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Hunt for what makes us tick proves a human interest story
By Dick Ahlstrom, Science Editor



Both the secular left and the religious right resist the notion that humans possess an innate "human nature". The idea disturbs long-held believes that the mind of an infant comes as a "blank slate" onto which experience and society make their mark.

Yet this view was undermined by the findings coming out of biological studies of the human mind, according to Prof Steven Pinker, professor of psychology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston.

Prof Pinker discussed the evidence for human nature and arguments against the blank slate last night in Dublin during an Irish Times/Royal Dublin Society Science Today public lecture.

"We all have some idea of human nature and a concept of what makes people tick," he said. We use this understanding in our daily lives, when dealing with children and in education.

There were three typical populist views of human nature, he said. The blank slate idea argued that infants arrived with an untouched mind ready to be moulded by experience and the influence of society.

The idea of a "noble savage" was another view that held that humans started "good" but were inevitably corrupted by the failings of society. He described the third view as "the ghost in the machine", a force exerting influence in our lives. "This is something separate to our body that makes choices under free will."

None of these, however, has held up under the latest scientific findings of how our minds work. "All three have recently been challenged by biological science," he said. "These findings have been incendiary, both the political left and the political right in the US have been upset by them."

He expressed surprise at this however, saying that the evidence for innate human nature was readily available to any parent who noted differences between children and in the universality of human behaviour.

He identified four fears that could motivate resistance to the idea of innate human nature. One was the fear of inequality, typified by those who would argue that if we did not all start as a blank slate then we must start different, opening the way towards race or sex discrimination.

The second he describes as the fear of "imperfectability", the notion that we may be born with a dark side that cannot be corrected by experience or society.

The third is "determinism", that if our brains were hard-wired for human nature then our actions are not our own.

The fourth is "nihilism", he said. It is typified by the notion that our love for children or others is simply a chemical process without meaning.

"Even if evolution is a selfish amoral process, there is nothing to prevent a selfish amoral process from delivering a generous, moral being," he stated. "Just because our genes are selfish doesn't mean we are selfish."

[n2gun]

Eggy
Thanks for sharing that one. It really makes a person wonder just how much we really know about the Human Species. It is interesting to note the things they said where bad for us 20 years ago are good for us now(sometimes in moderation).

[eggplant43]

The foxes guarding democracy's henhouse
Remember the McCain-Feingold campaign reform bill? The ideologues who control the Federal Election Commission are gutting it.

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By Robert Capps



Sept. 27, 2002 | It's no secret that Bradley Smith opposes almost any effort by the federal government to regulate campaign finances. He's written, spoken and testified before Congress on his belief that campaign finance laws unconstitutionally restrict speech, help incumbents while hurting challengers and generally cause more problems than they solve. He has even written a book titled "Unfree Speech: The Folly of Campaign Reform."

After arguing for years that election reform laws should be repealed, the former law professor today finds himself in a curious position: He is a member of the Federal Election Commission, charged with enforcing the U.S. campaign finance laws that he has long opposed. And with a majority of his colleagues on the six-member panel, he appears to be working to systematically undermine the McCain-Feingold campaign reform law, which was supposed to impose dramatic new limits on the power of "soft money" in American campaigns.

Smith and the other commissioners in his camp say they are simply writing the rules required to make the law's definitions precise, resistant to court challenges and discouraging to frivolous or politically motivated attacks. But after a series of controversial votes last June -- and with a new rule-making session just beginning at commission headquarters in Washington -- critics say the commissioners have adopted a set of regulations with such narrow definitions and significant exemptions that the soft money floodgate will remain open, or at the very least, easy to circumvent.

Sen. John McCain and the other sponsors have blasted the FEC's interpretation of the law, charging that the commissioners have ignored the will of Congress and exceeded their authority. "Their conduct has been the most disgraceful I've seen in 20 years in Congress," McCain, an Arizona Republican, told Salon. "They're clearly violating both the intent and the letter of the law. They say they are writing their regulations on the basis of constitutionality. That's not their job. That's the job of the courts."

Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wis., expressed similar frustration in a statement to Salon. "With its eyes wide open and in the face of strong criticism from both the sponsors of the law and groups that support it, the FEC has opened loopholes in the new law before it even takes effect," he complained. "This is not a legitimate exercise of regulatory authority and something must be done about it."

For years, critics across the political spectrum have warned with increasing urgency that hundreds of millions of dollars in unregulated "soft money" was corrupting the political process, allowing free-spending special interests to buy access and influence with lawmakers that other people or groups could never match. McCain-Feingold was intended to help purify the process by clamping down on the riches that get funneled to political parties and political action committees every election cycle.

While McCain and his allies may be dismayed by the commission's actions, they shouldn't be surprised. According to a Salon investigation, the commission has been criticized almost since its inception in 1974 as a poorly camouflaged tool of the two major political parties. Critics derisively call it the Failure to Enforce Commission, or, more simply, FECkless. In a two-year study released this May, a task force of public policy specialists, former commission officials and legal experts found the agency so flawed that they recommended it be scrapped and replaced with something less political and, presumably, more functional.

Now, to the chagrin of critics, this little-known but high-powered agency is slamming headlong into the most sweeping campaign finance law in almost 30 years. This week, the commission turned its attention to revising rules for political advertising -- a process which, critics say, will likely mean finding a way to continue the abuses that plague campaign advertising in federal elections.

"If there's one thing the FEC has done over its lifetime, it's protect the political parties," says Paul Sanford, a former commission attorney and current head of FECWatch, an oversight group run by the nonpartisan Center For Responsive Politics, a nonprofit based in Washington.

To be sure, groups ranging from the Republican National Committee, the National Rifle Association and antiabortion groups to the AFL-CIO and the American Civil Liberties Union have filed suit over various provisions of the bill. And the commission itself defies easy partisan breakdown -- two veteran commissioners appointed by President Reagan, the conservative Republican icon, are the strongest reform advocates on the panel.

