Gulf War vet named Jay Fawcett, who this morning was on his way to pick up a special guest: Congressman John Murtha, who flew in to campaign for the long shot, who's not so much of a long shot anymore. REP. JOHN MURTHA (D), PENNSYLVANIA: You have to have people in Congress that understand the military, the limitations of power, with the background of Jay Fawcett. HENRY: Maybe so, but Fawcett Murtha's call to pull out of Iraq. (on camera): Doesn't it sound like you're trying to have it both ways? FAWCETT: I like John Murtha. I agree the debate needs to occur. But I still can disagree with him on how we effect the change. LAMBORN: I think bringing John Murtha into town is a disgraceful thing to do. And what message does that send to the terrorists? It tells the terrorists that if they're only patient, if they only wait it out, America will show itself to be weak and unreliable, and America will cut and run. HENRY: Republican Doug Lamborn stands four square behind President Bush on Iraq. (on camera): We know that you don't believe in the Murtha plan. You've made that clear. What's the Lamborn plan?
LAMBORN: I don't have my own plan. I think that the people who are there in the military on the ground have the best advice and the best way to dictate the course of the war.HENRY (voice-over): The campaign is fierce, charged with emotion, mirroring battles being fought across the nation this year. LAMBORN: I'm proud to say that the speaker of the House has said that he intends to put me on the House Armed Services Committee. FAWCETT: Mr. Hastert. This is a guy who has been protecting a pedophile for the last five months, if not the last five years. Well, you know, I've taken a lot of hits for the Democratic Party not understanding morals. There you go. HENRY: Colorado Republicans are pushing back hard. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Assume nothing. Because when you start assuming things, you end up with a Democrat telling you what to do. HENRY: And even if Fawcett wins this November, Colorado Republicans will immediately start planning to take him down two years from now. (CROSSTALK) HENRY: The candidate vows not to get sucked in to the permanent campaign. FAWCETT: If I'm able to show the constituents of this district I'm actually able to do the part of the job that represents them, then I'll have a good edge toward reelection. HENRY: But then his campaign manager jumps in. If Fawcett wins, she says, his reelection effort will immediately kick into high gear. The fund-raising, she adds, will never stop. J. HEFLEY: Something about horses that's very comforting. HENRY: Joel Hefley never wanted to make waves, but his refusal to endorse Doug Lamborn could ultimately hand Congress itself to the Democrats. J. HEFLEY: I just took a stand on the principle that I'd like to do some little thing that would change the political atmosphere, and it probably won't, but it's -- what can I do? I mean, that's all I can do.HENRY: And at the end of the day, Congressman Hefley, the Reagan Republican, the quiet crusader, the unlikeliest of rebels, is at peace. (END VIDEOTAPE) SOURCE:transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0610/23/se.01.htmlTHIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.Tomorrow: The 3rd Show in the Series......M
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michelle
Administrator
I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Oct 26, 2006 16:01:02 GMT 4
CNN LIVE EVENT/SPECIAL Broken Government: Two Left Feet Aired October 24, 2006 - 20:00 ET Transcript from the 3rd Show in the Series Part 1 of 2
Note from Michelle: How odd and diversified my country is! I cannot relate to the group of white men refered to in this show but, they do make up a large percentage of the country in terms of voters. This should should offer a clue to baffeled Americans and non-Americans as to why the US citizenry does not pull together. How would you find common ground between the various backgrounds, values, and personalities within the United States?
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) CANDY CROWLEY, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Elections warp the calendar. Forty-six days left can be a lifetime or a heartbeat away.
Up a flight of questionable stairs into a paper-strewn, half- furnished office space, a former NFL quarterback is making a play.
(on camera): How many people called you and said, run, run, run?
HEATH SHULER (D), NORTH CAROLINA CONGRESSIONAL CANDIDATE: Forty, 50, probably anywhere from 50 to 60 members of Congress. President Clinton called me, which was very exciting, to hear him.
CROWLEY: The 11th District is a western wedge of North Carolina, sharing the Great Smoky Mountains with neighboring Tennessee. It is a spot inside a state inside a region that has gone Republican, solid red, for the past two presidential campaigns. Shuler, son of the South, and a Democrat all his life, wants to turn it blue.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Let's have a big hand for Heath Shuler.
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
SHULER: Those are veterans.
CROWLEY: Speech by speech, mile by mile, hand by hand...
SHULER: I'm running for Congress.
CROWLEY: ... Shuler has covered the territory for 18 months.
SHULER: Until my son asked if -- he says, can you ask my boss if he will let you off today?
(LAUGHTER)
CROWLEY: He travels easily here, where he was born and raised, where he kicked off his first career.
SHULER: You know, name recognition certainly helps. You don't have to -- that's less you have to spend on identifying who you are and what you're about, because most people in this area, they remember me from high school, and they remember my days in college and the NFL.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: In fact, I got 40 of them there. SHULER: That will be fine. I will be happy to.
CROWLEY: He is, as they say, telegenic...
SHULER: Say your prayers.
CROWLEY: ... with a picture-perfect family, a Democratic candidate in a district that is Democratic in its numbers, if not its soul.
JOHN BOYLE, "THE ASHEVILLE CITIZEN-TIMES" It's interesting, because it's more registered Democrats than it is Republicans. But it tends to vote conservative. They have elected Charles Taylor, who is pretty conservative, eight times.
CROWLEY: Known for delivering the goods to the 11th District, Shuler's Republican candidate, Charles Taylor, is a formidable, well- financed, brass-knuckle player.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, AD)
NARRATOR: Rookie Heath Shuler is following the playbook of San Francisco liberal Nancy Pelosi.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CROWLEY (on camera): Are you an anti-Pelosi Democrat?
SHULER: You know, I -- I don't like to classify.
CROWLEY (voice-over): Washington liberal does not play well in North Carolina conservative. It is part of why, over the past three decades, Southern and rural, mostly white Democrats, have looked inside the national Democratic Party and gone elsewhere.
BRUCE REED, PRESIDENT, DEMOCRATIC LEADERSHIP COUNCIL: Our biggest problem is that, of late, we have been losing elections.
CROWLEY: What is wrong with these people? From Virginia, to Montana, to Georgia, crack open a Democrat, and they will tell you: It's the wussy factor.
MAX CLELAND (D), FORMER U.S. SENATOR: You have got to lance that bubble. I mean, you know, it has been a narrative for the Republicans for decades now, kind of an underlying -- underlying narrative against the Democrats, that they're soft on communism, and not -- soft on terrorism.
CROWLEY: It's the culture.
DAVID "MUDCAT" SAUNDERS, DEMOCRATIC STRATEGIST: And the culture is the reason the Democrats have been losing elections. It has nothing to do with policy. It has to do with culture.
CROWLEY: It's the guns. GOV. BRIAN SCHWEITZER (D), MONTANA: People ask me how many guns I have. I tell them, none of your damn business, and I tell them not as many as I'd like.
CROWLEY (on camera): Guns.
SHULER: I'm a very strong Second Amendment guy.
CROWLEY: God.
SHULER: If there is one thing that I try to -- to -- with integrity and -- and honor, is -- is my faith.
CROWLEY: What about gay, and gay marriage?
SHULER: You know, the sanctity of marriage between one man and one woman.
CROWLEY: Abortion?
SHULER: The way I look at it is, I'm pro-life.
CROWLEY: So, you sound like a Republican, yes?
SHULER: No. No. I mean, you know, when we look at the -- what the party has done for so many people, I mean, I go back to the -- the values that my grandmother taught me. Help those who cannot help themselves. And that one sentence tells me that that's the Democratic Party.
CROWLEY: Heath Shuler's positions on most social issues run counter to party orthodoxy. It means his toughest opponent may not be his Republican rival, but the legacy of his own party, its bad calls, its fumbles.
Trailing him, as we will over this next hour, you will learn a lot about how Democrats lost their mojo, and whether they have got a clue how to get it back.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This used to be an awful strong Democrat community right here.
SHULER: Yes. I think it still is. I think it still is.
CROWLEY (voice-over): If his journey is to end in Washington, Heath Shuler needs 11th District Democrats to come home.
SHULER: Well, that's why we have to a good job of being in the district like this, where they can talk, and they can spread the word and say: You know, he -- he's not like some of the national Democrats. You know, he's one of us.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, AD)
NARRATOR: Heath Shuler is taking money by the truckload from Washington liberals, from trial lawyers, from party extremists, and big labor leaders.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CROWLEY: Game on.
SHULER: We have to fight back. We -- we can't let them frame us. We can't let them say who we are.
CROWLEY: Shuler will need to shake off 40 years of party history.
GEORGE MCGOVERN, FORMER DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: I know the term McGovernite is used as a swear word. And so be it.
CROWLEY: Next up: taking on the wussy factor.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Play-action by Shuler. He will go up top and deep, far sideline. And it is caught! It is a touchdown!
CROWLEY: Football is a contact sport. That will help this All- American first-round NFL draft pick, because politics is a contact sport, too.
And Heath Shuler has joined a game where the stats show decades of Democratic fumbles and Republican pickups. No nuance in this game -- the words of leading Republicans are black and white.
KARL ROVE, SENIOR ADVISER TO PRESIDENT BUSH: If leading Democrats had their way, our nation would be weaker, and the enemies of our nation would be stronger.
SEN. BILL FRIST (R-TN), MAJORITY LEADER: The Defeatocrats is a pretty good name for -- for the Democrats, I think, at this juncture.
GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The party of FDR, the party of Harry Truman, has become the party of cut and run.
CROWLEY: The wuss factor is an ailment with roots in another time, another war.
Roll it back 34 years, 1972. More than a decade after JFK sent U.S. advisers to Vietnam, the party that prosecuted most of the war moved to stop it.
ELAINE KAMARCK, FORMER POLICY ADVISER FOR AL GORE: Look, it was the Democratic Party that more or less folded in the anti-war sentiments and the anti-Vietnam War sentiments. A big portion of the Democratic Party is still a party that is suspicion of the use of military power.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MCGOVERN: I accept your nomination with a full and grateful heart.
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CROWLEY: George McGovern was the Democrats' presidential choice, winning 11 primary victories with his calls for unilateral withdrawal from Vietnam, in exchange for American POWs.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MCGOVERN: Within 90 days of my inauguration, every American soldier and every American prisoner will be out of the jungle, and out of their cells, and back home in America, where they belong.
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CROWLEY: Richard Nixon promised peace was at hand. And McGovern was blasted as radical left, a candidate of acid, amnesty, and abortion.
Nixon won the '72 election in a blowout. McGovern took only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.
MCGOVERN: The party has been shattered in some respects. We mentioned Vietnam. That tore the Democratic Party in half. You were either a hawk or a dove. You -- you weren't allowed to be neutral.
PAUL BEGALA, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Most Americans today think it was probably a war we should not have been fighting. And, yet, they blame the Democrats for that defeat. We have been painted as the wimps.
CROWLEY: The party of FDR, Truman, and JFK disappeared into a mass of red states.
MCGOVERN: And I can tell you, for millions of Democrats, the big issue was stopping that war for about 10 years. That was more important than what happened to the Democratic Party.
CROWLEY: Jonathan Cowan heads a group dedicated to electing Democrats with a centrist stripe.
JONATHAN COWAN, PRESIDENT, THIRD WAY: McGovern blamed America. He was soft. He sounded like he was afraid of our adversaries and he was afraid of the application of American military power. The years between Kennedy and McGovern saw Democrats become a party that was perceived as weak. And, in many ways, they earned it.
CROWLEY: And the hits just kept on coming. In the midst of the Carter years, American hostages were paraded blindfolded outside the American Embassy in Iran, held captive for 444 days. There was a failed rescue attempt.
BEGALA: And America was seen as a -- a helpless, weak giant. And, then, the Desert One debacle, where he sent in special forces, and the -- and the helicopters crashed in the desert, and we lost soldiers, we -- we -- we then seemed ineffectual.
CROWLEY: Jimmy Carter lost his reelection bid.
KAMARCK: We had a whole campaign run after a failed rescue attempt, with all those Americans sitting there. And the -- the world, again, sort of turned on that event. And Ronald Reagan won, and -- and began, really, a resurgence of the Republican Party.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
RONALD REAGAN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: When action is required to preserve our national security, we will act.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CROWLEY: The day Ronald Reagan was inaugurated, the American hostages were freed.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CROWLEY: And muscular Republican dominance began.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REAGAN: Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CROWLEY: Democrats' efforts to counter their image fell flat, sometimes hilariously. Politically, they waved the white flag.
DOUG HATTAWAY, DEMOCRATIC STRATEGIST: Democrats largely ceded the ground on national security and foreign policy to the Republicans for quite a long time in the '80s. And you would have Democratic pundits and strategists saying, oh, that's the Republicans' issue. Let's not talk about that. We need to win elections on things like health care and education.
CROWLEY: With the Cold War over, and after the successful prosecution of the first Gulf War, the first President Bush, a World War II hero, seemed on the fast track to a second term. But Republicans misread peacetime politics. Americans returned to home- and-hearth issues.
BEGALA: Governor Clinton came along in 1992, just in that window, when the Berlin Wall had fallen, and the Twin Towers still stood. Clinton, I think, benefited from the fact that, right at that moment that he arose, the concerns of the country were essentially domestic.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
WILLIAM J. CLINTON, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I think this is a big deal.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CROWLEY: For reasons both big and small, America's attention was not focused on defense issues in the Clinton era. Decades after the last U.S. soldier left Vietnam, its shadow falls on Democratic campaigns.
KAMARCK: Republicans love the McGovern wing of the Democratic Party.
MCGOVERN: Artifacts. And, yes, there is the old B-24 I -- I flew.
CROWLEY: At his library in Mitchell, South Dakota, George McGovern walks through the artifacts of his life. He volunteered for the Army in World War II. He flew 35 of the most dangerous kind of missions, over enemy territory, under heavy German fire.
MCGOVERN: I didn't go around tooting my horn in that campaign about what a big hero I was. I still feel self-conscious talking about my war record.
CROWLEY: He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. Proud of his service in war, prouder still of his service in peace, McGovern knows the aftershocks from 1972 rumble still through the political landscape.
MCGOVERN: The Democratic Party, I suppose, is afraid, partly, to really come out against this war, for fear we will be charged with the same thing that has caused us much difficulty in the past, that we run away from a fight.
UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: Hell no, we won't go!
(on camera): The wussy factor generally is the idea that Democrats are weak on defense, and they are weak on national security.
SHULER: It has never been brought up, because people realize, the type of person that I am and the type of candidate that I will be is to be that leader, the person that will stand up first for our country.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Nice to see you.
CROWLEY (voice-over): But, if you are the new kid in the game, it never hurts to buff up your creds in the tough-guy department. SHULER: On the 28th, we're having Senator Max Cleland come in to town. We're doing a big celebration to -- thanks to all of our veterans. It's a big celebration.
CROWLEY: They don't come any tougher than this guy, so why is he an ex-senator, and why is he still one of the most in-demand campaigners on the trail?
(END VIDEOTAPE)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
CROWLEY (voice-over): Max Cleland served three years in the Army.
MAX CLELAND (D), FORMER U.S. SENATOR: If you come back the same person you left, you really haven't gained anything.
CROWLEY: Almost 30 years later, he ran for and won a U.S. Senate seat.
Then, the most controversial, the most effective ad of the 2002 election cycle cost Cleland his reelection bid.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, AD)
NARRATOR: Max Cleland says he has the courage to lead. But the record proves, Max Cleland is just misleading.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CROWLEY: It was distant echo over 30 years: war heroes brought down as soft on the "isms," communism for George McGovern, terrorism for Max Cleland.
CLELAND: A few minutes ago, I called Congressman Saxby Chambliss to congratulate him on his victory for the United States Senate.
CROWLEY: It was a stunner. He left two legs and an arm on the battlefield of Vietnam, but Cleland's political career could not survive an assault on his commitment to protect the country.
Former House Democratic Leader Dick Gephardt credits Republicans for painting a devastating portrait.
DICK GEPHARDT (D), FORMER U.S. CONGRESSMAN: That we're anti- military, we're pacifists, and we just won't do what it takes to keep you safe.
HOWARD DEAN, DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN: You have to be tough and smart. And that's the Democratic tradition. Who was tough and smart? Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Who was tough and smart on defense? Harry Truman. Jack Kennedy.
CLELAND: You are amazing.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Walter Reed is amazing.
(CROSSTALK)
CROWLEY: Ex-Senator Max Cleland lives on the road now, on a mission to break the curse of the wuss.
Democratic Congressman Jack Murtha is the ex-Marine who has called for immediate withdrawal from Iraq.
CLELAND: So, they are going after Jack Murtha now. We're not going to let them get -- get away with it this time. We're fighting back.
(APPLAUSE)
CLELAND: When Jack Murtha walked on stage, the sun began to break through.
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
CLELAND: We know whose side God is on today!
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
CROWLEY: Cleland is one of the most sought-after campaigners in the Democratic Party, from Pennsylvania, to Illinois, to Montana, more than 40 appearances across the country. Crowds show up to hear him.
CLELAND: I really didn't get wounded in Vietnam. I just went duck hunting with Dick Cheney.
(LAUGHTER)
(APPLAUSE)
CROWLEY: Voters push in to touch him.
CLELAND: You're a -- you're a Khe Sanh veteran.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Absolutely.
CLELAND: Me, too. I was wounded just outside of Khe Sanh.
CROWLEY: Without a word, Cleland is a double message. His defeat is a "Remember the Alamo" moment for the party still shaken to its core that a literally battle-scarred Democrat could lose on defense issues, and, at the same time:
(on camera): I mean, you're sort of a living, breathing example of what Democrats are willing to do for the safety of the country. Do you think that? Do you agree with that?
CLELAND: Yes. I do.
(LAUGHTER)
CROWLEY: So, we are?
SHULER: Forty days from election.
CROWLEY: If you had your choice, would you have it right now or 40 days?
SHULER: Today. Wish we would have had it yesterday.
CROWLEY (voice-over): September closes in on October, and reinforcements arrive.
CLELAND: Hey, brother.
SHULER: How are you, Senator?
CLELAND: I'm glad to be here, man.
(LAUGHTER)
SHULER: Thank you so much for being here. I really do appreciate everything.
CLELAND: Oh, man, I love you.
SHULER: I love you.
CLELAND: I'm proud of you. And I appreciate you.
SHULER: Thank you. Thank you for everything.
CROWLEY: A deep vein of patriotism runs through the Smoky Mountains. And Shuler's talk is muscular.
SHULER: We have maintained that we are going to be stronger on our national security and stronger on defense.
Tell everybody to come out and vote.
CROWLEY: Shuler is playing aggressive offense now, campaigning in this western-most rural end of the district. This is Republican territory.
JOHNNY BURCH, CLAY COUNTY DEMOCRAT: Well, it's more Democrats here than you think there is. A lot of people, you know, may be a registered Democrat, but might vote Republican.
CROWLEY: This is where Shuler needs to make inroads. Here, lots of veterans come to retire. Here, supporting the troops is often synonymous with supporting a family member.
SHULER: It gives me great pleasure to introduce my friend, a Vietnam hero.
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE) CROWLEY: In town halls and community centers, the day of Shuler- Cleland is a salute to veterans, and the most famous one in the room salutes back.
CLELAND: Now, this man, Heath Shuler, is an All-American in every sense of the word in which that term is used, All-American.
CROWLEY: Midday in Cleland's visit, Shuler's Republican opponent, Charles Taylor, moves in to protect his turf, firing off a press release. He accuses Cleland of supporting gay rights, late-term abortions, and, an echo of 2002, jeopardizing homeland security.
"It is a shame," Taylor wrote, "that Shuler doesn't know better to hide behind a closet liberal to cover up his own lack of public service. That's a rookie mistake."
(LAUGHTER)
CLELAND: I'm not running for anything. So, when they are attacking me, they're hurting.
CROWLEY (on camera): First of all, your reaction to Taylor's news release?
SHULER: Here, we have an American hero that sacrificed so much, you know? And to -- to criticize his work with the V.A. and our veterans and what he's done for our country, you just can't say anything good. There's nothing good to say.
