GOP Struggles To Define Its Message for 2006 Elections By Dan Balz and Jonathan Weisman, Washington Post Staff Writers

Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) said the root of the problem is a failure of Washington Republicans to stick to principles, saying that his party risks losing power because it has done “a pretty poor job” of executing its small-government philosophy. “Republicans just need to take stock, go back and realize that the American people elected them because of their principles, and when you do not adhere to those principles, the American people are just as likely to turn you out and choose someone else.”

Lately, the drift Perry described has been on glaring display almost daily. …

Because of these realities, Republicans have adopted a midterm strategy designed to avoid making the election a national referendum on their performance or one that focuses on their policy divisions. Their goal is to concentrate less on the kind of positive message they have challenged the Democrats to produce and more on framing a choice that says, however unhappy voters may be right now with the Republicans’ leadership, things would be worse if Democrats were in charge.

War! Good god y’all!
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing!

Three years ago, the United States invaded Iraq. Our enlightened leaders slammed the country with shock and awe and still expected flowers to be thrown at our troops and democracy to take instant root. Our lying leaders tried a wide range of lies to justify the invasion. And, before the invasion, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets all over the world to stop the war before it began.

Here in Albuquerque, our own police fired tear gas at protesters. Bernalillo County Sheriff Darren White, chair of the re-elect the liars committee, begged for the opportunity to show the citizens what he thinks of our right to protest. All around us, flags waved and dissent was shouted down with accusations of treason. Is it treason to oppose an unnecessary war? To oppose an administration spoiling for a fight long before 9/11, a completely unrelated matter?

Now, the flowers have become IEDs and more people recognize the lies from the bully in the pulpit. No matter what happens in Iraq, it was an unnecessary war botched by incompetent leaders. Iraq was no threat to America. But Iran is more dangerous than ever. Al Qaeda has more support than ever. Bin Laden is as safe as ever. Has anything good been accomplished?

Today, hundreds marched again in Albuquerque, unintimidated by prior police excesses, ignored or dismissed by the media. This time the assault was by fierce wind, not tear gas, and gas-bags like White were home watching whatever big game distracts them from the mountain of evidence of the utter failure of the Radical Right.

peace, mjh

Update 3/19/06: In coverage lasting a bit less than 1 minute, KOAT-7 TV news at 6pm estimated the crowd at about one hundred — perhaps because they didn’t arrive until long after the march reached the park. I saw no other coverage on TV.

Today, the Albuquerque Journal covered the march and printed the views of a local Iraq War vet against the war:

ABQjournal: Over 1,000 Join Anti-War Protest in Duke City
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ABQjournal: Iraq Vet: This War Is Wrong By Anthony Thomas Garcia, Iraq War Veteran
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The Albuquerque Tribune: National Government
Then and now

March 18, 2006

Some statistics and polls on Iraq at the time of the invasion and today:

President Bush’s job rating

March 2003: 67 percent of Americans surveyed in ABC-Washington Post poll approved of Bush’s job performance as U.S. and allies invaded Iraq.

March 2006: Overall approval rating now 37 percent, lowest of Bush’s presidency, according to latest AP-Ipsos poll.

Opinions about the war

April 2003: 70 percent in ABC-Washington Post poll said war in Iraq was worth fighting.

March 2006: 29 percent in CBS poll say results of war worth the cost.

Opinions about Bush’s handling of Iraq

April 2003: 71 percent in Gallup poll approved the way Bush was dealing with Iraq.

March 2006: 39 percent in AP-Ipsos poll approve Bush’s handling of situation.
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From Three Years Ago —
03/20/2003: War Protests in New Mexico

About 600 demonstrators protested the war near the campus of the University of New Mexico at 6pm, Thursday, 3/20/03 (the first day of Spring). Eventually, riot police used tear gas and “chemical agents” to “calm” the crowd. There was very interesting TV footage of children under 10 fleeing to nearby restaurants, eyes streaming tears. One bystander was hit between the eyes by a tear gas canister and taken to the hospital. 17 protesters were arrested, some for throwing the tear gas canisters back at the cops. Police advise those planning other protest not let “bad apples” make problems; “we will not tolerate them taking over the streets.”

