Opinion-Columns.com

Some Things Just Don’t Work Out

"I will restore honor and integrity to the White House" was a slam-dunk of a statement after the Clinton second term and Mr. Bush ran hard on it.

It’s possible he hadn’t yet sat down with Tom DeLay to get a feel for what Tom was up to over on K-Street, but not probable. Tom was a confidant. Which means that George Bush didn’t see anything morally unsound or dishonorable in auctioning off access to lawmakers and, in fact, making that access singularly Republican.

Which is an interesting, if somewhat pragmatic, definition of honor and integrity.

"I'm a compassionate conservative" was another of those misty-eyed statements that are hard to get a hook into. But what most of us thought he probably meant was that he had a place in his busy schedule and, perhaps even in his heart, for those who were caught out there on the edges of society. Not that he actually knew any of those people personally. But you don’t necessarily have to be a fisherman to know the smell of fish when you come across it.

After a mere two months in office, President Bush proposed cuts in the already modest funding for child-care assistance for low-income families. He further asked for cuts in funding for programs designed to investigate and combat child abuse and wanted cuts in an important new program to train pediatricians and other doctors at children's hospitals across the U.S. More recently, he answered the needs of the Katrina-devastated poor by cutting their Medicaid benefits.

Compassionate conservatism with a vengeance.

"I'm a uniter, not a divider" presumably meant that he, along with Tom DeLay and the less effective but equally partisan Bill Frist, planned to erase any distance between the levers of power and the levers of commerce--get all those things close, where we can keep our fingers on 'em. By insisting that the lobbyists of K-Street in Washington hire only Republicans for staff positions, DeLay fulfilled the president’s campaign promise to unite rather than divide.

For the first time in political history, lobbyists were thus united with their legislative targets by a system that not only made for easy Republican access, but disciplined lobbyists who favored Democrats.

“Bring ‘em on,” along with the slightly premature “Mission accomplished” and the vice-president’s statement in June of last year that the Iraq insurgency “was in its last throes,” all provide an insight into the isolation of this administration.

Foolish and premature bragging is merely an example of a few additional things that just didn’t work out.

Which would be all right, something we could live with and adjust to, if only the mistaken judgements were somewhere on the president’s horizon. But they're not. Tonight it will once again become clear that they're not, that all of those slogans, promises and challenges were just mouthwash, not to be taken seriously.

George F. Will’s column today, titled The State of Our Cynicism, points out something that caught me off-guard, surprised me. Today is the 1,050th day of the Iraq war. The 912th day of American participation in World War II was D-Day. I lived through that war as a young kid and remember Victory Gardens, gas and food rationing, Rosie the Riveter in defense plants, taxes, Victory Bonds and the absolute focus of a country at war. We gave all that, freely, generously and in good faith, along with our drafted young soldiers.

All this war has asked of us is our young men. This war is on a credit-card and we worry about gas prices rather than gas rationing.

President Bush stands before Congress tonight, spelling out his vision of the State of the Union, 138 days beyond D-Day in a war that promises not to have such a day. He will talk of honor and integrity, perhaps even the compassion of his conservatism.

But it’s a different conservatism than I knew through seventeen presidencies. This new conservatism, that even has its own lexicon, this neo-conservatism, squanders things. Education, health, money in the bank and a nation without debt, all of them conservative goals throughout my life, are out the window.

Idealism, fiscal responsibility, truth, fairness, regard for others, bi-partisanism and the good will and faith we once had in one another to see ourselves through have all been marked down in this bargain-basement sale of a government. The price-tag shouts convenience over character, take it before it's gone, no payments until your children grow up and everybody's doing it.

There’s not much of a standing-ovation in that.
____________________________________________________

See Taking My Country Personally on my personal web site.

Business Targets Law Enforcement

I’ve long argued for commercial principles in government and so, a big grin continued to expand across my face as I read Sarah Bridges’ Retailer Target Branches Out Into Police Work piece in the Washington Post.