It's shameful. It's un-American. I'm very, very disappointed that -- that we have a representative right now that represents our district. But it is obvious he's not representing our values.
CROWLEY (voice-over): But who exactly represents rural values? For more than a decade, the answer has been Republicans.
Cue Mudcat Saunders.
SAUNDERS: There are certain Democrats who cannot win in rural America.
CROWLEY (on camera): Are they the L-word?
SAUNDERS: No, they are not the L-word. They are the N-word, for naive. They might even be the N-word, for ignorant.
CROWLEY (voice-over): A deer-stand-building, bow-hunting, race- driving native of rural America has got a playbook for Democrats.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
JOHN KING, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: I'm John King in New York. "Broken Government" continues in a minute -- first, though, the hour's top stories. The killing of a U.S. soldier in a roadside bombing today brings the death military toll in Iraq to 2,804. The U.S. ambassador to Iraq says the war-torn country's government has agreed to develop a plan to improve security. The top U.S. commander, though, says it will be 12 to 18 months before Iraqi security forces can do the job.
The search continues for a missing U.S. soldier. He's an Iraqi- American translator who was kidnapped Monday while visiting relatives in Baghdad.
In another part of the Middle East, a kidnapping ends quickly. An Associated Press photographer was grabbed this morning in Gaza, then freed, unharmed, tonight.
And House Speaker Dennis Hastert spent the afternoon before the Ethics Committee, answering questions about the Mark Foley sex scandal.
Another day, another record on Wall Street -- the Dow Jones industrials closed a fraction under 12128. CONTINUED......
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michelle
Administrator
I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Oct 26, 2006 16:07:11 GMT 4
continued from aboveCNN LIVE EVENT/SPECIAL Broken Government: Two Left Feet Aired October 24, 2006 - 20:00 ET Transcript from the 3rd Show in the Series Part 2 of 2I'm John King in New York -- now back to "Broken Government." (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) CROWLEY (voice-over): Let's stipulate that Mudcat Saunders is not your standard Democrat. SAUNDERS: But, you know, if you miss, if Bubba misses, you know what he does if he misses when he bow hunts? Then he goes like this, and he goes... (GUNSHOT) CROWLEY: He's just funnin' with city slickers come to talk politics at his home in rural Virginia, outside Roanoke. SAUNDERS : If you go to the south of here or the east, you can't find a Democrat with a search warrant. It has become socially and culturally unacceptable for a white male to say he's a Democrat. CROWLEY: In 2000, George Bush beat out Gore by 22 points among rural voters. Four years later, the margin was 19 points, Bush over John Kerry. SAUNDERS: We don't have a lot in common with a boy that surfboards off the coast of Martha's Vineyard in spandex britches, do we?UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There ain't much of that. CROWLEY: Don't be misled. Mudcat is a savvy businessman and a sharp political mind. He and his political partner, Steve Jarding, have written a book about politics and rural Americans. SAUNDERS: We have been voting for Republicans but we're not Republicans. People tend to forget that. We're old-timey Democrats is what we are. We are FDR, the New Deal Democrats. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And, by the way, it is not just doing something about poverty ... CROWLEY: He's found his (inaudible) in Southern star and former Senator John Edwards, but Mudcat hates it when call you him a political consultant. He has nonetheless advised a host of Democrats looking for the keys to the kingdom of rural America. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: God bless you. Thank you all for coming. SAUNDERS: A U.S. senator -- I will not mention the name, but she asked me, she said, well, Mudcat, your people are voting against their own economic self-interests and why are they so ignorant? And it offended me a little. I said has it ever crossed your mind that sometimes people vote against their economic self-interest because there's a powerful force drawing them in the other direction.
CROWLEY: It's the culture, stupid. BEGALA: There's a story -- maybe apocryphal, but there's a story that in 1988 when he was running for president, Mike Dukakis was flying into Iowa, looked out the window and allegedly said, "I wonder what those hicks want to hear from me today." Maybe even if it's not true, it speaks to a larger truth. SAUNDERS: It's like the Metropolitan Opera wing of the Democratic Party. You know, they talk about tolerance but in reality a lot of them, the only real tolerance that I have ever seen them exhibit is for their own intellectual arrogance. CROWLEY: It is about the guns. HATTAWAY: I remember in the 2000 election I was getting on a plane to go to Washington from Nashville where the campaign headquarters was and there were two businessmen sitting behind me talking about the election. So I sort of listened in. And I heard them say, you know, Gore is OK but he'll take our guns away. And I was like, oh god, there goes the south. SAUNDERS: Guns are off the table. We just got to say it. The gun battle is over. We're not going to be taking anybody's guns anymore. CROWLEY: It's about god. COWAN: When John Kennedy ran for president he was so much of his faith that he had to downplay it and reassure voters that his faith wouldn't be his governing philosophy. Today it appears that Democrats don't have faith and that have got to reassure voters that they actually do. CROWLEY: It is about value voters who began to break from Democrats in the aftermath of the god is dead, free love 60s. DONNA BRAZILE, DEMOCRATIC STRATEGIST: I think the American people woke up and said, my god, it's those liberals that are telling us what to do. It's those liberals who are telling us that we have to integrate our schools. It's those liberals who are telling us that we can't have god in the classroom. It's those liberals who are telling us that we need to give women a right to choose in terms of their reproductive health.
CROWLEY: And then came Reagan, a gifted politician who opposed abortion, quoted the Bible and wore patriotism on his sleeve. BRAZILE: And at that point, the Democrats were painted as the godless, gutless party. CROWLEY: Yes, the Democratic Party has come a long way, baby. SAUNDERS: Listen, when we was kids, you didn't go to any of those houses there of those old people. You saw two pictures. Now, you think about it, Jesus Christ almighty and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That's right. SAUNDERS: Roosevelt and Jesus. CROWLEY: Rule number one in the Mudcat playbook -- and all the rules are number one -- you don't have to be from rural America to win its heart and votes but you do have to respect it from its values to its passions from NASCAR to the Locust Mountain Boys. Heath Shuler was born in the 11th, in Swain County, growing up under the Friday night lights on the playing field. He gets it. He courts it, even if he looks like he's not of it. Honest, integrity and standing up for what's right are the coin of the realm here. Values infuse Shuler's stump speech. SHULER: They've all called the Democratic Party a party of no values and no morals, right? Well, let me just -- I'm just here to tell you this. It is immoral to cut student loans. It is immoral to allow our seniors to go without prescription drugs. CROWLEY: He pounds it home on the airwaves. SHULER: I'm Heath Shuler and I approve this message because I want to take our mountain values to Congress. CROWLEY: Up in Washington at the Republican Congressional Committee they are looking to rough him up. By mid-October, they had poured over $660,000 into the race including this ad. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He says he'll bring integrity to Congress but over a dozen times, Heath Shuler or businesses he owned or operated failed to pay property taxes on time. That's not good enough. CROWLEY: Still, Shuler is not an easy target. On the most obvious points in the values debate, there's not a breath of air between him and his Republican opponent. ANNE FITTEN GLENN, ASHEVILLE VOTER: I believe I've heard him call a labor Republican, which I think is, to some extent, right. So he doesn't necessarily fit my definition of a strong Democrat. CROWLEY: It does not sit well in some of these parts. JOHN BOYLE, ASHEVILLE CITIZEN TIMES: Asheville itself is a very progressive city. It has a lot of artists, a lot of people who have moved in here who are very liberal. There's a drum circle every Friday night. CROWLEY: Is Shuler too conservative to bring out liberal Democrats? UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What we're doing, we're working with Heath Shuler's campaign for Congress. We're walking around talking to voters. CROWLEY: It is about turnout, door to door cajoling, and Shuler is up against a well-financed incumbent who has turned them out for 16 years. SHULER: It's a great fall day, isn't it. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes, it is. CROWLEY: The leaves are turning in North Carolina. The days are literally and figuratively growing shorter. (COMMERCIAL BREAK) CROWLEY: They canvas for the Shuler campaign on Saturdays. The door knockers gather for marching orders: get voters to vote. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We don't need to preach to the choir. We need to get the choir off the couch and to the polls and we know that. CROWLEY: They are mostly twenty-somethings prowling the neighborhoods, pounding the doors, walking, knocking, walking some more, knocking some more. Making a list, checking it twice. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What we're trying to do is just see if the Democratic voters that are registered to vote, whether we can count on your vote Heath Shuler in the November elections. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I do believe so. Yes. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: OK. CROWLEY: It is basic grassroots stuff. Knock on doors, hand out brochures, ask questions, and get answers. Find voters. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Thank you, ma'am. You have a good afternoon. SHULER: It doesn't matter what the issues are. It's, do they go to the polls and vote? And the Republicans do that. CROWLEY: By this point, you will not be surprised that Republicans do it better. GEPHARDT: We used to be the grassroots party. I think we for a lot of different reasons, you know, got enamored with just being on television and not doing hard grassroots work, as well. And the Republicans kind of went by us. CROWLEY: Mid October, Camp Shuler gets encouraging polls. It won't matter if they don't get to the real poll. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: How are you, sir? STEVE ROSENTHAL, FORMER AFL-CIO POLITICAL DIRECTOR: What you need in any of these campaigns is a sophisticated system to actually identify where the voters stand on the issues; who the swing voters are, those who are likely to move one way or the other, and then to get them the best information about the candidates; identify them again, where they stand; and then turn out the people who are for you. It's not really rocket science.
CROWLEY: Yet Democrats have botched it. Republicans have made a science of it.UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Use these cards well and often. And they are this size so that they can go into the polling place with you. CROWLEY: Republicans have a national database of voters, district by district by street. They know who's on the other side of the door. KAMARCK: The Republicans are genius at finding the three Republicans in the, you know, seven blocks of Democrats, OK. This can only happen through an ongoing institution. And we've done much too much of this through fly-by-night organizations that some rich guy funds for three years, then they lose the election, they're very disappointed, the whole organization disbands and disappears and we're left with nothing. CROWLEY: Which means no blind calls, no time wasted knocking on the doors of liberal households. Democrats, like Shuler, start from scratch. Voter turnout is a constant push. SHULER: We stay on the phone. We raise the money. And then we are out in the district in the afternoons doing all that we possibly can. SHULER (to constituent): We'll have more signs out this week. We ordered 1,000 more, sir. CROWLEY: Complicating Shuler's task is that his base just isn't enough. SHULER: I need votes from Republicans. I need votes from independents, liberals, moderates. CROWLEY: There are not enough liberals in the 11th District to elect a Democratic Congressman. There are not enough liberals in the country to elect a Democratic president. COWAN : For Democrats to build a majority, we not only have to hold the liberals in the party, we've got to win almost two thirds of moderates. The math is brutal for Democrats.SHULER: Well, bless your heart. CROWLEY: So essentially a Democrat has to reach into the middle while holding onto the left. For Shuler, that means being conservative enough for rural part of his district without forfeiting the more liberal area in and around Asheville. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We want it to be clear that Heath will defend the Environment. That's an important issue to most people in Asheville. CROWLEY (on camera): Could you, in this district, as easily have been a Republican? SCHULER: Wow, could I have easily been a Republican? You know, if I was born into a Republican family. CROWLEY (voice-over): Asheville, we have a problem. What's a Democratic anyway? The party struggles to find itself and Shuler gets an unexpected assist. (COMMERCIAL BREAK) CROWLEY: Hardcore Democrats in the 11th District have been waiting 16 years to put one of their own in Congress, but honestly, this is not what they had in mind. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: On a number of issues, on abortion, on immigration, and on gay rights, he's absolutely indistinguishable from Charles Taylor. CROWLEY: Ouch. Shuler just doesn't fit the template. It's remarkably difficult for a conservative to find space in the party. The day her husband was nominated, Teresa Heinz Kerry did a meet and greet with the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Caucus, not that there's anything wrong with that. Not exactly. SAUNDERS: You know, I went to a DNC meeting one time, and they said, you know, the Women's Caucus will meet over here, and the Black Caucus will be over here, and the gays will be over here. We forgot about the big tent. We've assembled a whole bunch of pup tents.
COWAN: And many voters, particularly white men, saw that collection of interest groups and said, that's not me, there's nothing in it for me. CROWLEY: This is party with so many identities, it has no identity. HATTAWAY: When you see an R after the candidate's name on the ballot, you pretty much know what you're going to get. Too many people in too many places see a D on the ballot and they don't know what they're going to get. CROWLEY: This is no way to win an election. Democrats have been a minority on Capitol Hill for 12 years. When George Bush's term ends in 2009, Democrats would have occupied the Oval Office just 12 of the last 40 years. In the last two elections, Gore and Kerry lost the entire South and much of the mid and interior West. SAUNDERS: You know, Al Gore has a little bit of a stiff style and it comes off as a planner, you know, style, you know, a little landed gentry. When he went goose hunting, John Kerry looked very elitist in that hunt. I mean, first, he didn't carry his game out. That was a huge mistake. CROWLEY: What we have here is failure to relate.
BRAZILE: They want somebody who can relate to their everyday concerns, that they can put on the table, you know, I'm having a hard time paying my bills, I have two kids that want to go to college.
BEGALA: There's something happened in the late '60s and '70s where the Democrats ceased being seen as -- and I think, in truth, ceased being, the party of the average guy, the regular guy, the working guy.
COWAN: Democrats are so blown out among the white middle class, that unless you address all three core problems at once, credibility on security, mainstream on cultural values, and middle class on economic issues, if you don't address all three of those at once, you cannot actually fix what ails the Democratic party. CROWLEY: Tell me how it's going so far. SHULER: Well, it's been good. I mean, obviously, the days are ticking away. And I've never wanted my life to kind of waste it away, but, 25 days is not going to come soon enough. CROWLEY: The Shuler/Taylor race is getting some big city attention. The "Wall Street Journal" blasts Taylor for profiting from government funded projects he got from his district. Taylor is legendary for superior constituent services and bringing home the bacon. He demands an apology from the journal and threatens to sue. Shuler runs with it. SHULER: You know, it just goes back to this absolute power corrupts, absolutely. CROWLEY: Taylor is Shuler's most powerful argument to the liberal denizens of Asheville. He may not be their idea of a Democrat, but he has a "D" after his name. It is probably enough to get most of them out to vote. FELICITY GREEN, ASHEVILLE VOTER: It's a lesser of two evils. I know what we have now. I know what a Republican Congressman has done for the area. So I will vote for pretty much almost anyone else. SHULER: It is right up honest, we can see the finish line. CROWLEY: Shuler opens a lead in the polls, but next Taylor calls for a debate and Shuler takes a hit. (COMMERCIAL BREAK) SCHWEITZER: I'm a red-meat eating, gun-toting, dog-loving, horse-riding, ranching, straight-talking Democrat from Montana. If I'm concerned about somebody, I tell them I'll be praying for them.
CROWLEY: Praise the lord and pass the ammunition. It works for Governor Brian Schweitzer.
SCHWEITZER: You can smoke cigars, drink whiskey and make it to 110.
CROWLEY: Schweitzer is Montana's first Democratic governor in 16 years. This is a state that's voted Republican in nine of the last 10 presidential elections. The interior west, a huge swath of Republican red states is flyover territory for Democratic presidential campaigns, not worth the time to land in. (on-camera): Have you ever brought a national politician out here and flown around with him? SCHWEITZER: No. CROWLEY: You got to do it. SCHWEITZER: I don't see the upside in it, bringing someone from East or West Coast or somebody out here. A, they probably don't understand Montana. Probably, Montana doesn't understand them.
CROWLEY (voice-over): This is an ornery kind of place that distrusts both coasts and the federal government. Last election, voters here approved medicinal marijuana and banned gay marriage.SCHWEITZER: I wouldn't be able to tell you what they think about the politics in Montana, because here's a news flash. We don't make the "New York Times" much in Montana. CROWLEY: This is not precisely true. Schweitzer got a good spread in the Sunday "New York Times Magazine." STEPHEN COLBERT, TALK SHOW HOST: Please welcome Governor Brian Schweitzer. CROWLEY: He dropped in on Stephen Colbert. COLBERT: You've got to get yourself one of these. SCHWEITZER: They are wild tonight. CROWLEY: He was a headliner at the Washington D.C. Press Club. SCHWEITZER: I usually travel with my dog. I have a border collie, a smart, dang border collie. CROWLEY: Schweitzer is the rock star from the Rockies, a successful red-state Democrat with conservative social values and progressive policies including the governor's biggest pride, the windmill energy he brought to the state. SCHWEITZER: I would say to the national party, listen to folks in your own states. Don't try to export your values into Rocky Mountain states or the Midwest. There are values in each of those states. Some of them are Democrats. Some of them are Republicans. But it is fertile ground. Plant, nurture it, and you'll grow a wonderful tree. CROWLEY: At 6'2, he has the swagger and the personality of the land. Big and open, rough and tumble. BRAZILE: I don't want to quote Arnold Schwarzenegger, but they want manly men. They want men that stand up for what they believe in and when they are attacked, they want to see a man fight back. SHULER: Boys with the big toys, huh?
CROWLEY: No problem on the brawn front here in the 11th, where the quarterback digs NASCAR and gets how to translate the manly man thing into politics.SHULER: I mean, we're not going to let somebody say anything about our campaign that we're not going to fight for. CROWLEY: And Shuler understand the basic Montana model. SHULER: You know, it's hard for people in Washington D.C. to tell me how they think here. SCHWEITZER: They try. SHULER: Oh, they try so much. And we get a lot of that influence but it is real important that we maintain the control of this campaign and we said it from the beginning, we're going to listen to our people. CROWLEY: Republican Charles Taylor said no to our multiple requests for interviews. He and Shuler have not appeared together at any of the candidate forum this is year but now Taylor wants a televised debate and Shuler says no. The "Asheville Citizen Times" calls him on it. There is a discrepancy over who declined which dates, but Shuler says the day offered was a Sunday. SHULER: That's our day of worship at church and that's our day of family and I persistently continue to tell them that's my family day. The editor questioned by integrity on that. CROWLEY: Soon after the article appears, Shuler attends a candidate forum. His campaign circulates this picture. Punch, counter punch. The passage of time, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, is visible now in landscapes both natural and political. Max Cleland is still out campaigning for Democrats though never again for himself. CLELAND: I just want to be -- there's a great line by Robert Burns, the Scottish poet that said, "Build my house by the side of the road and be a friend to man." CROWLEY: George McGovern, a self-identified bleeding heart liberal, dedicated his library with Bill Clinton, centrist. Mudcat Saunders is working on an album of populous songs with Nashville recording artists. SAUNDERS: It's a money disease. It's a thing called greed and it feeds on those who need the money most in moneyland. CROWLEY: In the 11th district of North Carolina, football metaphors abound. SHULER: We are on the 10-yard line, folks. We're staring at the end zone right in the face. CROWLEY (on camera): Many party insiders think if Democrats like Heath Shuler win this year, it will be despite the disadvantages of the party label. Maybe Democrats are getting a clue, but '06 is a weighted test. Every indicator points to an election not about Democrats getting it together, but about Republicans falling apart. (voice-over): Two-minute warning. Not exactly but early voting has begun. (on camera): Who are you going to vote for for U.S. Congress? SHULER: Well, that's going to be the obvious one, I believe. I still think the funny thing about this whole, entire campaign is a lot of this is so much out of your control and there's very little that's in your control, but you do have the one vote. SOURCE:transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0610/24/se.01.htmlTHIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.Tommorw: The 4th Transcript from the series....M
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Oct 27, 2006 14:28:09 GMT 4
CNN LIVE EVENT/SPECIAL Broken Government: Power Play Aired October 26, 2006 - 20:00 ET Transcript from the 4th show in this series Part 1 of 2
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) JOHN KING, CNN ANCHOR (voice-over): Islamabad, Pakistan, an edgy place in the weeks after September 11.
Moazzam Begg, among the newcomers arriving from neighboring Afghanistan after the bombs started falling, he thought he had escaped, until a midnight knock at the door introduced him to the most expansive display of presidential power in American history.
MOAZZAM BEGG, FORMER DETAINEE: I opened the door to be faced with people, several of them, pointing guns and electric stun guns toward me. Nobody said anything. They didn't ask me any questions. They didn't identify themselves. They pushed me to the forecourt of -- of my house, and then into the front room, where I was made to kneel.