Have you noticed how cops now all look like soldiers? The uniforms and, especially, the machine guns?

Peaceful protesters are camped outside the gates to Kirtland Air Force Base. It’s raining & 47 degrees at 11pm.

In Santa Fe, protesters surrounded the Roundhouse, the State Capitol building. Some 60 high schoolers walked out of school to join protests and were suspended for 2 days for “open defiance and willful disobedience.” No one was arrested. mjh

Remember what Sally Meyer said after the ‘riot’? What Mayor Marty did? Or what one-among-many of our fellow citizens wrote about protesters? Read on:

Continue reading Three Long Years →

GOP Irritation At Bush Was Long Brewing By Jim VandeHei, Washington Post Staff Writer

“Bottom line, there is a lot of buyer’s remorse,” said Rep. Tom Feeney (R-Fla.). If the vote were held today on the Medicare prescription drug benefit, he said, as many 120 Republicans would vote against it. “It was probably our greatest failure in my adult lifetime,” he said. …

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), a Bush ally who dismissed concerns about an inattentive White House, said he regrets voting for the No Child Left Behind bill in the first term.

Ginsburg Faults GOP Critics, Cites a Threat From ‘Fringe’ By Charles Lane, Washington Post Staff Writer

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg assailed the court’s congressional critics in a recent speech overseas, saying their efforts “fuel” an “irrational fringe” that threatened her life and that of a colleague, former justice Sandra Day O’Connor. …

[A Feb. 28, 2005, chatroom] posting said: “Okay, commandoes, here is your first patriotic assignment . . . an easy one. Supreme Court Justices Ginsburg and O’Connor have publicly stated that they use [foreign] laws and rulings to decide how to rule on American cases. This is a huge threat to our Republic and Constitutional freedom. . . . If you are what you say you are, and NOT armchair patriots, then these two justices will not live another week.“

Bill Would Allow Warrantless Spying By Charles Babington, Washington Post Staff Writer

The Bush administration could continue its policy of spying on targeted Americans without obtaining warrants, but only if it justifies the action to a small group of lawmakers, under legislation introduced yesterday by key Republican senators. …

The bill would allow the NSA to eavesdrop, without a warrant, for up to 45 days per case, at which point the Justice Department would have three options. It could drop the surveillance, seek a warrant from FISA’s court, or convince a handful of House and Senate members that although there is insufficient evidence for a warrant, continued surveillance “is necessary to protect the United States,” according to a summary the four sponsors provided yesterday. They are Mike DeWine (Ohio), Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.), Chuck Hagel (Neb.) and Olympia J. Snowe (Maine).

Kempthorne Picked for Interior By Peter Baker and Juliet Eilperin,
Washington Post Staff Writer

[E]nvironmental groups immediately assailed the selection, calling it the latest example of the Bush administration selling out to development and energy industry interests. Environmentalists noted that Kempthorne fought to open national forests to logging, mining, and oil and gas drilling. They said he worked to weaken water safety and endangered species laws. …

The League of Conservation Voters offered a two-sentence response: “During his career in Congress, Governor Kempthorne earned a paltry 1 percent lifetime LCV score. Enough said.” …

“Gov. Kempthorne is a very nice, personable and noncombative person, which are some of the features the Bush administration is looking for and which will help in confirmation,” said Roger Singer, Idaho chapter director of the Sierra Club. “But his record on environmental issues is quite abysmal.”

SUNSHINE Week – SUNSHINE Week

Sixty-two percent of respondents to a Scripps Survey Research Center poll conducted at the request of the American Society of Newspaper Editors said “public access to government records is critical to the functioning of good government.”

The poll indicated that only a third of Americans consider the federal government “very open.” Twenty-two percent of respondents consider the federal government “very secretive”; another 42 percent said it was “somewhat secretive.”

Bush Expands Government Secrecy, Arouses Critics By Alan Elsner, Reuters [September 3, 2002]

“This administration is the most secretive of our lifetime, even more secretive than the Nixon administration. They don’t believe the American people or Congress have any right to information,” said last week Larry Klayman, chairman of Judicial Watch, a conservative group that is suing the administration to force it to reveal the members of the energy task force.