But the majority of FEC commissioners today are political ideologues or party insiders who often appear more intent on catering to the parties' interests -- and the interests of big money -- than in protecting the public's interest in having fair and honest elections. At least four of the commissioners -- Chairman David Mason, Vice Chairman Karl Sandstrom, Smith, and Michael Toner -- have expressed opposition to current campaign finance law. And three of them -- Mason, Smith and Toner -- openly opposed the bill as it moved through Congress. Only the Reagan holdovers, Danny McDonald and Scott Thomas, seem to support the laws they are responsible for enforcing.

But if the will of the membership seems to contradict the spirit of federal campaign laws, critics say, that may be by design. Fred Wertheimer, executive director of the watchdog group Democracy 21, says the problem is simple: The commission was supposed to be a paper tiger, and it is. The members, who are paid a set income of $130,000 a year, are chosen by the same politicians they are supposed to regulate. Commissioners like Smith are selected for their ability to soften the campaign laws and preserve the parties' power, Wertheimer says, not for their ability to aggressively enforce the law.

"You don't have people with enforcement backgrounds being appointed," Wertheimer says. "You don't have people who come from state ethics agencies or other ethics backgrounds appointed to this commission. You have people who are sent there with an implicit if not explicit mandate to protect the members of Congress and the political parties who sent them there."

Reformers had been pushing federal lawmakers since the early years of the 20th century to regulate campaign spending and practices, but with little effect. That changed with the 1971 Federal Election Campaign Act, the law that sets campaign contribution limits and requires timely contribution disclosures from federal candidates.

The law was amended after the Watergate scandals in 1974, giving birth to the Federal Election Commission, which is charged with investigating campaign abuses and, when it finds violations, either seeking fines or recommending that the Justice Department pursue criminal investigations. Under the law, the commission is the only body allowed to file suit against federal campaigns.

The concept of "soft money" was born in 1978, when the commission issued an opinion that allowed state political party activities affecting both state and federal races to be paid for with a mix of regulated and unregulated funds. A year later, the commission cleared the way for the national parties to raise unregulated funds for similar mixed state-and-federal campaign activities. Enron, for example, would be allowed to give millions to various state or national party committees and not have the donations be covered by the strict federal donation limits that presidential campaigns are subject to. These party committees can then spend the money on advertising, facilities, get-out-the-vote drives or other activities that end up benefiting the party's presidential candidate.

"Gradually," says Commissioner Thomas, "the party committees figured out that, hey, you've got a lot of states where you can give an unlimited amount to a party committee. Corporations can give, unions can give ... Very influential federal legislators got involved in raising the soft money and it became suddenly a real players' game, with huge amounts of money coming in. And the FEC, stemming from that 1978 decision, is largely responsible for getting it going." Later, Thomas says, Congress reinforced this game with legislation that officially sanctioned such activities.

According to the campaign watchdog group Common Cause, during the first 18 months of the current election cycle, national parties raised over $300 million in soft money. That is an 18 percent increase over the amount raised in the first 18 months of the 2000 election cycle (a presidential cycle) and nearly three times the amount raised in the last comparable election four years ago, according to the group.

Critics identified problems in the system years ago, but early efforts to reform the commission were undermined in Congress. The commission originally had been structured to avoid partisan enforcement actions. No more than three of the six commissioners could be from any one party, and a four-vote minimum was required for any commission action. At first, the president was given two appointments, with two going to the majority leadership in Congress and two others to the minority leadership.

In 1976, the Supreme Court ruled that the process violated presidential appointment powers. Because the Federal Election Commission has the power to administer and enforce the law, the court ruled, commissioners are officers of the United States, similar to top executives at the FBI or the Securities and Exchange Commission. Therefore, the court said, the election commissioners have to be nominated by the president. Congress then restructured the appointment process to a more traditional formula in which the president made the appointments and Congress approved them. Practically, though, little changed. The president usually defers to congressional leadership for four of the seats, and Congress has been known to retaliate if the process doesn't run smoothly.

Commissioner Bradley Smith is a contemporary case in point.

Smith, a law professor, had written numerous articles against campaign finance regulation and reform in journals and newspaper editorials, and found himself a favorite witness of reform opponents on Capitol Hill, most of them conservative Republicans. Eventually, Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., approached Smith about an appointment to the commission. McConnell is among the most outspoken critics of campaign finance reform in Congress, and has already filed a lawsuit attacking McCain-Feingold as unconstitutional.

Mississippi Republican Sen. Trent Lott, then the majority leader, sent Smith's name to President Clinton for appointment. Clinton initially balked at putting such a strong critic of campaign finance regulation on the commission, but when Lott delayed the confirmation of Clinton's choice for U.N. ambassador, Richard Holbrooke, and threatened several judicial appointees, the president relented.

Clinton thereby found himself in the odd position of simultaneously nominating and disparaging Smith. "I don't like it," Clinton told reporters in a 2000 news conference covered by the Associated Press. "But I decided that I should not shut down the whole appointments process and depart from the plain intent of the law, which requires that [the commission] be bipartisan and, by all tradition, that the majority make the nomination."

Wertheimer and his group, Democracy 21, put together a task force of experts in 2000 to study the commission's history and problems. Members of the team came from a range of backgrounds and included experts from such places as the Brookings Institution, Harvard Law School, Common Cause, and one former federal election commissioner. In its findings, the task force detailed a series of spectacular enforcement breakdowns. It also named the politicized nature of the appointment process as a key problem.

While the commission this week announced record fines against players in the 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign for illegally soliciting foreign money, that action may have been a cover for mounting attacks against its leniency. Critics say such enforcement is the exception and not the rule.