My hands were shackled behind my back. My legs were shackled. The last thing I saw, before they put my hood over my head, was them walking towards the room where my children were.
KING: A terrifying van ride would bring Begg his first glimpse of America's reach in the post-9/11 world.
BEGG: Somebody lifted the hood off of my head. And I heard an American voice speak to me. And I -- I saw him. And he produced a pair of handcuffs. And he said that these handcuffs were -- were from one of the widows of the September 11 victims, given to him in order for him to capture the perpetrators.
KING: No search warrant, no arrest warrant -- enemy combatant was his designation. And he would soon realize that there were others, that his captors wanted information, and that they were impatient.
BEGG: Dragged across the floor, thrown on to the ground. Our clothes were ripped off with knives, with several soldiers sitting on top of us. We were being kicked, punched, beaten, sworn at, spat at. Dogs were barking around us. We were photographed naked, and then dragged naked and shivering into interrogation rooms, where the first questioning began.
GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Our grief has turned to anger, and anger to resolution. Whether we bring our enemies to justice, or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.
(APPLAUSE)
KING: The president, who took 9/11 personally, wanted justice on his terms.
MARY MATALIN, FORMER ASSISTANT TO PRESIDENT BUSH: I remember, almost from the moment of the night of 9/11, saying to us, in the bomb shelter, when he got back from Nebraska: "This is the mission of this government. This is the mission of this administration. We will bring these terrorists, in whatever form it takes, to justice," and was relentless in pursuing whatever it took to change the machinery and the strategic relationships of government to make that happen.
KING: New rules for a new enemy.
BUSH: I can hear you.
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
KING: The president in office just eight months, facing an extraordinary challenge, and finding a critical ally in a man he had never met, and in an outpost of the bureaucracy not usually associated with war or diplomacy.
Law professor John Yoo had just landed a mid-level job at the Justice Department, and was suddenly turning his lectures about presidential power into muscular memos for the Oval Office inbox.
JOHN YOO, FORMER JUSTICE DEPARTMENT COUNSEL: Wartime always expands the powers of the president, because it's the agency of the government that's best able to reaction to foreign danger, and act quickly.
KING (on camera): Justice, on Mrs. Bush's terms, would mean challenge after challenge, test after test of the balance of powers laid out in the Constitution, adopted here in Philadelphia's Independence Hall 219 years ago, written by men, who, for all their brilliance, could not have imagined jet aircraft, let alone jet aircraft used as weapons.
Nor could men determined to find the lasting antidote to tyranny have imagined the Internet, spy satellites, other technological advances now so central in the war on terror. But they did warn, in this hall, time and time again of too much presidential power, creating a careful system of checks by the Congress and the courts, lines the Bush administration, in the name of protecting Americans from another attack, has repeatedly stretched, rewritten, and sometimes just ignored.
(voice-over): Within hours of the 9/11 attacks, a military response was inevitable. And, within days, the defense secretary began asking about the lines between tough and torture. It made some military lawyers nervous. To them, it was all spelled out in the Army Field Manual and the Geneva Conventions.
TORIE CLARKE, FORMER PENTAGON SPOKESWOMAN: Difficult issues are never black and white. There are grays and shades of gray. And they change, and they evolve. So, it was never a simple: This is one position; that's the other position -- position.
There are many different levels to each. And, so, it was much more of a Rubik's Cube, if you will, of trying to find your way forward.
KING: The White House wasn't interested in a debate. It bypassed the Pentagon, looking, instead, to the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel and John Yoo.
YOO: But, if there was ever an emergency that struck our country and demanded vigorous executive action and response, it was this new kind of attack.
KING: The Geneva Conventions govern treatment of wartime prisoners -- not this time. "Customary international law, whatever its source and content, does not bind the president," Yoo and his Office of Legal Counsel colleagues advised the White House.
Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution gives Congress the power to make rules concerning captures on land and water -- again, not this time. "Any efforts by Congress to regulate the interrogation of battlefield combatants, the Justice Department told Mr. Bush, would violate the Constitution's sole vesting of the commander in chief authority in the president."
YOO: The general idea was, we want to give the president as much authority as possible to fight this war. It's a network of extremists. And the way to defeat them might call on us to use methods and tools that would be more secret than what has been in the past, or more aggressive than what was in the past.
KING: Methods and tools Moazzam Begg first encountered in Kandahar, then, more aggressively and frequently, he says, at the U.S. detention center at Bagram, Afghanistan.
BEGG: Tied with my hands behind my back, being then shackled to my legs. So, I was almost hog-tied, like an animal, being kicked and punched and beaten, threatened with further torture in a place in Egypt, if I didn't cooperate, and hearing the sound of a woman screaming next door to the interrogation room, which I was led to believe was my wife.
If there's anything worse than that, it's watching the abuse, humiliation, and murder of other people. I watched two people getting beaten to death in front of me, and was unable to do anything about it.
KING: Coming up: broad expansion of presidential powers here at home, too.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Satellite communications, Internet, you know, things like that, are also the same tools al Qaeda is using against us. That's how they succeed.
KING: And the small-town Connecticut library that said, enough.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
KING (voice-over): Glastonbury, Connecticut, is one of those places that values its history and traditions. Flags were always easy to come by. There are more since 9/11.
The Welles-Turner Memorial Library is a Main Street landmark. Here, the first sign of how that day changed everything came in the crush for new shelf space.
Then came the call from the FBI, talk of a suspicious Internet session on a library computer, and a visit to executive director George Christian to deliver a letter.
GEORGE CHRISTIAN, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, LIBRARY CONNECTION, INC.: A national security letter. And I -- I had never heard those three words before, as I'm sure most people in the United States never had.
KING: A little research told Christian all he needed to know: Main street Glastonbury was smack in the middle of the post-9/11 collision between law enforcement and civil liberties.
CHRISTIAN: They wanted to know everything we knew about who might be using that I.P. address for a particular 45-minute period back in February.
KING: George Christian said no.
CHRISTIAN: Connecticut, like 47 other of the 50 states, has statutes that guarantee the inviolability of patron privacy. And we are instructed by the law not to disclose what our patrons are up to, to anyone, without, obviously, a -- a search warrant.
KING: Christian recalls two FBI agents insisting they didn't need a warrant, and warning him, those who receive national security letters are sworn to secrecy.
CHRISTIAN: It was interesting, though, that it was a -- a good- guy/bad-guy kind of thing, that -- that one of the FBI agents was a nice young man, dressed, like I, in blazer, tie, and the other was a much more robustly muscled individual, wearing a nit shirt that revealed exactly how -- how muscular he was. He stood in the background and didn't say anything.
KING (on camera): But you knew he was around.
(LAUGHTER)
KING (voice-over): Christian said he needed to talk to his lawyer.
CHRISTIAN: Really, coming at it from a civil liberties aspect, I think that it's natural, over time, for governments to intrude on civil liberties. And -- and the way to curb that is to stand up and say, no, I don't think so.
KING: No was not a word the FBI -- and the president, for that matter -- was prepared to accept in the post-9/11 anti-terror revolution, a new normal that brought a color code for terror threats and a new mission for the FBI.
BUSH: Now that we're at war, we ought to give the FBI the tools necessary to track down terrorists.
KING: What is new and controversial to many Americans is longstanding practice in some democracies.
In the late 1990s, for example, Moazzam Begg was still living in his hometown of Birmingham, England, and drawing the attention of Britain's MI5 spy agency. Islamic radicalism was on the rise. And a bookstore Begg owns in a Muslim neighborhood became a gathering place of many on both British and U.S. government watch lists.
The MI5 would be a model, as the president pushed the USA Patriot Act, passed by Congress just six weeks after 9/11 -- one of its goals, breaking a tense CIA-FBI rivalry that made competition more common than cooperation. It relaxed rules for sharing between law enforcement and intelligence agencies, allowed roving wiretaps of suspected terrorists, and created great executive authority to use national security letters to subpoena e-mail, library, and other records.
(on camera): I would assume you would concede that, in rare circumstances, the government has to trample on individual rights for a larger cause?
CHRISTIAN: I would say, in emergencies, yes. But I would rather have that defined carefully than just say, blanket, yes, there are circumstances, and let the government define what those circumstances are.
KING (voice-over): Broad new powers, but, in the view of the president and his team, they did not go far enough.
Mr. Bush approved more aggressive home-front tactics that were meant to stay secret: a massive domestic eavesdropping program, an unprecedented use of data mining, searching electronic bills and other records, and a secret financial database to track terror supporters. Administration critics, like former Clinton White House Chief of Staff John Podesta, call it a reckless power play.
JOHN PODESTA, FORMER CLINTON WHITE HOUSE CHIEF OF STAFF: Specifically, for example, in the -- in the warrantless wiretapping case, they ignore statutes. They ignore the Constitution. And they have gone well beyond what people view as being a strong president, to perhaps being a lawless one.
KING: The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 was one of many post-Watergate reforms designed to check presidential power. It created a special secret court to approve surveillance within the United States. But the president didn't want to involve the courts or ask Congress for more robust surveillance powers.
Once again, John Yoo and the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel cleared the way.
SEN. TRENT LOTT (R), MISSISSIPPI: The American people expect it of us, and they will accept nothing less.
KING: Just three days after the 9/11 attacks, Congress passed a resolution authorizing the president to use all necessary and appropriate force against those responsible -- to John Yoo, legal justification for bypassing the courts, ignoring the 1978 FISA law, and launching the top-secret eavesdropping program.
YOO: I think what happened with the NSA program is not that there's this desire to grab power. I think it's a legitimate concern about revealing information that would be helpful to al Qaeda.
PODESTA: What's really characteristic of this administration is, they make law in secret. They -- they write memos to themselves, claiming this authority, never explain it to the American people, never explain it to the Congress.
KING: George Christian is neither a lawyer, nor a politician. His decision to fight back, he says, born of Yankee sensibility and history's lessons.
CHRISTIAN: They certainly do not want our country to suffer the deprivations of terrorist attacks. But, when you join the armed forces, you take an oath to defend the Constitution, not the country, not the president.
And that's -- that's what this country is all about. And I feel that I -- I was patriotic, in that sense, very much. I was defending the Constitution against its being violated, needlessly. Franklin made a famous quip about that, that those who would sacrifice liberty in order to gain security deserve neither, and -- and end up with neither.
KING: Up next:
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Just kind of assess everything (INAUDIBLE) situation (INAUDIBLE) as far as casualties and whatnot.
KING: Not the presidency he imagined, but a defining moment gave birth to defiant rhetoric.
BUSH: Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) KING: He began on a very different course, a governor with a famous name who conveyed more West Texas than Washington. Compassionate conservative was his label of choice, kinder, gentler, his promised world view.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, OCTOBER 12, 2000)
BUSH: State, if we're an arrogant nation, they will -- they will resent us. If we're a humble nation, but strong, they will welcome us.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
SEN. ROBERT BYRD (D), WEST VIRGINIA: I looked with great hope upon our president when he first came to the Oval Office.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KING: Democrat Robert Byrd is the longest serving senator in history, always carrying a copy of the Constitution as he has crossed paths, and sometimes swords, with 11 presidents. He fondly recalls a dinner invitation just after George W. Bush moved into the White House.
BYRD: I was very impressed -- and I told my wife on the way home so -- very impressed that he said grace at the meal. He was a humble man, I thought, a man who will think of the scriptures, and who will think of the Constitution, who will be a man who will listen.
KING: Not long after, a crisp September morning suddenly turned from gorgeous to gruesome.
ANDREW CARD, WHITE HOUSE CHIEF OF STAFF: And I walked up to his right ear, leaned over, and whispered in: "A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack."
KING: A few whispered words in a Florida schoolroom transformed a presidency and a president.
On Air Force One, moments later, his first big taste of the power and consequences of being commander in chief -- a few commercial flights were still unaccounted for. The Pentagon needed orders.
CARD: It was a short, but very heavy discussion, but the decision was made that, if hostile acts were likely to be taken place by a commercial jetliner, a fighter pilot would be given permission to shoot the plane down.
BUSH: America has stood down enemies before, and we will do so this time.
KING: The transformation was immediate. Talk of humility on the world stage gave way to a doctrine of preemption, us vs. them, whatever it takes.
BUSH: Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.
BRUCE BUCHANAN, PRESIDENTIAL HISTORIAN: There's a religious factor. Bush, by many accounts, truly believes that he is divinely inspired, and feels that he's doing the right thing. There's that side of it, the -- the sense-of-destiny side. There is also a kind of a personal-defiance side.
KING: Not the same man University of Texas historian Bruce Buchanan studied during his days in Austin.
BUCHANAN: Would never have expected it, watching him as governor right down the street. He was not someone with any particular interest in foreign policy.
KING: In his new mission, results mattered more than rules.
Moazzam Begg was one of dozens rounded up when the White House gave Pakistan a list of suspected al Qaeda operatives, and an ultimatum.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, OCTOBER 7, 2001)
BUSH: If any government sponsors the outlaws and killers of innocents, they have become outlaws and murderers themselves, and they will take that lonely path at their own peril.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BEGG: This could not have happened, in this way, in Europe or elsewhere. You could not kidnap somebody in this way, and expect to get away with it.
KING: A president obsessed with preventing another attack, and convinced people like Begg were the key.
YOO: The first question was really, what do we do with these guys? It wasn't like they came to us and said: We want to do something. Give us a justification for it.
They honestly didn't know what the right thing to do was.
KING (on camera): But, at some point, somebody thinks, the tougher we can be, the more we will learn.
YOO: Mmm-hmm.
KING: What happens if somebody says, "I'm torturing these people"?
YOO: What people really want to know is how much flexibility does the president have even to make those kinds of choices?
KING (voice-over): The decision to bypass Congress and authorize the domestic surveillance program was born of the same calculation.
YOO: Go back to the winter of 2001, 2002, where we thought there were going to be very devastating attacks that were about to be launched. And, so, yes, I do think that, if you're in that situation, the ticking-time-bomb situation, where you believe there's about to be an imminent -- imminent attack, I think the president can take measures he's -- that he believes are necessary to prevent those attacks.
KING: Mr. Bush is hardly the first president to test the reach of executive power. President Lincoln, at the height of the Civil War, suspended one of democracy's most fundamental rights: habeas corpus, the right to go to court to challenge imprisonment. During World War II, President Roosevelt ordered the detention of 100,000 Japanese and Americans of Japanese descent.
But no president has pushed the limits on the scale of this one, overseas at home, from secret CIA prisons and domestic eavesdropping, to what some consider the boldest test of all, launching war in Iraq, absent any direct attack or provocation.
BUCHANAN: That assertion stands as the most stark departure from ordinary assumptions about how presidents will use the war power. It raises questions about the -- the proper scope of presidential power in more intense ways, I think, than most of the other things associated with detainees, and wiretapping, and things of that sort.
KING: Mr. Bush argues, the results justify the extraordinary steps.
Captured senior al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah, for example, initially told interrogators little.
BUSH: And, so, the CIA used an alternative set of procedures.
KING: Mr. Bush credits those alternative procedures for information that led to the capture of 9/11 planners Ramzi Binalshibh and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.
BUSH: Once in our custody, KSM was questioned by the CIA using these procedures. And he soon provided information that helped us stop another planned attack on the United States.
KING: Moazzam Begg remembers both physical and psychological extremes.
BEGG: Sometimes, in the middle of the night, sometimes, continuously being interrogated for hours on end, lasting up to 24 hours, and sometimes for five minutes. We didn't have access to natural light. I didn't -- hadn't seen the sun for almost a year. I don't think any man, president or not of the United States, should have that much power.
BUSH: There will be a legal debate about whether or not I have the authority to do this. I'm absolutely convinced I do.
KING: But, to Senator Byrd, the lesson of that long-ago dinner: His first impressions can be wrong. BYRD: No president is above the law or above the Constitution. And I have to say that this White House, I think, has disregarded the Constitution in many ways. And I think the people are going to make a judgment. And so will history.
KING: Ahead: The man at Mr. Bush's side has waited 30 years for the chance to rebuild the power of the presidency.
RICHARD B. CHENEY, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We're doing what we think is right. And I'm very comfortable with that.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
KING: I'm John King in New York. Our "Broken Government" special continues in just a moment.
First though, this hour's top stories. A big wildfire near Palm Springs, California has killed four firefighters and another is in critical condition. The wind shifted and blew a wall of flame into their fire engine. The arson-caused fire is also blocking the only road out of an R.V. park, trapping some 500 campers.
This month's U.S. military death toll in Iraq is now 96. The Pentagon announced today five U.S. troop deaths in Iraq's Anbar province. However, the military also says violence in Baghdad has dipped in the past few days.
President Bush has signed a bill to put up 700 miles of fencing along the U.S./Mexican border. The bill provides no money to actually pay for the fence, although there's a $1 billion down payment in a different homeland security measure.
On the campaign trail today the president slammed the New Jersey state supreme court decision to give same-sex couples the same rights and benefits as married heterosexuals. The president blamed what he called, "an activist court," even though a majority of the justices were appointed by a Republican governor.
Scientists say wild pigs called javelina may be to blame spreading e. coli bacteria in California's spinach fields, sparking the recent nation-wide outbreak.
And the spring of records continues on Wall Street. For the twelfth time in the last 17 sessions, the Dow Industrials closed at an all-time high, this time, 12,163.
Note from Michelle: You can read more about librarian, George Christian, and his stand against the FBI at older posts in BANNED BOOKS, under US Affairs on the homeboard. Continued.....
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michelle
Administrator
I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Oct 27, 2006 14:32:41 GMT 4
....continued:CNN LIVE EVENT/SPECIAL Broken Government: Power Play Aired October 26, 2006 - 20:00 ET Transcript from the 4th show in this series Part 2 of 2I'm John King. Not back to our "Broken Government" series, "Power Play". (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) KING: Morfoot (ph), Texas, show of military might. It is the vice president's favorite setting. This, his constant refrain. CHENEY: Thinking about September 11th still moves all of us, because the attack was directed at all of us. We were meant to take it personally, and we still do take it personally. KING: There is no doubt in Dick Cheney's imprint on the administration's war on terror. Support for robust presidential power is a Cheney trademark, a personal mission for 30 years, and central to virtually every policy recommendation, before and after 9/11. CHENEY: We are now engaged in a constant effort, obviously, to protect the nation against further attack. That means we need good intelligence. It means there have to be national security secrets. It means we need to be able to go after and capture or kill those people who are trying to kill Americans. That's not pleasant business. It's a very serious business. KING: His views can seem at odds with his upbringing. Wyoming is Dick Cheney's home, a rugged place where most are skeptical of government power, especially government in far away Washington. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You know, this is -- out here gun control is how steady you hold your rifle. ALAN SIMPSON, (R) FORMER U.S. SENATOR: Cheney is a westerner. He's inoculated against B.S. KING: Former Senator Alan Simpson is a Cheney friend, dating back to the 1960s, a student of both frontier and presidential history. SIMPSON: Executive power has a lighter hand in peace and a heavier hand in war. KING: By all accounts, including Mr. Cheney's, his zest for a strong presidency was born of his witness to a weak one, at Gerald Ford's side in the aftermath of Watergate. SIMPSON: When he was 34 years old, he was the chief of staff of the president of the United States. So why wouldn't he be enamored for the rest of his days about the power of the presidency? RICHARD M. NIXON, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Well, I'm not a crook. I've earned everything I've got. KING: Cheney was on the losing side in those days after Nixon's resignation as Congress rushed to restrict executive power. He talked about it with CNN in an interview in 2002. CHENEY: And there's been a constant steady erosion of the prerogatives and the power of the Oval Office, a continual encroachment by Congress, War Powers Act, anti-impoundment and a budget control act. So the office is weaker today than it was 30, 35 years ago.
KING: That first White House experience would guide his political career. In Congress in the 1980s, for example, the Iran- Contra committee accused the Reagan White House of deliberating ignoring a law forbidding U.S. aid to Nicaraguan rebels. But Cheney was the architect of a defiant 155-page minority report that said Congress had no right to tell a president how to direct foreign policy.
