Opinion-Columns.com

A Snake River-Colunbia River Fish Story

There are certainly enough claims for ‘equity’ these days and salmon may not strike you as having a voice in the discord that’s out there, but Congress thought they did. Admittedly, they thought that some twenty-five years ago, a full ten years before Larry Craig became the Senator from Idaho and set out to erase equity as a salmon standard.

In 1980, Congress passed a law ordering that salmon in the Columbia hydro-system receive "equitable treatment," along with electricity generation, irrigation and barge transport. I don’t know how exactly you measure being equitable to a salmon, but those were days when Congress worried about such things. For that altruistic concern, the created the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), the federal agency that sells power from federal dams.

So far, so good.

That twenty-five year ago legislation created the Fish Passage Center, a tiny fish-science organization with just 12 employees that counts salmon in the river ecosystem, to see how they’re doing. The power companies hate those well meaning fish-counters because from time to time they’re ordered to send enough water over the top of the dams to keep salmon alive and healthy. Water over the top doesn’t make any money.

Something like four out of five homes in the Pacific Northwest are lighted by hydroelectric power, so the Snake and Columbia river system is a big deal, an absolutely right direction to have gone for power generation and a vital national asset. But the rivers were dammed by agreement and with requirements and salmon were part of that. An agreed part. A part that can be lived with at relatively small cost.

Enter, Larry Craig, Senator from Idaho, where he is the darling of the hydroelectric power industry. The last time Larry had to defend his seat in 2002, he piled up more money from electric utilities than from any other industry. I don’t know if Larry fishes, but I do know he was named "legislator of the year" by the National Hydropower Association. Legislator of the Year. That would be a hell of a fine tribute, if it came from anyone other than a guy’s deepest-pocketed contributor.

The National Hydropower Association’s “Legislator We Most Own in Washington Award” doesn’t have quite that nail-it-on-the-wall right there next to the picture of me and the president aspect about it. Particularly as it undoes Congress’ 1980 intent. Craig’s contribution to the undoing was but a single sentence hidden in fine print of the energy and water appropriations bill. "The Bonneville Power Administration may make no new obligations in support of the Fish Passage Center." Very concise, well edited and not too wordy, Senator.

Fish and game agencies in Oregon, Washington and Idaho, Indian tribes with fishing rights on the river and the governors of Oregon and Washington have all said that eliminating the Fish Passage Center is a bad idea that would reduce the quality of information on endangered salmon. But it’s a dead issue, because if you don’t count the fish, no one needs to require water for the fish that aren't counted and Larry has just made sure no one counts.

Okay, so what? The ‘so what’ is the method by which this occurred. Craig didn’t craft that sentence (admittedly, I speculate), the power industry did. It was cunningly tucked in to the legislation where no one would see it. Few Senators actually read these bills, their staffs are charged with that. An overworked staff, a single sentence.

Bingo! Pay-back time for a fish story.
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A bunch more environmental issues muddying the waters on my personal web site.

There’s a Strong Consensus Building

That’s the quote from Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, the full statement enlightening us further that "There is a strong consensus building in Washington in favor of President Bush's strategy for victory in Iraq."

Uh huh. Okay, Scott. A strategy?

He went on to say, “As the Iraqi security forces gain strength and experience, we can lessen our troop presence in the country without losing our capability to effectively defeat the terrorists. Today, Sen. Biden described a plan remarkably similar (my italics) to the Administration's plan to fight and win the war on terror (yeah, my italics again). We welcome Sen. Biden's voice in the debate (?). We are pleased he shares our view that the way to a democratic and peaceful Iraq is through aggressively training Iraqi police and soldiers, rebuilding the country's infrastructure and forging political compromises between Iraqi factions."

So, the Democratic Senator who came out with a statement to somehow goose a confused and impotent administration into some kind of action, got co-opted. The neocons are pleased that Biden sees it their way. The hand of Karl Rove is certainly in that clever little manoeuvre. Biden actually said,  "There is a broad consensus on what must be done to preserve our interests. Recently, 79 Democratic and Republican senators told President Bush we need a detailed, public plan for Iraq, with specific goals and a timetable for achieving each one." 