One of the more serious debacles took place when the commission investigated both the Clinton-Gore and Dole-Kemp presidential campaigns' use of television advertising in the 1996 campaign cycle. The commission's general counsel found that both campaigns had run ads illegally coordinated between the candidates and the political parties, which had been paid for with soft money. The Clinton-Gore camp alone used over $47 million in illegally coordinated campaign ads, according to the report. Despite strong evidence of wrongdoing, and the recommendations of its own staff, the commission failed to pursue charges against either campaign. Even a fine, critics point out, would have discouraged such illegal coordination in the future.

"Those kinds of things involve enough spending that it really could have impacted the election result," says Thomas, who voted in favor of enforcement. "And yet the commission ... did nothing."

Even as the Democracy 21 investigators were at work, ambitious bipartisan measures to overhaul the system were being advanced in Congress by Sens. McCain and Feingold and by Reps. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., and Martin Meehan, D-Mass. McCain and Feingold waged an epic seven-year battle to get their landmark campaign finance reform bill past fervent opposition. In late March, the supporters outmaneuvered the opponents for a final time, winning legislative approval for a bill formally known as the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act. Public support for the measure was so strong that President Bush was compelled to sign it into law despite his earlier opposition.

The main thrust of the measure was to choke off soft money. The bill prohibits federal candidates and national parties from raising or spending soft money, even for state party activities. The president, for example, is prohibited from asking rich donors to give contributions over $25,000 to state party committees. Additionally, the law puts a check on state party usage of soft money to influence federal elections -- money used for advertising mentioning a candidate, or get-out-the-vote drives, for example. The bill also places new restrictions on the kind of advertising that can be done by special interest groups close to an election. The bill has other provisions, such as raising the maximum individual restriction limits and further tightening restrictions on foreign donors, but the heart of the law is its attack on large, unregulated contributions.

But while a legal challenge was inevitable, a challenge from the Federal Election Commission was predictable, too. The bloc of four reform opponents was in place and they were facing their biggest challenge -- and a cursory review of their résumés makes clear that even Bush's signature was no guarantee that the law would be put into effect.


Bradley Smith has never been a Republican activist, but as a professor at Capital University Law School in Columbus, Ohio, he gained notice in Washington for his frequent articles blasting campaign finance reform. McConnell views his recruit as an ideal choice for the commission.

"Professor Smith is a First Amendment scholar and the most qualified commissioner in the history of the Federal Election Commission," McConnell said in a prepared statement. "His constitutional expertise is particularly needed at an FEC that has a dismal string of losses in federal court. I believe the FEC needs at least one commissioner who understands the First Amendment and respects Supreme Court precedent."

Smith sees himself as a civil libertarian pulling for the underdog. In his view, campaign finance regulation restricts speech, is vulnerable to loopholes and helps incumbents at the expense of challengers. In a commentary written for the Wall Street Journal in March 2001, after his appointment, Smith accused McCain and Feingold of a cynical ploy to silence critics with their bill's advertising restrictions.

Contrary to the findings of Democracy 21, Smith, like McConnell, says the commission has been too aggressive in the past, venturing into areas where it has repeatedly been struck down by the courts.

"I certainly wasn't chosen for my partisanship," he says. "I was selected because there was a great number of people in Congress who I think represent a great many people in this country who felt this commission had gone the wrong direction and needed a voice that would pull it back to the center."


FEC Chairman David Mason was deeply involved in the Republican Party prior to his 1998 appointment. He served in both Ronald Reagan's and former President George H.W. Bush's defense departments, and has served on the staffs of several House and Senate members, all Republicans. He ran for the Virginia House of Delegates on the Republican ticket in 1982, but lost.

In a report for the conservative Heritage Foundation titled "Why Congress Can't Ban Soft Money," Mason made his objection clear: "Congress should recall that existing practices are direct responses to previous attempts to regulate political activity. As 'hard money' (direct expenditures on campaigns) was limited and regulated, activists simply changed tactics ... The real solution to the problem of soft money lies in minimizing, not expanding, government controls."

Mason did not return calls for comment.


Michael Toner is the most recent commission appointee, taking the post during a congressional recess in March -- two days after Bush signed McCain-Feingold. Toner's choice represented a slight departure from the traditional appointment process, in that Bush chose him rather than support the Republican congressional choice, former commissioner Daryl Wold. But critics were hardly relieved by Bush's break from tradition. Like Smith and Mason, Toner has denounced campaign finance reform, though not as often or with as much furor. And he is much closer to the Republican Party apparatus.

Immediately before his appointment, Toner was general counsel at the Republican National Committee, which soon would file suit to overturn the reform law. Before that, he was general counsel on the Bush-Cheney presidential campaign. He also worked as a counsel to the Dole-Kemp ticket in 1996.

It was during his time with the Republican National Committee that Toner publicly opposed the McCain-Feingold bill. "Democrats are driving legislation that will put a stake through the heart of grass-roots and voter-education initiatives," he told the Associated Press in July 2001.

Like Smith and Mason, Toner has issued assurances that his views of campaign finance, and his relationship with the Republican Party, will not unduly influence his actions on the commission. In fact, Toner said in an interview that his involvement with the GOP is an asset to the commission.

"I think my having worked in the trenches, advising candidates, political staff, the RNC -- people who've had to deal with all these regulations -- about what they need to do [is] a healthy and positive perspective," he says. "You've got to tell people what they can and cannot do. The rules have got to be made as clear as possible."


Democrat Karl Sandstrom was appointed in 1998. Before that he was chairman of the Administrative Review Board at the Department of Labor and served on the Subcommittee on Elections in the Democrat-controlled House during the late '80s and early '90s. He doesn't have the ideological baggage that his Republican counterparts do, but he has largely voted like them, shying away from strong enforcement action, refusing to pursue action in the Clinton and Dole television ad fiascos and asserting himself to water down McCain-Feingold.