CHENEY: The last thing Congress needs to do is to legislate new restrictions on presidential power and authority. SIMPSON: The power of the presidency, that's his lodestone. KING: Being back in the White House meant a chance to set things right. His secret energy task force, citing executive privilege, refused to disclose participants in its meetings. Cheney fought complaints all the way to the Supreme Court. CHENEY: This is about the ability of future presidents and vice presidents to do their job. And they've always had the capacity in the past to get honest, unvarnished advice. KING: He is also the architect of another dramatic executive power play, an explosion in the use of signing statements to take issue with laws passed by Congress, especially those dealing with presidential power.
PODESTA: He's created for himself virtually a line item veto, that is, he can strike certain sections of the bill, and say, I'm going to ignore those and implement the ones I agree with and not implement the ones I disagree with.KING: Twice, for example, Congress has passed laws forbidding the military from using intelligence not lawfully collected. On both occasions Mr. Bush issued a signing statement, saying only the commander in chief can make such decisions. The tactic is not new. The president's father challenged 232 laws over four years. President Clinton issued 140 signing statements in eight years. But this administration has used the practice nearly 800 times in six years. PODESTA: Pre-dates 9/11, it was a plan to exalt and aggrandize the executive branch, the so-called unitary executive theory. You kind of have to scratch your head a little bit and say that the model you set for yourself is to restore the imperial presidency of Richard Nixon. SIMPSON: Give it up, being a tough guy. I mean, I don't agree with all he does, but I know that he's not out to destroy the United States of America and the Constitution and all of the things we cherish. I do know that. KING: The dark side. He is well aware of the label. CHENEY: I suppose sometimes people look at my demeanor and say, well, he's the Darth Vader of the administration. KING: His default, especially since 9/11, is assume the worst, whether the issue is intelligence about Iraq's weapons programs or what legal status to give suspected terrorists in U.S. custody, people like Moazzam Begg. CHENEY: These are not prisoners of war. These are terrorists. These are people who, some of whom may in fact have been involved in planning or supporting the attack on the United States on September 11. KING: Begg was transferred from Bagram to Guantanamo Bay after a year in U.S. custody. It was not just Begg's radical friends in Birmingham that concerned U.S. and British counterterrorism officials. His passport was a road map of militant Islam. He delivered relief to Bosnian Muslims during their civil war and considered joining the fight, more trips to militant Muslim camps in Chechnya and Kashmir. And it more than raised eyebrows in intelligence circles when a man with a wife and kids left a comfortable middle class British neighborhood to move to Afghanistan in 2000. (on camera): If you tried to explain something like that the reaction was? BEGG: The reaction was, why would you go to such a place? You must be a terrorist. KING (voice-over): So when British Prime Minister Tony Blair began pressuring Washington about the treatment of Begg and other British nationals in U.S. custody, the vice president was reluctant to give ground. CHENEY: These are bad guys. They've been screened, pre- screened, if you will, in Afghanistan and those that end up in Guantanamo, we have reason to believe are in fact very dangerous. KING: Assume the worst, a philosophy that came from the top, from the vice president, who sees his job as being the bad cop. His responsibility, see the glass as half empty, to assume the worst. Coming up: LT. CMDR CHARLES SWIFT: He says, I don't want to be famous, I want to go home. I said, home is through the Supreme Court. KING: The president's powers come under challenge in the courts by men Mr. Bush calls terrorists and by men who call Mr. Bush commander in chief. (COMMERCIAL BREAK) KING: Lieutenant Commander Charlie Swift loves a challenge, hates sitting still. But sit he did, for nine months after being assigned to the Navy JAG unit assembled to serve as defense attorneys for terror detainees being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In December 2003, finally a client, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's driver. Swift remembers packing for his first trip to Gitmo and stopping by for a quick chat with the military prosecutor. SWIFT: The chief prosecutor said, your access is there so long as you negotiate a plea bargain. If you're not negotiating a plea, then your access may be cut off. KING (on camera): What did that tell you? SWIFT: That told me I was definitely going to federal court. KING: David versus Goliath. A mid-level officer not only suing his commander in chief, but accusing him of running roughshod over the Constitution, international law, and more than a century of military tradition.
SWIFT: The president of the United States decides who gets tried. And he's the one who ultimately approves or disapproves your sentence. And he's the one who sets the rules. That's how it all came together in one branch.
That power is incredibly abusive. That power cannot work. We stopped being American when we start doing that.KING: What bothered him most was learning he might not get access to everything the government knew about his client. That prompted him to look even more closely at the new rules of evidence approved by the president. SWIFT: Chaining somebody down for 24 hours until they talk or 12 hours, putting them in extraordinarily uncomfortable positions for hours on end, or actually even going so far as possibly, you know, simulating drowning, or something like that, to obtain a confession. That's not coming in, in any regular court, anywhere in the civilized world. KING: Charlie Swift's complaint about conditions at Guantanamo Bay is Moazzam Begg's experience, at least by his account. BEGG: The same people who had ordered my maltreatment, my torture in Bagram turned up with a confession for me to sign. I refused initially and said I wouldn't do so without a lawyer. And they said that you won't see a lawyer unless you sign this. KING: Begg would be in U.S. custody for two and a half years before he saw a lawyer. By then the pendulum was beginning to swing against the president and his expansive view of executive power. And Charlie Swift, Lieutenant Commander Charlie Swift, was happy to help push. SWIFT: You don't want the president to have a blank check. We don't pledge allegiance to the president. Every military officer pledges allegiance to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.KING: The high court had already twice rejected the president's rules, but Swift's case, Hamdan versus Rumsfeld, was the decisive blow. SWIFT: It means that we can't be scared out of who we are. And that's victory, folks. KING: Writing for the majority, Justice John Paul Stevens said the president wrongly bypassed Congress and ignored international law in establishing military commissions. "The executive," Justice Stevens wrote, "is bound to comply with the Rule of Law".
The domestic eavesdropping program also is in legal jeopardy. A U.S. District Court judge ruled it unconstitutional, saying,
"It was never the intent of the framers to give the president such unfettered control, particularly when his actions blatantly disregard the parameters clearly enumerated in the Bill of Rights." The administration is appealing that ruling.[/b] YOO: Civil War, World War II, the courts generally until the war was over make decisions about the legality of this or desirability of that. In this war, it's incredible, the Supreme Court is intervening while the war is still going on. PODESTA: You know, that's the different between President George and King George. You know, we did fight a revolution about this, to provide a set of checks and balances in our Constitution that has made this the strongest, greatest country on earth. And I think they want to turn the clock so far back that it's really quite mind-boggling.KING: Charlie Swift was twice passed over for promotions during all this and says he will leave the military soon with no bitterness and no regrets. (on camera): If you had five minutes on the way out to sit down with the President of the United States, what did you tell him? SWIFT: That there's another way that we can do this. President Bush right after 9/11 said that terrorists could bring down our tallest building, but they could not destroy our values. Now, I think that the Supreme Court put us back on line to make sure that doesn't happen. KING (voice-over): Just ahead, stronger efforts to rein in the president, and more and more questions about the price of his stubborn insistence that wartime decisions are his and his alone. (COMMERCIAL BREAK) KING: Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina is also Colonel Lindsey Graham of the United States Air Force Reserves. He's a conservative, a Republican and another military lawyer who thinks the commander in chief needs to brush up on history. SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM, (R) SOUTH CAROLINA: This is a constitutional democracy. There are three branches, not one. KING: The sudden push back under the Capitol dome is as remarkable, if not more so, than the lectures on the limits of presidential power directed at the Bush White House by the Supreme Court. A Republican-controlled Congress that had largely given the president his way had largely kept silent even when actions offended his increasingly challenging administration that has from early on made clear its disdain for Congressional interference. YOO: Most everyone agreed that the president should decide on the measures to wage war and that, you know, Congress's support is welcome but it's not necessary. KING: Lawmakers' frustration at what they see as executive arrogance has been bubbling for most of the Bush presidency. SEN. ARLEN SPECTER (R), PENNSYLVANIA: I want to turn now to executive power. KING: At the Alito confirmation hearings, for example, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter raised complaints about the presidential signing statements, treatment of terror detainees, and the legal basis for the domestic eavesdropping program. SAM ALITO, SUPREME COURT JUSTICE: No person in this country is above the law, and that includes the president and it includes the Supreme Court.KING: It was the Hamdan ruling, which required the president to get congressional approval of a new detainee program, that brought the frustration to a boil. SEN. JOHN MCCAIN (R), ARIZONA: The United States is not like the terrorists. We have no grief for them, but what we are is a nation that upholds values and standards of behavior in treatment of all people, no matter how evil or bad they are. KING: But it was the initial my way or the highway approach again, even in the face of a Supreme Court rebuke, that turned the rumbling into a revolt. GRAHAM: If you deal the other two branches out the way that's been proposed, it will come back to haunt us, because this won't be the only president we'll have. KING: Graham had tried to head all this off two years ago as court challenges mounted, as detainees like Moazzam Begg began to get access to lawyers and accuse the United States of violating its most cherished legal principles. BEGG: Nobody knows what crime they are supposed to have committed against the United States of America. Most of the people there argue their innocence and are not given an arena in which to prove or disprove otherwise. KING: Senator Graham worried, correctly, it would turn out, the courts would find the rules put in place by the president unconstitutional. He went to the White House and offered to write legislation authorizing military trials. GRAHAM: They told me in no uncertain terms, thank you for your input, but we have all the authority we need. KING: It was the same White House answer when lawmakers suggested the domestic eavesdropping program violated existing law, or when they pointed out anti-torture statutes already on the books. YOO: We wrote it on purpose to be as broad as possible. It says the president can use all necessary and appropriate force. GRAHAM: This is not the last war we'll have. I can assure you, if the executive keeps pushing this theory that once you authorize the use of force, all the other statutes on the books where Congress has spoken in time of war are no longer valid, then you're going to have a hard time getting a force resolution through Congress. They're not legal niceties. They make us different. So every time you cut a legal corner unnecessarily, it will come back to bite you. KING: Come back to bite you, the price of the president's power play is increasingly in question. International outrage, and freedom for men the CIA insists to this day were part of plots against America. (COMMERCIAL BREAK) KING: Moazzam Begg calls Birmingham home again, not Gitmo or Bagram, and he owes his freedom to a man he calls a criminal, George W. Bush. BEGG: And if he continues to be in power, then I can only fear for the future of the world. KING: Begg's release was a reluctant favor to Prime Minister Tony Blair, because of the outrage in Britain and around the world at the images from Guantanamo Bay and Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, images Charlie Swift says helped the very enemy Mr. Bush has promised his aggressive tactics would defeat. SWIFT: Not only is it un-American, it's the sort of thing that strengthens our enemies when they're on the streets to go, you know, recruiting, saying the United States hates everyone, all Muslims. KING: Public opinion at home is more complicated. The Iraq war is increasingly unpopular, but the American people have, by and large, supported other bold assertions of wartime powers, and to Senator Simpson, it's a simple calculation. SIMPSON: Don't think the American people aren't a little bit pleased, as they sit in Cody, Wyoming, or Cincinnati, or L.A., that no one has gone into the restaurant and blown somebody up in there. And the perception, when you hear about the Patriot Act and wiretapping, is that these are just a bunch of sweet, little people that happened to be locked up by accident, and that's bullshit, pure bullshit. KING: It is future presidents who are likely to pay for the constitutional tensions here at home. BUCHANAN: When president are very assertive, there tends to be in the aftermath of that assertiveness for a year or two or 10 years or more a kind of a backlash, an effort to rein the president in. KING: The questions about Moazzam Begg are more immediate, a paradox in Mr. Bush's world of whatever it takes. BEGG: Did I kidnap, imprison, torture, beat to death anybody? Did I do those things, or did not the United States of American government do that? KING: The president released Begg over the objections of his national security team. U.S. intelligence officials insist Begg exaggerates the harshness of his treatment, and to this day these intelligence officials stand by the accuracy of the statement Begg signed while in U.S. custody. Among other things, it said Begg trained at three al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, knew at least a half dozen al Qaeda operatives, and planned to take up arms against the United States before fleeing through Tora Bora to Pakistan. BEGG: It was coercive, and it was under duress that I signed it. KING (on camera): Do you hate America or Americans? BEGG: No, I don't hate Americans or America, and the reason why I don't hate them is because I never hated them to begin with. KING (voice-over): Islam, he says, forbids killing innocent civilians. Begg has no qualms, however, with attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, because they are, in his view, occupying Muslim lands on Mr. Bush's orders. BEGG: His abuse of power has been able, allowed him to get away with abduction, kidnap, false imprisonment. He's a man who has brought more destruction and more terror on the earth than any of the terrorists. KING: And while insisting he is no threat, no terrorist, Begg also insists the president who jailed him, in the name of keeping America safe, will someday learn his lesson. BEGG: Once you take this road and once you go down this road, you are actually making the world a much, much less safe place, because if that's what the Americans are going to do around the world, then they must accept repercussions. (END VIDEOTAPE) THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED. SOURCE:transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0610/26/se.01.htmlUpcoming: Look for the transcript for the 5th show of this series...M
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michelle
Administrator
I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Oct 29, 2006 8:30:33 GMT 4
CNN LIVE EVENT/SPECIAL Broken Government: Where the Right Went Wrong Aired October 27, 2006 - 20:00 ET Transcript from the 5th Show in the series Part 1 of 2
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) JEFF GREENFIELD, CNN ANCHOR (voice-over): It is a bitterly cold January morning in 2002. The president of the United States steps off Marine One and boards Air Force One for a flight to a small town in Ohio. It's a short flight, but it has been more than 70 years in the making.
An avowedly conservative president is going to sign into a law bill passed by a Senate and a House under Republican control, the Republican Party now firmly under conservative control, governing the country where three voters calling themselves conservatives for every two that call themselves liberal.
("HAIL TO THE CHIEF" PLAYS)
GREENFIELD: But, as President Bush and his entourage enter a public school in Hamilton, Ohio, this January day, look again at one of his traveling companions.
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
GREENFIELD: Yes, it's Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, the living symbol of contemporary American liberalism. And he's here because the bill President Bush is signing will vastly increase federal spending and federal supervision over the nation's public schools.
GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The new role of the federal government is to set high standards, provide resources, hold people accountable, and liberate school districts to meet the standards.
So, now it's time to spend billions of dollars and get good results.
(APPLAUSE)
GREENFIELD: You heard that right: an avowedly conservative president celebrating the spending of billions more dollars on education by the same federal Department of Education Ronald Reagan had once vowed to abolish.
Watching all of this was Mike Pence.
REP. MIKE PENCE (R), INDIANA: I didn't come to Congress to help Ted Kennedy move his agenda. I came to make the agenda of Ronald Reagan, the conservative of the Republican Party, real.
GREENFIELD: ... then a 42-year-old from Indiana serving his first term in Congress. As much as anyone can, Pence embodies the growth of conservatism in recent decades.
PENCE: Growing up in a large Irish Catholic family, for me, there was a picture of the pope and John F. Kennedy on the television set. And, from very early on, President Kennedy and his family really fired my imagination about public service.
I was the Democratic Party coordinator in Bartholomew County, Indiana, in 1976. But, by the time I got to college, began to think about the conservative values that I was raised to believe in, I was very much drawn to the philosophy of government expressed by President Ronald Reagan.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
RONALD REAGAN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: No government in history has ever voluntarily reduced itself in size. And that's what we're going to do to the federal government.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GREENFIELD: Mike Pence ran and lost twice for Congress preaching the gospel of conservatism.
NEWT GINGRICH, FORMER SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE: We believe in the power and the importance of the individual. Second...
PENCE: I spend a lot of time driving around southern Indiana in a Grand Prix with Newt Gingrich's GOPAC tapes strewn all over the floor...
(LAUGHTER)
PENCE: ... of our car.
Know that the time of politics...
GREENFIELD: In 2000, Pence finally won that seat in Congress. And he was ready to help rein in big government. But there was a surprise in store for him.
PENCE: I arrived in Washington, D.C., in 2001, greatly inspired by the ideals of Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GINGRICH: Won't a little less money for government...
(END VIDEO CLIP)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REAGAN: As you know, I have never liked big government. (END VIDEO CLIP)
PENCE: And the very first priority in the very first Congress I was a part of was the No Child Left Behind act that increased the federal Department of Education by 50 percent and introduced national testing in the fourth and eighth grade.
GREENFIELD: And that was only the beginning. Over the next five years, a growing number of conservatives watched with growing uneasiness at what unfolded.
BUSH: The bill I signed today authorizes $400 million.
This legislation will authorize $200 million per year.
There's no doubt we increased our budgets.
GREENFIELD: The biggest increase in discretionary domestic spending of any administration since LBJ's.
BUSH: Our government is finally bringing prescription drug coverage to the seniors of America.
GREENFIELD: The biggest new entitlement, the prescription drug program, since Medicare.
BUSH: In order to fight and win the war, it requires an expenditure of money.
GREENFIELD: A war in Iraq premised on a foreign policy that aimed to bring democracy to every corner of the globe...
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SCOTT MCCLELLAN, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: There is an investigation going on by the Justice Department.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GREENFIELD: ... and embraced by congressional Republicans of the very behavior...
BUSH: I don't know him.
GREENFIELD: ... trading legislative favors for campaign cash and personal enrichment, that outraged conservatives when Democrats were in control.
PENCE: I believe that -- as a movement, that we have veered off course into the dangerous and unchartered waters of big-government Republicanism.
GREENFIELD: Mike Pence is far from alone.
In recent months, conservative have penned a stack of books, accusing Bush and congressional Republicans of abandoning the conservative cause.
And a growing number of conservatives have been asking out loud, what ever happened to the core conservative notion proclaimed by Ronald Reagan in his first inaugural?
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REAGAN: Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GREENFIELD: It is a conviction held by the founding father of conservatism, who launched his "National Review" magazine half-a- century ago.
WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR., FOUNDER, "NATIONAL REVIEW": The government can't do anything for you, except in proportion as it can do something to you.
GREENFIELD: By a British-born, Catholic, gay libertarian.
ANDREW SULLIVAN, ANDREWSULLIVAN.COM: Why can we not say small government is the best government?
GREENFIELD: By a Texas-academic-turned-politician who helped win the battle for Congress and became one of its leaders.
DICK ARMEY (R), FORMER HOUSE MAJORITY LEADER: I believe in small government. I believe in personal liberty.
GREENFIELD: And a Kennedy-Democrat-turned-conservative- Republican who is in his third term in the House.
PENCE: Millions of Americans who cherish the ideals of limited government and traditional values are not about power.
GREENFIELD: Although Pence is not among them, the discontent has grown so loud that, this fall, several well-known conservatives joined in arguing that: It's time for us to go -- saying that conservatives should actually welcome the loss of Republican majorities in the Congress.
(on camera): The conservatives' discontent with what has been done in their name is far from all-encompassing.
The president's conduct of the war on terror, his appointment of judges to the federal bench meet with widespread approval from the base. But what you will hear in this hour -- and you will be hearing only from conservatives -- is that, for a surprising number, what has been done under the banner of conservatism is not really conservative at all.
SULLIVAN: This is not just a betrayal of it. It's an attack on it. GREENFIELD (voice-over): It is the essential conservative creed: Government is too big, and it spends too much. But, while virtually all conservatives welcomed the Bush tax cuts, some of them charge that this president and this Congress have actually spent beyond a liberal's wildest dreams.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
BUSH: I, George Walker Bush, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute, so help me God.
GREENFIELD (voice-over): Less than a month after President Bush began his second term, conservatives gathered again to celebrate in Washington at the Conservative Political Action Conference, the Woodstock of the American right.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The White House deputy chief of staff, Karl Rove.
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
GREENFIELD: There, they heard Karl Rove, the architect of Bush's reelection, as the president dubbed him, celebrate the conservative triumphs.
KARL ROVE, SENIOR ADVISER TO PRESIDENT BUSH: Republicans and conservatives control the White House...
BUSH: May God bless.
ROVE: The Senate, the House, the majority of governorships, and more state legislative seats than we have had in the last 80 years. That's a pretty remarkable rise...
(APPLAUSE)
GREENFIELD: And this building where conservatives met seemed a perfect symbol. It was the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, named after the larger-than-life hero who first gained real power for conservatives.