Did I miss something? Is there a plan in there anywhere or just the demand for a plan?

Now the guy who was previously up to his knees in war plans, Donald Rumsfeld, has been conspicuous by his absence lately. Either he and our warmongering Vice President have had a falling-out or he’s just politically astute enough to know when it’s time to hunker in the bunker and keep a low profile.

So, Scott, just exactly what strong consensus is building in Washington? If it’s in favor of President Bush's strategy for victory in Iraq, it seems only fair to let all us ordinary Joes in on how that winning strategy plays out. I’m ready for a winning strategy. The President needs one. If it’s there and you all are excited about Joe Biden’s voice in the debate, then there must be a debate going on that escaped my attention.

I’ve seen some stonewalling. I’ve heard our president say “we do not torture” at the same time his vice-president was trying to keep torture on the books. I’ve heard about Eastern European secret detention facilities and read about the several-times-daily car bombings in Iraq. I’ve seen and you have as well, the reports of this or that political assassination, but the Bush plan that expects to forge political compromises between Iraqi factions, doesn’t seem to be able to keep them alive, much less forged.

Tomorrow, we are promised (or at least tantalized by) the speculation that Bush will make all these collaborative plans known to us in a speech he plans for the U. S. Naval Academy at Annapolis. It’s an inescapable fact that, whatever those ‘plans’ might turn out to be, they are driven not by circumstances on the ground or even what passes for Bush policy. They are driven, at the point of a congressional sword, by next year’s mid-term elections. Several days ago, Annapolis suffered a fire in its historic downtown area and several buildings were burned out.

Sometimes the President has all the luck. Now he has a perfect backdrop for his speech.
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Read more of my musings on the war in Iraq at my personal web site.

Corporate Ethics vs Congressional Ethics, There Is a Difference

There is a sense of absolute wrong about various corporate misdoings and yet, somehow a kind of natural entitlement to money-contributions in the Congress. That’s always seemed strange to me because I would think it would be the other way ‘round.

If the major oil companies collude to set gasoline and heating-oil prices (and heaven knows, I would never claim that), then the result is a spike in their profitability and a slight dent in my pocketbook. But if these same companies go around a law here and a regulation there by (essentially) paying-off my Senator or Representative, then I have lost a very basic freedom to be fairly represented.

Slicing the tops off West Virginia’s most scenic mountain ranges to get cheap coal is an example. No one would approve of that disgrace but the coal companies. It doesn’t even provide jobs comparable to the lost income from a damaged tourist industry, the pollution of streams and rivers and the loss to all future generations for a trade-off to momentary commercial profit.

But it is done and I don’t want to point at that instance too severely because it’s not my point.

The facts are that we have had pay-offs at the Senate and House level ever since we have had a Senate and a House. Spin back through a couple centuries of the great tradition of political cartooning and that becomes evident. More presidents have probably been elected on ‘reform’ platforms than any other banner and they have all failed at the attempt or conveniently lost interest after their election. So, it is what it is and we try, through our muckraking press, to keep a lid on the most outrageous offenses.

That was then and this is now. Then was like mice in the kitchen, a periodic problem that a few traps can keep under control, something that can be lived with. Now is an avalanche that the Congress has encouraged and, indeed, provided for under the misrepresentation of ethical behavior. The mice have invented traps that keep them from getting caught.

Campaign contribution laws they call them. They have replaced the old direct hand-off by a complicated series of lateral passes. As long as someone on staff fills in the correct column and checks the proper boxes, the pay-off becomes legal. It should not be and certainly is in no way ethical, but it is legal and, should anyone ever point out the disparity, the everybody-does-it defense prevails.