Most large retail operations have in-house ‘inventory conservation enforcement’ programs of one kind or another, a euphemism for making sure shoplifting and employee theft don’t get out of hand. Target, the retailing giant, has just such a department that’s been unusually strong and effective over the years, building on latest technology as well as recruiting top-level law enforcement officials to make it run.

And run it does, to the envy of such police entities as the FBI and police departments nationwide.

Robert J. Ulrich, Chairman and CEO at Target had one of those moments we’ve all had over breakfast, when he read about a repeat offender walking out of a courtroom because the judge wasn’t aware he had a record elsewhere in the state. The State was Minnesota and Target is headquartered in Minneapolis. It turned out the man who was released raped a woman the day after his dismissal and Ulrich was outraged. He wanted to know how the guy got out of jail so fast and assigned Nathan Garvis, Target's vice president of government affairs, to find out.

It turned out that one branch of Minnesota law enforcement didn’t have access to another agency's records. Uh huh, guess we’ve all heard that one. City, county, state and federal criminal record systems had different ways of entering data and couldn't routinely share information. According to Garvis, "It struck me that following repeat criminals was really an inventory-management problem."

A eureka moment and confirmation of my prejudice. A government agency would never think like that.

Unlike many competitors, who may have developed some degree of technology in order to keep an eye on things, Target has been called “a technology company masquerading as a retailer.” Be that as it may, and somewhat tongue-in-cheek, there are those who credit Target for teaching police departments that may have been masquerading as law enforcement agencies. Target’s high profile helpings-out include

• A Houston arson-homicide in 2004, where a woman and two children died in a fire.
• A bank robbery that the FBI brought brought in to try to figure out who the criminal was, who happened to have been videotaped. Target experts made an identification that led to conviction.
• Building a forensics lab for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.
• Including FBI and other agency officials in their corporate leadership programs
• Providing various agencies with trucks filled with electronics and other merchandise to lure criminals.
• Running programs for the World Customs Organization to protect cargo with advanced technical systems.
• Developing surveillance programs in various cities to monitor high-crime areas.

That’s pretty impressive stuff. Still, uncomfortable with such close associations,  Ernesto Dal Bó a professor at Berkeley says, "It is a tricky issue when firms get too close to government. There is no reason we need to say that anything bad is happening, but we do need to watch." There’s truth in that, no doubt. But commercial businesses run on a different parameter than government agencies and that can be refreshing.

In the matter of bringing Minnesota agencies together, Richard Stanek, a former Minnesota public safety commissioner said in the Post article, "This kind of thing had been tried before. The extra thing that Target brought was neutrality and mediation. They physically brought the different arms of law enforcement together and helped get us talking."

Neutrality and mediation--both huge problems in the reconfiguration and database management upgrading at the FBI and within agencies of the Homeland Security Agency. Turf Issues, hierarchies of data access, who’s in charge where and who might be stepping on someone else’s toes. If we have nothing else since 9-11, we have toes, tens of thousands more toes.

It’s possible that some of them need stepping on.
______________________________________________________

See Taking My Country Personally on my personal web site.

Man Refuses to Sell Big Mac, Sues McDonald’s For Loss of Job

A McDonald’s employee filed suit Friday against the hamburger giant, charging that “as a matter of conscience” he had refused to sell animal meat products. “Do you have any idea of what’s happening here?” said Wayne Willful. “Animals, cows with no choice in the matter are being intentionally and arbitrarily sent to their deaths, in order that McDonald’s can profit from the Big Mac. I’m against that. I agree to sell salads and Cokes, but don’t ask me to violate my conscience by selling McNuggets.”

Asked why he didn’t simply find work in a vegetarian restaurant, Willful said “It’s my right under the Illinois Health Care Right of Conscience Act to refuse to sell Big Macs and ‘they better not be allowed to fire me for it.’”

Told that McDonald’s was not a health care provider, Willful told this reporter he wasn’t aware of that, but he wasn’t going to sell Big Macs anyway. “Let them prove it’s not a health care product,” he raged. “They were wrong to fire me.”

Contacted at the corporation’s Oakbrook, Illinois headquarters, a spokesman asked “Why are you reporting this perfectly bogus story?”