But the Reagan building is also symbolic in a way that makes many on the right uneasy. It's a billion-dollar baby, one of the most expensive government buildings of them all.
(on camera): Why is this symbolic? Because, while they talk conservative rhetoric, the president and the Congress have actually been spending the taxpayers' dollars at a rate faster than at any time since Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. And a lot of the spending is just the kind that drives conservatives right up the wall.
(voice-over): Federal education spending, up 27 percent in Clinton's eight years.
BUSH: What are you writing about?
GREENFIELD: Thirty-nine percent under Bush after just five years.
BUSH: I'm here to sign the highway bill.
GREENFIELD: Transportation, a $286 billion bill that included the infamous bridge to nowhere.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TOM DASCHLE (D), FORMER U.S. SENATOR: It was rigged. They stole the vote.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GREENFIELD: In 2003, the Republican congressional leadership twisted arms and bent the rules...
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The yeas are 220. The nays are 215.
GREENFIELD: ... all to pass a prescription drug deal that, over the years, will add some $2 trillion -- that's trillion with a T. -- to federal obligations.
(APPLAUSE)
GREENFIELD: And, as if to rub salt in conservative wounds, look whose commitment to health care the president cited when he signed that bill.
BUSH: Lyndon Johnson established that commitment by signing the Medicare Act of 1965. And, today, by reforming and modernizing this vital program, we are honoring the commitments of Medicare to all our seniors.
(APPLAUSE)
GREENFIELD: And all this red ink has any number of conservatives seeing red.
SEN. JOHN MCCAIN (R), ARIZONA: Conservatives came to office to reduce the size of government and enlarge the sphere of free and private enterprise. But, lately, we have increased government, in order to stay in office.
SULLIVAN: They have increased the amount of government spending by a degree that no Democrat would ever dream of getting away with. Do we really think the Democrats could have spent more money over the last five years than the Republicans? And do you think they would have ever gotten away with it? Don't you think the president would have vetoed a couple of those spending bills?
GREENFIELD: Bruce Bartlett, who helped shape Ronald Reagan's tax ideas, said that, when Bush campaigned...
BUSH: It's conservative to cuts taxes. It's compassionate to give people their own money back.
Our conservative philosophy will lead to compassionate results.
GREENFIELD: Conservatives may have heard what they wanted to hear.
BRUCE BARTLETT, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: When we heard Bush say these things, like compassionate conservatism...
BUSH: I'm a compassionate conservative.
BARTLETT: ... we thought it was just campaign rhetoric. He was just saying this to get elected, and it didn't mean anything. But, once he got into office, it turned out that these terms, like compassionate conservatism, were, in fact, operational. They -- they actually meant something.
GREENFIELD: Indeed, no matter what the Congress has done in the way of spending, no matter how many hometown projects are stuffed into something like that $286 billion transportation bill -- you will hear a lot more about these in a few minutes -- President Bush has not vetoed a single spending bill in the nearly six years of his administration.
Why not?
GROVER NORQUIST, PRESIDENT, AMERICANS FOR TAX REFORM: This is when I met President Reagan in New Hampshire. We raised $20,000 for him.
GREENFIELD: Grover Norquist, the head of Americans For Tax Reform, has a blunt, maybe even cynical explanation: Spending just doesn't mean that much to the coalition of conservatives gathered around the table.
NORQUIST: Around that table, they will walk, if you step on their toes, on their central vote-moving issue. There is nobody around the center-right table that moves on spending. So, you go to everybody in the room, they say, "I wish you wouldn't spend so much." But nobody walks out of the room because of that.
SEN. SAM BROWNBACK (R), KANSAS: I mean, these are the guys that are saying the things that I agree with.
GREENFIELD: Kansas Senator Sam Brownback, a likely presidential candidate in '08, put it succinctly, as he worked a gathering of social conservatives in Washington recently.
BROWNBACK: Few people will come up to me in Kansas and say, you know, thank you for cutting this program. A number of people will come up to me and say, thank you for getting us this bridge.
PENCE: Annie (ph), I'm Mike Pence. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Nice to meet you.
PENCE: Welcome. Welcome.
GREENFIELD: As he campaigns in Indiana this autumn...
PENCE: I hear we're going to get some pork today.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We're going to get some pork today. That's right.
PENCE: Yes. Yes. I mean the good kind.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The good kind.
PENCE: Yes, not the kind I'm fighting in Washington.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: No.
GREENFIELD: ... Mike Pence can hear from his own constituents that the question of federal spending may not exactly be at the top of their concerns.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I think the war is an issue that is really significant to everybody.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The death tax.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Abortion.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Pro-life and health care.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Education.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I would say illegal immigration.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Taxes.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Education.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The morals in our society going downhill.
GREENFIELD: But his own view?
PENCE: I think the real scandal in Washington, D.C., is runaway federal spending. I really believe that, to the extent that -- that millions of Americans are -- are frustrated with our national legislature under Republican control, it is a sense of frustration that a party committed to fiscal discipline and reform has not been about those things.
GREENFIELD: Big government means more corruption -- that's what conservatives have always said -- politicians using their power to swap tax dollars to insiders, in return for campaign cash and favors. Did that change when they took power? Yes. It got worse.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, MAY 31, 1989)
REP. JIM WRIGHT (D-TX), SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE: Let me give you back this job.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GREENFIELD: May 31, 1989, the first major victory of the Republican revolutionaries in Congress, driving Speaker Jim Wright out of the Congress for selling both copies of his book to evade limits on speaking fees.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GINGRICH: They worked out a nice deal to get around the rules, and Jim Wright got some more money.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GREENFIELD: For Newt Gingrich, a Republican backbencher determined to end decades of Democratic rule, it was proof that corruption was a powerful political message.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GINGRICH: Hopefully, I would be able to convince them.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GREENFIELD: And, notes one of his top lieutenants, ex- Congressman Vin Weber, corruption meant something much broader than crime. It went to the heart of what was wrong with big government.
VIN WEBER (R), FORMER U.S. CONGRESSMAN: It doesn't necessarily have to mean that it corrupts them personally. It can mean, you know, you sort of corrupt the electorate by buying off their votes with government subsidies. And I think that -- that's -- that's a bedrock conservative belief.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GINGRICH: I pull the string, all right?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GREENFIELD: So, when the Republicans ended the Democrats' 40- year rule in 1994...
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GINGRICH: We are going to change their world.
(END VIDEO CLIP) GREENFIELD: ... one key promise was to attack the traditional exchange of legislative favors for political and even personal benefit.
(APPLAUSE)
GREENFIELD (on camera): But conservatives have long argued, all power tends to corrupt. And, when they got their hands on it, they proved just how right they were.
(voice-over): Consider Tom DeLay, arguably the most powerful member of Congress during his 12-year reign as majority whip and then majority leader...
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REP. TOM DELAY (R), TEXAS: The Republican Congress has found over $14 billion in waste, fraud and abuse.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GREENFIELD: ... until he resigned this year, under an ethical cloud.
He set out almost immediately to use the power of the purse to keep his party in power. DeLay did not respond to CNN's request for an interview.
ARMEY: Tom DeLay was, in fact, a man of very narrow vision. He was always more convinced -- concerned about politics, particularly his own political well-being. And he was always quite comfortable with the idea that whatever power we have should be used on our own behalf.
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
GREENFIELD: DeLay often put freshman Republicans who had won very close elections on the House Appropriations Committee, which controls congressional purse strings.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DELAY: This is about power.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GREENFIELD: Members like Anne Northup of Kentucky, for example, who had won by only 1,300 votes in 1996.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Congressman Anne Northup has led the lobbying for a new hospital.
GREENFIELD: In every election since, she has run on her ability to bring home the bacon...
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And don't forget on alternative fuel. GREENFIELD: ... or pork, as the case may be.
REP. ANNE NORTHUP (R), KENTUCKY: It's important that we have regional centers of excellence.
GREENFIELD: This was pretty much business as usual, even if it was the sort of business the conservative insurgents had promised to stop.
More dramatic was DeLay's so-called K Street project, named after the Washington street where powerful lawyers and lobbyists cluster.
Grover Norquist says the K Street project was nothing more than an attempt to get lobbying firms to hire people, including ex- congressmen and staffers, who were sympathetic to basic conservative notions about regulation and taxes.
NORQUIST: We say to K Street: Hire people who agree with you philosophically. If you want free trade, if you want to fight trial lawyers, if you want lower taxes, hire people who understand why that's good policy. Do not hire for access.
GREENFIELD: But conservative writer Matthew Continetti says, author of a book on the project, says, Tom DeLay's goal was actually very different.
MATTHEW CONTINETTI, "THE WEEKLY STANDARD": He basically created a -- political machine by tapping those lobbyists for contributions, and asking them, what do they want from the Republican majority?
GREENFIELD: And nowhere did the influence of lobbyists have more impact on the Congress than with so-called earmarks, projects that individual members of Congress can slip into spending bills, usually without any oversight whatsoever.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
GREENFIELD: They can include everything from the now infamous $223 million Alaska bridge to nowhere...
(MUSIC)
GREENFIELD: ... to $25,000 for mariachi music education in schools in Clark County, Nevada, to $225,000 for reducing wild beaver damage in Wausau, Wisconsin.
When he was president...
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REAGAN: ... is look at this $87.5 billion budget-busting highway and transit bill passed by Congress.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GREENFIELD: ... Ronald Reagan had vetoed a bill with 152 earmarks.
In 2005, President Bush signed one with 6,371 earmarks.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's OK.
(CROSSTALK)
GREENFIELD: Earmarks were how Randy "Duke" Cunningham was able to supply favors for business interests who gave him some $2.5 million in bribes.
They were how Congressman Bob Ney was able to do favors for lobbyist Jack Abramoff's clients, in return for campaign cash and other favors. All three are now in or on their way to prison.
But, to use a now classic observation, the real scandal isn't what's illegal, but what is legal. And the gap between what these insurgent conservatives promised when they took power and what's been done is more like a chasm.
CONTINETTI: Well, I think, if you look back, the Republican revolution wanted to drain the swamp of public corruption in Washington. They wanted to shrink government. And they wanted to kind of restore the national defense. That's something that is often overlooked. And, of course, now, in terms of that swamp, they find themselves up to their neck in the muck.
GREENFIELD: They're the so-called value voters. And they have been a key to conservative victories. But now some of them say they're being taken for granted. And other conservatives say, their causes aren't really conservative at all.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
JOHN KING, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: I'm John King in New York.
Our "Broken Government" special continues in just a moment -- first, though, this hour's top stories.
The reward for catching the arsonist who set a deadly wildfire in California is now up to $300,000. The flames killed four firefighters Thursday. Doctors say the prognosis is poor for a fifth firefighter, who is burned over 90 percent of his body.
Convicted Washington-area sniper Lee Boyd Malvo has confessed to another killing. Malvo told police that he and his sniper cohort, John Allen Muhammad, killed a 60-year-old man on a Tucson golf course back in 2002.
Another U.S. military death in Iraq, the 97th this month. In a rare joint statement today, Iraq's prime minister and the U.S. ambassador to Iraq agree that timelines may help bring peace and security. Senior intelligence officials tell CNN that recent al Qaeda threats against Saudi Arabia oil fields and offshore oil facilities are specific and credible. The threats prompted warnings to commercial shipping in the Persian Gulf.
CONTINUED.....
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michelle
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Post by michelle on Oct 29, 2006 8:34:10 GMT 4
.......continuedCNN LIVE EVENT/SPECIAL Broken Government: Where the Right Went Wrong Aired October 27, 2006 - 20:00 ET Transcript from the 5th Show in the series Part 2 of 2I'm John King. Our "Broken Government" series continues now with "How the Right Went Wrong." (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) GREENFIELD (voice-over): September 2006 -- more than 1,500 people will crowd into a Washington hotel for a gathering that embodies the power... TONY PERKINS, FAMILY RESEARCH COUNCIL: Washington is never going to be the same again. GREENFIELD: ... and the tension of a conservative coalition. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The first thing you do.... GREENFIELD: This is the value voters summit of the Family Research Council, an organization formed to advance the cause of traditional conservative values. DOBSON: Abortion is morally wrong. We're winning that battle. PERKINS: We did invite Hillary Clinton. GREENFIELD: Council President Tony Perkins, one-time Republican politician from Louisiana, insists the council is not an extension of the Republican Party. PERKINS: I know people look at us and say that you're fiercely partisan. Our folks are driven by the issues. I wish we had more Democrats that embraced the core family values. It would be good competition. GREENFIELD: For now, the traditional values movement has become a key element of the modern GOP. At its summit, a parade of would-be Republican presidential candidates appear, and Congressman Mike Pence is here as well. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Congressman, how are you? PENCE: I'm great, Harvey. Great to be on... GREENFIELD: Looking at (inaudible) of conservative radio talk show hosts, rallying the faithful. PENCE: We need a Republican majority in Washington, D.C., and I challenge you, I challenge you to labor in the weeks ahead. GREENFIELD: And faithful is the right word. In the last presidential election, at least 78 percent of white evangelicals voted for President Bush, and regular church goers chose Bush over Gore and Kerry by 20 points or more. (on camera): When it comes to values, discontent has emerged on two fronts. Many of them ardent foot soldiers in the movement say the Republicans have taken them for granted, even sold them out. And many more traditional conservatives are strongly opposed to what this movement wants. PERKINS: I think there is quite a bit of disappointment. You have a lot of folks that were involved in the Republican revolutions that have not seen the advancements that they wanted, and they have become very discouraged and in some cases frustrated and ready to throw in the towel. Hey, Phil. How are you doing? GREENFIELD: Phil Burress is one of those frustrated activists. He's president of the Ohio-based Citizens for Community Values. He led the successful fight in 2004 to ban gay marriage in Ohio, which just might have brought enough voters to the polls to give the state, and thus the White House, to Bush. Listen to what he says he would say to Republican office holders before the Mark Foley scandal exploded.PHIL BURRESS, CITIZENS FOR COMMUNITY VALUES: We voted for you because you're pro-life, pro-family, pro-marriage. And if you're going to go up there and use your influence to combat us in those arenas, you're going to lose this. GREENFIELD: That is exactly why the Mark Foley story has the GOP so worried.HASTERT: When you talk about the page issue and... GREENFIELD: What the House Republican leadership did or didn't do played right into the conviction of any number of social conservatives that the party cares about their political clout but not about their deeply held convictions. Underlining this belief, a new book by former White House aide David Kuo, which charges that high White House officials actually treated social conservatives in private with contempt. But there's also a very different kind of conservative discontent on social issues. Whatever happened, some asked, to the root conservative belief that the size and the reach of government is at odds with individual freedom?
For Andrew Sullivan, conservative means that the government stays out of the bedroom and the boardroom, that religion is left to the private sphere, not entwined with the state. His book, "The Conservative Soul," argues that the capture of the Republican Party by the so-called religious right has done injury to real conservatism. SULLIVAN: The founding fathers of this country kept God out of the Constitution for a reason. They had seen what had happened. But putting God into politics, putting God into partisan politics is to me blasphemy. GREENFIELD: Conservatives may well argue that Andrew Sullivan is not precisely a representative source. British-born, pro-gay marriage -- openly gay, for that matter -- and a fierce critic of Bush's conduct of the Iraq war and his use of broad executive power. So consider Dick Armey. Armey was a top lieutenant for Newt Gingrich when the self-proclaimed revolutionaries captured the Congress. An unapologetic partisan, Armey sees the dominance of the so-called religious right in harsh terms. Here, for instance, is how he describes the Terri Schiavo case, when Congress and the president rushed to intervene in the case of the comatose young woman. ARMEY: The Schiavo case was a case of our party hopelessly pandering to the most militant, aggressive and least thoughtful people in the Christian right movement, least appreciative of how America is about freedom, individual rights, personal privacy. GREENFIELD: There is, however, one area where social conservatives and economic conservatives are united in praise of the Republican president and Congress: The appointment of federal judges. And social conservatives also point to an issue separate from traditional values that has won the president strong support from their ranks... BUSH: Homeland security. GREENFIELD: His response to the threat of terrorism. PERKINS: That is where social conservatives stand very firmly with the president, disproportionately to the rest of the population, because the president, as he has described it, this is a war between good and evil, and social conservatives understand the difference between good and evil and they stand with the president on this. BUSH: In this time of war... GREENFIELD: But as a whole, the conservative movement is deeply, even passionately, divided over the war in Iraq and over the president's sweeping redefinition of American foreign policy: To make America safer by spreading democracy worldwide. BUSH: And we will win. GREENFIELD: To many figures on the right, that is emphatically not what a conservative foreign policy is about. (COMMERCIAL BREAK) BUSH: I, George Walker Bush, do solemnly swear ... GREENFIELD: January 20th, 2001. One a rainswept midday at the start of the new millennium, a new president took the oath of office when the forces of history seemed to have swept away many of the terrors of the old millennium. The Berlin Wall had fallen. Then the Soviet Union itself, our nuclear adversary for half a century, had literally ceased to exist. And in his campaign the year before, candidate Bush had sounded traditional conservative themes. BUSH: The need for limited government. GREENFIELD: Caution, prudence, skepticism about grand ambitions. BUSH: Our nation stands alone right now in the world in terms of power. And that's why we've got to be humble. GREENFIELD: Eight months later, on a brilliant September morning, terror came calling. Nine days after the attacks, President Bush rallied the country. BUSH: America will do what is necessary. GREENFIELD: With a promise of decisive action against the perpetrators. BUSH: Eliminate the terrorist parasites. GREENFIELD: But he announced something else -- the beginnings of the Bush doctrine. BUSH: This is the world's fight. This is civilizations' fight. This is the fight of all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom. GREENFIELD: For five years, through an increasingly difficult and unpopular war in Iraq... BUSH: Democracy is coming to the broader Middle East. GREENFIELD: The president has been arguing that the spread of democracy is the best way to keep America safe. BUSH: Every step towards freedom in the world makes our country safer. GREENFIELD: And freedom, he argues, is a worldwide goal, even in the most unlikely of places. BUSH: We also hear doubts that democracy is a realistic goal for the greater Middle East, where freedom is rare. I believe that God has planted in every human heart the desire to live in freedom. And even when that desire is crushed by tyranny for decades, it will rise again. GREENFIELD: Nowhere did he announce so sweeping a goal as in his second inaugural. BUSH: So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world. GREENFIELD: At first blush, it may sound like an extension of essential conservative thinking. After all, the two great heroes of the right seemed to say as much to the rulers of the Soviet Union. SEN. BARRY GOLDWATER: I believe that the communism, will boasts it will bury us, will instead give way to the forces of freedom. RONALD REAGAN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. GREENFIELD: And it's not just the so-called religious right that applauds this vision. The so-called neoconservatives, longtime advocates of assertive foreign policy also champion this view. And after the attacks of September 11th, says former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, the spread of democracy and American security became indivisible. GERSON: The president has, as president of the United States, has embarked on democratic internationalism, that he feels, and which I think clearly is essential to the national interest. This is a case where the hope and liberty of peoples in the Middle East and other parts of the world is directly relevant to the future of American security. GREENFIELD: But listen to other conservative voices and you hear a very different view. For instance, William F. Buckley Jr., for whom Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan were friends and allies. (on camera): You seem -- and other conservatives -- look at Bush's foreign policy and say, this is not a conservative foreign policy. BUCKLEY: Well, manifestly it is not. To suggest that we should undertake to import democracy into every country in the world is loony, and also unhealthy. Now, if you say, OK, the American people were threatened by Iraq, and incidentally, if we win that engagement, we're also going to introduce democracy, that's a nice afterthought. But it is not something which retrospectively authorizes that military intervention. GREENFIELD (voice-over): Buckley is far from alone. In the wake of Bush's second inaugural, other conservative commentators claimed they heard echoes of Woodrow Wilson's... WOODROW WILSON, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The world must be made safe for democracy. GREENFIELD: ... make the world safe for democracy rhetoric. Whatever happened, they asked, to traditional conservative skepticism, especially about cultures so different from ours? BARTLETT: I think that the soil of the Middle East is very, very inhospitable to at least a Western notion of democracy, and it was just crazy to think that that was our goal. NORQUIST: Going into Afghanistan, taking out the Taliban government, hunting down al Qaeda, that clearly was part of making this a safer world. Was going into Iraq something that makes fewer terrorists in the future or more terrorists in the future? More stability, with America working with other countries, or less? You have conservatives who will argue that either way. GREENFIELD: And while most conservatives do back the president's approach to global terror, others, like former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, warn against the president's assertion of broad, almost unlimited executive power. ARMEY: Are we going to be so insecure in a world of terrorists that we will sacrifice our liberties in order to have security? People who sacrifice their liberty for security generally end up with neither. GREENFIELD (on camera): Without question, most conservatives, however disappointed or frustrated, plan to vote this fall to keep their side in power. But others have taken their discontent a step further. They're actually saying it's time for their team to lose.