Sandstrom's actions seem to stem from a belief that attempts at campaign finance regulation are so complicated that enforcing them is often impossible. His common refrain is that laws need to be made clear and "concrete" before they can be enforced.

"Before we can enforce the law the public must be made aware of what the law is," he said in a recent interview. "People active in politics are [sometimes] uncertain as to what the rules are. That is not a healthy situation. Either people proceed at some risk or they do not engage in political activity because they are fearful they might violate an uncertain standard."


The cautious approach and the narrow interpretations are frustrating -- sometimes maddening -- to their two colleagues, Scott Thomas and Danny McDonald. Both, surprisingly, were appointed by President Reagan, and both have been bluntly critical of the majority.

"I view my role as primarily trying to give my colleagues the courage to enforce the law as Congress intended," Thomas said in an interview. "At least from my perspective, commissioners are spending too much time trying to figure out ways not enforce the law, or to enforce it in a way that is focused only on rather insignificant little cases, and finding ways to drop the big cases."

Between now and year's end, the commissioners will preside over a complex process in which the rules of campaign finance reform will be drafted, studied, subjected to public hearings, reviewed, amended and then approved in a public vote. Thus far, only the rules on soft money have been reviewed and approved by the commissioners, but in that process, critics see a grim harbinger of things to come.

Initial drafts by the commission staff provoked only modest debate, and most controversies seemed to be quelled by the last proposed draft. But in the final session, spread over four days in June, the commissioners introduced and approved a set of amendments to the draft regulations that bloodied the law. "Watching the final soft money rule-making was like watching a stock market crash from the trading floor," says Paul Sanford of FECWatch.

The meeting was held in the Federal Election Commission's public hearing room in Washington, a room packed with commissioners, lawyers, staffers and an audience of more than 100. Those who attended watched a lesson in how fine-print changes in the law -- seemingly insignificant -- had the effect of a counterrevolution.

As drafted, the rules blocked federal candidates from raising or directing soft money, prevented national political parties or organizations related to them from doing the same, and generally curbed soft money's influence on federal elections. But scores of amendments were introduced, one at a time, each weakening the law, and many passing by the same 4-2 vote.

When the commissioners tried to settle on what it meant to "solicit" donations, the commissioners' general counsel, Larry Norton, offered a common-sense approach: Solicit means to "request, suggest or recommend" that a donation be made. Sandstrom flatly rejected that language, asserting instead that "solicit" means a candidate must explicitly "ask" for a donation. Norton shot back: "It doesn't seem to me to take a great deal of cleverness to ... persuade a person to make a contribution, without coming out and asking. I think this definition has the potential for great mischief."

The reform opponents mustered four votes to pass the amendment.

In its effort to stop national political parties from using shell organizations to get around the new law, McCain-Feingold states that such organizations, when created or run by the parties, would also be covered under the law. But Toner moved to open a potentially huge loophole: Any organization created before the law took effect Nov. 6 would be exempt, as long as it was no longer controlled by the party after that date.

Again, the reformers were incredulous. "[The FEC] will allow the parties to set up these organizations, and perhaps provide them with some funding, and then after November these groups can operate however they like, and they're not subject to the same soft money restrictions that apply to the parties themselves," Sanford says. "The rules are a recipe for them to do this. It's a big, giant sign in 6-foot letters that says: 'Do this.' And they've painted it on the Capitol dome. If party committees aren't doing this, they need to have their eyes checked."

And Sanford appears to be correct. The Washington Post reported just weeks after the meeting that the national parties were already moving to set up soft money shell organizations for use after November.

Toner counters that it's ridiculous to hold someone accountable under a law for things they do before the law takes effect. "What basically developed was a concern that people would be prosecuted next year for conduct that they're doing now that is legal under current law," Toner says. "If you're going to have a transition period, than what you're doing now, if it's legal under current law, should have no bearing on if it's legal next year."

When the June rule-making session was finished, campaign finance advocates were outraged. "You have so tortured this law, it's beyond silly," Commissioner Thomas, one of the Reagan-era veterans, told his colleagues. McCain and the bill's other sponsors agreed, and they blasted the commission's actions.

"The Federal Election Commission has taken upon itself the task of rewriting the newly passed McCain-Feingold/Shays-Meehan bill," the four said in a joint press release the day after the rules were issued. "This is not a role given to the FEC by Congress, or by the Constitution ... Many of the amendments adopted in the past two days simply ignore the law. They show that a majority of the FEC is willing to flout congressional intent and substitute its own policy preferences. The country deserves better, especially from an unelected body."

Despite such a dressing-down by the congressmen who created the bill, the four commissioners who rewrote it were unapologetic. "They don't understand the regulations that they're criticizing," Smith says of the sponsors. "At times they either don't understand their own bill, or they're trying to get the commission to do things that they didn't think they could put in their bill and get it through Congress."

Thomas disagrees. "I'd be happy to sit down with anybody at any time, and take the provisions of the statute and the legislative history and the comments we got, and show how the approach that my colleagues took doesn't coincide with the language or intent or the legislative history," Thomas says. "In virtually every occasion when that kind of an issue came up, four commissioners took the position that was: 'Let's interpret the law in a way that will allow more of the soft money to come in and continue.'"

McCain and the other sponsors will likely file a resolution in Congress seeking to have the rules overturned. They have also said that they are considering filing a legal action against the commission. But both avenues will be difficult at best. The resolution would need approval in both houses of Congress and would have to be signed by the president. A lawsuit will have to prove that the rules were "arbitrary and capricious," a standard that campaign finance advocates say can be achieved, but only after a long detour through the courts.

And even as McCain and the other sponsors pursue these efforts, the commission is likely to chip away at the law in different areas as it continues in the five other rule-making sessions that are likely to last until the end of the year. So far, the draft rules in areas like advertising appear to be far less controversial than the final soft money rules, but critics are mindful that most of the objectionable changes on soft money rules came at the last minute.

