Rove Offers Republicans A

Battle Plan For Elections By Dan Balz, Washington Post Staff Writer

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove offered a

biting preview of the 2006 midterm elections yesterday, drawing sharp distinctions with the Democrats over the campaign against

terrorism, tax cuts and judicial philosophy, and describing the opposition party as backward-looking and bereft of ideas.

“At the

core, we are dealing with two parties that have fundamentally different views on national security,” Rove said. “Republicans have a

post-9/11 worldview and many Democrats have a pre-9/11 worldview. That doesn’t make them unpatriotic — not at all. But it does make

them wrong — deeply and profoundly and consistently wrong.” …

Rove used his platform to excoriate Democrats for “wild and

reckless and false charges” against Bush on the issue of domestic spying ….

“Karl Rove only has a White House job and a security

clearance because President Bush has refused to keep his promise to fire anyone involved in revealing the identity of an undercover CIA

operative,” Dean said in a statement. Dean added: “The truth is, Karl Rove breached our national security for partisan gain and that is

both unpatriotic and wrong.”

It was four years ago this week when Rove, appearing at another meeting of the RNC, said Republicans

would make terrorism a central issue of the 2002 midterm elections. Rove’s remarks infuriated Democrats, who protested that, until then,

Bush had stressed bipartisanship and national unity in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Republicans made historic

gains in 2002, and Bush successfully used the issue again to help secure his reelection in 2004, despite growing public

dissatisfaction with the administration’s handling of the war in Iraq. Yesterday’s speeches by Rove and Mehlman signaled that

the White House and the RNC intend to pursue much the same strategy in a midterm-election year that begins with

Republicans on the defensive.

Wanted: Democrats that can

show some spine By Molly Ivins

What kind of courage does it take, for mercy’s sake? The majority of the American people (55

percent) think the war in Iraq is a mistake and that we should get out. The majority (65 percent) of the American people want single-

payer health care and are willing to pay more taxes to get it. The majority (86 percent) of the American people favor raising the minimum

wage. The majority of the American people (60 percent) favor repealing Bush’s tax cuts, or at least those that go only to the rich. The

majority (66 percent) wants to reduce the deficit not by cutting domestic spending, but by reducing Pentagon spending or raising taxes.

The majority (77 percent) thinks we should do ”whatever it takes” to protect the environment. The majority (87 percent)

thinks big oil companies are gouging consumers and would support a windfall profits tax. That is the center, you fools. Who are you

afraid of?

You may have read about BushCo subpoenaing Google to provide

a massive amount of random data — which could include your queries. Kudos to Google for standing up to the Department of Justice. And

brickbats to Yahoo for giving in without a squeak.

Take a look at what all these fine companies are willing to do to work with China and wonder what they won’t do to stay in business in AmeriCo. mjh

Analysis: Google Case Raises New Questions –

Forbes.com By TOM RAUM

Already on the defensive about its domestic spying program, the Bush administration has alarmed privacy

and free-speech advocates by demanding search information from millions of users of Google and other Internet companies.

The

moves raise questions about how far the government should be allowed to go to probe into American homes. The administration is pushing

back hard, defending its surveillance as helping to protect the nation from terrorism and, to a lesser extent, shield minors from

pornography.

Critics see the moves as an unwarranted expansion of presidential authority.

Yahoo China journalist – Yahoo helped Chinese to prosecute

journalist

China’s tangled Web

U.S. companies enable China censorship, critics say
Have U.S.

high-tech giants helped China bring the Internet to heel?

Microsoft Defends Censoring a Dissident’s

Blog in China

First, we simply have corporate welfare going on with the Feds underwriting

the purchase of this technology — along with all the military gear police now use. Second, we have a population growing used to always

being watched — and perfectly fine with that. mjh

Federal Grants Bring

Surveillance Cameras to Small Towns
Village in Vermont Has Almost as Many as D.C.
By David A. Fahrenthold, Washington Post

Staff Writer

This snowy village [of Bellows Falls, Vt. — population 3,050] , in the shadow of Fall Mountain and alongside the

iced-over Connecticut River, is the kind of place where a little of anything usually suffices. There are just eight full-time police

officers on the town’s force, two chairs in the barbershop and one screen in the theater.

A little of anything — except

surveillance cameras. Bellows Falls has decided it needs 16 of those.

Using federal grant money, police plan to put up the

24-hour cameras at such spots as intersections, a sewage plant and the town square. All told, this hamlet will have just three

fewer police surveillance cameras than the District of Columbia, which has 181 times Bellows Falls’s population. …

On

Maryland’s Eastern Shore, for example, Ridgely Police Chief Merl Evans got a homeland security grant, funneled through the state, to pay

for five cameras apiece in Ridgely, population 1,300, and Preston, population 573. The cameras went up on water towers, at water-

treatment plants and in the two small downtowns.

“It was difficult to be able to find something to use the money

for,” said Evans [mjh: because the Congress makes sure you can only spend it on things that enrich their

contributors.], who is also temporary chief in Preston. He said because the grants needed to be used on “target hardening” —

protecting infrastructure — “the cameras fit in real nice.” …

“What you do in

public, you’ve got no expectation of privacy,” said Police Chief Rick Clark.

Note very carefully that

the following story is about detainees in Guantanamo who the military says should never have been incarcerated 5 years ago.

Trapped in limbo at the whim of Duhbya. mjh

Chinese Detainees’ Lawyers Will Take Case to High Court By Carol

D. Leonnig, Washington Post Staff Writer

The government acknowledges that the Uighurs were imprisoned by mistake in 2002. Military

officials determined in 2004 that they were not enemy combatants and should be released. …

Lawyers working on behalf of the

Uighurs argue that Robertson’s decision effectively “proclaims an Executive with unchecked power . . . to seize and perpetually imprison

persons from around the globe.”

“The prospect of innocent men detained indefinitely, and of an Executive wielding powers beyond

those granted to it by the Constitution . . . is simply intolerable,” they wrote. …

The administration has argued in court that

the president can continue to detain the Uighurs under the executive’s “necessary power to wind up wartime detentions in an orderly

fashion.”

The two men at the center of the dispute, Abu Bakker Qassim and Adel Abdu Hakim, were seized by bounty hunters in

Pakistan after they fled U.S. bombing in Afghanistan in the fall of 2001. They were turned over to U.S. forces and taken to Guantanamo

Bay in 2002. A military tribunal formally ruled in the spring of 2004 that they were not enemy combatants and should be released. Their

case could affect as many as nine Uighurs currently held at Guantanamo Bay.

—–

FindLaw: U.S. Constitution: Sixth Amendment

In all

criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury ….

The U.S. Constitution Online