(voice-over): This conservative discontent over foreign policy raises a broader issue for the immediate political future. If you add up dissent on the right over spending, corruption, the war and foreign policy, even values, it might actually lead to a movement among conservatives to vote against the people they helped put in power. Might? It already has. (COMMERCIAL BREAK) GREENFIELD: October, 2006. Congress has shut down for the campaign season. And Congressman Mike Pence is, well, we'll let the kids at East Side elementary school in Anderson, Indiana, tell you. It is a safe Republican seat. Pence won last time with 67 percent of the vote. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: A lot of people in my area voted for you. GREENFIELD: But it took him three times to win that House seat, and he's taking no chances. PENCE: Did you get a pancake? Did you guys get some pancakes? We've got to get some pancakes. GREENFIELD: From the Youth for Christ, then breakfast in Anderson. PENCE: Reelecting a Republican majority... GREENFIELD: To a canal boat ride in Metamora... UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You're back in our neck of the woods. GREENFIELD: ... to Tom Chelton's (ph) farm in Parker City. Pence hammers out a warning for conservatives, however dissatisfied they may be. PENCE: This is the toughest year in the history of the modern Republican majority. And this congressman and this Republican majority will stand with those who stand for freedom. But we have to take that case to our neighbors. GREENFIELD: For a lot of conservatives, no pep talk is needed for the fall campaign. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Look at tax cuts since Ronald Reagan. We've got a much stronger, robust military. Look at your foreign policy. Much more aggressive and robust. And even emphasizing things like human rights. Look at the pro-life or the marriage agenda. GREENFIELD: Or they argue that the president deserves an A -- OK, maybe a B for effort. WEBER: I give the president more credit for trying to be a conservative reformer of these core entitlement programs that are really the biggest problem we face in terms of the growth of government than people are willing to give him. BILL BENNETT, FORMER EDUCATION SECRETARY: It's 22 past the hour, I'm Bill Bennett... GREENFIELD: And talk radio show host and former Education Secretary Bill Bennett... BENNETT: That really has a direct effect on presidential approval. GREENFIELD: ... cites another reason for conservative support. (on camera): What do you give President Bush the most credit for, would you say? BENNETT: Conviction. Conviction about basic things and basic values. GREENFIELD: But Reagan helped win the Cold War. What I'm asking is, in terms of accomplishment... BENNETT: Keeping the country safe for five years. GREENFIELD: But not every conservative is buying this argument anymore. Some, in fact, have begun to embrace an outright political heresy. Maybe, they say, the only way for us to reclaim our political souls is to lose our political power. (voice-over): Last month, several well-known conservatives, including novelist Chris Buckley, who's William F. Buckley's son, argued just that. For some, it was tactical. It would make it easier to keep the White House in '08. Others said Republicans had forfeited their right to conservative support, while still others sang the praises of divided government. BARTLETT: Who wouldn't go back to the days of the late 1990's in terms of the economy, if you could? I mean, you had massive budget surpluses, and the reason we did is because Clinton wouldn't support anything the Republicans wanted to do, and they wouldn't support anything he wanted to do. And as a libertarian, that's about as good as it gets.
SULLIVAN: A lot of conservatives are saying, I think, look, the problem is too much power, too long. Corruption. What we need is divided government for a while to try and put a check against this unrestrained power and corrupt power.GREENFIELD: Against this argument, other conservatives offer less in the way of praise for the president and the Congress and more -- much more -- of fear and loathing at the prospect of what the other guys would do. REP. NANCY PELOSI (D-CA), MINORITY LEADER: The problem is deeper and greater than that. WEBER: Nancy Pelosi, the would-be speaker of the House, is a lovely person and a friend of mine from our days serving together. She is not a Bill Clinton Democrat. She is a very liberal Democrat. GREENFIELD (on camera): So this is like the funeral that the guy had to give a eulogy to and couldn't find anything to say but he says, well, his brother was worse? WEBER: Well, that's a big part of politics, isn't it? GREENFIELD (voice-over): Many on the right are asking the question that looks beyond the midterm elections. It goes to the heart of their 50-year struggle. Did we come all this way for this? (COMMERCIAL BREAK) BUSH: Putting a little extra money in his pocket. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We're going to fight. SEN. JIM TALENT (R), MISSOURI: I believe marriage is a relationship between a man... SEN. GEORGE ALLEN (R), VIRGINIA: Victory based on issues. GREENFIELD: Fall, 2006. ALLEN: Victory based on ideas. GREENFIELD: As the midterm elections near, Republicans find themselves sailing against the wind. An unpopular war in Iraq, lingering memory of Katrina. HASTERT: We're now trying to correct the problem. GREENFIELD: An unexpected scandal that has tainted congressional leadership have all combined to put the party's dominance in jeopardy. But there are those in the conservative movement, foot soldiers and generals alike, who trace some of the current discontent with the failure of conservative politicians to turn their words into deeds. From his home in Connecticut, William F. Buckley Jr. can look back at a half century of conservative successes -- from a small insurgency to the dominant political force in America. But he can also look ahead to a repudiation of what has been done in its name. BUCKLEY: At the Republican convention of '08, there will be a lot of rhetoric which will deplore what has been done in the name of conservatism and Republicanism. And I think it will bring the house down. I think there is always a queasy feeling when you violate your own cannons. GREENFIELD: And from his home in Indiana, Mike Pence, who was not even born when Buckley's career began, can look at the dangers that now face the conservative cause. PENCE: What made us a majority in 1994 in Congress, what began a national majority and movement in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan was a commitment to the ideas of limited government. If we as a movement walk away from those things and we become the Democrat Party's agenda minus 10 percent, I think the Republican movement, the conservative movement does so at its peril. GREENFIELD: Maybe there are bigger reasons why the conservative vision did not become real. Maybe most Americans, whatever they say, actually want a government actively engaged in their lives. Maybe George W. Bush meant what he said about spending more on education and prescription drugs. Maybe there never was a national mandate to move America to the right. Maybe, on a hot button issue like immigration, the split among conservatives is irreconcilable. But for all that, the question that is haunting many on the right this fall goes far beyond the potential loss of political power. If we cannot or will not use the power we have gained to do what we said we would do, they ask, then what is the fight all about? (END VIDEOTAPE) SOURCE: transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0610/27/se.01.htmlTHIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.Notes from Michelle: In Part 1 of the 5th Show here note the following quote: GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The new role of the federal government is to set high standards, provide resources, hold people accountable, and liberate school districts to meet the standards. So, now it's time to spend billions of dollars and get good results. I become livid with rage when I hear government officials speak of our Public Educational System. The push for standards put into place by the NCLB legislation have hurt our schools, our children, the economic health of our country, and have completely failed to better educate our children. The 'good results' Bush speaks of are monetary and have gone to the Bush family and long time family friends in text book publishing companies, while literacy program budgets have been cut by Bush. I invite you to browse the pages of Educating a Democracy and How Not To tinyurl.com/yh98p4 to read more on this and other disturbing facts about our Public Education System.
Also in Part 1, I couldn't help highlighting this quote from Bush:BUSH: It's conservative to cuts taxes. It's compassionate to give people their own money back. What a guy, real compassionate, to the filthy rich, the only ones who matter to our government officials. Consider the following:Critics maintain that those tax cuts have overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy, while budget cuts target programs for the poor to close a deficit created largely by tax cuts totaling nearly $2 trillion since Bush took office. Middle-income households would receive an average tax cut of $20 from the agreement, according to the joint Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center, while 0.02 percent of households with incomes over $1 million would receive average tax cuts of $42,000/$43,000. The tax agreement would cut revenue to the Treasury by $90 billion over the next five years, but other measures would raise about $21 billion -- for a net loss to the Treasury of about $69 billion. By keeping the total five-year cost below $70 billion, negotiators satisfied arcane Senate budget rules, thus protecting the package from a filibuster and ensuring passage with a simple majority. The information above was gathered from posts at: Money Masters and Enslaved Taxpayers tinyurl.com/yfdy3v You can read more on this and other subjects like corporate earnings and tax cuts AND the The Federal Reserve, which all Americans should read if you want to understand our fraudulent monetary system.
And there's this info found at Permanent Huge Deficit & A Major Tax Shift tinyurl.com/wjfl9 : Finally, today’s announcement provides more evidence of the central role that recent tax cuts have played in the current deficit picture. Based on Joint Committee on Taxation estimates, the total cost in 2006 of tax cuts enacted since January 2001 was $251 billion (including the increased interest costs of the debt that resulted from borrowing to offset the lost revenues). This means that even with the spending for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the response to Hurricane Katrina, the federal budget would have been in virtual balance in 2006 if the tax cuts had not been enacted.
Finally, in Part 2 of this show, I've highlighted some comments concerning the Terri Schiavo case, one of the many embarrassing spectacles our Republican dominated government has provided for the rest of the world. Here I invite you to read, or re-read, Anwaar's article, The United Vegetative States of America tinyurl.com/y87f5s , and ponder upon how our priorities as a nation and as individuals have become so FUBAR!
Next look for the transcript from the 6th show of CNN's "Broken Government".......Michelle
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michelle
Administrator
I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Oct 31, 2006 16:31:41 GMT 4
CNN LIVE EVENT/SPECIAL Broken Government: Judges on Trial Aired October 28, 2006 - 20:00 ET Transcript of 6th Show in the Series PART 1 of 2
Note from Michelle: Examining the Judicial Branch of out government is a much more complicated process than looking at the Executive and Legislative departments. The American scheme of government is built upon the rock of separation of powers. The legislative branch makes the laws, the executive administers and enforces them, and the judiciary interprets and applies them to cases as they arise. The men who framed the Constitution were convinced of the need for a national system of courts. The Articles of Confederation had made no provision for a national judiciary, and that fact proved a major weakness in the government. Over the period the Articles were in force [1781-1789], the laws of the united States were interpreted and applied among the States as each saw fit. Disputes between States and residents of different States were decided, if at all, by the courts of one or more of the States involved. More often than not, decisions in one State were not accepted or enforced in others. To meet this defect, the Framers wrote Article III into the Constitution. Article III, Section 1 created the national judiciary in one brief sentence: The judicial power of the united States shall be vested in one Supreme Court, and in such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. Lately in our country, the Supreme Court has been under attack from not only public opinion, but also from the other 2 branches of our government. As an individual trying to come to my own decisions in the midst of public and government outcries, I have found the words of Justice Hugo Black to be very helpful: "Under our constitutional system courts stand against any winds that blow as havens for those who might otherwise suffer because they are helpless, weak, outnumbered, or because they are nonconforming victims of prejudice and public excitement." Keeping these words in mind, please read on.....Michelle
JOHN ROBERTS, CNN HOST: Thanks for joining us on "This Week at War." I'm John Roberts reporting from Baghdad. Straight ahead, a check of the headlines, then "BROKEN GOVERNMENT: JUDGES ON TRIAL." A look at how politics play a role in the higher court.
MICHAEL SCHIAVO, HUSBAND OF TERRI: And see Terri and be with her in these last hours.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hail Mary, full of grace...
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The lord is with you.
NARRATOR: By the time of her death, she had become a cause.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The entire federal government is powerless.
NARRATOR: And the very public anguish over a young woman named Terri Schiavo went far beyond anger.
CROWD: Give Terri water. Giver Terri water.
NARRATOR: Far beyond the protests.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I'm proud that my children were arrested for having love and compassion. So I don't apologize for that.
NARRATOR: The battle drilled deep into a national debate on the right to die. And it took the nation into unchartered regions of politics and the law.
REV. FRANK PAVONE, NATIONAL DIRECTOR, PREISTS FOR LIFE: Unelected judges begin to chart the course of the nation for us, implementing policies and committing actions that offend the vast majority of the American people.
NARRATOR: It's easy to forget how it began. She grew up in suburban Philadelphia as Teresa Marie Schindler. Married her first boyfriend, a restaurant manager named Michael Schiavo.
On a February morning in 1990, while her husband was sleeping, Teri collapsed in the hallway of this apartment building.
SGT. PHILLIP BREWER, ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA POLICE: He said that he either awakened to the sound of a thud or had just awakened and then heard a thud, thought his wife may have fallen. NARRATOR: Michael Schiavo called 911 and his actions set the course of the next 15 years.
From the beginning, it was Michael Schiavo who dictated the treatment for his wife.
Her parents, Robert and Mary Schindler were consulted, but never in charge. Michael took Teri to California, then back to Florida searching for treatment for anything that could ease or even reverse her condition.
Eight years after her collapse in 1998, Michael asked the court for permission to remove his wife's feeding tube. She was, he said, in a persistent vegetative state.
But her parents disagreed -- disagreed stridently. She could smile, they said; react, they said. The battle was joined.
Ultimately, standing right in the middle was Jay Wolfson.
You represented Teri Schiavo herself?
JAY WOLFSON, ATTORNEY: That was my job, to represent Mrs. Schiavo.
NARRATOR: Wolfson is an attorney and a Florida public health specialist. He was appointed by the court in 2003 to try and arbitrate between the warring families. He had a special title called guardian ad litem, a guardian at law. And he would decide if Michael Schiavo's actions corresponded to the last known wishes of his wife.
What did you do?
WOLFSON: Well, first, I was charges with summarizing the entire legal and medical history of the case. So I had to gained access to all the documents. And I went to the courthouse just about every day.
NARRATOR: In boxes, through thousands of pages.
WOLFSON: Thirty thousand pages.
NARRATOR: You reviewed 30,000 pages?
WOLFSON: I touched and looked at every single of those 30,000 pages.
NARRATOR: Jay Wolfson's report would be crucial to any final outcome.
WOLFSON: My job was to, as objectively as I could, using the science and legal knowledge that I have to understand what the history of her case was and to answer the questions that the governor and the court had posed.
NARRATOR: Their encounters were more than analytical. In a strange way, he says they were emotional.
WOLFSON: I would talk to her. I would play music for her. I would sit next to her in the bed. I would hold her head in my hands. I would stroke her hair. I would get as close to her face as I could. I would talk to her. I would beg her. I would cajole her to help me help her. Because I walked into the room wanting to show that there was something that I could do to demonstrate that Mrs. Schiavo had clear capacity.
NARRATOR: Did you ever get a reaction from her?
WOLFSON: She frequently moved her head like this, which is what many Americans saw on video snippets. She frequently made groaning noises. She frequently made sounds that sounded like laughter, that sounded like crying. And all of those behaviors are completely consistent with the technical medical definition of a vegetative state.
NARRATOR: And at the end of those 30 days he said he reached the only conclusion he could.
WOLFSON: It was clear and convincing that she was suffering from a persistent vegetative state, the cause of which was undetermined.
NARRATOR: But that was not the end. Nearly two more years would pass before the events of spring 2005. Court after court ruled in favor of Michael Schiavo and against the Schindler family.
But around the country in evangelical churches, ministers began to mobilize, pressuring the lawmakers and the judges.
REV. GARY CASS, CENTER FOR RECLAIMING AMERICA FOR CHRIST: Over 100,000 people signed our petition to Governor Bush asking him to intervene. And we tried very hard in the last few weeks of her life to lobby the legislature in Florida to pass some bills that would make saving Terri's life completely unequivocally legal, rather than just leaving it in the hands of the courts.
NARRATOR: And for a time, it worked. But Michael Schiavo finally received permission from a Florida judge, Judge Greer, to remove the feeding tube permanently.
As she lay in a hospital, not far from the apartment where she first became ill, crowds began to gather. And the pressure grew.
REV. PAVONE: What is happening here is a monumental disaster for our nation and for civilization.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I have several people here that wanted to talk.
MARY SCHINDLER, TERRI SCHIAVO'S MOTHER: A runaway justice system where judges to legislate from the bench in favor of death.
NARRATOR: The courts were under attack. The threats were thinly veiled. REV. PAVONE: I'm tired with hearing the executive and the legislative branches of our government say, well, the court has spoken and there's nothing we can do. Yes, there is something you can do. Use your own authority given to you by the Constitution to protect human life.
NARRATOR: This hospice, where Terri Schiavo spent her final days, is quiet now, of course. No demonstrators, no police, no media anymore. But the political, legal and even social aftershocks linger. Especially the last-minute attempt by some republican leaders in Congress and President Bush to overturn judicial decisions in the case, actions that drew notice at the highest court in the land.
Did that trouble you?
SANDRA DAY O'CONNER, RETIRED JUSTICE OF SUPREME COURT: It did. Because it was asking for review of one specific case.
NARRATOR: Next, the Congress steps in. And even the president becomes involved in the Schiavo case. And much more of a rare on- the-record interview with former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and sitting Justice Stephen Breyer.
(COMMERICAL BREAK)
UNIDNETIFIED MALE: Look out. Back up, back up, back up.
NARRATOR: Watching the protests edge toward confrontation, watching senators hundreds of miles away on Capitol Hill.
SEN. JOHN CORNYN, (R) TEXAS: It causes a lot of people, including me, great distress to see judges use the authority that they have been given to make raw political or ideological decisions.
NARRATOR: Watching it all unfold on television was Michael Schiavo.
SCHIAVO: It made me angry to see what these people did. I mean, I sat there and I watched Congress convening over my life.
UNIDENTIFIED SENATOR: Her legal guardian, that's Terri's husband.
SCHIAVO: When just a week before that, they couldn't even tell you who Terri Schiavo was. They didn't even know how to pronounce my name.
SEN. SAM BROWNBACK, (R) KANSAS: The life of Terri Schiavo that she will have.
SCHIAVO: So what business do they have of discussing that?
NARRATOR: Finally, on Palm Sunday, March 20th, 2005, President Bush took action. Interrupting his vacation in Texas to fly back to the White House. The purpose? To sign into law a bill designed to affect a single American -- Teresa Marie Schiavo.
BOBBY SCHINDLER, TERRI SCHIAVO'S BROTHER: They recognized that Terri, who was sentenced to death by dehydration and starvation. They recognized that someone on death row had more protection than she did.
NARRATOR: At 1:14 a.m., with no television cameras, no photographers to record the event, the president signed Senate Bill S- 686. It ordered the jurisdiction of the Schiavo case be taken from the State of Florida and handed exclusively to the federal courts, an act unheard of in recent America history.
SCHIAVO: We should be ashamed as a president. But he thinks it was OK. He's just -- well, you know, we should preserve life. Who are you to tell us that? Did you know Terri Schiavo? Did you come down after I invited you? No. Did your brother, who was 20 minutes away? No.
NARRATOR: For that matter, none of the politicians, who offered opinions in the preceding days and weeks, had ever knew Terri Schiavo.
The whole case was now in the hands of federal judges. But once again, court after court refused appeals by the Schindler family that her feeding tube should be reinstated.
Finally, Supreme Court justices refused to intervene. And the 15-year battle was over.
ROBERT SCHINDLER, TERRI SCHIAVO'S FATHER: We just feel bad that Terri left this life without one of her family members' right beside her.
MARY SCHINDLER: Get out of my face. Get out of my face.
SEN. BROWNBACK: With Terri, we witnessed a legally sanctioned death by starvation and dehydration.
DR. JOHN THOGMARTIN, MEDICAL EXAMINER: There was massive neuronal loss or death.
NARRATOR: The doctor who performed the autopsy said she had extensive brain damage and died of dehydration.
JEB BUSH, GOVENOR OF FLORIDA: It's heart breaking, to be honest with you. Our thoughts and prayers go out to her family, to all the people that wanted her to live.