There is one bright light on the horizon for Sanford and other reform proponents: Sandstrom is set to be replaced in October by Ellen Weintraub, a former counsel to the House Ethics Committee and the wife of Feingold's legislative staff director; that change will almost certainly alter the balance of power. Bush approved the nomination only after McCain threatened to vote against Bush's judicial nominees.

Far from solving the commission's problems, however, the change may only result in gridlock. Many critics insist that the only way to really solve the problems of the Federal Election Commission is to disband it. The Democracy 21 task force recommended replacing the commissioners with a single, long-term administrator. That, the authors said, would force the president and Congress to appoint an executive who is more powerful and less partisan.

McCain says he may pursue some type of restructuring of the agency, in hopes that one day the campaign reform law will become what it was intended to be. "It took Russ [Feingold] and I seven years to get this law passed," he says, "and we're not going to quit. It may take another seven years to get it enforced properly, but we'll win over time."


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About the writer
Robert Capps is a fellow in investigative reporting at Salon.

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September 28, 2002
The Jack Welch War Plan
By FRANK RICH


ou had to sympathize with poor Tom Daschle when he erupted on the floor of the Senate this week. After months of playing Clark Kent to George W. Bush's Superman, the guy looked as if he were about to become unhinged.

Sure, the majority leader had a valid point. The president was wrong to say that the Democrat-controlled Senate is "not interested in the security of the American people" when everyone knows that Democrats care every bit as much about our security as Republicans do, patriotically ranking it second in importance only to their own job security. But Mr. Daschle's real frustration is his inability to change the subject of the national conversation. As the election nears, the Democrats want to talk about the economy, and every time they try, Mr. Bush drowns it out with "Iraq," a word so overpowering it can make grown Americans forget that their pensions are in the toilet.

What Mr. Daschle and the rest of his incoherent party have failed to articulate (along with so much else) is that this presidency is all of one consistent piece, whether it is managing our money or managing a war. Now, as pre-9/11, it reflects the C.E.O. ethos of the 1990's bubble at least as abundantly as the previous administration did the promiscuous 1960's. Two weeks before his inauguration, Mr. Bush invited Jack Welch, Ken Lay and a bevy of C.E.O.'s down to Texas, and he has always run the White House by the cardinal rules in their playbook. A chief executive can do no wrong. The directors (for which read Republicans in Congress) and outside directors (that would be the Democrats) are expected to give him a blank check and question nothing, including the accounting, while the grateful shareholders (the benighted voters) watch their portfolios bulge.

Now that we know that this model was a sham, with even Mr. Welch's General Electric under scrutiny for fiscal sleight of hand, you would think the Bush administration might revisit it. But instead it is following a discredited modus operandi more slavishly than ever, even as it prepares to fight a new war. "There is a fine line between arrogance and self-confidence," said Mr. Welch in "Jack: Straight From the Gut," his Bushian-titled memoir. "Arrogance is a killer." Mr. Bush and the C.E.O.'s around him seem as oblivious to this maxim as the C.E.O. who coined it.

The "fuzzy math" of this White House's tax cut and budget projections, chronicled by my colleague Paul Krugman from the start, is compounded daily rather than corrected. When we poor shareholders worry too loudly about our growing economic pain, the administration's antidote to our woes is not more honesty in bookkeeping but Ken Lay-style cheerleading. This month Mr. Bush's S.E.C. chief, Harvey Pitt, went so far as to tell Americans it is "more than safe" to get back in the market — as the Dow plummeted for its sixth consecutive month. It's the same pitch Mr. Lay offered his employees in an e-mail — "I want to assure you that I have never felt better about the prospects for the company" — on the day Jeffrey Skilling resigned as chief executive in anticipation of Enron's collapse.

But this administration no longer cooks the books merely on fiscal matters. Disinformation has become ubiquitous, even in the government's allegedly empirical scientific data on public health. The annual federal report on air pollution trends published this month simply eliminated its usual (and no doubt troubling) section on global warming, much as accountants at Andersen might have cleaned up a balance sheet by hiding an unprofitable division. At the Department of Health and Human Services, The Washington Post reported last week, expert committees are being "retired" before they can present data that might contradict the president's views on medical matters — much as naysaying Wall Street analysts were sidelined in favor of boosters who could be counted on to flog dogs like WorldCom or Pets.com right until they imploded.

It's when such dishonesty extends to the war on terrorism, though, that you appreciate just how much a killer arrogance can be. Even with little White House cooperation in its inquiry, this month's Congressional intelligence hearings presented a chilling portrait of the administration's efforts to cover up its pre-9/11 lassitude about terrorist threats. Exhibit A was Condoleezza Rice's pronouncement from last May: "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center . . . that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile." In fact, the committee reported, U.S. intelligence had picked up a dozen plots of a similar sort, over a period from 1994 to pre-9/11 2001, with some of them specifically mentioning the World Trade Center and the White House as potential targets. In the weeks before the attack the C.I.A. learned that in Afghanistan "everyone is talking about an impending attack."

The past cannot be undone, and the intelligence committee found no smoking gun to suggest that the administration could have prevented the horror. But as we ready our own attack on Saddam Hussein, that's not the issue. What we need to know now is if any of these catastrophic failings in preparedness have been corrected in the year-plus since. The Congressional report says that Al Qaeda learns from its mistakes, flexibly adjusting its organization and plans. Do we?

While the administration says yes, the factual backup is again fuzzy. Certainly it's hard to be reassured by anything said or done by John Ashcroft, who in May 2001 testified to the Senate that "our No. 1 goal is the prevention of terrorist acts." We now know that he was just putting us on. On Sept. 10, 2001, he refused a F.B.I. budget request to add 149 field agents, 200 analysts and 54 translators to its counterterrorism effort. He did so despite the fact, unearthed by Congressional investigators, that the F.B.I. then had only one analyst monitoring Al Qaeda.