AlterNet: WireTap: Five Minutes with Helen Thomas By Elana Berkowitz, Campus Progress.

Helen Thomas: “This Bush administration is the most secretive I have ever covered, and I think the most secretive in American history since the time presidents have been covered.”

Ari Fleischer in 2002: “I make the case that we are more accessible and open than many previous administrations — given how many times Powell, Rumsfeld and Ashcroft have briefed,” he said.

Ari Fleischer in 2006

“It’s constantly getting worse,” said Ari Fleischer, who preceded Mr. McClellan as Mr. Bush’s spokesman. Perhaps surprisingly for a Bush defender, he attributed the soured relationship in part to what he said was a secretiveness within the White House.

“It’s accented and compounded now because this administration is more secretive,” he said.

USATODAY.com – Secrecy grows more common with war on terror as excuse

In the ensuing years, Americans have seen many examples, including:

• A program that allows authorities to intercept electronic communications between people in the USA and people abroad. It evades the long-standing safeguard against misuse: that a warrant be granted by an independent court. Even the program itself was kept secret from everyone save a few members of Congress.

• A stepped up effort to punish government officials who leak information and to prosecute journalists who refuse to name these officials.

• A network of foreign prisons about which virtually nothing is known, and an extreme reluctance to reveal any information about the detainees at the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

• Sluggish response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for documents going back to before Sept. 11, 2001.

• A policy of classifying more government documents than previous administrations and even reclassifying some that had been released to the public in recent years.

USATODAY.com – Survey finds more information kept from public By Mark Memmott, USA TODAY

Local, state and federal government agencies are keeping more information secret from the public, making it harder for citizens to keep tabs on what elected officials and bureaucrats are doing, an investigation by the Associated Press shows.

The findings alarm proponents of open government.

“What is happening, especially at the highest levels of government, is basically un-American,” says Hodding Carter, State Department spokesman in the Carter administration. “Americans should be treated as owners of their government and of their government’s information, not as supplicants to whom you dole it out when you feel like it.” …

The AP investigation found that:

• States have steadily limited the public’s access to government information since the Sept. 11 attacks. It analyzed legislation in all 50 states and found that, since the attacks, legislatures have passed “more than 1,000 laws changing access to information, approving more than twice as many measures that restrict information as laws that open government books.”

• “Many federal agencies fall far short of the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act, repeatedly failing to meet reporting deadlines while citizens wait ever longer for documents.” The act, like similar laws in each state, is designed to ensure that most government information is available to the public. It also spells out how to request the information.

The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) Blog: Public Hearing Transcript Taken Off Line

The news media kicked off Sunshine Week yesterday. Still, darkness looms. In recent days, the Defense Department’s NORAD reportedly ordered that a transcript be taken off the web from an open, public hearing which happened in January. That’s a new one, with Big Brotherish overtones, we say.

Government Openness at Issue as Bush Holds On to Records By Adam Clymer, The New York Times

The Bush administration has put a much tighter lid than recent presidents on government proceedings and the public release of information, exhibiting a penchant for secrecy that has been striking to historians, legal experts and lawmakers of both parties.

Some of the Bush policies, like closing previously public court proceedings, were prompted by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and are part of the administration’s drive for greater domestic security. Others, like Vice President Dick Cheney’s battle to keep records of his energy task force secret, reflect an administration that arrived in Washington determined to strengthen the authority of the executive branch, senior administration officials say. …

Secrecy is almost impossible to quantify, but there are some revealing measures. In the year that ended on Sept. 30, 2001, most of which came during the Bush presidency, 260,978 documents were classified, up 18 percent from the previous year. And since Sept. 11, three new agencies were given the power to stamp documents as “Secret” — the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services. …

Former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat of New York, argues that secrecy does more harm than good. …

“Secrecy is a formula for inefficient decision-making,” Mr. Moynihan said, and plays to the instincts of self-importance of the bureaucracy.

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This week on NOW:
Friday, March 17, 2006 on PBS
(Check local listings at http://www.pbs.org/now/sched.html)

“The Sunshine Gang”

Your government is keeping secrets from you. Meet some people fighting
back to uncover the truth. Continue reading Secrecy is a formula for inefficient decision-making →