July Week 1, 2005
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July Week 1, 2005
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Friday July 1, 2005 Wherever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship. Harry S. Truman, 33rd US president (1884-1972) The year is half gone today... hard to believe. Villaraigosa is being sworn in as the Mayor of Los Angeles today, that's a big deal, changing the mindset of people who don't see Mexicans as people. Antonio Villaraigosa is a smart crafty tough guy. I hope he does well, he wants to unite the population and help them to identify as Angelino's not by race. LA is a neat place, it is an amazing place to live and work. His acceptance speech was very powerful, I enjoyed it... William Rivers Pitt wrote a great article on Corporations... "A corporation is indeed a non-living entity, a group of people looking to make money. But thanks to a Supreme Court decision, corporations are also actual living entities in every legal sense of the word, with all rights and privileges of citizenship - and several more besides - intact."
I
wrote this in response to a columnist in the LA Times. His question is "Help
me out. In this most conspicuously American period of the calendar year, why
are some of you flag-wavers and some not? Why will some of you stand under a
hot sun and watch a Fourth of July parade, and others consider it a
pointless way to spend a couple hours?"
(Whole article here)
I was looking for the exact quote from Bush on the net and found this page on a Right Wing, hate all the Liberals, site: http://www.rightwingnews.com/quotes/left.php These are quotes from the left all right, many of them are a little outrageous even for me but I can understand the passion and find something to defend in just about every single one of them. The closed minded Neanderthals that put up this site do not have a clue what it takes to be an American... to close your mind to the facts when the facts don't support your views is a definition of insanity. To discount the opinions of others because those opinions don't agree with yours is what got us into this mess. One thing a bully seems incapable of learning and that is that though he is getting what he wants and he's winning now he will ultimately be the looser, where as the people being bullied, the ones he considers beneath him, will find a way and they will ultimately come out on top. If you look at the world solely with an arrogant eye to determine what's good for America you are setting us up to be hated and despised. Some people appear to firmly believe that their God created them and this country to be served by the rest of the world. Nothing ultimately matters except their happiness and their well being. If thousands of Iraqi's die, so what, better them than us. If thousands of Ugandan's are slaughtered, so what, better them than us. Hundreds of thousands of people die in a tsunami so what, send them a couple million bucks and move on... The attitudes of the Right Wing in this country is simply despicable. The Me First Party. At some point there will come a reckoning, all Empires throughout the history of man have collapsed, some violently some quietly but they all collapse. I believe that when ours collapses, as it inevitably will, that if we keep on at this pace and with this attitude we will not be missed, as a matter of fact we will be waved farewell with a general sense of Good Riddance.
A fella named Ralph Reed and his buddy Jack Abramoff ripped of a couple Indian tribes. One of the most despicable and arrogant thefts in the history of this country... this story is reeling in a lot of folks, I appended a story on the subject below... I don't want to lose it. I also put Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D's latest offering in here too... Saturday July 2, 2005 "No one starts a war – or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so – without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it." Karl von Clausewitz wrote, I read this on a site called Dharma Bum, a young woman posted it on Father's Day to commemorate the loss of her father... Nice poem/lyric, the author of it surprised me.
Photograph Richard Starkey aka Ringo Starr
Another entry from the Dharma Bums Blog: Here are the top 10 questions we think need to be answered:
It is beginning to look like the Times memo dump that was ordered by the court to determine who outed Valerie Plame is going to incriminate Karl Rove... I wonder how the slug is going to spin this... My impression of Karl Rove is that he is an unbelievably slimy, win at all costs, partisan, ideologue. His comments about Liberals was totally offensive to me, The Chickenhawk s.o.b. appears to be under the impression that the only people fighting his horrible war are hardliner Republican conservatives. Where does he get off blaming his war on 'Liberals', I think that now that public opinion is turning against his fair haired boy he is going to pull out all the stops shifting the blame away from his boss. They are a despicable bunch.