The attorney general drives liberals crazy with his assaults on civil liberties, but we do have courts to sort that out (as they are already doing). What's truly frightening about Mr. Ashcroft is his incompetence. Even as we learned this week that the Justice Department's prosecutors are so sloppy that they mistakenly turned over 48 classified F.B.I. reports to Zacarias Moussaoui, Seymour Hersh reported in The New Yorker that the attorney general may have blown our chance to get useful Qaeda information out of Mr. Moussaoui by mismanaging his prosecution.

Nor is there any evidence that our intelligence operations have been repaired over the past year. Coordination between the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. remains so spotty that as of the 9/11 anniversary Congress still had not received an updated, cross-agency accounting of Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological arms capabilities. The administration's conflicting accounts of Saddam Hussein's nuclear prowess and his alleged links to Al Qaeda change by the day. "The dots are there for all to connect," said Donald Rumsfeld last week; this week Ms. Rice's spokeswoman said: "Have we connected those dots? No."

Is our information about other, possibly even graver terrorist threats just as slipshod? Like it or not, we have a new, pre-emptive defense policy built on the principle that we strike the bad guys before they hit us. But how can it be executed if our intelligence is too inconsistent to determine which bad guys are first on the horizon? As Hezbollah militants mobilize in Lebanon and non-fuzzy math suggests that more Qaeda operatives are in Iran than Iraq, we have chosen a first-strike target, however thuggish, that may be tangential to the stateless, itinerant Islamic terrorism of the youthful Mohamed Atta generation.


But there's no point in debating that now. We are already on our way to Baghdad. It's our C.E.O.'s choice as the most profitable target for the next fiscal year, and we are assured that it will go better than some other C.E.O. pet projects, like Dick Cheney's "win-win" Halliburton-Dresser merger. What's more, it is cost free: the chief White House economic adviser, Lawrence Lindsey, said it won't even dent that fine economy the president keeps telling us he is so optimistic about. Maybe there will be some price in blood, but the battle plans leaked daily from the Pentagon never seem to offer any casualty projections, reassuringly enough.

Mr. Daschle and his fellow outside directors, meanwhile, have their own politically profitable business plan, to be executed as soon as they sign off on the war resolution. They will be all too happy to let Al Gore worry about Iraq in San Francisco, or wherever he is, while they whip up election-eve fears about something truly scary, like Social Security.

[Rep]

Sept. 28, 2002, 7:00PM

Shame, shame, shame, shame, shame...
By CRAGG HINES
Copyright 2002 Houston Chronicle
While President Bush is playing fast and loose with the politics of the war on terror, he should consider that were it not for Sept. 11 his administration and its Republican friends on Capitol Hill likely would be deep in the tank and about to go down for the third time. Or, more likely, Bush (or Karl Rove) has thought of that. And the realization led the president into his sorry enterprise of declaring that the Democratically controlled Senate is "not interested in the security of the American people."

Without the veneer of national solidarity produced by the attacks, most Americans rightly would be focused on the flaccid economy and thinking that Bush was a fiscal doofus and corporate crony who should be hitting the road and taking Trent Lott and Tom DeLay with him.

The war has saved their skins, and Bush's implicit suggestion that he and other Republicans are morally superior to Democrats in the fight against Osama bin Laden and even Saddam Hussein is egregious and sickening -- not to mention baseless.

Bush's success in the fight against bin Laden is modest enough and his mooted battle with Saddam, although well founded, is tricky enough that there is no room for his chest-thumping commentary that grows more urgent as mid-term elections approach.

The White House and its supporters said Bush's most overt criticism (at a fund-raising appearance for a Republican candidate in New Jersey on Monday) was limited to differences over the legislation to create the Homeland Security Department and did not extend to varying positions regarding war against Saddam Hussein. That doesn't make the president's comment any more palatable or correct.

Nor does it answer for the drumbeat of similar Republican commentary recently. Bush & Co. clearly want to foster the impression that Democrats in Washington are less interested in national security. He's been venturing near the point for weeks, most regularly in frequent partisan appearances.

It's surprising that Democrats, who rarely are so high-minded when it comes to political slights, waited this long for a high-level response such as that made Wednesday by Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. He properly set the stage, recounting some of the numerous times that White House officials and operatives have shown their hand.

Daschle began with the words of Bush pollster Matthew Dowd: "The No. 1 driver for our base motivationally is the war." Daschle ranged on through other instances, including the White House diskette on which Rove advised Republican campaigners: "Focus on the war." (Well, I guess it's understandable that he wouldn't want them to focus on the fact that the proportion of Americans living in poverty increased last year for the first time in a decade and that median household incomes fell last year 2.2 percent from 2000.)

Daschle also referred to campaigning by Vice President Dick Cheney in Kansas, on the same day that Bush was in New Jersey. Cheney said the election of a Republican U.S. House candidate would aid "in terms of winning the war on terror ... and defending our homeland."

The remark is virtually indefensible, and certainly so given the moderate record of the Democratic incumbent. But that doesn't mean that White House spokesman Ari Fleischer did not attempt a defense, calling the vice president's comment a "totally innocuous quote." No, Ari. Words have meaning, and the meaning of Cheney's are clear and disgusting.

Daschle said he had tried to think this was not the president, himself, attempting to politicize the war on terrorism. Then came Bush's appearance in New Jersey. Daschle said the approach, capped by Bush's word, was

"outrageous." He is correct. And that it "has to end." Amen.

Bush's happy-talk attempt to paper over the issue in a Rose Garden appearance with lawmakers of both parties on Thursday was short of the apology that Democrats requested and are due. In light of his politicized rhetoric on the campaign trail, Bush's unctuous claim that he and the Congress could soon "speak with one voice" on the need to oust Saddam verges on the galling.