My purpose is to highlight just how far the religious right has descended into a ‘policy of idiocy’ in an effort, any effort, to connect religion and law. We have, as a nation, defended for hundreds of years your right and my right to practice our religion without hindrance, or to practice no religion at all. The pact we made was to not let our specific belief (or lack thereof) impinge on any fellow citizen’s rights.

Rights that are defined by law, laws written by the state, either federal or individual and constitutionally proscribed from espousing a particular religious belief. The Separation of Church and State is a pillar of our defining freedoms. When you mask religious belief as ‘conscience,’ you make a mockery of law as we know it and foolishly take up the time of the courts.

Gore Vidal, the noted writer, admonishes

“As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by
destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.”

Two policies of idiocy are recently reported in the papers; one documenting a group of four pharmacists suing the Walgreen Company for firing them because they would not dispense legal birth-control medication that ‘offended their conscience.” No matter that their decision impinged upon their fellow citizens’ ability to receive those medications.

In another case, an Italian judge is preparing to rule on a suit against a Catholic priest, who 'made the claim that Jesus existed.’ It is as much the right of a priest to allege that Jesus Christ existed as it is the right of a pharmacist to feel his conscience has been offended by selling over-the-counter birth-control medication.

But these are not appropriate matters for the courts.

The Church, if not in Italy then certainly in this country, is protected from laws that define its theology. The pharmacist is protected from discrimination due to his religion, but being fired for failing to carry out company policy is not discrimination. It’s company policy. What’s to prevent his failure to sell any specific item that ‘offends his conscience’ by its profit structure? It may be equally offensive to these particular employees that Walgreen is open on Sunday, but it’s not a cause for litigation.

Go work at another company and stop wasting the court’s time.
____________________________________________________________

There are lots more Things That Make Me Nuts, all of them on my personal web site.

Eliminate the “State of the Union” Address? What’s Left Then?

Lewis Gould argues in a Washington Post op-ed that we ought to “end the bombast’ of the annual presidential State of the Union address to Congress.

What, get rid of that ritual of somber attention to our leader? C’mon, Lew, there’s little enough left of tradition now that men no longer wear hats.

Professor of history emeritus (which means he’s retired from active duty) at the University of Texas, Gould wrote a history of the modern United States Senate, plus a bunch of other quite well received books on the presidency and Congress. Which I guess gives him stature, but maybe too little sense of what we who are not historians need of our presidents.

We’re in a time (and have been for some years) when we don’t really think of ourselves as ‘having a president.’ In place of that, we have presidents in transition, who’ve either just been elected or will soon have to run for re-election, kind of one foot on banana-peel presidencies. FDR was certainly president, the only one I’d ever heard of until I was ten years old and it seems we had only two ‘comfortable’ presidencies after that—Eisenhower and Reagan.

Which may be kind of a long way ‘round to thinking it’s a comfort, stage managed or not, to see our president come into the Congress once a year to the Marine Band playing ‘Ruffles and Flourishes.’ Yeah, it’s theatre. Maybe we need a little theatre from time to time to re-establish in our minds the grandeur and magnificence of what is too often the partisan and vicious.

Gould says in his op-ed piece:

“On Tuesday night, President Bush, like his recent predecessors, will play his part in the gaudy spectacle of ballyhoo and hype that the State of the Union has become. From a Rocky-style entrance of the president through a gantlet of applauding solons to the introduction of mini-celebrities carefully situated in the gallery, the prime-time extravaganza will have all the spontaneity of -- and about as much meaning as -- a televised Hollywood awards ceremony.”

Still in all, we like the Academy Awards. They give us a once-a-year chance to take some time out and give out a few honors to Hollywood, the same as we do for Emmys and Golden Globes and Country Music.

We catch our presidents these days, heads ducked, on their way to or from their helicopter. Business as usual means a few hollered questions they don’t want to answer, accompanied by a scowl or a wave, one as meaningless as the other. Messy democracy, but we’re forced into it as politics become so partisan that presidents no longer risk regularly scheduled press conferences.