I just read the new Molly Ivins Column... Where is the outrage, where is the media? Sunday July 3, 2005 Americans are benevolently ignorant about Canada, while Canadians are malevolently well informed about the United States. J. Bartlett Brebner I managed to listen to the Motocross race from Red Bud Michigan. Another amazing ride by RC... I thought that this was an interesting take on the impending battle to replace Sandra Day O'Connor... the first breath of rationality I have read.: Not a Campaign The trouble with Post Editorials is that they are unsigned so there is no way to look up other articles by the same author. I am not looking forward to the next couple of months. I wonder if we'll ever get the straight skinny on the nominee. The left and the right will spare no expense on promoting or defeating whoever it is. It is possible that both sides have been setting their sights on Rehnquist's replacement and they don't have a battle plan for O'Connor. If Bush comes up with a reasonable nomination there may not be too much of a fight. I am convinced that the battle for Rehnquist's seat on the bench will be Titanic. I thought that there would be no way they could get Clarence Thomas on the bench but they managed to smear Anita Hill enough to discredit her testimony and it was all over but the acrimony. If the bench was populated by seven Sandra Day O'Connor's I would not complain. She may not have always voted the way that I liked but I think she voted with conscience and without bias to preserve the Constitution. Not having her there makes me very uncomfortable. I think that it is important to have three Conservatives, three Liberals and a moderate on the Supreme Court. Too Conservative and the result is authoritarian and arbitrary judgments, too Liberal and the outcomes will bleed the country of it's wealth and resolve... Moderation almost always pays off... almost.
Just saying 'no' prevents
teenage pregnancy the way 'Have a nice day' cures chronic depression.
The Supremacy of the Super-Citizen Thursday 30 June 2005 "Unless you become more watchful in your States and check this spirit of monopoly and thirst for exclusive privileges, you will in the end find that the most important powers of Government have been given or bartered away, and the control of your dearest interests have been passed into the hands of these corporations." The document reads, "All men are created equal." When those words were first put to paper, of course, the literal meaning of the phrase did not match what was written. A more accurate sentence would have read, "All white land-owning men are created equal," but despite the inherent racism and misogyny buried in the original meaning, the words had magic and power enough to lay the groundwork for 200 years of progress. The words as written became the basis for reform after reform, for the strengthening of the rights of minorities, women, and basically anyone who would be made subservient to anyone else. The struggle took a long time, and continues today with much remaining to do before that equality is truly achieved, but the strength of those words as written has been proven time and again to be more than a match for anyone who would stand on the neck of a fellow citizen. That's what the billboard reads, anyway. That's the propaganda, the myth, the way we rock ourselves to sleep at night. The truth is significantly different, however, and is at the root of just about everything that has gone wrong with this great democratic experiment. We are not all created equal, in fact. This inequality is not based on race, or sex, or religion, but upon the slow development of a body of laws that have created and empowered a breed of super-citizens which rule over every aspect of our lives, almost completely beyond the reach of justice. These super-citizens exist today under the familiar name "corporation." But wait, a corporation is basically a company, right? A corporation is a non-living entity, a group of people endeavoring to make money in a business enterprise or non-profit organization, right? Wrong. A corporation is indeed a non-living entity, a group of people looking to make money. But thanks to a Supreme Court decision, corporations are also actual living entities in every legal sense of the word, with all rights and privileges of citizenship - and several more besides - intact. A Short History of Corporations The word "corporation" comes from the Latin "corpus," or "body." The Oxford English Dictionary defines "corporation" as "a group of people authorized to act as an individual." The history of corporations in America is intertwined with the story of the revolution that birthed this nation. British corporations in colonial America were rebelled against vigorously as representatives of the Crown, which they were. Many of the principal actors in the American revolution, among them George Washington, wanted to throw off British rule because they felt their ability to conduct commerce freely was being disrupted. When 60 Boston residents hurled the tea into Boston Harbor in 1773, it was an attack specifically upon the economic power and supremacy of a corporation called the British East India Tea Company, which had been undercutting the profits of colonial merchants thanks to the passage of the Tea Acts. After the revolution, and for a hundred years, the American people bore a deep distrust of the corporation, and corporations were regulated severely. Corporate charters were created by individual states, and those states had the power to revoke that charter if the corporation was deemed to be acting against the public good or had deviated from its charter. Corporations were not allowed to own other corporations, nor were they allowed to participate in the political process. Very slowly over that 100 years, however, the power of the corporation began to grow. In the 1818 Supreme Court case "Dartmouth College v. Woodward," Daniel Webster, advocating for Dartmouth, argued passionately for the power of corporations in regards to property rights. The Court sided with Webster and corporate rights, stating: "The opinion of the Court, after mature deliberation, is that this corporate charter is a contract, the obligation of which cannot be impaired without violating the Constitution of the United States. This opinion appears to us to be equally supported by reason, and by the former decisions of this Court." A good deal of hell was raised after this decision, with many citizens and state legislatures standing upon the right of a state to repeal or amend a corporate charter. Seven years later, however, another