United States News Digest
New York Times Warns Against Computer Voting
"The morning after the 2000 election, Americans woke up to a disturbing realization: Our electoral system was too flawed to say with certainty who had won," noted the Times on Jan. 18. "Three years later, things may actually be worse. If this year's presidential election is at all close, there is every reason to believe that there will be another national trauma over who the rightful winner is, this time compounded by troubling new questions about the reliability of electronic voting machines." As the now-discredited punch-card voting machines are being discarded, the editorial continues, "[T]here has been a shift to electronic voting machines with serious reliability problems of their own." A hacker on the outside, or a malicious programmer on the inside, or purely technical errors, can cause the machines to misrepresent the votes cast.
The editorial reports a number of examples of electronic machines failing, or producing dubious results, and notes correctly that since these machines produce no paper record, there is no way to check the votes cast. The Times supports demands, in some states and in Congress, that these machines be modified to produce a paper trial.
Compounding the problems are the political entanglements of voting machine companies, says the Times, citing the widely reported case of the head of Diebold raising large sums of money for Bush (and Cheney, they should add).
Other aspects of elections which pose threats to democracy, cited by the Times, are:
* Low voter participation, with only 51% of voters participating in the 2000 Presidential elections, being compounded by the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which encourages Florida-style purges of voting rolls and new requirements for voter identification which could turn away potential voters.
*Partisan gerrymandering in redistricting, which has resulted in a situation where only four incumbents were defeated in the 2000 Congressional elections, and where the outcome is in doubt in only about 30 of 435 Congressional districts.
British Commentator: It's the Cheney Administration
"When I visited Washington in the spring of 2001the early days of the Bush administrationProfessor Colin Campbell, the Canadian political scientist then at Georgetown University, told me that it wasn't really a Bush administration at all, but one run by Vice President Dick Cheney," writes William Keegan in the Jan. 18 London Observer. "George W. Bush was more likely to be in the gymnasium than the Oval Office."
Keegan says that after Sept. 11, perceptions about Bush and Cheney changed, as the President proceeded to assume the role of commander-in-chief. But now, he continues: "All the suspicions about the Bush-Cheney relationship have been confirmed in the new book, The Price of Loyalty, written by Ron Suskind, but essentially containing the damaging memoirs of sacked U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill. O'Neill used to confide his frustrations with Bush to his old friend Cheney, only to discover rather late in the day, that his confessor was also his Control." The column is entitled: "The overruling of the President."
Bush Policy on Israel Is Insane
Bush policy on Israel "is my definition of insane," writes New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, on Jan. 19. On the eve of the State of Union address, Friedman, who in 2002 first wrote about Saudi Prince Abdullah's offer for a regional peace, has an exceptionally (especially for him) direct and hard-hitting column on the Middle East disaster.
Well-informed Washington sources report that in writing this, Friedman had very heavy input from certain Middle East experts who are close both to Bill Clinton's circles, and to former President Bush 41's advisersJames Baker III and former Ambassador Edward Djerejian, who have both been appointed as current Presidential envoys for George W. Bush, with different functions relating to the Middle East. Friedman writes, "Let's not mince words. American policy today toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is insane." He says the Palestinians and Israelis are "gripped" in fanaticism, "Yet, the Bush team, backed up by certain conservative Jewish and Christian activist groups, believes the correct policy is to do nothing. That is my definition of insane. Israel must get out of the West Bank and Gaza Strip as soon as possible and evacuate most of the settlements.... [I]t is an urgent necessity. Otherwise the Jewish state is in peril. Ideally, this withdrawal should be negotiated along the Clinton plan" (emphasis addded). But, even if Israel does it unilaterally, "This can't happen too soon, and the U.S. should be forcing it."
Nothing would "help the war of ideas" in the Middle East, or protect Israel better than this. Without the U.S. forcing Israel along this course, America is simply acting out "hypocrisy."
Friedman details how the hatred of the U.S. is growing every day in the Middle East, the greatest violence ever is playing out between Jews and Palestinians, and Palestinian population growth is such that "the Palestinians will either soon outnumber the Jews and Israel will either become an apartheid state or a non-Jewish state."