That’s how Teddy Kennedy happens to have an $8 million campaign war-chest. I keep dinging away on poor old Teddy (only one of those adjectives being correct) because he is such an icon of respect. Forty years in the Senate. White-haired Teddy doesn’t take bribes, he’s an honest man and there’s not a speck of irony in that statement. But he is a wonderfully non-partisan example of the scope of the problem.

Lobbyists have the right as well as the obligation to represent issues that bear on legislation, whether that be for commercial or civil purposes. No legislator can possibly be versed in the nuance of limitless issues coming before him or her. Without lobbyists for and against, the job would be substantially undoable, a roll of dice. It’s where money changes hands that I part ways with the everybody-does-it defense. Arguing that payment under-the-table is unethical is what got us to accepting payment above the table, as long as it's reported.

Lobbyist explanations, pro and con, inform and enlighten legislators so they are better able to judge the issues. Money bribes them. It’s as simple as that. We presently have a bribed legislature and it’s now a matter of whether we commit the error of omission by allowing that bribery to continue.
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For more comments on Washington at work, see my personal web site.

Deeply Split By the Mid-Term Axe

Makes me chuckle to pick up the paper and read a headline “Republicans Are Deeply Split Over How to Apportion New Tax Cuts” in the New York Times. They're not split, they're scared to death of the mid-term election axe. A year ago they were not only not split, they weren’t even mildly splintered. The Bush Tax Abatement Machine was more popular than a Humvee with 50 cent gasoline.

House Republicans are still of that mind, but then the House has always been more of a zoo than a legislative body. Dick Cheney was even a member at one time. Anyway, these tax-slashing neocons are dead-set to earmark $63 billion in cuts, more than half of which would go to households with more than $1 million in yearly income. Not one million, more than one million.

Well, if you can’t help the down-and-out million-a-year crowd, what kind of neocon are you, anyway?

"We're not going to be left out in the cold," said Representative Tom Reynolds, whose affluent district is packed with families who could be battered by the alternative minimum tax. Battered. The Alternative Minimum Tax would batter these near-destitute families who are so lost in the forest of loopholes that they pay no other tax.

You thought all those poor folks in New Orleans were battered. Forget it. Tom Reynolds and his buddies know battered and it’s not losing your home and all your belongings, it’s not being able to have the third winter home to accompany the second summer home. Without two or three homes, Tom's constituents will be left out in the cold.

According to the Times, Representative Devin Nunes, a California Republican on the tax-writing committee, said about the Thanksgiving postponement of vote, "What we decided to do is let people go back and think. We said, let's wait and make sure all the members are comfortable." That’s politico-speak for finding out how angry the voters are back home.

They’re angry. Angry because this used to be a country that prided itself on fairness, even though fairness got bent a lot in the legislative process. But it’s broken now and Americans don’t like to see fairness swept up like broken pottery and pitched out the door. Katrina and the New Orleans aftermath shook this country far more than those who are isolated in Washington seem to realize.

In two months we’ve gone from watching bodies float by under bridges swarming with the New Orleans abandoned poor, to our president standing in front of Andrew Jackson, promising help, to a Congress that’s slashed food stamps, child support and Medicare to make an unconscionable giveaway of tax relief to the already rich. Bush would give $1.4 trillion over ten years, if he could. $140 billion a year according to the Congressional Budget Office.

That’s fourteen times the total budget for the United Nations given away each year to the already rich. And yes, that is unfair in the face of massive unemployment, an auto industry on its knees, college education beyond the reach of all but (you guessed it) the super-wealthy, our Gulf Coast in tatters and Congress feeding off the lobby industry . . . they are no longer organizations, they have become legislative feeding-troughs.

So yes, Devin Nunes is right to let his fellow Representatives go home and think.

Thanksgiving is a particularly appropriate time to think about these issues because it’s a time we give thanks for our diversity and the common welfare of our neighbors; thanks for opportunity and the helping-hand to those without it; thanks for the soundness of our sleep and completeness of our charity.