Supreme Court case buttressed the power of the corporation with their decision in "Society for the Preservation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts v. Town of Pawlet." The Society was seeking to protect its colonial-era property grants in Vermont, while Vermont was seeking to revoke those grants. The Court decided in favor of the Society, and explicitly extended the same protections to corporation-owned property as are enjoyed by property-owning natural persons. Corporations in America began to become truly powerful with the rise of the railroads. Railroads were the lifeblood of the growing nation, carrying both agriculture and industry from one side of the country to the other. This was a highly profitable enterprise, and railroad corporations began to exert heavy influence on both state and federal leaders. Corporate attorneys boldly asserted the precedents set in the Dartmouth and Society Supreme Court decisions, demanding that corporations deserved to have at least some of the rights of natural persons. Meanwhile, attorneys loyal to the railroads began to rise through the ranks of the Judiciary, finally finding seats on the highest bench. This process came to a final head in 1886, when the Supreme Court heard the case "Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad." Arguments over the rights of corporations as persons had been raging for decades, and Chief Justice Waite pounded home the nail: "The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does." "We are all of the opinion that it does." The pertinent section of the Fourteenth Amendment reads, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." Before the Santa Clara decision, this amendment applied only to living, breathing people. After Santa Clara, it applied also to massively wealthy corporations, groups of people authorized to act as individuals, but beyond the kinds of legal liabilities natural persons are subject to. The Santa Clara decision, and subsequent decisions affirming it, created the formidable distinction between the citizen and the super-citizen. Both have purchasing power, both can give money to whomever or whatever they please, but the difference lies in the extent to which this can be done. A natural person can buy a house and give money to a politician. A wealthy corporation, on the other hand, can buy a thousand houses and give money to a thousand politicians. In other words, a corporation which enjoys the same rights as a natural person has a thousand times the power and influence of a natural person over the economics and politics of the country. That is a super-citizen. Because these super-citizens can exert so much power, their rights have been dramatically extended over the years. In the 1950s, for example, corporations paid some 40% of the taxes in this country. They flexed their muscles and exerted their influence, and by 1980 were paying only 26% of the taxes in this country. The Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 slashed that payment to 8%. The economic boon enjoyed by these super-citizens is augmented by the fact that regular citizens' tax dollars are used by the government to purchase goods and services from corporations involved in the production of weapons, petroleum, timber and agricultural products. Corporate perks like jets, elaborate headquarters, public relations firms, and executive retreats are all tax write-offs; the regular citizen, by contrast, pays for their perks with after-tax dollars. When a corporation screws up and destroys an ecosystem with a toxic spill, corporate liability shields protect them from financial and legal punishment, and the cost of the clean-up is borne by the tax dollars of the regular citizen. Today, corporations control almost every aspect of what we see, hear, eat, wear and live. Every television news media organization is owned by a small handful of corporations, which use these news outlets to filter out information that might be damaging to the parent company. Agriculture in America is controlled by a small group of corporations. One cannot drive a car, rent a van, buy a house or deliver goods in a business transaction without purchasing insurance from a corporation. Getting sick in America has become a ruinously expensive experience because corporations now control even the smallest functions of the medical profession, and have turned the practice of health care into a for-profit industry. The influence these super-citizens hold over local, state and national politics is the reason why so many privileges have been afforded to them. This influence has existed to one degree or another for decades. Yet it was another Supreme Court decision, handed down in 1976, that allowed these super-citizens to establish a strangle-hold on our politics and government institutions. The Supremacy of the Super-Citizen In 1976, the case "Buckley v. Valeo" came before the Supreme Court. Senator James Buckley, former Senator and Presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy, and several others had filed suit to challenge the constitutionality of the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 (FECA) and the Presidential Election Campaign Fund Act. Among the defendants were Francis Valeo, Secretary of the Senate and ex officio member of the newly-created Federal Election Commission, as well as the Commission itself. The final Supreme Court decision split a number of legal hairs. The decision upheld the constitutionality of limiting political contributions to candidates, and the disclosure and record-keeping requirements established by FECA. The aspects of FECA deemed unconstitutional, however, became the basis for the supremacy of the super-citizen. In short, the Court decided that limiting the amount of money a candidate could spend was a violation of the First Amendment. In other words, the spending of campaign money was equated with the right of free speech. On the surface, the decision makes sense. Because so much of modern political campaigning involves television and radio advertisements, direct mailing of campaign literature, extensive travel and lodging and staff payrolls, and because all these things cost money, a limitation on campaign spending necessarily restricts the ability of a candidate to practice free speech in the political realm. The danger, of course, was that corporations would take advantage of the new spending freedoms enjoyed by politicians and flood them with influence-creating cash. The Court attempted to address this concern by upholding the limits on contribution amounts, stating that these limitations were