Gould longs for the days when presidents sent off their State of the Union documents to the Congress without delivering them verbally. The fact that congressional and popular ignorance of those tomes rendered them meaningless, seems preferable in his mind to Bush’s Tuesday opportunity to ‘put a best face’ on his presidency before the Congress and the televised American public.

Without quite the decibel level of campaign rhetoric, our sitting presidents are able to lay before the public their own report card. The country and the Congress may think the self-grading too high or low but, buoyed in the arms of their speech-writers, each president has his day and his say. And so, in one hunk, the current occupant of the Oval Office gets to lay out his hopes for the administration’s coming legislative year before the House and Senate, without interruption, and the country hears them as well.

Hurrah for Theodore Roosevelt’s ‘bully pulpit’ is my reaction. I am not a great fan of this president. But I’m a whole cheering-section for presidencies in general and celebrate the few and far-between chances they have by tradition to rally the troops. Congress, for its part, treats them during that brief speech with honor and civility, no matter that it’s more Roman games than serious politics.

Tuesday, let the games begin.
__________________________________________________

.
For more comments on Washington at work, see my personal web site.

Taking a Poll Instead of a Position

John Kerry’s rush back from Davos to try and orchestrate a filibuster, that he knew had no chance, against Sam Alito, is a symptom. Hillary Clinton’s relentlessly middle-of-the-road and don’t-ruffle-any-feathers stance on almost any issue, is another.

The Democratic Party is rudderless and ineffective when the nation needs it most. The Dems have been persuaded into middle-ground and the Republicans already own that real estate. They fear John McCain, but don’t in the least understand or learn from him. McCain is not uncomfortable with taking positions, sometimes quite bold and against the grain of his own party. Americans love that and McCain will probably be our next president because of it.

There hasn’t been a time of such clear need for ideological definition in decades, perhaps in my lifetime and the opposition is in disarray, churning in circles, unable to chart a direction. There’s not a Democratic candidate in sight who can win, with the exception of Barack Obama and this time around will not be his turn.

Famously, Casey Stengel said, “Two hundred million Americans, and there ain't two good catchers among 'em.” That lament fits politics as well as baseball. Another piece of Stengelese that works, "Can't anybody here play this game?"

In a time when

• We have been misled into war and the people who got us in can’t seem to get us out
• The 'conservative' deficit grows at $77 million an hour, 24 hours a day
• Republican engineered tax cuts guarantee that number will grow exponentially
• Republicans have made lobbyists a private industry, beyond bipartisan control
• Health care is beyond the reach of 42 million Americans
• Industry after industry defaults on its health and pension obligations
• The two-party system has deconstructed into alternatively savaging one another instead of legislating through bi-partisan negotiation
• Interest on the mounting debt threatens to swamp government by choice
• Our image throughout the world is less admiration-based and more fear-based

and all Kerry can muster is a foolish flight home on a hopeless mission.

Successfully engineering the past two elections, Karl Rove understood that Republicans did not own an electable majority and so he set out to manufacture one. Admirably, he marshaled a conservative religious power-base that was, essentially, the old philosophical south (and if you see that as another word for racist, you are correct). It was, as are most religious groups, fear-based and it worked so well, he took the fear-base into administrative governing.

Rove’s manipulation of ‘presidential powers’ after 9-11, his allowing the continued DeLay discipline of K-Street, his creation of a terrorist focused ‘war rhetoric,’ endless color-coded alerts of imminent attack, decision-making behind closed doors and unilateral American foreign policy are all textbook examples of government-by-fear.

And it has worked, effectively if not constitutionally. We are fearful of our government, each other, dying from bird-flu, global warming, gas prices, hurricanes, the world beyond our doors, our jobs and the very future of the Norman Rockwell life we once knew. Apple pie? Whatever has happened to apple pie?

The same conundrum exists today for Democrats that faced Republicans six, and again two years ago; a country evenly divided (more viciously now than before) and a razor-thin sliver of voters who will determine elections to come. They can’t be polled, their numbers are less than the percentage of error the polls accomodate. Thus Kerry and Hillary are misinformed, misled and doomed to failure, as are all who would try to make their stand based on polling the center. 