Placing the war on terror at the heart of the Republican campaign, as House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt said, "will destroy our ability to get a consensus about these important issues." It will also increase the attractiveness to some Democrats of unnecessarily postponing a vote on a congressional resolution until after the Nov. 5 election.

That probably will not happen, nor should it, but Bush would have no one to blame but himself (and Cheney and Rove et al).

Hines is a Houston Chronicle columnist based in Washington, D.C. cragg.hines@chron.com

[eggplant43]

WHAT'S THE difference between a terrorist and a peace activist?

One uses violence to terrorize a civilian population; the other exercises our constitutional right to dissent from government policy.

The question is, does our government understand the difference?

As part of last year's Aviation and Transportation Security Act, Congress ordered the creation of a "watch list" of persons who could be stopped from entering an airplane. In the aftermath of Sept. 11, this was a reasonable response to the fact that two of the hijackers had used their real names.

Since then, according to a recent Chronicle report, a number of peace activists have also been detained at airports. Last November, the National Guard prevented a Green Party USA official from flying from Maine to Chicago where she planned to speak about the use of pesticides as war weapons. In April, airport authorities detained a group of 20 Wisconsin anti-war activists,

including a 74-year-old Catholic nun, who planned to meet with their congressional representatives. In August, police questioned two San Franciscan activists who are co-founders of War Times, an anti-war publication.

What's so disturbing about these incidents is that neither The Chronicle nor these activists has been able to discover who maintains the secret "no fly" list to which many federal agencies contribute. Although the FBI told The Chronicle that the Transportation Security Administration keeps the list, the agency denies it.

In May, Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., asked FBI Director Robert Mueller whether the agency provides the names of people who have dissented from the federal government to this list. Mueller responded, "We would never put a person on the watch list solely because they sought to express their First Amendment rights."

Civil rights advocates are concerned that the government may be targeting peace activists as threats to "civil aviation or national security." Since the database of names is so widely shared throughout the government, there is, as ACLU attorney Jayashri Srikantiah told The Chronicle, "a large potential for abuse." Some activists even wonder if the government has resurrected the types of lists of anti-war protestors that were compiled by the FBI during the Vietnam era.

It's possible, of course, that bureaucratic bumbling can explain why peace activists have been detained at airports. But we'd feel better if our senators and representatives seek answers to these questions: Who keeps this list and how is public accountability assured?

Only when these questions have been answered will we feel confident that civil rights are not being sacrificed in the name of protecting freedom.

[eggplant43]

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

September 30, 2002
For Giuliani, Few Shades of Gray
By JOYCE PURNICK


It is the certainty that is so striking. In his new book, "Leadership," Rudolph W. Giuliani sounds so free of self-doubt that despite the book's mild tone, it will remind readers of the willful years of the Giuliani mayoralty, when there were few shades of gray.

In his book, just as in City Hall, the former mayor gives little credit to the role the booming economy must have played in the city's impressive reduction in crime, for example, ascribing his greatest successes to his crime-fighting strategies.

And in a similar vein, in the book and in related interviews, Mr. Giuliani takes direct issue with criticism that his administration was not as well prepared for the attack of Sept. 11 as it could have been. The book begins with a compelling chapter on the attack — a restrained, suspenseful account that is very much the former mayor's version of events.

His leadership in the face of an attack of unimagined scope made him an international hero. Thousands of lives were saved; the city stood.

But the praise of New York has been leavened in recent months with questions about its preparedness for a major emergency — criticism that strikes at the heart of Mr. Giuliani's most fundamental qualities of leadership.

An independent consultant, investigations by The New York Times and department interviews with firefighters have painted a parallel picture of a disorganized emergency response, bad communications between the Fire and Police Departments — traditional rivals — and sporadic radio communication within the Fire Department. The disturbing question underlying all of this is whether some firefighters who died that day could have lived.

The former mayor is having none of it. He disagrees with most of the critical findings, and faults the consultant, McKinsey & Company, for failing to interview him, contending he coordinated the rescue.

That failure is baffling, but does not undermine many findings.

For example, after the south tower collapsed, a police helicopter reported that the north tower was in danger of collapsing as well. That is not in dispute, nor is it in dispute that the helicopter report did not get to firefighters, or that some people in the north tower did not know that the south tower had fallen.

The Times has reported that more than 100 firefighters who might have saved themselves died, seemingly unaware of the imminent danger, according to civilians who saw them.

Poor communications with the Police Department and poorly functioning fire radios — a problem going back at least to the 1993 attack on the trade center — have been blamed. Another problem was the selfless but disorganized response of rescue workers, especially firefighters, who rushed to the scene on their own to help, leaving secondary targets, and potential victims of other emergencies, vulnerable. Secondary targets were covered, argues the former mayor.

The police helicopter saw the north tower listing 21 minutes before it collapsed — time for firefighters in the other tower to escape. Many firefighters said in interviews that most of their colleagues in the building did not get the final message that was sent to police officers to evacuate.

"We know that many firefighters received the order to evacuate," Mr. Giuliani said in an interview last week. "We believe that some didn't. But we don't know that."


MR. GIULIANI said he was persuaded that some firefighters knew the danger but refused to leave the building. If they had left, he argues, other lives — lives they saved — would have been lost. He dismisses reports from survivors that some firefighters who never got out were resting on a lower floor, unaware of the impending collapse.

Firefighters, said Mr. Giuliani, "weren't going to abandon their ship. You have to understand the nature of a firefighter. It's like the nature of a Navy captain." People who fight fires for a living, he went on, "are trained to be the last ones to leave a building."

Again, that certainty. How can he — how can anyone — know what men who died that fateful day were thinking?

Mr. Giuliani said that he thought the public believed that the city had done the best it could under the circumstances: "Could you handle a situation like that without mistakes being made? Of course not. But the city was better prepared than any city in the country."

Perhaps. But it appears it could have been even better prepared, and might be in the future, if it addresses its vulnerabilities. That is part of leadership, too.