A time also to remember that the axe is not for the turkey alone.
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More about Conservative Politics at my opinion columns web site.

It’s Not Where You Are, It’s What You See

In a stunning victory for panoramic views, New Hampshire has made it legal for townships to adjust assessed property values according to the view.

Look out now, every burg with a panorama from Sitka, Alaska to Jackson, Wyoming is going to climb onboard this clever new source of income. To a substantial degree of course, all the ‘last best places’ already have a vista tax, in that it’s decidedly more expensive as one moves from ground floor to penthouse of a tall apartment building. Likewise, a home on a lake or abutting undeveloped and unspoiled countryside brings more on the real estate market than one without such benefits.

This added value though is established in the marketplace, not by the assessor. A four-bedroom, 3,000 square foot house that brings a premium price because of its location will pay more taxes then one that does not. The key is that magic phrase, worth more in the market.

Unless you live in New Hampshire.

Brad Wilder’s Plainfield, New Hampshire home enjoys a view not all that uncommon in that pretty and  mountainous state, but one that would surely stun a flat-lander. Every October, leaf-peepers come from as far as Chicago just to enjoy the vibrantly beautiful fall colors. But, according to David Fahrenthold’s Washington Post article, the town of Plainfield assessed Brad's view at $237,265. They didn’t assess the house at that value, they said the view was worth that, down to the last five bucks. An additional $4,700 in property taxes is demanded of Brad for that vista, on top of his prior tax assessment.

This is the sort of story that just makes you shake your head, similar to news items that surface from time to time about thieves who steal a car, wreck it, then sue the owner for damages . . . and collect.

But the damaging part to me in this whole scenario, is that New Hampshire residents, people who have lived there for generations are being forced to move because the house they’ve lived in for sixty years is suddenly discovered to have a view. Certainly a retired person of any average circumstance has a hard enough time riding off into a New Hampshire sunset, without some smiling assessor rapping at the door.

Obviously there are no rules and no definitive guidelines for this kind of thing, it's all subjective and because of that may ultimately fail in the courts. Tom Holmes, assessor for Conway, New Hampshire says "It's more of an 'I know it when I see it' kind of thing." Well, I don’t know about you, but that would certainly be enough for me. Enough to make me reach for my shotgun anyway.

According to the article, Bennet Nicholson's view of the Connecticut River valley bumped his property value from $98,000 in 2002 to about $273,000 in 2003. 300% in a year! Nicholson said "There's no way that I could pay $10,000 a year in taxes." He left the house where he had planned to spend the rest of his life and moved to Canada's Prince Edward Island.

Elected officials decided this nonsense, ostensibly because New Hampshire has no sales or income tax and depends upon real estate taxes. It would seem the logical remedy would be to increase all property taxes by whatever needed percentage instead of piling on an accidental circumstance that punishes the few. The nearsighted legislators think they’re properly soaking some rich Bostonians who come up to buy second or retirement homes, but in fact they’re driving out their own residents.

There will no doubt be many failing to be re-elected for these reasons, but lots of damage will already have been done. Taxes cannot be left in arrears while legislation changes. Many, like Bennet Nicholson will be long gone. There will be hard feelings and people come to blows who have been neighbors.

A sunset tax is a tax increase with a limited term. But I wouldn’t use the term in New Hampshire, it might give them ideas. A new revenue source for all west-facing properties. Another $100,000 for watching the sun go down.
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There are lots more Things That Make Me Nuts, all of them on my personal web site.

The Grapes of Warlord Wrath

According to the Associated Press (AP), gunmen wearing Iraqi army uniforms burst into the home of a Sunni Arab sheik Wednesday, killing him, three of his sons and a son-in-law. The sheik, who lived on the outskirts of Baghdad, was the leader of a branch of the Dulaimi tribe, one of the biggest in Iraq. Police said the attack may have been aimed at discouraging members of the minority from participating in next month's election.