NARRATOR: The courts, especially the Supreme Court, were now in the line of fire. And there was outrage in the street.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Someday, maybe we'll get some good Supreme Court judges that have a little common sense, compassion, and to do the decent thing for humanity.
NARRATOR: And stark threats from leaders in Congress. BROWNBACK: We will look at an arrogant, out of control, unaccountable judiciary that thumb their nose at Congress and the president when given the jurisdiction to hear this case anew and look at all the facts and make a determination. They chose not to participate.
NARRATOR: The Supreme Court, of course, didn't explain why it declined to hear the case. By tradition, it rarely does.
But I recently had a rare opportunity to talk on the record with one former and one current member of this court.
Justice Breyer, because he is still a sitting justice, didn't talk about the Schiavo case. But Justice O'Connor, recently retired, showed no hesitation.
O'CONNER: There were members of Congress who were very unhappy with the Florida court's decision. And as you know, legislation was passed for that one specific case, requiring federal court review.
NARRATOR: Did that trouble you?
O'CONNER: It did. Because it was asking for review of one specific case. That's so unusual.
The federal trial court concluded that there had been no legal error in the state court's resolution. So it went to the federal court of appeals, which agreed. It then came to this court. And we did not take the case and overturn it. And that resulted in a great deal of outspoken sentiment, unhappy with the courts for how they had dealt with it.
STEPHEN BREYER, SUPREME COURT JUSTICE: I think it's true that, if you look at polls and trying to get attitudes and so forth, there are a growing number of people who think that what judges do is just decide what they like. My goodness, I don't ever feel I decide what I like. And there are fewer people who are thinking judges are trying impartially to apply the law, which, of course, is what I try to do.
NARRATOR: We're judges, Justice Breyer is saying, not politicians. And he likes to point out that the justices are unanimous in about 40 percent of their cases each year. But in the others, especially those with high profiles, the justice's party, their ideology, the president who nominated them, are all pretty good indicators of how they'll vote.
SCHIAVO: You know, my main goal last year was just to be with Terri.
NARRATOR: As for Michael Schiavo...
SCHIAVO: And hold other politicians accountable.
NARRATOR: He's just hoping that all parts of the government -- legislative, executive, and judicial -- take a step back. SCHIAVO: We live our lives as Americans. You know, we make our decisions every day about our families, about our loved ones. It's scary when the government comes in and says you can't do that. What are we turning into?
NAELA IMANYARA-SERIKALI, SUPPORTS SCHOOL CHOICE PLAN: If the playing field was equal from the beginning, I would says, OK, we embrace it. It shouldn't be a part of this. But we are not on equal playing ground.
NARRATOR: Ahead, another incendiary battleground where the courts have intervened, the battle over school desegregation in America. School buses, once again, at the Supreme Court.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
NARRATOR: This is the morning ritual for most kids who attend public school in metropolitan Louisville, Kentucky. It's only one of several so-called transportation depots where thousands of students leave one school bus, and then transfer to other buses to begin their day -- all in the name of the city's Voluntary Diversity Program.
JEFFREY TOOBIN, CNN SENIOR LEGAL ANALYST: This is orchestrated chaos. But it's the practical result of what Louisville tried to do, not only comply with court orders, but based on pressure from politicians, parents and the court, come up with a solution that officials thought everyone could live with.
LORI DEWBOYS, SETH'S MOTHERDEVOY: Hey. Boys? Hey, guys.
NARRATOR: It's just past 6:00 a.m. at the Dewboy's house.
DEVOY: Seth? Hey?
NARRATOR: Seven-year-old Seth is not a happy camper.
We're going to make the sacrifices that we need to get what we feel like is best for Seth.
NARRATOR: That sacrifice means up to three hours a day on a public school bus to a magnet school in a mostly black neighborhood, but with a mostly white student body.
It's because Louisville officials, with the court's approval, came up with a plan that mandated most schools had to have at least 15 percent, but no more than 50 percent black enrollment.
DEWBOY: He doesn't know anything different. He's gone there since he was 4 years old. He's in the pre-K program.
NARRATOR: While Seth heads west to a class in a predominantly urban neighborhood, 16-year-old Howard Brim goes east to Ballard High School and a predominantly white suburb. Different directions, same three hours on a bus.
HOWARD BRIM, STUDENT: Kentucky's motto is education pays. I mean you are going to have to do things to get it.
NARRATOR: He's up every school day at 5:00 a.m. and takes public transportation. Howard says the school nearest his home doesn't offer the kind of education he's receiving now.
BRIM: What works 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago, is not going to work now.
NARRATOR: The long trek of both boys is much like Louisville's own journey. Schools here were once segregated by law. The Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v Board of Education ruling made that illegal. But Louisville was slow to change.
Nineteen seventy-five began a quarter century of federal court oversight in Jefferson County. Back then, these black students, pelted with rocks.
Naela Serikali attended Louisville schools in the days of court ordered busing. She now works for the city and supports the current racial balancing plan for her three children.
SERIKALI: They are not on equal playing grounds. And so we have to put that variable into the picture.
TEDDY B. GORDON, CIVIL RIGHTS ATTORNEY: Everyone calls me teddy bear.
NARRATOR: Teddy Gordon is an experienced civil rights attorney who has, in the past, represented blacks in discrimination cases. Now, he will oppose the diversity plan before the Supreme Court on behalf of some white and black parents.
GORDON: It's about actual discrimination that white kids, who want to go to their neighborhood schools that are better-performing schools, are denied entrance to that school solely because of their color.
NARRATOR: Arguably, the modern civil rights movement was launched more than half a century ago here at the United States Supreme Court. Although it was a unanimous decision, Brown versus Board of Education was broadly criticized at the time as judicial activism.
But it's since become known as the touch stone, the shining example of how the courts wield power when elected lawmakers cannot, or will not act.
Even so, a half century later, much of Louisville and its suburbs remain segregated. In fact, if not by law, the former White Water prosecutor thinks the Supreme Court will strike down the Louisville plan.
KENNETH STARR, DEAN, PEPPERDINE UNIVERSITY LAW SCHOOL: What we do, since Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito may not be especially wedded to the idea that there should be counting by the numbers, counting on the basis of race. NARRATOR: The sticking point could be what is a compelling government interest for a diversity plan.
KATHLEEN SULLIVAN, STANFORD UNIVERSITY LAW SCHOOL: It's a real clash between two conservative principals. Do you want to go for color blindness at the expense of local democracy? Or do you want to allow local school districts to experiment, to try and bring about a less color-conscious student body because everybody goes to school together.
NARRATOR: The debate will continues. But Seth's bus ride is finally over. Nine a.m., time to learn. But his bus is the last to arrive at Grandice (ph) Elementary school. It's a Math-Science magnet school with completive spots. Thirty-two percent of its students are African-American.
Seth doesn't see the racial divide. None of the children we spoke with in Louisville see it. But he has little idea how much it took to get him where he is now, and how much it may take to keep him there. CONTINUED.....
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Oct 31, 2006 16:42:57 GMT 4
.....continued:CNN LIVE EVENT/SPECIAL Broken Government: Judges on Trial Aired October 28, 2006 - 20:00 ET Transcript of 6th Show in the Series PART 2 of 2Ahead, why did the courts OK the seizure of private property? MIKE CHRISTOFARA (ph): They are up there in black robes, supposed to be protecting our constitutionality. And what do they do? They stole our property rights.NARRATOR: Next, why things are not that simple.(COMMERCIAL BREAK) NARRATOR: Fort Trumble didn't always look like this. But we had a little of everything down here. We had our own marina. We had bakeries down here at one time. NARRATOR: And one of the things Mike Christofara (ph) will remember most is his favorite maple tree. CHRISTOFARA (ph): It's a beautiful tree. And I hope that they save that tree. I mean you cannot grow trees like that anymore. I mean it takes, you know, 50 years to grow them. TOOBIN: It's a tiny place tucked against the Long Island Sound in the city of New London, Connecticut, a city the mayor says needs a great deal of help. MAYOR ELIZABETH SABILIA, NEW LONDON, CONNECTICUT: New London has seen jobs, not only jobs, high-tech jobs, while still jobs leave and we only have about 34 percent of our housing is home owner occupied. The rest are rentals. TOOBIN: Because of that, New London officials in the late 1990s formed what they called a development corporation. The idea was to create a new upscale commercial and retail zone in Fort Trumbull and new condominiums would replace some of the existing homes. City officials had a big ally, the giant pharmaceutical company Pfizer, which had opened an enormous research and development complex adjacent to the neighborhood.SABILIA: It was bungled in the beginning but it doesn't mean that the sentiment, the cause wasn't just. TOOBIN: There was one big stumbling block, people. People like Mike Christofaro already lived there. SABILIA: I think what should have happened was that there should have been a delegation of city leaders that went down and talked to the residents there and explained what was happening. TOOBIN: Instead, this is what happened. CHRISTOFARO: We were given the condemnation notice the day before Thanksgiving in 2000. TOOBIN: New London officials had ordered all the homes in Fort Trumbull condemned, an action known at eminent domain, where government can legally acquire private property at a reasonable price in the name of public use. The property owners have to sell whether they want to or not.DANA BERLINER, SENIOR ATTORNEY, INSTITUTE FOR JUSTICE: The idea that you could work your whole life to purchase a home and that it could be taken from you because somebody wealthier had a home or a business they wanted to put there runs contrary to everything we think life in America is about. TOOBIN: So, the residents who didn't want to sell, with the help of a public interest law firm in Washington, filed suit. But, at every stage of the case, they lost until five long years later it reached the Supreme Court. Why did you fight so hard on this issue? CHRISTOFARO : It's your right to say it's up for sale, not to have someone come in here and say they have a better use for it to build a condo so that someone else can move into your neighborhood where they're basically telling you that you're not good enough to be here.TOOBIN: The lawsuit, Kelo v. New London, was named for the woman who owned this pink house Susette Kelo. SUSETTE KELO, FORT TRUMBULL HOMEOWNER: It took over our lives for a long time until we finally took our own lives back and decided we're going to live our lives and not be prisoners in our own homes. TOOBIN (on camera): The Supreme Court's opinion in the Kelo case was handed down here last spring. The vote was 5-4 against the homeowners and for the city.CHRISTOFARO: How can, you know, five justices come back, steal your property rights, you know what I mean that they're up there in black robes supposed to be protecting our constitutionality. And, what do they do, they stole our property rights. TOOBIN (voice-over): To say the decision triggered a storm of protests is putting it very mildly indeed. THOMAS DELAY: This Congress is not going to idly sit by and let an unaccountable judiciary make these kinds of decisions without taking our responsibility and our duty given to us by the Constitution to be a check on the judiciary. TOOBIN: In New Hampshire, protesters tried to persuade local officials to use eminent domain to seize the home of Justice David Souter. And, around the nation, nearly 30 state legislatures changed their laws.BERLINER: The majority of states took this decision and their responsibility very seriously and passed laws that provided further protection for people against the abuse of eminent domain. CHRISTOFARO: We lost the battle. We lost the battle on eminent domain here in Fort Trumbull but we're winning the war. I mean people are so outraged across this nation. TOOBIN: The former solicitor general for President Bush, Ted Olson, agrees. (on camera): Why do you think the Kelo case touched such a nerve in a lot of people? THEODORE OLSON, FORMER SOLICITOR GENERAL: Well, your home is your castle. We believe that in this country. We believe in property rights. We believe it's pretty sacred. I think it struck a nerve because people thought, "Well, if they did that to that couple or those families, they can do that to me because they want to build a parking lot for a pharmaceutical company."TOOBIN (voice-over): Back in Fort Trumbull, all the owners have finally reached settlements, finally moved on to other homes. These houses will be bulldozed before the first snowfall. And, even though tougher laws were passed, public interest attorneys say that since the decision nearly 6,000 private properties around the country have been condemned in a similar manner.UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This might be a time that the court could, as it were, take its foot off the gas pedal. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: If there's a specific threat to that judge... TOOBIN: As public anger against judges increases, some are suggesting radical solutions. SEN. CHARLES GRASSLEY (R), IOWA: Quite frankly, the judiciary could use an inspector general. TOOBIN: Should we be judging the judges?(END VIDEOTAPE) (COMMERCIAL BREAK) (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) TOOBIN (voice-over): Even by the standards of overheated political rhetoric, what Texas Senator and former Texas Judge John Cornyn said a year ago was stunning. SENATOR JOHN CORNYN (R) TEXAS: I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters on some occasions where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public that it builds up and builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in violence certainly without any justification but a concern that I have that I wanted to share. TOOBIN: The Senator's statement came just after the husband and 90-year-old mother of a federal judge in Chicago were murdered killed, the police said later, by a man who had lost a lawsuit before that same judge. Senator Cornyn later apologized for even appearing to condone courthouse violence but he struck a chord at the highest levels. SANDRA DAY O'CONNOR, SUPREME COURT JUSTICE (RET.): If it comes to the point of retaliating against judges for the very decisions they've made within their jurisdiction, that's when I get worried.
TOOBIN (on camera): Actual violence, of course, is rare against judges in this country. But, after a flood of outrage over cases like Terri Schiavo and eminent domain, there are clear signs of a political backlash against the American judiciary. Not surprisingly, the most significant moves are being planned right across the street at the Capitol.GRASSLEY: Quite frankly, the judiciary could use an inspector general. TOOBIN (voice-over): Iowa Senator Charles Grassley says the idea of a inspector general is to ferret out fraud and waste. It's worked well in other parts of the government, so why not in the courts? GRASSLEY: No branch of government, no public servant, no one individual is perfect. People can make mistakes. People can become so independent that they overlook a lot of things like whether money is being wasted, overlook whether ethics are being followed as they should be. OLSON: I don't think there's anyone that contends that there's any fraud, abuse, or corruption in our federal judiciary. An inspector general then would, I suppose, start getting involved in deciding whether things were decided in the right way. TOOBIN: So far, the idea hasn't moved past the committee stage in Congress and many are already lined up against it. O'CONNOR: I don't know that we need a whole new regulatory scheme to address that and I just think it might lead to some unfortunate relations between the branches of government. TOOBIN: But why are the judges themselves on trial? THOMAS GOLDSTEIN, SUPREME COURT LEGAL ANALYST: I think conservatives have figured out that judges are an easy target. They can't fight back in any real way. They get involved in social issues. Frequently they decide those issues in ways that conservatives disagree with vehemently. And so, conservatives are going to blame it on the judge rather than the law that the judge is applying. TOOBIN: Some conservatives, of course, don't see it that way. KENNETH STARR, DEAN, PEPPERDINE UNIVERSITY LAW SCHOOL: There is an erosion, a loss of public confidence in the courts generally and in the Supreme Court more specifically, so I think the court has to or should be mindful of that. What can it do? I think one of the things it can do is do more real law cases. Do what courts typically do, as opposed to entering constitutional frontiers that they're being encouraged to go into.
Let's talk about issues of gay rights. Well, the court doesn't have to go there. Let's talk about end of life issues and physician assisted suicide. The court doesn't have to go there.TOOBIN: Ahead, extreme candor at the Supreme Court. (on camera): Why should we trust you rather than the government officials who are answerable to the people? (voice-over): A sitting justice on the record and a former justice finally free to speak her mind. (END VIDEOTAPE) (COMMERCIAL BREAK) (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) TOOBIN: This is the United States Supreme Court where presidents have been rebuked and chosen, where the course of American history has been changed. It's a given that the justices who preside here almost never talk publicly about their jobs or especially about their decisions. But I recently had the chance, rarely granted, to talk on the record with a former justice and a justice still sitting on the court. Justice Stephen Breyer talked about his job and about the court's critics. And, former Justice Sandra Day O'Connor was anxious to talk, talk about the surge in complaints about judges and justice all over the country. O'CONNOR: As I went through the last few years of service here at the court, I saw increasing indicators of unhappiness with judges. We heard all kinds of statements by members of Congress. DELAY: This is a horrible decision. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This court doesn't seem to understand the unattended consequences. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: To reign back in this broad interpretation. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Congress has to respond to this. We cannot let the courts step in. O'CONNOR: We saw legislation introduced to somehow restrict or affect judges at both the state and federal levels and even public opinion polls about courts and judges showed an increase in dissatisfaction with the American public. And there was a great deal of rhetoric about activist judges and that seemed to be a mantra of some kind.TOOBIN: Federal judges they are appointed. They're not democratically elected. They serve essentially for life. Why should we trust you rather than the government officials who are answerable to the people?STEPHEN BREYER, SUPREME COURT JUSTICE: That's a very good question. Why would anyone want a system like ours in a democracy? The answer has to be it's possible despite those words on paper that a majority could gang up on a minority. The prayer of the founders was that that wouldn't happen here. I can remember in my youth Governor (INAUDIBLE)...Well, the unusual thing about Arkansas is that... BREYER: ...stood in the schoolhouse door with the state militia and said "The Supreme Court has told me to let the black children into the white school but I won't. I won't do it." It took more than the Supreme Court. It took President Eisenhower to send paratroopers to Little Rock, who took those children by the hand and walked into that white school integrating the school according to law.
I tell you that story, it's one of many, because it both shows a need for judges to be independent and, more important than that, it shows the need for people in the United States to understand how that independence is part of their life, why they might support it, why they might stand up for judicial decisions even those that they think are very wrong.TOOBIN (voice-over): Justice O'Connor was the first woman ever appointed to the Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan in 1981. She was raised on a ranch in Arizona, third in her class at Stanford Law School in 1952, but still no law firm would hire her because she was a woman, became a state senator, then a judge in Arizona. BILL CLINTON, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Ladies and gentlemen, Judge Stephen Breyer. TOOBIN: Justice Breyer was appointed by Bill Clinton in 1994. He was born and raised in San Francisco, a law clerk to Justice Arthur Golberg, professor at Harvard Law School, aide to Senator Ted Kennedy. Recently, of course, the whole confirmation process has become a great deal more political. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What kind of Supreme Court justice would John Roberts be? Americans have a right to know. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Every day desperate liberals make up a steady drip of attacks against Judge Samuel Alito. TOOBIN: You just had a selection process to replace you on the Supreme Court. O'CONNOR: Indeed. TOOBIN: Television commercials both sides buying ads, a very political process. O'CONNOR: It was and I think the television viewer may be encouraged to get the impression that judges do then take office and decide on the basis of their own political instincts how to decide cases and I think that's very unfortunate. TOOBIN: Does it bother you when people like me go on television and say, "Well the Reagan justices, like Justice O'Connor, and the Clinton justices, like Justice Breyer... BREYER: Yes, it does, it does bother me. TOOBIN: Why? BREYER: Because I think that when I'm here I know I was appointed by President Clinton and I'm proud of that. The fact is once I'm appointed I'm not a judge for one group or another group. And when I write a dissent or I write a majority, the people that disagrees with me the most I'm their justice too. I have to remember that. I can't write in a way that will please everybody. I know I can't. It's a big country.O'CONNOR: Who would know how you would come down on some issue you had never addressed before and sometimes in a field of law unfamiliar to the judge? And the judge is in office a lot longer than the president who makes the appointment. They go on for a long time. So, I think it's kind of unrealistic to say, "Oh, there's a Reagan judge." So, of course, that's how they decided. TOOBIN: Is it a problem when people make up their minds about an institution like the Supreme Court based solely on high profile cases, like Bush v. Gore? BREYER: Yes. O'CONNOR: Yes. BREYER: I'd say... TOOBIN: How do you avoid a problem like that? BREYER: Well, you can't but the remarkable thing about it is despite the strong feelings and the good arguments against it, which I thought I made some, but not everyone agreed. So, despite the division and the uncertainty the remarkable thing to me is that the American public followed it even on something they disagreed. And it's taken 200 years to get to that point. We've learned as a nation to follow decisions even when we think they're wrong. And, in a country of 300 million people, as I said, with 900 million points of view, that is a national treasure.TOOBIN (voice-over): Just ahead... O'CONNOR: Do you think you get a written explanation from the president for every decision he makes? TOOBIN: ...at the boundaries of the Constitution. (END VIDEOTAPE) (COMMERCIAL BREAK) (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) TOOBIN (voice-over): The justices of the Supreme Court like to say they decide issues where the Constitution is less than clear, where there are no easy answers. BREYER: We often divide in such difficult cases but it is important to remember that those cases are at the boundary that what the Constitution foresees is a vast area between those boundaries where people, average people, will decide democratically what kind of society they want. GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: To do the job that the American people expect us to do. TOOBIN: Since 9/11, those boundaries have been stretched even further in the name of a strong executive and the courts once again are in the crossfire. KATHLEEN SULLIVAN, STANFORD UNIVERSITY LAW SCHOOL: We're at a very perilous time when the independence of the courts is vital to making sure that the president doesn't go too far, even in acts of well meaning zeal, to keep the fabric of our Constitution together.O'CONNOR: Requiring federal court review. TOOBIN (on camera): Did that trouble you? O'CONNOR: It did because... TOOBIN (voice-over): As we've seen in the past hour, judges are very aware of the anger. DELAY: And arrogant, out of control. TOOBIN: But there's little judges can do about how they're perceived. (on camera): Justice Breyer, do you think the judiciary does a good job explaining itself to the public? BREYER: No but it isn't really the job of the judiciary to explain itself. O'CONNOR: Well, see I think we do in this sense if I could speak to that. It's because at the appellate level, at the level of this court, we write the reasons for the decisions that we make. They're published. We are the only one of the branches that does that. Do you think you get a written explanation from the president for every decision he makes, of course not. Do you think Congress does that, no.TOOBIN (voice-over): You can't blame them for being testy. Still, according to the most recent polling, about 60 percent of Americans still believe Supreme Court justices are doing a good job. BREYER: Someone has to have the last word. For 200 years people have thought in this country that the best guarantee that minorities will not be oppressed, that the Constitution will be lived up to, is to give that very last word under narrow circumstances to a group of judges who are independent, not because they're wiser, they make mistakes, but because by giving them the last word there is a better guarantee of that neutrality insulated from politics that can help those whom the Constitution wanted to help that minority that might be oppressed.(END VIDEOTAPE) THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.Source: transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0610/28/se.03.html
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DT1
Moderator
You know, it's not like I wanted to be right about all of this...
