Ted Stevens in Winter By Robert D. Novak

Although the practice of lobbyists running fundraisers for members of Congress has become common, [Alaska’s Republican Senator Ted] Stevens’s planned reception at the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) headquarters Monday is extraordinary. The host committee, as of last week, had 44 members, all but one of them a registered lobbyist. (The exception, Fred Wahl, owns a boatbuilding company.) The host list includes such big-time lobbyists as Phil Ruter of Boeing and Ken W. Cole of General Motors. Other corporations contributing are Lockheed Martin, American Airlines, Northrop Grumman, Time Warner, Union Pacific, Disney and Textron. The scope of industries represented includes aviation, defense, telecommunications, insurance, paper, broadcasting and railroads.

The money raised goes not directly to Stevens (who is not up for reelection until 2008) but to his leadership political action committee, Northern Lights. The funds it raises are distributed to other Republican candidates, enhancing Stevens’s influence. Since he would be able to raise little or nothing for Northern Lights back in Alaska, such leadership PACs have to rely almost entirely on lobbyists.

Plugging Leaks, Chilling Debate By Gary Wasserman

Not content with jailing an employee for mishandling classified material, the government is applying to private citizens a never-used part of the 1917 Espionage Act. Its expanding secrecy powers threaten to paralyze public participation in making foreign policy. The experts, lobbyists and journalists who, in the normal routines of their jobs, discuss confidential information could now become criminals. …

Information is the lifeblood of policymaking. Expanding restrictions on information adds greatly to the power of the executive; criminalizing citizens’ contact with that information adds even greater uncertainty. …

A democratic government does not, in general, “authorize” the information citizens are allowed. Given enough information, citizens authorize and control their government. Or at least we used to.

No Checks, Many Imbalances By George F. Will

[P]erhaps no future president will ask for such congressional involvement in the gravest decision government makes — going to war. Why would future presidents ask, if the present administration successfully asserts its current doctrine? It is that whenever the nation is at war, the other two branches of government have a radically diminished pertinence to governance, and the president determines what that pertinence shall be. This monarchical doctrine emerges from the administration’s stance that warrantless surveillance by the National Security Agency targeting American citizens on American soil is a legal exercise of the president’s inherent powers as commander in chief, even though it violates the clear language of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was written to regulate wartime surveillance. …

The administration’s argument about the legality of the NSA program also has been discordant with its argument about the urgency of extending the USA Patriot Act. Many provisions of that act are superfluous if a president’s wartime powers are as far-reaching as today’s president says they are. …

Besides, terrorism is not the only new danger of this era. Another is the administration’s argument that because the president is commander in chief, he is the “sole organ for the nation in foreign affairs.” That non sequitur is refuted by the Constitution’s plain language….

Trillion-Dollar Gimmick
Extending Bush’s Tax Cuts Through Sleight of Hand
By David S. Broder

Back when the late John Mitchell was attorney general in the Nixon administration, he advised reporters, “Watch what we do, not what we say.”

That advice certainly applies to the Bush administration as well. The latest bit of evidence to come to my attention is what you might think of as the Case of the Disappearing Trillion. …

The Congressional Budget Office scores the cost of making these tax cuts permanent at $1.6 trillion over the next decade. The administration’s estimate is somewhat less — $1.35 trillion.

But, the folks at the OMB told me, it’s wrong to claim that they are hiding that cost. They told me to get out my copy of the budget, and they told me right where to look. And sure enough on Column 8, Line 11 of Table S-7 on Page 324 of the green-bordered book, I found the very figure they had cited — $1.35 trillion.

The heading on the chart of Effects of Proposals on Receipts reads: “Make Permanent Certain Tax Cuts Enacted in 2001 and 2003 (assumed in the baseline).” Those last four words conceal more than a trillion dollars worth of lost revenue. …

In fact, it turns out that Bush tried to get Congress to go along with this bookkeeping switch back in 2004, actually submitting legislation to authorize the change. The House refused to accept it. He put it back in his budget last year, with the same result. But this year he’s back again, with more urgency, as he presses the case to make these tax cuts permanent.

The Albuquerque

Tribune: National
Forest land sale planned
By James W. Brosnan
Scripps Howard News Service

The Bush administration

proposes to sell up to 307,000 acres of National Forest in 32 states to developers, including 7,447 acres in New Mexico, to

subsidize schools in timber country. …

More than one-quarter of the acres considered for sale are in California, with 85,465

acres. Idaho is next with 26,194 acres, followed by Colorado, 21,572 acres, and Missouri, 21,566 acres. …

The Forest Service

hopes to generate $800 million over five years from the sale of isolated parcels that are difficult for foresters to manage, said Mark

Rey, undersecretary of Agriculture for natural resources and environment.

In New Mexico, the proposal includes 18 tracts

acres to 640 acres.

The Cibola areas are all west of Grants, in the Zuni Mountains, said Cibola National Forest spokesman

Mark Chavez.