So, Democrats can’t use the Rove fear techniques. He’s already been there and done that. But there is another electable majority ripe to be ‘manufactured.’ The voting bloc that is not so razor-thin is among those who are fed-up with government generally and party-promises specifically. They don’t want to hear and do not believe Democrats will ‘clean up’ or ‘bring back’ anything. Certainly, in their minds, Democrats don’t hold the moral keys to honesty or integrity.

They do want to hear specifically how coalition government can be made to work, what logical controls can be clamped on lobbyists, how we plan to exit Iraq, regain control over deficits, deal with health and pension issues and stop being so afraid. They don’t want a candidate who’s too timid to be wrong and they won’t tolerate one with no sense of humor or sense of him (or her) self.

Party-base will take care of itself. Any Republican and any Democrat will get his base numbers, but who legitimately appeals to the ‘fed-up’ among the presumed faithful of either party, will win the next election.

John McCain seems poised to sweep those numbers into his camp.
_______________________________________________________________

More about Liberal Politics at my opinion columns web site.

Democracy With a Lid On It

The rich and the various assorted enablers-of-the-rich were all there in Davos, Switzerland this week, while the previously-disenfranchised milled around various Palestinian polling places. Both events were (and are) experiments in, or the results of, ventures in democracy that were unheard of a half century ago.

The casting out of dictators in Asia, along with China’s moderation into a wannabe consumer-based economy has brought immense capital wealth to the Far East. The lid is certainly off (or nearly off) that trembling, boiling pot that is the masses of Asia. Nearby, in the Middle East, the steam is rising—a pressure-cooker, whose clamped-down lid seeks out an early release of pressure in the Stans, Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq, in an effort to avoid explosion.

Far East and Middle East are works-in-progress and, while the short-term results may be subject to whims of capital or forces of rhetoric and bias , there is no denying their progress toward democracy in the long run. This is not a Bush-administration achievement, it’s been a long time in the making and its roots can be found in the Marshall Plan that followed WWII.

There wouldn’t be a World Economic Forum in Davos without Klaus Schwab. Born in 1938 in Ravensburg, Germany, his academic laurels, U.N. credentials and worldwide honors stun the ordinary imagination. Certainly nothing would have held such a man back, but European Marshall Plan recovery thrust him forward.

The Asian attendees at Davos are progressions of the Japanese miracle and the Japanese miracle is the work of two war-makers, generals George Marshall and Douglas MacArthur. Two victors-turned-philanthropists in the first such event ever recorded in the history of the world.

It doesn’t surprise me that the leading economy in the world is American. We were the only industrial nation left standing at the end of WWII, profited from that happenstance and never looked back. But I find it fascinating and of great historic interest that second in the world is Japan and third, Germany. The second greatest and third greatest economic powers on the planet are the losers of the greatest war in history. That’s using ‘greatest’ three times in one sentence, but it’s a mind-bending sentence.

Which brings us, inevitably, to Palestine and the recent election that has so shaken the free world.

Palestine and most all of the Middle East for that matter, were the passed-by of American largesse after WWII. They simply weren’t important enough, nor were they badly enough damaged to be a focus of economic aid. Who knew the role oil would play? We had our own oil, Texas was full of it.

Left to stew in their own cultural juices, certainly without much American concern and subject to a constant selling off of their rights to suit our needs, they no longer fit into the neat little box of logical definition. And so, as democratic election comes haltingly, to first one and then another angry and abused population, the results serve a self-interest we are not equipped to recognize.

How could we? We made a foreign policy of neglect, fostered oil-rich dictatorships in power ‘balances,’ armed the area to the teeth and made of it an socio-economic disaster. The Middle East was the Marshall Plan not offered and perhaps a mirror to what might have been in Europe and Asia, had they been similarly neglected.

