Friday, July 02, 2004
Where's that line of separation again?
President Bush, seeking to mobilize religious conservatives for his reelection campaign, has asked church-going volunteers to turn over church membership directories, campaign officials said on Thursday.
In a move sharply criticized both by religious leaders and civil libertarians, the Bush-Cheney campaign has issued a guide listing about two-dozen "duties" and a series of deadlines for organizing support among conservative church congregations.
A copy of the guide obtained by Reuters directs religious volunteers to send church directories to state campaign committees, identify new churches that can be organized by the Bush campaign and talk to clergy members about holding voter registration drives.
The document, distributed to campaign coordinators across the country earlier this year, also recommends that volunteers distribute voter guides in church and use Sunday service programs for get-out-the-vote drives.
More.
posted by chris at 6:21 PM
Here we go again
More than 2,100 Florida voters -- many of them black Democrats -- could be wrongly barred from voting in November because Tallahassee elections officials included them on a list of felons potentially ineligible to vote, a Herald investigation has found.
A Florida Division of Elections database lists more than 47,000 people the department said may be ineligible to vote because of felony records. The state is directing local elections offices to check the list and scrub felons from voter rolls.
But a Herald review shows that at least 2,119 of those names -- including 547 in South Florida -- shouldn't be on the list because their rights to vote were formally restored through the state's clemency process.
That's a potentially jarring flaw, critics say, in a state that turned the 2000 presidential election to Gov. Jeb Bush's brother George on the narrowest of margins -- 537 votes.
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Of the 2,119 people who obtained clemency, 62 percent are registered Democrats, and almost half are black. Less than 20 percent are Republican. Those ratios are very close to the same in the list of 47,000 voters who the local elections officers are supposed to review and possibly purge from the registration rolls.
Seriously, what's wrong with Florida?? Here's the list, if you want to check it yourself.
posted by chris at 3:25 PM
Mix and match, part 18
This:
Ninety-nine million Americans are breathing unhealthful air that can cause respiratory problems and even premature death, according to assessments released yesterday by the Environmental Protection Agency.
The agency identified 243 counties that fail to meet national air standards for fine-particle pollution -- mainly soot -- in response to state submissions that designated 141 counties. Once the rulemaking process is complete, state and local officials will have to devise plans to reduce the pollution. States now have three months to respond before the agency issues a final rule in November.
EPA Administrator Mike Leavitt said the announcement was "about getting our air cleaner and our standards getting tougher."
and this:
As on-target as EPA Administrator Mike Leavitt's demand sounds, it is seriously undercut by his own efforts and those of his boss, President Bush, to erode even existing protections.
That's especially true of the administration's decision to file a friend-of-the-court brief against an important anti-pollution initiative in Southern California, where some of the worst particulate pollution occurs. The U.S. Supreme Court in April struck down a regional air quality rule that would have required fleet owners to buy cleaner engines when they replaced their dirty diesel vehicles. The White House could and should have left engine makers to mount their own attack, giving the state a better chance of winning.
Bush also rejected the idea of environmental reviews before allowing dirtier Mexican diesel trucks to drive U.S. roads. That decision, backed by the high court in June, would disproportionately pollute Southern California. The administration extols its "Clear Skies" initiative, stalled in Congress, as a pollution cutter even though it would leave more soot and smog in the air than the Clean Air Act, which it would replace. Under Bush, the EPA has made it easier for coal plants — the major source of fine particulates in the East — to avoid installing state-of-the-art pollution equipment when they renovate.
posted by chris at 10:48 AM
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Wednesday, June 30, 2004
Scraping the bottom of the barrel
The Army disclosed yesterday it is preparing an involuntary recall to active duty of about 5,600 former soldiers who have either retired or been discharged, a signal that the service is stretched thin because of missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Some defense analysts and members of Congress said the activation of the reservists, known as the Individual Ready Reserve, reveals how much trouble the Army is having sustaining its commitments with an active-duty force of roughly 500,000 troops. It marks the first time since the 1991 Persian Gulf War that the Army has called on the Individual Ready Reserve in substantial numbers.
More.
posted by chris at 9:52 AM
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Tuesday, June 29, 2004
What he said
Some commentary, a metaphor, and some more commentary. Like a sandwich. Just go read it.
posted by chris at 10:21 AM
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Monday, June 28, 2004
Make sure you get your permission slips
The Bush administration has ordered that government scientists must be approved by a senior political appointee before they can participate in meetings convened by the World Health Organization, the leading international health and science agency.