the "primary weapons against the reality or appearance of improper influence stemming from the dependence of candidates on large campaign contributions." The Court's attempt to address this concern failed, in no small part because of the existence of so-called "soft money." Soft money was supposed to be cash given to political parties for "party-building activities" rather than for the direct support of candidates and campaigns. Soft money contributions were not subjected to limitations, allowing super-citizens to flood outrageous amounts of money into the process. Because the soft-money rules were so vague, and because soft money contributions were so huge, the money was invariably directed towards the support of individual candidates. The politicians became corporate entities, commodities bought and sold by the super-citizens. The passage in 2002 of the Campaign Reform Act did little to cut into the massive influence in politics enjoyed by the super-citizens. The Campaign Reform Act made most soft money contributions illegal but created a loophole large enough to sail a British tea ship through, with the enshrinement of 527 groups as political entities. 527s are tax-exempt organizations created to influence the nomination, election, appointment or defeat of political candidates. The soft money previously given to political parties goes now to these groups, and these groups enjoy umbilical connections to the parties and candidates they work in favor of. In other words, nothing really changed, and the influence of the super-citizens was undiminished. The Campaign Reform Act also raised the hard money contribution limit from $1,000 to $2,000, thus doubling the ability of super-citizens to exert direct financial influence upon candidates and office-holders. Today, virtually every politician holding national office is financially beholden to a corporation. Beyond the favorable tax status for corporations established by these owned politicians, the effects of this ownership are felt by average citizens every day. Foreign policy is all too often decided by corporate considerations, and these decisions often lead to war. The air we breathe, the food we eat and the water we drink is contaminated by pollutants that corporations are legally allowed to spew, thanks to the legislative protections created by corporate-owned politicians. Draconian sentencing rules created by legislators that incarcerate millions of Americans - think "The War on Drugs" specifically - have as much to do with the influence of the corporate-controlled prison industry as with anything else. This list goes on and on. Super-citizens define our reality by controlling the information we receive via television, newspaper and radio. Super-citizens make sure that information casts them in a favorable light. Super-citizens pound us with advertising and thus maintain the fiction that spending money on products defines the nature of a person. The best and brightest are drafted out of law school to work for corporate defense firms for six-figure salaries, thus ensuring that super-citizens enjoy a level of legal defense not available to anyone else. Many of these corporate attorneys graduate to the bench, where they extend the influence of super-citizens across all levels of the judicial branch. More than anything else, however, super-citizens control the ways and means of government at every level. They bought it, they own it, and they make sure it does their bidding. The needs, requirements and best interests of the average citizen do not enter into the equation. Created Equal Arguments can be made that corporations are good for the economy and the country. They can get things done with a speed and efficiency not often found in the bureaucracies of government. When the country had to get itself ready to fight World War II, for one example, it was the industrial and manufacturing corporations that produced the means to achieve victory beyond anyone's expectations. In the final analysis, however, the influence held by these entities is antithetical to the fundamental ideals of the nation. We are not all created equal, and within that inequality lies the potential for enormous evil. Consider the case of I.G. Farben, the industrial giant that was the financial core of the Nazi regime. Farben produced the gas used in the concentration camps, and made lucrative use of slave labor in the camps. Before the war, Farben worked hand-in-hand with a number of powerful American corporations, the most prominent of which was Standard Oil. In the aftermath of World War II, the crimes committed by Farben were considered so enormous that many wanted the corporation to be utterly destroyed. Instead, Farben was split into several smaller entities, several of which still exist. Millions of Americans purchase aspirin from Bayer, a company that was once part of Farben. Commercials for BASF tell us that company makes the products we buy better, but do not tell us that BASF was once part of Farben. It speaks to the power enjoyed by corporations that Farben, the company that forced concentration camp laborers to manufacture the Zyklon-B used to exterminate them, and which was the backbone of Nazi financial power, was not destroyed out of hand once the war was over. Farben is still with us. Its charter has merely been changed. Are all corporations on the moral level of I.G. Farben? Certainly not. Many corporations work for the public good, and many that work for their own enrichment do not necessarily undermine the country and its principles. But some do, and exist beyond punishment or account. The potential for evil is certainly there when super-citizens exist above the law. When the New York Times reviewed the book The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben, it observed that the story of Farben "Forces one to consider the possibility that when corporate evil reaches a certain status, it simply cannot be defeated." In the end, the existence of incredibly powerful entities that enjoy the status of citizens demote the vast majority of average citizens to second-class status. If the ideals we hold sacred have any truth to them, if the myths we sleep by have any basis in reality, such a division is intolerable and must be changed. "All men are created equal" once excluded vast swaths of Americans from their basic rights. Battles were fought to change that. Today, a battle to realign the balance of power between the citizen and the super-citizen must also be fought. It must be won. William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know and The Greatest Sedition Is Silence.