Davos is the proof that social and economic inclusion are more powerful than men and nations. The democracies that have thrived have come not at the point of a sword, but at the offer of a job. Those who are disgusted with the Palestinians voting-in Hamas would do well to realize that Hamas supported schools and charities that Yasser Arafat ignored. For forty years.

Some principles are the same in Palestine or Singapore, Davos or Detroit. Lids on freedoms eventually come off (or are blown off) and given an opportunity, men and women will vote in their own best self-interest.

And that, ultimately, saves us all.
___________________________________________________

More at my personal web site about what interests me in International Affairs.

The Blogs Are Alive With the Sound of Democrats

All that’s missing is Julie-Andrews, floating through fields of wildflowers, wearing a sash across her pretty bosom declaring Democratic purity.

Doing the Google Blog Search on ‘Jack Abramoff’ earlier in the week (before the Abramoff-Bush photos hit the news), I got the weirdest conglomeration of liberal-blogs-in-denial that the imagination could possibly create. Page one samples:

• Native American tribes tend to support Democratic causes so it should not surprise anyone that they donated to Democrats. But these donations are not part of the scandal.
• At a time when his party and some in the press are still trying to argue that the Jack Abramoff scandal is a bipartisan affair, Rep. John Doolittle -- a California Republican said to be under investigation in the case -- says he always ...
• Whenever anyone, whether it’s seedy, unethical Republicans or their various media bobbleheads, try to pass off the Abramoff Scandal as a “bi-partisan scandal,” they are lying. This is a Republican scandal, and ONLY a Republican scandal. ...

I really thought the Deborah Howell (Washington Post Ombudsman) critical firebombing of their web site was absurd, but it seems the Dems actually think their minority legislators in the Congress have clean hands.

They are merely un-equal-opportunity co-conspirators in this mess and their having been elbowed aside from the lobbyist money trough is in no way an indication of ethical superiority. A case in point is Montana’s two Senators, one a Democrat, the other Republican. Conrad Burns (Rep) turned back $150,000 that came (directly or indirectly) from Abramoff. Max Baucus (Dem) gave back $18,892, that included $1,892 that he’d sorta forgotten to report for use of Jack’s skybox.

This tale of two senators says far more about access than it does integrity. Burns was in and Baucus out, when it came to access. One of the major aspects of the scandal is that Republicans had tied up access to money because they had control of both houses of congress and that allowed them to do it. They could deliver the vote. Democrats had a hard enough time even getting behind the closed doors, as Republicans divvied up the spoils and crafted the legislation accordingly.

But not being invited to the bank doesn’t mean you’re not a robber.

And so that portion of the blogosphere inhabited by the truly naïve, or that portion of the country that is so incensed by George Bush that they are blinded, has gone entirely nuts. In that context, the debacle that sent the Washington Post a-running from their ombudsman is entirely understandable, even if it's not very courageous newspapering.

The country is flinchy. It has a great deal from which to flinch. But snap-judgment, based upon party politics and a certain amount of rage at the direction of the country, is hardly a firm place from which to declare the moral high ground.
____________________________________________

For more comments on Washington at work, see my personal web site.

Nuclear Proliferation Has Its Place

Once we’ve all agreed that keeping nuclear weapons in the box they came in is impossible, other options become agreeable, or at least open to discussion. Pakistan having the bomb rather abruptly cut off all serious talk about containment. And that’s probably a good thing. 

So, having cashed-in at least some of our cold-war prejudices, we can get to work on demystifying the old nuclear power bugaboos, one of which has always been what to do about the reprocessing of spent fuel rods. Our Prez has an idea on that. He wants the U.S. to get in the reprocessing business, effectively becoming the world's go-to (and only) source.

Might not be a bad idea. Whether or not the world will accept the parenthetical portion of that intention, we can only wait to see. One can imagine problems.

This idea has shaken some members of Congress who consider it ‘an expensive venture that relies on unproven concepts’ that could increase the danger of proliferation. Yeah well, the spread of nuke technology is a given. It’s like trying to keep the secret of steelmaking to ourselves during the industrial revolution. What used to be complicated is now pretty straightforward and making bombs is more a question of money and access to raw materials than it is know-how.

