Jim Miller on Politics

An independent political group allied with Democrats and heavily bankrolled by billionaire George Soros has agreed to pay $775,000 to the Federal Election commission for violating campaign laws during the 2004 presidential campaign.

The civil penalty, announced Wednesday, is the third largest fine ever levied by the FEC.

The group, America Coming Together, was an influential player in the 2004 election cycle, spending millions of dollars to mobilize voters in support of Democrats in key states.

The FEC found that ACT inappropriately used money raised outside federal election limits to help federal candidates.

As ACT's bank account grew and grew, experts in campaign finance noticed something curious going on in the group's accounting.  It had to do with the way ACT spent its money and the explanation it made for those expenditures in filings with the Federal Election Commission.  At issue were complex rules covering the arcana of campaign finance and the precise legal meanings of terms like "hard money," "soft money," "federal accounts," "nonfederal accounts," and "allocation."  The issues were difficult to understand — that's why they went mostly unreported in the press — but the evidence suggested that ACT had simply decided to ignore the rules that were supposed to govern its activities.

One accused George W. Bush and the Republican Party of "work[ing] hard to undermine a woman's right to choose," of displaying "reckless disregard for the environment," and of "making a shambles of our economy."  The letter continued, "But wishing won't make Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft, DeLay and their extremist agenda go away.  Wishing won't elect John Kerry.  People-to-people organizing will — and organizing is what ACT is all about.  Another fund-raising letter pledged that ACT would fill in "where the Kerry campaign and the Democratic Party simply don't have the resources to operate."  And yet another appeal said that "when Election Day is over, we will have helped John Kerry defeat George W. Bush and elected progressive candidates across the nation."

Today, most Americans believe the establishment media is often inaccurate and more are confident that the US military is providing an accurate picture of Iraq than are confident of the establishment media.

A federal investigation of Senator Robert Menendez over potential conflicts of interests with recipients of government financing has shifted focus to the lobbying work of his former chief of staff and confidante, according to lawyers and others familiar with the case.

A grand jury in Newark has subpoenaed hundreds of pages of financial documents from Jersey City Medical Center, which received a variety of public financing when Kay LiCausi, who was an aide to Mr. Menendez while he was in the House of Representatives, lobbied for the hospital.  Last week, the grand jury heard testimony from Jonathan Metsch, a former Menendez fund-raiser who was president and chief executive of the hospital when it hired Ms. LiCausi, The Star-Ledger of Newark reported on Sunday.

Mr. Menendez's relationship with Ms. LiCausi, who worked in his Congressional office from 1998 to 2002, has been the subject of sustained criticism.  Neither has commented on reports that they were romantically involved.

In fact, since Katrina, New Orleans's murder rate has been higher than that of any First World city.   Depending on fluctuating estimates of the city's returning population, it's perhaps 40% higher than before Katrina and twice as high as the rate in other dangerous cities like Detroit, Newark and Washington.   Families trying to make a home in this environment live in fear, even while many have taken to rebuilding their homes with their bare hands.
. . .
For generations now--and this is the city's deepest problem--New Orleans has hobbled along without a real law-and-order presence.  Criminals graduate from petty crimes to burglary to drug-dealing to carrying illegal weapons to gang robberies to murder, and face few consequences at any stage.  The police, and especially the prosecutors, are ineffectual.  Since Katrina, things have gotten much worse, in part because criminals, finding life difficult in cities that enforce the law, have returned to the Big Easy in numbers disproportionate to those of law-abiding citizens.  Mayor Ray Nagin doesn't try to fix things, perhaps because, as he often says, he believes crime is a social problem, rooted in a lack of opportunity for poor youth.

The battle erupted after a convoy of Afghan and U.S. coalition forces came under attack in Shah Wali Kot district in Kandahar province, it said in a statement.

U.S.-led close air support attacked insurgent positions in the battle, it added.

"Afghan National Security Forces, advised by coalition forces, engaged and eliminated more than 100 insurgent fighters," the U.S. military said of the Tuesday fighting in the north of Kandahar province.

There were no civilian casualties but one Afghan security force member was killed and three foreign troops and three Afghan soldiers were wounded, it added.

There was no independent verification of the reported deaths of the insurgents.

Taliban spokesman often accuse Western troops of exaggerating insurgent casualties, while Western forces accuse the Taliban of exaggerating the number of casualties on the U.S., NATO and Afghan government side.

The liberal view of homosexuality is based on two claims: an empirical one and a moral one.  The empirical claim is that sexual orientation is inborn, a trait over which one has no control.  The moral claim is that homosexuality is no better or worse than heterosexuality; that a gay relationship, like a traditional marriage, can be an expression of true love and a source of deep fulfillment.   Out of these claims flows the conclusion that opposition to gay rights is akin to racism: an unwarranted prejudice against people for a trait over which they have no control.

For the sake of argument, suppose this liberal view is true.  What does it imply about the closeted homosexual who takes antigay positions?  To our mind, the implication is that he is a deeply tragic figure, an abject victim of society's prejudices, which he has internalized and turned against himself.   "Outing" him seems an act of gratuitous cruelty, not to mention hypocrisy if one also claims to believe in the right to privacy.