What’s going on (my view) is only peripherally associated with the elections, but is mainly the opening salvos of all-out war between warlords who intend to run the country according to their power bases. In War With Iraq Is Not the Problem, a piece I wrote in September, 2002, some eight months before we attacked Iraq, I suggested:

“Iraq is a warlord society, as is Afghanistan. Saddam Hussein, much as we dislike him and wish him to be otherwise, is the Tito of Iraq, the only man capable of the power to keep Iraq’s warlords in check. He’s done it brutally, efficiently, ruthlessly. We are not prepared to be brutal and ruthless. We expect, and for some reason continue to expect in the face of the bloody evidence at hand, that wise, popular, even-handed Iraqis are merely awaiting liberation to turn their country into a Jeffersonian democracy.

It simply is not going to happen and we are on our way to expanding Muslim extremism, where it is our hope to contain it. Iran may well follow Iraq into the hellish factionalism that now overpowers our best efforts in Afghanistan.”

So, we needn’t wait for or fear civil war in Iraq . . . we are there. To paraphrase the words of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, We have trampled out the vintage where the Grapes of Wrath are stored, We have loosed the fateful lightning of their terrible, swift sword. It has come true as I wrote that it would and there is no pleasure at all in the reminder.

Those who find it inconceivable that a percentage of Iraqis look with nostalgia on Saddam’s reign need only to look at the daily bombings of street markets, mosques, police stations and even weddings. Saddam kept the grapes of warlord wrath stored all right, but now we’ve loosed lightning big-time. We keep losing occasional soldiers to car bombs, almost as a reminder that we are occupiers in their nation, but the thrust and focus of these bombings has turned to disrupting civil law. Disrupting civil law by means of arms is civil war.

Iraqis know we’re about out f their country, one way or another, and they’re positioning themselves for the war to come.

AP reports U.S. intelligence agencies say foreign terrorists represent a minority of the insurgent forces; the vast majority are Iraqis. Classified findings by U.S. intelligence agencies are reflected in a study by Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, released yesterday, which estimates that at least 90 percent of the fighters are Iraqi. These are no doubt the Iraqis our Vice President claimed would meet us in the streets with chocolates and flowers slipped into our gun barrels.

Snarling at those who say the administration lied us into war about banned weapons, Dick Cheney said, “I repeat that we never had the burden of proof; Saddam Hussein did." The American Enterprise Institute, where the Dick-man made that statement and was once a research fellow and trustee might swallow that kind of talk by an alumnus, but it makes me wary of the quality of their research. Boasting about attacking another sovereign nation without proof, carrying America to war with mere allegations is not only his personal shame, it should be an indictable, impeachable offense.

Dick Cheney’s Untruth is Marching On.
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Read more of my musings on the war in Iraq at my personal web site.

Someone Forgot to Tell Bill Ford

When Dick Cheney had all the big oil honchos in to divide up the spoils of energy policy, someone forgot to tell William Clay Ford, the family scion, CEO and largest private shareholder of Ford Motor Company.

Following a speech at the National Press Club yesterday, Ford expected to meet with White House neocon econs, including a guy by the name of Allan Hubbard, the White House adviser on economic policy. Can you believe they actually have an advisor? An actual policy? Anyway, Bill wants to plan a summit on energy issues that he said the White House has agreed to hold.

I don’t know how to break this to you, Bill, but Dick Cheney already had that meeting three years or so ago and apparently your invitation got lost in the mail. Dick was meeting with the other end of the snake, the oil production end and somehow he must have lost all sight of you consumer-related guys. He knew you were getting your collective asses kicked by Japan again, but it just seemed like such old news. Cripes, Dick was working for that other Dick (the tricky one) back in those bad old days, the beginning of the end days for America’s auto industry.

At the Press Club, Ford asked for more incentives. I guess he somehow feels it’s not incentive enough to run and pretty much own one of the world’s largest auto manufacturers. There wasn’t sufficient incentive to stick his head outside the family mansion, wet his finger and see which way the global auto business was blowing thirty years ago . . . back when there was still time to change course. Back when Ford bonds didn’t carry a ‘junk’ rating. 