The Forest Service plans to publish maps of the proposed sale properties on its Web site Feb. 28 and take comments on

which ones to remove. …

“Public lands are an asset that need to be managed and conserved,” said Idaho Republican Sen.

Larry Craig.
—–

State Total 
Ala. 3,220 
Alaska 99 
Ariz. 1,030 
Ark. 3,612 
Calif. 85,465



Colo. 21,572 
Fla. 973 
Ga. 4,522 
Idaho 26,194 
Ill. 191 
Ky. 4,518 
La. 3,895 



Mich. 5,880 
Minn. 2,622 
Miss. 7,503 
Mo. 21,566 
Mont. 13,948 
Neb. 360 
Nev. 2,782 



N.M. 7,447 
N.C. 9,828 
Ohio 420 
Okla. 3,572 
Ore. 10,581 
S.C. 4,665 
S.D. 13,961 
Tenn. 2,996 


Texas 4,813 
Utah 5,398 
Va. 5,717 
Wash. 7,516 
W.Va. 4,836 
Wis. 80 
Wyo. 17,659 
Nation 

309,441 
Source: United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service

Secure Rural Schools Forest Service FY 2007

Initiative

A hunting tale peppered with discrepancies By Calvin Woodward, ASSOCIATED PRESS

Vice President Dick Cheney said he didn’t immediately disclose his hunting accident because he wanted the confusing details to come out right. Instead, authorized accounts came out slowly – and often still wrong.

The result: a week of shifting blame, belatedly acknowledged beer consumption (not “zero” drinking after all) and evolving discrepancies in how the shooting happened, its aftermath and the way it was told to the nation.

“There’s a reason they call this crisis management,” said corporate damage-control specialist Eric Dezenhall, “and that’s because it’s a mess.” …

Although there is no evidence that beer impaired Cheney’s judgment, initial denials that he had consumed alcohol were wrong.

“No one was drinking,” Armstrong said at the outset. “No, zero, zippo.” She said the hunters washed down lunch with Dr Pepper. Later, she qualified her comments and said beer might have been in the cooler but she did not think anyone drank any. …

Cheney acknowledged Wednesday, “I had a beer at lunch” several hours before the group’s afternoon hunt, asserting “nobody was under the influence.” …

“If I recall,” Bush spokesman Scott McClellan said of Armstrong, “she pointed out that the protocol was not followed by Mr. Whittington, when it came to notifying the others that he was there.”

The about-face came Wednesday when Cheney made his first public comment on the accident.

“It was not Harry’s fault,” he said. “You can’t blame anybody else. I’m the guy who pulled the trigger and shot my friend.”

I’m a very ‘lucky’ guy, says man hit by veep BY KENNETH R. BAZINET, DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU

Browbeaten by late-night comedians and an aggressive press corps, Cheney acknowledged he’d endured “a very long week.” Even loyal Republicans said the GOP has been hurt by Cheney’s stonewalling tactics and stubborn resistance to answer questions.

Potential GOP presidential candidate and Vietnam vet Chuck Hagel took a whack at Cheney’s five draft deferments that kept him from serving in Vietnam.

“If he’d been in the military, he would have learned gun safety,” the Nebraska senator told the Omaha World-Herald.

The whole time I read Cal Thomas’ indictment of Al Gore for treason, I kept thinking about this series of pictures, including Bush kissing the Saudi prince and holding his hand.

Calcified Cal seems to forget that, not only is Saudi Arabia an official ally in the War Without End, but that the royal family is joined at the hips with our own King George. mjh

Cal Thomas Al Gore’s diminished capacity

Last Sunday, Gore spoke to the Jeddah Economic Forum in Saudi Arabia. He trashed his country on the soil of one of the most repressive regimes on earth — a monarchy that incubated 15 of the 19 hijackers who killed 3,000 of his fellow citizens on Sept. 11, 2001, and is the home country of Osama bin Laden. …

That Gore has “lost it” is evident from his personal attacks on the president, whom he has called “the most dishonest president since Richard Nixon” and a man who “has brought deep dishonor to our country.” Gore has called the president a “moral coward” and referred to the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse as “the Bush Gulag.” He has accused the administration of an alliance with “digital brownshirts,” called the administration “simultaneously dishonest and incompetent,” and said the president is “out of touch with reality.” [mjh: Note that Gore may not have said any of these things during his “treasonous” speech in Saudi Arabia, but Cal Thomas is happy to leave you with that impression.]

Even allowing for excesses of political rhetoric, such comments are way over extreme. …

For Gore to make his anti-American remarks in Saudi Arabia is at least as bad as what Nazi sympathizers said in this country and abroad leading up to and during World War II. One definition of “treason” is: Violation of allegiance toward one’s country or sovereign, especially the betrayal of one’s country by waging war against it or by consciously and purposely acting to aid its enemies.

By any objective standard, Al Gore’s remarks in Saudi Arabia appear to fit the definition.