Codevilla Demands End to Iraq as a Nation
In a letter to the Wall Street Journal, published on Jan. 19, Angelo Codevilla, a professor at Boston University and visiting professor at Princeton, calls on the United States not to restrain those forces which will naturally rip Iraq apart in civil war. Under the headline, "'Falling Apart' Will Be the Best Thing for Iraq," he writes, "Iraq is the last of the bad ideas of 1919 to fall apart.... [T]he artificial construct called Iraq benefitted only a minority and could be held together only by a dictatorship.... [C]ommon sense ... makes it impossible for Americans to hold Iraq together.... America's vital business in Iraq was to destroy a regime the very existence of which inspired ... anti-American violence throughout the world.... Excessive concern for Iraqi unity and for the sentiments of other foreigners led the Bush team to postpone until spring 2003 serving America's interest by attacking Saddam. Since then, the same misguided concerns have led the administration to rein in the majority Shi'ites' and Kurds' desire to strike at the people and arrangements that are the base of the Saddam regime."
Codevilla formerly co-directed the Jerusalem- and Washington-based Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS), which in 1996 concocted the "Clean Break" plan for Israel's Likud government, for permanent Israeli occupation of the West Bank/Gaza and the overthrow or wrecking of governments in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia. Codevilla is a leading advocate for the release of Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard.
RNC Meeting Fixated on Tax Cuts
According to a participant in the day-long Republican National Committee (RNC) sessions in Washington, D.C. Jan. 21, where 185 of the faithful gathered for President Bush's State of the Union address and party confab, the meeting had absolutely no discussion of any kind on the economy. The source said, "It was psychotic. There is total fixation on the tax cuts issue. Completely ideological." The source reported, "At one point, I raised the problem of the current account deficit, and how a chain reaction could set in, leading to a dollar crisis. There was no reaction at all. Just a stony pause." He said that he picked up from informal chat, that Bush doesn't like any differing opinions around him. So "mono-think" now prevails, and it seems that life-long party ideologues are sticking to the line on the economy, "like John Snow, who does a Melvin E. Snerdley imitation" (the associate of Alfred E."What, Me Worry?"Newman). Most of the day was devoted to briefings on where the Congressional election races stand, with most focus on Tom Daschle's Senate seat.
Recall Campaign Launched Against D.C. Mayor
On Jan. 21, organizers filed an official "notice of intent" with the District of Columbia Board of Elections and Ethics, thus launching a drive to recall Mayor Anthony Williams, who shut down D.C. General Hospital on behalf of Wall Street's Financial Control Board in 2001. The notice says that Williams' "malfeasance, misfeasance, and nonfeasance endangered the well-being and even the very lives of District residents." The chairman of the D.C. Democratic Party immediately issued a statement denouncing the recall drive, and personally attacking the chief organizer of the recall, Barbara Lett Simmons, accusing her of using her role on the D.C. State Democratic Committee without the support of other committee members. Simmons is also one of D.C.'s representatives on the Democratic National Committee, as well as being the senior member of the State Committee. She is also a former chairman of the D.C. Board of Education. She has attended and spoken at many LaRouche events and webcasts.
Recall organizers cite the Mayor's shutdown of D.C. General, his cuts in funding for education, and his austerity policiesone of whose results is the city's 12,000 homeless, who are seen everywhere, while at the same time, Williams courts major real estate developers, is building a $1-billion convention center, and is going all out to get a Major League baseball team into the city.
Once the petition is officially approved, and the Mayor issues his counterstatement, organizers have a 150-day period to collect 36,300 signatures. The matter will then be placed on the November ballot. The wimpy Mayor, a pushover when it comes to bankers and real estate moguls, is vowing "to use every effort at my disposal to crush the recall."
Senate Passes $328-Billion Appropriations Bill
On Jan. 22, the Senate passed the long-awaited omnibus appropriations bill, finally closing out the fiscal year 2004 appropriations process, more than three months after the Oct. 1 deadline. The bill, which also includes almost $500 billion in mandatory spending, wraps up seven of the 13 annual spending bills. The bill had been rammed through the House last November, with little debate, and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) wanted to pass it through the Senate on a voice vote, but was blocked by Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), who insisted that Senators ought to debate the bill and pass it on a roll call vote.
When the Senate came back on Jan. 20, the bill was the first item on the agenda, but the Democrats initially blocked the bill on a 48 to 43 cloture vote, 12 short of the 60 required to limit debate. However, Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) conceded from the outset that the bill would eventually pass, in spite of unsettled disputes over overtime regulations and country-of-origin labelling for food. The Democrats gave in two days later, under GOP threats to replace the bill with another one funding the government at fiscal 2003 levels, about $6 billion less than in the omnibus bill. A number of Democrats joined the Republicans in invoking cloture on a 61 to 32 roll call vote, and the bill then passed 65 to 28.
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