The world certainly doesn’t need more killing-power, but it desperately needs more non-fossil-fuel energy.

Nuclear power is essentially steam-power to drive turbines. It’s been called a hell of a dangerous way to boil water, but it’s become less so with each generation of nuclear plants. Three Mile Island and Chernobyl are no longer even close to the norm technologically and, if we can get over the jumpiness about fuel reprocessing producing weapons grade plutonium, everyone can get down to fine-tuning reactor design.

The people who think this is a good idea, talk about a process that doesn’t separate plutonium, but whips up a mixed fuel too hot for terrorists to handle. Such a ‘hot mix’ can be used in special reactors that exist in France but not as yet in the United States.

Talk about French fries.

Bush is trying to get on the front-end of the global warming flak he’s been taking, saying "We ought to have more nuclear power in the United States of America. It's clean, it's renewable, it's safer than it ever was in the past." All of which is true and all of would lean us away from our vulnerability to each and every oil crisis.

A strong argument can be made for turning the world’s ink-blot reaction to the word ‘nuclear’ from bombs to energy. A remarkably effective way to do that would be to fund major research into reactor technology, share that research with other nations and lease reactors to economically emerging nations, where the dirtiest energy policies undermine new standards.

The key to that, at least in the short-term, is to control the disposition of nuclear fuel, from inception though the numerous re-processings to final disposal. The Bush plan (which he has not yet signed-off on and which is being shopped around to various allies) would solve that by making the United States the world’s source of re-processed fuel. That will make for some very interesting international shipping problems, as well as land-based transport. But who knows, maybe we'll do it all on a remote Pacific atoll and perhaps the fuel itself will become far less difficult to handle.

Maybe that's a fair share of supposition, but this 21st century will be technologically advanced beyond all commonly held understanding.

What a huge and sudden leap it would be, from the controversy over spent nuclear fuel disposal in the western states, to recycling for profit. Which doesn’t mean there is no controversy. There’s bound to be a huge national debate, as there should be. Everyone comes equally out of denial; the administration that there’s no global warming issue and the public that nuclear in any form is a no-no.

A few decades late, but better late than . . . whatever.
________________________________________________________

A bunch more environmental issues muddying the waters on my personal web site.

The Man Offered Me Money, the Crook

“Jeez, the man offered me money, the crook. Wanted me to vote his way. So I took the money and I voted his way. What a crook the guy is, they oughta put him in the slammer.”

The Washington Post, in an editorial, says of Scott McClellan’s White House refusal to comment,

“Under these circumstances, asking about Mr. Abramoff's White House meetings is no mere exercise in reportorial curiosity but a legitimate inquiry about what an admitted felon might have been seeking at the highest levels of government. Whatever White House officials did or didn't do, there is every reason to believe that Mr. Abramoff was up to no good and therefore every reason the public ought to know with whom he was meeting.”

Every reason to believe Mr. Abramoff was up to no good? Are they serious? 

Tens, and probably hundreds, of legislators, staff of legislators, appointed officials and staff of appointed officials—at the highest levels of government—possibly and quite probably including White House staff, have been paid-off by this guy. There is no other word for it—paid-off.

The absolute outrage is that the Washington Post (and other media) timorously talk of ‘asking’ about Abramoff’s White House meetings. They ought to be pounding on doors, pulling down the walls and giving no rest to an administration that made a business out of selling off the nation’s political integrity.

Tom DeLay reveled in his K-Street operations that, without a single whimper from the law, sold off lobbyist access like they were Virginia hams. Possibly they were. Legislators carved up, bagged and hung in that curing-shed they call the United States Congress, to be sold off to the highest bidder.

And the nation wonders, breathlessly, what will become of Jack Abramoff—stands around and speculates on whether Tom DeLay will beat the rap.

Wake up, America! These are not side issues to American Idol and whether the stock market is up or down a few points. You’ve been sold-out.

The so-called conservatives among you, who delight in what has been done during the past six years of the Bush presidency and the ten years of Republican domination of Congress, might wake up to the fact that government to the highest bidder wounds the right as deeply as the left. A civil society depends upon the balance of interests.