[eggplant43]

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

You have mail: 31 billion a day

» Nick Farrell , 30-09-2002

Email may grow out of practical control within three years, research from IDC has warned.
The analyst organisation predicts that more than 60 billion emails will be sent every day by 2006. The report, Worldwide Email Usage Forecast, 2002-2006: Know What's Coming Your Way, puts the current daily email count at 31 billion.

The report's author, Mark Levitt - vice president of IDC's Collaborative Computing program - said: "Like water flowing out of a hose, email has the potential to fill our inboxes and workdays, overwhelming our abilities to navigate through the growing currents of content."

He said that firms need to do more to address the continued upsurge, particularly in the volume of spam.

Levitt said that technology to streamlines customers' access to important and time-sensitive email was urgently needed.

Only a more effective means of filtering out spam would "ensure that email continues to be a valuable business and personal communications tool," he said.

"If spam was more actively discouraged there would be more room on the net for legitimate users."

[n2gun]

Oceanside sued by 'street preachers'




Arrests violate civil rights, members of church claim

By Lola Sherman
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

September 18, 2002

OCEANSIDE – A group of self-proclaimed "street preachers," claiming violation of their civil rights, has sued the city of Oceanside for allowing its police officers to arrest them on citizen complaints.

Seven members of West Coast Baptist Church of Vista are seeking an injunction from the federal court in San Diego to stop future arrests.

They also are seeking an undisclosed amount of money in damages.

"The First Amendment protects a person's right to preach on a street corner," but state law also provides for citizen arrests, City Attorney Duane Bennett said.

And that, he said, puts police officers in a quandary when they are faced with a requested arrest by a citizen.

Members of the West Coast church preach, sing and hand out leaflets.

They angered students at Rancho Buena Vista High School in Vista in 2000 by handing out pamphlets that the students decried as anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, anti-Muslim and racist propaganda.

The group, which opposes homosexuality, made its stance known at the annual Gay Pride Parade in Hillcrest.

The Rev. Philip Clark, pastor of the 450-member church, which is independent and not affiliated with any other Baptist organization, said its evangelists have been preaching on Oceanside streets for nearly 30 years.

"When they put them in jail, this is getting a bit ridiculous," Clark said.

Lately, the group has stood in front of the Civic Center at Pier View Way and Coast Highway from 10 a.m. to noon on Saturdays.

The suit says the preachers do not use a megaphone, touch anyone or block pedestrian or car traffic and are at all times peaceful and nonviolent.

It says police, on behalf of Regina Leiss, owner of the Longboarder Cafe across Pier View Way, arrested Joshua D. Beltramo, John D. Ryan, Wayne J. Yasinski and Jose G. Serrano on Aug. 3 and confiscated their Bibles.

They are joined in the suit by the pastor; his son, Andrew Clark; and Scott Dutton. Andrew Clark and Dutton were present at the scene but not jailed.

"The city of Oceanside's ban on plaintiffs from the public fora is not based on core criminal conduct," the suit says. "Rather it is based on local merchants' objection to plaintiffs' expressive activity."

Leiss has declined to comment.

Bruce Green, senior trial attorney with the American Family Association for Law & Policy, which specializes in constitutional litigation and represents the church group, said California uses citizens arrests more than most other states.

"We think it's a very important case," he said.

Green said it already has been decided in court that the "disturbing the peace" law under which the church members have been arrested cannot be applied to limit freedom of speech. He said other standards, such as the decibels of sound emitted, can be set by city anti-noise ordinances, but only if the law is applied fairly to all.

Bennett said cities can impose some regulation of the "time, place and manner" of public speaking.

"It's unfortunate to be in this position," he said.

Bennett said he "worked hard to try to resolve the issues" but was unsuccessful, so now the court will have to decide.

Green said in a phone interview from his office in Tupelo, Miss., that he will set forth in his court reply, which was due yesterday, the theory of a "heckler veto," that no one can silence a person's right to public speech because he does not agree with the content of the message.

"The fact that society may find speech offensive is not a sufficient reason for suppressing it," the suit says, while stating "admittedly, street preaching frequently invites dispute."

Green said Beltramo has been particularly damaged because the arrest could jeopardize his career as a Navy petty officer.




From the thread: Oceanside sued by 'street preachers'
Here here! When I walk down the street I want to enjoy myself, if I want to be preached at I'll go to church thank you.
Posted by: Mayor McCheese

[eggplant43]

An interesting article. I side with the church. I know how obnoxious these folks can get, but see their right to preach as the price we have to pay in order to protect the right of all of us to free speech. I'd be interested in Mulder's take on this.

[n2gun]

Eggy
I was reading where they actually stand at the windows of the Longboearder Restaurant and yell thru the windows at the patrons inside. That is carrying things a little to far. I know I want peace and quiet when I am eating a meal.

[eggplant43]

Well, there is freedom of speech, and there is disturbing the peace. I was responding to the article as written, which did not include this additional information. If I were the restaurant owner, I'd set up a nice little fiberoptic camera, and start documenting.

[JewisHeritage]

Bruce: Why does your post 113 "Threaten TSG's Very Existence"?

What, if any "spam", does TSG generate?

I NEED to know when Mulder replies to my posts!

But, seriously .. Why do you feel this way?

[n2gun]

Eggy
The camera is an excellent idea. It could be used for disturbing the peace charges and also for a civil lawsuit for loss of business. The owner has said he is losing a fair amount of business as people are so upset over this they will not come any more even though they love the restaurant.

[eggplant43]

If the arteries of the Internet become so "clogged" by spam that it affects Internet performance, then legitimate venues like TSG will be negatively affected, since E-mail is such an important aspect of the TSG experience.

In other words. if involvement with each other at TSG becomes a "pain", then people may simply stop their involvement, and voluntary support of the site. That is my reasoning.