Posts: 428
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Post by DT1 on Jan 24, 2007 8:15:43 GMT 4
State of Denial,Part SixI watched as much as I could stomach,and walked away when the crass,self-serving wounded soldier shoutouts began... My impressions: Who is doing his makeup?He looked like an Oomp-loompa. Isn't it odd that he and his Evil Veep Baron Harkonnen are so in tune that they drink water at the same time? Like McCain,I almost fell asleep...SOS,just shuffle the talking points. No"Axis of Evil"claptrap.Guess someone clued him in that labeling millions of people as"evil" is rather infantile,and does not sell very well. He seemed a bit more coherent,perhaps his handlers reduced his meds... Not one word about the shameful debacle following Katrina.Did the Gulf Coast secceede from the Union when I wasn't looking? Wouldn't blame them. And then, inevitably ... out of nowhere ... the elephant in the room raises her trunk... you might remember her: She's an unseemly beast, name of "Iraq." Where we picked up this perilous pachyderm, I don't know. But she's ours now, and we've got to keep her ... be a good steward to this "Dumbo" ... true, she's a bit ornery at the moment ... she needs a calming voice, a steady hand ... lots of special Muslim hay ... but no worries, we can help her. She'll be walking on her own two feet before too long...(Thanks 2 Dave Rees, Huffingtonpost.com for saying it best.) Our buds over at thinkprogress.org took the reality-based Ginsu to this delusional speech.Here's the link: thinkprogress.org/2007/01/24/annotated-sotu/I had a daydream of the entire Democratic Party,most of the Republicans,and our soldiers just getting up... Turning their backs on him and walking out of the Chamber.... He does not listen to us,so why should we listen to him?On the whole, I am niether shocked or awed... I eagerly await his State of Incarceration Address. Please add your thoughts,my friends.
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michelle
Administrator
I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on May 6, 2007 14:13:47 GMT 4
One Day You're Gonna Wake UpDavid Michael Green5/3/07 1:31:45 PM Eastern Daylight Time One day you’re gonna wake up, America.And, like every other one since last you can remember, it’s gonna be an ugly morning. One day you’re gonna wake up and go to your lousy job with its lousy salary and non-existent benefits. You might even remember the good job you once had. Or that the government you once supported gave tax breaks to companies like the one that exported that good job of yours to the Third World (which is what they’re now starting to call your country). Or that that same government undermined the labor unions which fought to get you your good wages and benefits. One day you’re gonna wake up and be furious at the monstrous tax burden you are carrying, a tab which accounts for fifty of the seventy hours you must work each week just to eke by. You might even figure out why your tax bill is so high. You might remember that the government you once supported shifted the tax burden from the rich onto people like you, and from the taxpayers of the time onto those of today. And that they borrowed money in astonishing quantities to fund their sleight-of-hand, so that you work thirty hours a week just to pay the interest on a mountain of money borrowed decades ago. One day you’re gonna wake up in anger at the absurdly poor education your children are receiving. You’re gonna remember that it wasn’t always that way, that even after the military’s voracious appetite was temporarily sated, your country still managed to find a few bucks to at least educate a workforce. No more. And you’re gonna remember how you applauded when your educational system was twisted in to a test taking industry that is careful, above all, not to teach children how to think. One day you’re gonna wake up literally sick and tired. You’re gonna want treatment for your maladies but you won’t be able to touch the cost. You’re gonna wonder what you were thinking when believed your country had the best healthcare system in the world, even though it was the only advanced democracy in the world that didn’t provide universal care, even though it devoted fifty percent more of its economy than those other countries to pay for a system that left fifty million people uninsured, and even though there were massive layers of unnecessary and harmful private sector bureaucracy skimming hundreds of billions of dollars of profits out of the system in the name of free enterprise. One day you’re gonna wake up too tired to go to work anymore. You’re gonna want to retire in dignity but will be left instead to laugh bitterly at the cruelty of that joke. And you’re gonna wonder what in the world you had been thinking voting for a president who’s primary goal was to allow Wall Street to raid Social Security, destroying what had once been considered the most successful domestic program in human history. One day you’re gonna wake up and wish that it wasn’t so bloody hot, and that there weren’t so many diseases and species eradications and violent storms lashing the planet. And maybe you’ll even remember that you once supported a government that lied about the very existence of global warming – back when it might have been curtailed – a government that scuttled the barest remedy for the problem in order to protect oil company profits. One day you’re gonna wake up and wish you had a government that could simply and competently do the basic things it was designed for. A government that could protect you from foreign attack, that could come to your rescue after a devastating hurricane, that could properly manage a new program or other people’s security. An administration that didn’t pervert the purpose of every agency within the government to its opposite, using civil rights lawyers to fight civil rights, for example, or the EPA to protect polluters. One day you’re gonna wake up and cry out for simple justice, blindly applied without bias. And perhaps you’ll remember when that principle died. When your country stood by and watched the politicization of its judicial system for purposes of partisanship, and said nothing. When it stood by and watched its highest law enforcement officials in the land lie about their failing memory of events and pretended to believe that was acceptable. One day you’re gonna wake up and wish that you weren’t being drafted to go fight wars you don’t believe in. You’ll remember how soldiers were sent to their deaths for lies. You’ll remember how badly they were treated when they came home maimed and twisted. You’ll remember how real, patriotic, former soldiers were mocked and humiliated by dress-up, unpatriotic, former non-soldiers. And suddenly you’ll understand why no one would volunteer for the military anymore, and why people like you had to be drafted. One day you’re gonna wake up and want very badly to run outside and scream in anger about a government that long ago stopped serving your interests in favor of the narrow interests of a tiny oligarchy. But instead you’ll stay inside and keep your scream tucked safely in your belly. Because you’ll know that in your country dissent has long since been outlawed, on pain of torture and death. You’ll remember concepts like due process, limitations on government search, seizure and wiretapping, habeas corpus, trial by peers, legal representation and prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment as historical artifacts no longer even taught in schools. On day you’re gonna wake up and want so badly to change governments. You’re gonna treasure the concept of democracy like no Soviet dissident ever did. You’re gonna crave the opportunity to own your own government, to make your own societal choices, to make a change of direction never before so desperately necessary. And you’re gonna wonder why you didn’t speak up as you watched first-hand the dismantling of the democracy you had been handed by previous generations of patriots. You’re gonna wish you had been patriotic enough yourself to demand, above all else, free and fair elections, and you’re gonna shake your head in puzzlement at how you stood by watching in silence those that patently were not. One day you’re gonna wake up and want to get the hell out of your rotting, repressive country. You’re gonna remember a time when that wasn’t true. But, oddly enough, you’ll find that other countries remember too. They’ll remember your country’s arrogance, its unilateralism, its walls, its racism, and its politicized abuse of immigrants. And they’ll remember how your government undermined and violently replaced theirs whenever corporations from your country had their profits threatened. You’re gonna want to leave, but there will be nowhere you’ll be welcome. You’re gonna find out that walls can face both directions. One day you’re gonna wake up in a hostile world where your country no longer has any friends. There will be governments of other countries – former long-standing allies – that cannot afford to have anything to do with you, lest their publics angrily remove them from office for collaborating with a country as hated as yours. Nor will those governments trust yours anyway. They will perhaps possess intelligence that could save your life, but they will not share it. They will possess forces that could help you survive real security threats, but they will not provide them. Your country will have become an international pariah, the South Africa of the twenty-first century. And because no one will assist you, one day you’re gonna wake up fearing for your life as your country is brutally attacked by angry militants deploying weapons of mass destruction against your cities. Long dormant connections in your brain will resurface, and you will dimly understand why. On this day – perhaps March 20, 2023 – you might be assisted in your comprehension by the message of one of the attackers, someone whose family your country callously destroyed in its mission accomplished in Iraq, and who spent the next twenty years plotting this day’s revenge. And you will wonder again why you stood by as your country attacked Iraq on a completely bogus pretext. You’ll remember applauding when this mailed fist was long ago sent. And, just as it comes hurling back in your direction at a lethal velocity, stamped “Return to Sender”, you’ll wonder what you were thinking. And you’ll realize just how much you weren’t. One day you’re gonna wake up, America, and you’re gonna find out what was happening while you were sprawled on the couch watching endless mind-numbing loops of CSI, Desperate Housewives or Dancing with the Stars. One day you’re gonna wake up and realize that catching all the action during week seven of the 2011 NFL season really wasn’t so critical in the greater scheme of things after all. One day you’re gonna wake up and wished you’d invested a little more energy into monitoring and choosing the people who made monumental decisions on your behalf. One day, with a flash of remorse greater than you thought it possible that one human vessel could contain, you’ll remember the ignored warning shots across your bow. Moments later, you’ll discover the human capacity for searing remorse is actually even greater still, as you contemplate your inattention even to the shots that were fired right through the bow. With a fury you would yesterday have thought yourself incapable of, you’ll hurriedly attempt to affix Band-Aids to the tattered splinters remaining from your country’s once sturdy hull. But you’ll learn quickly the toll of those years spent wasted in a civic coma. You’ll find that no amount of patchwork can any longer save this sinking ship from its appointment with the dustbin of history. In shame, you’ll regret the callous arrogance with which you laughingly dismissed those who sounded the early clarion call. “We are destroying ourselves”, they tried to tell you. But even on the rare occasion when you roused yourself from your stupor long enough to learn the slightest bit about the very threats that jeopardized your life and that of your species, still you found it more reassuring to follow the blustering worst amongst us, with their patently absurd pretended confidence, and their ever constant resort to the cheapest of false solutions, and the rudest of demeanors. One day, you’ll desperately search for hope of any sort, but none will remain. Nothing will be left to save you. One day you’ll realize that once there were solutions, but that that day is now long past. You’ll see that human technological capacity ran its evolutionary race with wisdom, and the latter came in second. You’ll sadly realize that you stood by while your country led the once great tool-making species to its own destruction. One day you’re gonna wake up, America, and realize how far it’s all gone. But if that day isn’t very soon, it won’t matter. Because one day you’re gonna wake up, and it will be far, far too late. Source: tinyurl.com/2ppvzn
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michelle
Administrator
I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Jun 22, 2007 16:49:34 GMT 4
If Reid Were Rove Part 1 of 2
Here's the latest from David Michael Green, which I believe fits perfectly under Broken Government. Our governmental system just doesn't work any longer; we need to throw most of the bums out and rebuild. The following is David's introduction to his most recent commentary:
6/21/07
Greetings, Good People - I hope this message finds you well, happy and productive! Can you imagine living in a democracy of 300 million people, and having only two political parties to chose from? Worse yet, what if there wasn't much difference between the two?! How did we manage this feat of political self-destruction? I don't know (well, I have a notion or two...), but what I do know is that things would be much different if we had a Democratic Party (I think we should start calling it the Democratic Pastry!) that stood for something, that provided an alternative, and that wasn't afraid to throw a punch for the right reasons every once in a while. I do know that things would be better in America and in the world:
If Reid Were Rove David Michael Green 6/21/07
The state of American politics is dismal.
To begin with, there are no third choices. And, truthfully, there’s hardly a second one either.
If you had asked me prior to 2001, I would have echoed the long-held sentiment in American politics that there wasn’t a dime’s worth of difference between Republicans and Democrats. That the choice was between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. That both parties were fully owned corporate subsidiaries – the only difference being which corporate masters were at the helm.
Then Bush happened. The truth, of course, is that Bushism – regressivism – had been around for quite a while, at least since Reagan, but without the unholy combination of Rovian brashness, a national security fright, and all branches of the government being in the hands of the same set of scary monsters. In my book, this was something rather different – both in terms of scale and kind – and made for what appeared to be a substantial distinction between Democrats and Republicans for maybe the first time ever in the course of my life.
A distinction, yes, if only a sort of backhanded one, though. That is to say, the gap opened up purely because the Republicans moved so far to the right, not because of any progressive renaissance in the Democratic Party. In fact, the Democrats moved to their right as well, just not as far, not from the same starting place, and not all of them. And so, once the Texas Tornado moved to town, we got the incredibly irresponsible tax transfers (disingenuously labeled tax cuts), the insanely brutal Iraq war, neglect then exacerbation of global warming, and so on, with about half the Democrats in Congress going along for each of these rides.
That wasn’t a huge shock. Democrats have been in retreat since 1980, and the context from 2002 to 2006 was not one which particularly rewarded boldness or dissent. Since then, however, conditions have changed. George Bush’s job approval is starting to fall below the 30 percent mark with some consistency. His war and his credibility are completely shot. There is a lot of anger out there, and probably the only reason the movement for impeachment isn’t stronger is because many people figure it’s not worth it with ‘just’ a year and a half to go.
But also because even if you could take down Bush and Cheney, you’d be left with... Nancy Pelosi, leader of a Congress that has miraculously managed to be less popular than George Bush only five months into their term, demonized female Democrat from San Francisco (and therefore – hint, hint – probably a lesbian!, in addition to being, gulp, a liberal!), and something less than an inspiring political figure in terms of either substance or style. If Cheney is Bush’s insurance policy, Pelosi is both of theirs.
But I digress. How in the world could a Democratic Congress manage to earn a 23 percent favorability rating in just six short months, without even doing anything? Perhaps by not doing anything? Nothing, that is, except, of course capitulating on the single issue that enrages the American public the most, and that most explains the rout of 2006 that gave them their very majority. It was one thing for Democrats to melt like a snow cone in Riyadh when conditions were not terribly favorable to playing the role of principled opposition (although please don’t get me started on how failing to oppose on principle actually leads to a vicious cycle which encourages more violations of principle later). But this is something quite different.
The sad fact is that Democrats are frightened of the shadows of their shadows. On an overcast day. Which leads to the even sadder fact that American voters effectively have two bold selections from which to choose when they step into a voting booth. There is the truly disastrous party and then there is the merely embarrassing party. There is the party that is destroying when it isn’t pathetically bumbling, and then there is the party that facilitates whatever the other guys want (hey, you don’t even have to say ‘please’, either!). Tweedledee and Tweedledum, my handbag! In any given election, American voters can choose between really evil monsters, on the one hand, and a third-cup-out-of-the-same-depleted-tea-bag anemic approximation of evil monsters, on the other. Who says there’s no real choice in American politics?!
Karl Rove knows where on the human body one finds the jugular vein. (Hint to Democrats: it’s not located in the pinky finger, not that you’ve particularly attacked GOP pinkies, anyhow.) He and his ilk are completely and utterly unscrupulous about destroying any obstacles that block their attempts to obtain and wield power, and that certainly includes knocking over democracy, the Constitution, and truth, not to mention American soldiers and Iraqi citizens, should any of those have the bad fortune to find themselves on the wrong end of Dick Cheney’s bourbon-fueled shotgun.
The list of their power-seeking crimes is as big as George Bush’s personal library is small, but it is worthwhile to consider some of the highlights. Of course, the endless exploitation of 9/11 is highest on that list, with perhaps 9/11 itself at the top, depending on your conspiratorial cup of tea. It seems pretty clear that the presidential elections were stolen in 2000 and 2004, in the former case by employing the partisan majority of the highest court of ‘justice’ in the land to seize power. That alone is certainly one helluva set of seriously tawdry politics, for any polity calling itself a democracy.
Once in office, everything was politicized, in the most crass terms imaginable. Especially Iraq. My guess is that each of the principals in the Bush administration had their various reasons for wanting to invade, whether that was war profiteering, Likud puppeteering, Iraqi exile racketeering, Pentagon engineering, or anti-parental domineering. For Rove, though, it would seem that it was all about power (and some good old fashioned Democratic Party smearing). Thinking the war would be a piece of cake, I’m quite sure they believed that Iraq would help Bush in 2004, dominate domestic politics (e.g., Social Security plundering) and allow Republicans to establish the generational juggernaut that Professor Rove dreamed about late at night, up in his laboratory.
And so, for starters, they scheduled the war ‘authorization’ vote in October 2002, right before an election, one of the most crass displays imaginable of one of the most cynical ploys conceivable – that of exploiting national security issues for nakedly political purposes. From there it only went downhill. During that race, Rove and the GOP (almost none of whom, of course, had bothered to show up for duty in Vietnam) smeared Democratic Senator Max Cleland, a triple-amputee Vietnam vet, with advertisements morphing his face into that of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Of course, politics has rarely been a sport for the feint of heart. Just the same, this sort of thing would never have happened a generation ago. Nixon would not have gone that far, and McCarthy was clobbered when he did.
What was Cleland’s alleged crime? Therein lies another tale of the politicization of national security. After 9/11, Democrats proposed the creation of a Department of Homeland Security in the federal government. Bush rejected the idea. Then he changed his mind, and all of a sudden it was his program, and if you didn’t vote for it, your face got morphed into bin Laden’s or Saddam’s. Never mind that the administration had meanwhile loaded the bill up with union-busting language, killing the labor rights of tens of thousands of federal employees and making them newly vulnerable to whatever management wanted to do to them. Provided morality is a foreign country to you, you have to admire this bit of engineering for its sheer craftsmanship in cynical politicking, not to mention its ultimate effectiveness. On the other hand, if you do have moral qualms about how politics is practiced, few prior episodes could be more nauseating.
We could go on and on because, frankly, they’ve gone on and on. Who could forget the swift-boating of John Kerry, or the Republican convention Band-Aids mocking his purple hearts? Who could forget Bush saying that al Qaeda was hoping the Democrats would win the elections of 2004 and 2006? These and other similar depredations are the actions of cancer cells on the parasites attached to the bloodsuckers affixed to the bottom-feeders in the skankiest swamp of American politics. Assuming we can survive it, this era will surely be known to history for the radical cheapening of the national discourse we’ve all witnessed firsthand.
Unfortunately, however, such tactics happen to be pretty effective. And especially so when the national press and the poorly-labeled opposition party cower in the corner rather than scream bloody murder at the degradation of American politics. So the GOP and its Rovian cancer have been ‘winning’ elections and, with rare exception, getting just about everything else they want, legislatively and otherwise. That is pretty much the very definition of success in politics, and so – unless you were fortunate enough that your mama raised you to have better manners – that’s, unfortunately, what you’re gonna do.
Continued.....
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