If we lose that belief that the Congress of the United States works in our individual and collective interests, if we become convinced that our present and future is being auctioned off to the guys with the most dough, then civility in our society is at great risk.

Abraham Lincoln, remember him? He said, “America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter, and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”

I suggest to the Washington Post and others, who mistake the indictment of one criminal for the curing of crime, that they stop staring at their shoes, lift their eyes and demand wide-ranging criminal prosecutions. Wherever they lead, down and through the halls of the White House and the corridors of Congress. The scandals of Wall Street were merely momentary afflictions to our pocketbooks and we chose to send their CEOs off to serious prison sentences.

I want to hear of no reconfiguring of the rules of limits on bribing our lawmakers. Don’t test my patience, you Democrats who would promise a new integrity in the government, if only you had your chance at the levers of power. You can’t promise integrity, you either have it or you don’t.

But you can promise prison and the selling of a vote is a felony.
__________________________________________________________

For more comments on Washington at work, see my personal web site.

The Photo Flap--Who, Me?

Perhaps a dozen photos of George Bush shaking hands with Jack Abramoff exist, maybe more. The Prez may even be shown with his arm around the guy, or in one of those back-slapping ‘tell me that one again’ moments.

Presidential photos are a major industry. They hang proudly on the walls of legislators, staff of legislators, wives of staff and even the occasional lobbyist. Like probably ten thousand of them. Among the ten thousand is Jack, the most famous of them all, at least for the moment.

Somehow or another, the photo of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein never became a controversial issue, possibly, because it was never withheld. It’s an American axiom that if you’re not going to show me, I’ve absolutely, positively got to see. Careers have been made on that . . . and broken.

And so it goes, the White House once again (tiresomely) making something out of nothing.

If they were anywhere near as good publicizing their agenda as they are bringing critical focus to their blunders, they wouldn’t even need Karl Rove. Dark-side Karl, the father of all this nonsense.

Mary Matalin, an informal White House adviser, said the photos should not be released and that, if they are, voters are savvy enough to realize the images are not evidence of a Bush role in the scandal. Matalin, Karl Rove think-alike and self-styled political consultant ought to know about keeping things out of the public eye, having whisked Dick Cheney off to various locations, all of them as undisclosed as the photos in question.

This is an administration that thrives on the cloak and the dagger, that perceives itself in terms of darkness and shadow. It no doubt revels in watching old James Bond movies, the real ones that featured the real man, Sean Connery. They are, each of them, legends in their own minds and real men. The bathroom mirrors of Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush have in common the squint-eyed morning poses of men of action, guys in the know, makers of history.

Until it comes to a dozen worthless photos, that have now become the cause celebre of the opposition and front-page focus in the nation’s newspapers. Can you imagine Bond refusing the press? He'd toss the photos at their feet and turn to his martini, shaken, not stirred.

This president, who cannot be stirred, is clearly shaken.

What is the White House, some kind of national kindergarden? What silly games they continue to play. It’s been said (with considerable truth) that Nixon could have avoided resignation if he’d only admitted and shrugged off the Watergate break-in as an embarrassing incident of no importance. Clinton might have (with somewhat more personal difficulty) acknowledged his weakness for babes and pointed in the general direction of John Kennedy.

But presidents seem never to learn and (more to the point) they’re handled and advised by staff that are scared to death of making wrong moves. So they never dare make the right ones, just diddle around pawing the earth in denial while their president swings in the wind.

Note to Karl Rove: Release the stupid pictures, Karl.

They’re coming out anyway. Do you guys really think, in this day and age, that a dozen photos that are already on various walls and desks can really be kept from the front pages?

“Yeah,” George squints at the photo and adjusts his glasses, “I guess that’s Abramoff, if you guys say so. Big money-man, if I remember. I back-slap a million of those guys. Shame he got in trouble, but that’s Washington.” Big grin. 

The country would love it, but he's gonna throw it away.
______________________________________________________

More about Conservative Politics at my opinion columns web site.