If he could somehow claw his way back to that energy summit of Dick Cheney's that he wasn’t at, maybe he could talk the VP into tax credits to prod consumers to buy hybrids and other vehicles with fuel-saving technology. That's what he proposes. Funny thing is, Toyota didn’t need tax credits to sell out their entire year's production of the Prius. Consumers flocked to pay a premium for the car and they seem to love driving it. No rebates in the Prius showrooms.

He also asked Congress (from the Press Club podium) for money to retrain workers, and to wheedle out some tax incentives to help manufacturers outfit old plants with new equipment. Hey Bill, that’s what ‘depreciation’ is supposed to be for in the heavy industries, they already gave you a tax credit for that. Ford said a national strategy is needed to respond to the pressures of globalization, which he called the "economic challenge of our time."

Well, heck. I guess by our, he meant the auto makers' time. The econimic challenge of the steel makers time and the garment-workers time and a whole list of other manufacturers' time must have slipped Bill's notice during their particularly challenging decades.

If the Ford Motor Company is feeling the pressures of globalization, what does it mean that it also owns Aston Martin, Jaguar, Volvo, Mazda and Land Rover? That’s not global enough? Those acquisitions, made with such fanfare, have suddenly turned into the economic challenge of our time? My own personal view is that Ford’s economic challenges accrue to thirty years with their head in the sand on union issues, modernization and (by far the most importantly) totally missing and insisting on continuing to miss the emerging market.

Ford's 'back to the future' is 400 hp muscle cars.

I understand that it hurts to lose the family jewels on your watch. I once did the same on a microscopically smaller scale, but it hurt a lot anyway. I also understand (unlike my case) that many of the hubris-induced decisions that put Ford where it now finds itself, were not made when William Clay Ford had anything to say about anything. It was a tattered and precarious legacy by the time he got his hands on it.

But an energy summit isn’t likely to help, Bill. Your timing right now could hardly be worse, with the Republicans having their own family fight at the moment, the President out of sorts, the Vice President a breath away from possible indictment and the Abramoff affair distracting Congress. This administration can’t even help New Orleans, ten weeks after promising the world from Jackson Square.

The creek is dry, Bill and it seems your guys, politically and in business, drained it.
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See Taking My Country Personally on my personal web site.

The First Shoe to Drop

Ah well, what we’ve come to know and wait for is the first guilty plea. Smaller fish trade prison for bigger fish, it's the way of the oceans. Michael Scanlon, partner to lobbyist Jack Abramoff pleaded guilty yesterday, the first shoe to drop in what I think will become a major congressional scandal. How major? Biggest in decades is my guess and that’s why everyone on Capitol Hill is so quiet. They’re all running scared. Mike is a very knowledgeable fish.

Scanlon pleaded to 'conspiring to bribe a congressman and other public officials' but the plea-deal has become the wedge with which most conspiratorial timber is split.

Mike agreed to pay back his share of a kickback from Jack Abramoff, some $19 million that came from him and Jack playing both sides of various Indian casino issues. He’s got five possible years in the clinker hanging over his head as well as a possible quarter-million dollar fine. The quarter mil is chump-change for a high roller, but prison time is another matter and you can bet Scanlon will be a talker. He's close to Tom DeLay as well (isn't everyone?), having served as his press secretary. Public disclosure of his unburdening to a prosecutor could be very interesting.

So, this first-shoe to drop is a real boot, one that’s been simmering for more than six months of negotiations with prosecutors. Sweat sessions, no doubt. "C'mon, Mike, we can't deal on that, you gotta give us more." But the perspiration is mostly in the halls of Congress as Senators and Representatives scan their e-mails for any reference to Scanlon, Abramoff, or Tom DeLay. If you think this is about casinos and Indian tribes, think again. This is about the mechanics of lobbying.