A top official from the Health and Human Services Department in April asked the WHO to begin routing requests for participation in its meetings to the department's secretary for review, rather than directly invite individual scientists, as has long been the case.
Officials at the WHO, based in Geneva, Switzerland, have refused to implement the request, saying it could compromise the independence of international scientific deliberations. Denis G. Aitken, WHO assistant director-general, said Friday that he had been negotiating with Washington in an effort to reach a compromise.
The request is the latest instance in which the Bush administration has been accused of allowing politics to intrude into once-sacrosanct areas of scientific deliberation. It has been criticized for replacing highly regarded scientists with industry and political allies on advisory panels. A biologist who was at odds with the administration's position on stem-cell research was dismissed from a presidential advisory commission. This year, 60 prominent scientists accused the administration of "misrepresenting and suppressing scientific knowledge for political purposes."
Well, really, science is just a matter of interpretation, isn't it?
posted by chris at 5:04 PM
"Two days ahead of schedule"
I love the way the media is phrasing this, like the transition was going so smoothly that they finished early or something. In fact, June 30 was always just an arbitrary day, picked by Karl Rove (probably) to give the Bush administration enough distance between the hand-off and the US elections in November. Just enough time inbetween so Iraq becomes a fuzzy memory in the voting public's collective mind.
And it's not like everything's A-OK in Iraq right now. Just last Thursday, a coordinated offensive killed more than 100 Iraqis and 3 US soldiers as insurgents detonated bombs in 6 different cities. The handover's not even a day old and the US is already giving its support for martial law to be declared in Iraq. Even money might be missing from the coffers. Democracy sure does look a bit different outside of the US:
As Iraq's highest authority, Bremer had issued more than 100 orders and regulations, many of them Western-style laws governing everything from bankruptcy and traffic, to restrictions on child labor and copying movies.
...On Saturday, Bremer signed an edict that gave U.S. and other Western civilian contractors immunity from Iraqi law while performing their jobs in Iraq. The idea outrages many Iraqis who said the law allows foreigners to act with impunity even after the occupation.
A Bremer elections law restricts certain candidates from running for office, banning parties with links to militias, for instance.
The Coalition Provisional Authority's laws remain in effect after the occupation ends unless rescinded or revised by the interim government, a task that another Bremer-signed law allows, but only after a difficult process.
Paul Bremer may have gotten the hell out of there, but our troops haven't been given that luxury. And the new boss just arrived, contrary to earlier reports that the administration didn't want to make it look like exactly what it looks like:
Only hours after Mr. Bremer's departure, the new American ambassador here, John Negroponte, landed at Baghdad International Airport.
Mr. Negroponte, you may recall, got into a little bit of trouble down in Central America some years back with that whole "Iran-Contra" mess. But that certainly doesn't mean the man is unfit to be an Ambassador of the United States of America to the Iraqi people. No, not at all.
posted by chris at 3:56 PM
Like we said . . .
In two crucial decisions today on the scope of presidential wartime powers, the Supreme Court rejected the Bush administration's claim that it can hold suspected terrorists or "enemy combatants" on American soil without giving them a day in court.
The court said detainees, whether American citizens or not, retain their rights, at least to a legal hearing, even if they are held at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Guantanamo Bay is under U.S. control and thus appropriately within the jurisdiction of U.S. courts, the high court ruled.
The president's constitutional powers, even when supported by Congress in wartime, do not include the authority to close the doors to an independent review of the legality of locking people up, the justices said.
Damn activist judges.
posted by chris at 2:15 PM
Talking loud and saying nothing
As the July 4 holiday approaches, Bush Administration officials are bombarding the nation's police, fire, emergency and corporate-security offices with another round of terrorism warnings. Although there are no plans to raise the threat level from yellow to orange, a senior Justice Department official says, "there's very serious intelligence that's corroborated, that's multiple sourced, that indicates that al-Qaeda is intent on hitting us and hitting us hard this year." The official concedes, however, that "we don't have specific information."
...A lightly classified bulletin sent to 18,000 state and local agencies last week advised local authorities to look out for plastic-foam containers, inner tubes and other waterborne flotsam commonly seen around marinas that could be rigged to blow up on contact. Also, the bulletin warned, terrorists might attach bombs to buoys. FBI and Department of Homeland Security officials say no such devices have actually been discovered, nor is there any current intelligence that terrorists are hatching plots involving floating bombs.
Just ramping up the fear factor. Don't believe the hype.
posted by chris at 12:28 PM
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