What's it all about? In one sentence, it comes down to this:

Does the United States Government have the right to conduct secret surveillance of terrorism suspects on American soil?

But the case has become rather more complicated than that.  Before we get to the action of August 15, here's the gist of the case in a few short paragraphs, cutting through everyone's double-talk on both sides, and granting everyone's allegations to be true:

A Saudi charity [Al Haramain] known to finance terrorist activities opened a branch in Oregon.  The US government tapped the phones of the Oregon branch and heard evidence that they were helping to finance terrorist activities as well.  With this info in hand, the government designated the Oregon branch as terrorists, and froze their assets.  The Oregon branch, unaware that they had been sureveilled and that the government had solid evidence against them, challenged this, and during legal proceedings, a government employee accidentally gave logs of the tapped phone conversations to the charity's lawyers.

At that point, the case changed gears: the charity hooked up with liberal lawyers to challenge the very legality of the surveillance, and by extension the legality of all secret surveillance.  The decision was made to make the trial into a test case designed to weaken and embarrass the Bush administration.   The government sought to circumvent this strategy by suppressing the evidence of the leaked document on grounds that its exposure would endanger national security.  The governement requested back and eventually obtained all U.S. copies of the surveillance logs -- but not before an unknown number of copies made their way overseas, presumably into hostile hands.  Aside from revealing the fact that the charity was surveilled, it is not clear what "operational details" the leaked document reveals.   The government refuses to admit to the wiretapping or to say whether or not a warrant was obtained.

The entire case, as it is now being litigated, hinges on the question: do the plaintiffs even have the legal right to sue the government?  In order to prove they have "standing," they must prove they were surveilled; and so must refer to the only evidence which proves this, the mysterious document.   The government claims the document is Top Secret, and thus not admissable evidence.  It is this question that was being argued before the Ninth Circuit Court on August 15.

When I came to the US in 2000 I stared reading the NYT again as I religiously did in the 70's when I was a "Mariscal de Ayacucho becario".  I immediately noticed that the articles about Venezuela published under a name: Juan Forero, favored Chavez a lot.  I thought this guy didn't know much about Venezuela although his name was sort of Spanish.  By 2001, I convinced my husband whose English was a lot better than mine to write letters to the editor of the NYT, every time an article was published given our point of view as Venezuelan citizens.  They never published our letters.  I do not know if we were naive at the time or if it was our past love for the NYT that didn't allow us to see reality.   As articles and time went by I stared becoming suspicious and I researched the topic, I went to the libraries and read everything that was published by the NYT about Venezuela ever since Chavez came into the radar, especially after his election in December 1998.  Then I saw the light: there was an agenda, the NYT had an agenda.  I knew that no letter to the editor from a Venezuelan citizen with an opinion against Chavez would ever be published by the NYT.

80 percent of poor households have air conditioning.  By contrast, in 1970, only 36 percent of the entire U.S. population enjoyed air conditioning.
. . .
The typical poor American has more living space than the average individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens, and other cities throughout Europe.  (These comparisons are to the average citizens in foreign countries, not to those classified as poor.)
. . .
Nearly two thirds of poor children reside in single-parent homes; each year, an additional 1.5 million children are born out of wedlock.  If poor mothers married the fathers of their children, nearly three quarters of the nation's impoverished youth would immediately be lifted out of poverty.

One thing that has always baffled me about the Bush team's war effort in Iraq and against Al Qaeda is this:  How could an administration that is so good at Swift-boating its political opponents at home be so inept at Swift-boating its geopolitical opponents abroad?
. . .
Dive into a conversation about America in the Arab world today, or even in Europe and Africa, and it won't take 30 seconds before the words "Abu Ghraib" and "Guantánamo Bay" are thrown at you.  Yes, both are shameful, but Abu Ghraib was a day at the beach compared to what Al Qaeda and its Sunni jihadist supporters have been doing in Iraq, yet none of their acts have become one-punch global insults like Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.

I think there's a strong argument that the Bush 2000 platform was well adapted to the nation's needs and that most of it has been put successfully into effect.  The education accountability act was a constructive and bipartisan federal push for reforms already proved in some states.  The tax cuts, especially those of 2003, usefully stimulated an economy weakened by the bursting of the tech bubble and the 9/11 attacks.  The Medicare prescription drug bill headed the nation's healthcare systems toward markets and away from government control.  Social Security reform was defeated by obdurate Democrats (and not helped by reluctant Republicans).  But who can deny that it addressed a long-term problem that must sooner or later require changes in policy?

Rove's political strategy defeated the in party in 2000 at a time of apparent peace and prosperity (and helped Republicans face the strongest push for a Democratic Congress between 1994 and 2006), made unusual off-year gains for Republicans in 2002, and, through microtargeting and unprecedented volunteer involvement, produced a solid victory in 2004.

New-home sales turned up and factory orders soared in July, suggesting the economy was on stable footing before a credit crunch took a turn for the worse.

The Commerce Department reported Friday that sales of new homes rose 2.8 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 870,000 units. The increase came after a 4 percent drop in June.

Another report from the department showed that orders placed with factories for big-ticket goods jumped 5.9 percent in July, the most in 10 months.

The latest batch of economic news was better than analysts had expected.  They were forecasting home sales to fall and calling for a much smaller, 1 percent gain in factory orders.