When the shoe dropped, it landed directly on the toupee of Representative Robert W. Ney, a Republican from Ohio. If the allegations are true, Ney will prove to be a minor character in the drama to come, a low-budget co-conspirator not worthy of much other than some golf trips and ten grand in his name to the National Republican Campaign Committee. A small-change guy, at the moment Ney is full of righteous indignation, claiming to have been defrauded by Scanlon and his partners, which is a good quick-grab for the time to think through a defense.

Most interesting is the first of the other issues mentioned besides Indian casinos. Sun Cruz Casinos, a Florida fleet of gambling boats taken over by Scanlon and Abramoff under dubious circumstances (which may or may not include fraudulent loan documents and the murder of the owner) are yet (thump) another shoe. Yet another all-expenses-paid trip to the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands promises to be a shoe in the act of free-fall.

Northern Marianas? Their Commerce Department web site says their ‘mission and goals set hereunder are geared fundamentally toward developing sound solutions that would help stimulate the Commonwealth economy, create wealth and minimize poverty by way of promoting favorable business environment, attract private capital investment, infrastructure investment, research grants, and job development.’

Yeah, well garment production is by far the Marianas most important industry, employing 17,500 mostly Chinese workers, many of whom have had their documents impounded and claim to be virtual wage-slaves.  DeLay and Ney staffers are said to have golfed, while assuring local officials that their sound solutions included wage autonomy and a continuation of sizable shipments to the US under duty and quota exemptions. Good guys to know, Ney and DeLay.

So one can expect a number of Congressmen and Senators to carve their Thanksgiving turkeys under just the slightest shadow of impending worry over who is connecting dots. For his part, Mike Scanlon seems to be the most at-ease of any of the so far indicted.

Which is either because he’s lost it all or has the most to gain.
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For more comments on Washington at work, see my personal web site.

Asia Can Afford to Turn Its Back

President Bush came back from Asia and it may as well have been South America, for all the respect he got. Sorry ‘bout that, Dubya, but the rest of the world sees you falling apart at home and it makes them bold. They were bold in South America and you came away with nothing. Now they are bold in Japan and Korea, China and Mongolia and you’ve come home with nothing from that trip as well.

There’s still a terrorist game out there, but it’s suddenly being played on Asia’s and the Middle East’s terms because no one need play the ‘reacting to Bush’ game now that it’s no longer being played in America. Not even in his own party. He’s slipped on the kennel floor and all the hounds are having at him while he’s down.

Which is strange and not so strange at the same time

In the middle of Bill Clinton’s worst times, when Monica was all that held any newspaper’s interest in America, I remember Vaclav Havel and Nelson Mandela standing on either side of him at a press conference. The world’s two leading moral forces, unwilling to back away from a man in whom they had confidence. Not only confidence, but respect. Clinton had come to that international reputation the hard way, by listening to the world and doing the best he could with it. And his policy wasn’t always great and it wasn’t always successful but it was a listener’s response and it was coalition politics.

That makes Clinton a remembered man, one who is not yet done with the world stage.

George Bush has swaggered and threatened and presumed himself to have a mandate that was not there. His politics was unilateral and represented the closed circuitry of not a half dozen people who fed on his natural comfort with isolation. His ‘mandate’ was fear-based. Fear in his home country of possible terrorist attack and fear worldwide of how this man was abusing the full might of the world’s sole remaining superpower. Dubja thought he was spending his political capital and the truth was that account had insufficient funds. More than anything else, what we are now watching is a foreclosed presidency. Chapter 11 in a White House that told itself anything goes and believed it.

That will make Bush a forgotten man who will withdraw from the world stage behind dark glasses, his hoped-for legacy consigned to the dustbin of history.

The tragedy for the nation is that it has exhausted its political integrity in both major parties. The collapse of the Twin Towers was allowed by Democrats as well as Republicans to presage a foundering of American will, confidence, reputation, internal freedoms and international power. We allowed deliberation to be hijacked in the name of expedience, lashing out instead of tying down, bullying away a shocked world's goodwill. Our vulnerabilities have been exposed for ourselves and the world to see and perhaps not a moment too soon.

We are not a nation of George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. We are a nation of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. Rather than self-righteous, we are self-righting. Our errors and abuses are not pointed out by others, they are exposed within our own system of self-government and, when exposed, the guilty parties made to pay. Even when they are titans of industry or politicians at the peak of power and prestige. Even, sometimes, when they are president.

What other nation on the face of the earth can make that claim?
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See Taking My Country Personally on my personal web site.

We Tried “Limited Government” and it Failed

Tired of hearing Democrats accused of ‘spend and borrow’ politics? So am I. The accusation is absolutely correct, but now the cat is finally out of the bag and we’ve got Republicans, particularly neocon Republicans, in our sights as well.

The Reagan-Bush-Bush administrations have been unmitigated financial disasters. Fiscally, Ronald Reagan’s ‘smaller government’ took a deficit that required the entire history of the nation to compile and tripled it in eight short years. So much for smallness. The current Bozo-Republican ‘smaller government’ tribe has taken what Reagan crafted and, unbelievably, doubled that in five years and threatens to double it again in the remaining three.

Someone bring a bucket of water---the schoolhouse is on fire!

The congressional school house is as out of control as the worst inner-city classroom. Senators and Congressmen throw erasers, spitball one another and drop their pants to have any available orgy with lobbyists in the cloakrooms. No matter what president, Democrat or Republican, in jogging clothes or three-piece suit, comes in to stand at the head of this disreputable class, the congressional rebels no longer respond. And they are all rebels, not a Jimmy Stewart among them. Authority is a thing of the past, as is honor, civility and the common sense that God gave a goose.

It’s a money game. Graft and political war-chests are the drug of choice. Congress has the ethics, morals  and willpower of cocaine users, along with a winner-take-all mentality that hungers to keep the good times rolling until the next fix. They fidget and roll their eyes waiting for their lobbyist connection, ready to give him whatever he wants, kidding themselves they can kick the habit, lying to the folks back home.

The latest bait and switch, this week’s bald-faced piece of fiction has to do more with bringing home the bacon than stripping the pork. The headline is “G.O.P. Strips Mandatory Funding for Two Alaskan Bridges,” which would lead the unsuspecting to believe the pin-up-pork bridge to nowhere had finally run aground.

Not while there’s a breath in an Alaskan legislator.

In hard-headed and glinty-eyed negotiations, House-Senate co-conspirators ‘stripped’ the mandatory funding for those stupid bridges, but left the $432 million in place to be ‘spent as Alaska sees fit.’ Wow. Great headline, high-fives all around and absolutely no candy taken away from the errant children.

Last week in the Senate, the honorable Ted Stevens, who represents Alaska in that animal house they call the Senate, threatened to ‘resign from the Senate’ if his bridge to nowhere got axed. There hasn’t been an opportunity like that in years, but the other 99 hadn’t the guts to call his bluff and they folded on the cut. So much easier to take some safety-net benefit away from the poor or the displaced, who haven’t sense enough to hire gold-plated lobbyists.

If I sound angry by all of this, I am. I am uncharacteristically pissed off at that collection of toadies we keep sending to Washington, Kennedy as well as Lott, Frist as well as Reid. There isn’t a one of them worthy of the office, not a single Democrat or Republican who’s not on the payroll of this or that special interest.

I’m not crazy about George W. Bush, but Jesus Christ himself couldn’t bring order to this uncontrolled and uncontrollable batch of two-faced, paid-off, strutting and posturing bunch of gangsters we call the United States Congress. It will serve this country admirably when the threads of conspiracy and graft running from Jack Abramoff tie each and every one of them like Gulliver.

A hundred years ago, Mark Twain said “It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.” That was correct in his day and there has been a sharp decline in the intervening years.
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There are lots more Things That Make Me Nuts, all of them on my personal web site.