T RO U T H O U T.
by Dana Parsons I asked
a friend what she was doing for the Fourth, and she replied, "The same thing we
always do, the parade in Huntington Beach." Three Wise Men and an IdiotBy Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D I didn’t notice, but I’ve been told George W, Bush delivered his latest speech smoothly, more so than most of his speeches. He has certainly practiced the stay-the-course storyline.How many times have we suffered White House fanfare for a presidential speech that will finally solve the mystery of our foreign policy? How many times have we listened, only to reluctantly conclude that George W. Bush is indeed a broken record, and worse for wear? George waved the bloody shirt at Fort Bragg, recalling 9-11 and global terrorists. He again brought forth the well-used and amazingly stupid idea that we will somehow take the war to the terrorists. And yes, he was talking about Iraq. Those of us living in the reality-based world must be ever so tiresome to our nifty commander in chief. In the real world, Mr. Bush, young Americans die, are maimed and morally devastated by wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan, both conducted without legal or moral justification, and hence without hope. In the real world, Americans, Iraqis and Afghans all suffer a conflict dreamed up by finely fed and well-dressed neoconservatives in air-conditioned Washington suites. At leisurely lunches and late night planning sessions they designed a boutique war to be fought by tin soldiers. I imagine the work, and the finger food, was positively delicious. As he has since his 9-11 raison d'être, Bush emphasized this week that we shall prevail by taking the war to the "terrorists." This must sound great echoing off the peach and lavender rooms of the administration’s unreality-based world. On the other hand, many great thinkers on military affairs have extensively studied the reality-based world, and thus might be helpful. Sun Tzu, for example. The ancient strategist wrote, "The spot where we intend to fight must not be made known; for then the enemy will have to prepare against a possible attack at several different points; and his forces being thus distributed in many directions, the numbers we shall have to face at any given point will be proportionately few." Transfixed by the light of their own brilliance reflecting from pastel-sheened walls and bulletproof windows, the Bush administration hears him not. Karl von Clausewitz wrote, "No one starts a war – or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so – without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it." Hear, hear! But it seems that the neoconservatives who long envisioned the toppling of the Ba’ath Party, and the emplacement of an administration-friendly Prime Minister in Baghdad as a Do-it-Yourself weekend project, were deafened once again by their own self-congratulatory cheers. Clausewitz, always trying to help innocent politicians, wryly noted, "In war the will is directed at an animate object that reacts." Sir Basil Liddell-Hart, in the mid-1900s, not so long ago, expanded upon Clausewitz in this regard. The old Brit noted, "Natural hazards, however formidable, are inherently less dangerous and less uncertain than fighting hazards. All conditions are more calculable, all obstacles more surmountable than those of human resistance." As President, George W. Bush is a public example of a life spent failing to learn from either his betters or his mistakes, refusing to develop empathy when revenge felt better, and avoiding the hard work and self-doubt of personal accountability. He vows to stay the course and exercise his will because without that, he is left alone with his fears of inconsequentiality and too many vengeful ghosts. It’s enough to drive a man to drink, to swear, to cry and crumble. The audience at Bragg was politically controlled and generally pro-Bush, yet the only applause-based interruption of Bush’s speech was apparently the result of a Bush aide’s signaling. American service members and their families – now in the third year of a three-week war driven by a secret Washington establishment geo-strategy and fueled by blatant repetitive lies – have seen their friends and lovers and children in wheelchairs and in coffins. They have intimately witnessed the disturbing moral fractures and personality changes that are inevitable in war – whether Congress declares one or not. Unlike George W. Bush, they are challenged by this. Unlike their confident and willful President, they pray every day for their faith to be sustained, and to be delivered from evil. That they might need to be prompted to cheer this particular President is no surprise. Sir Basil also noted that "No man can exactly calculate the capacity of human genius and stupidity, nor the incapacity of will." The history of George W. Bush and his long-desired and endless war in Iraq may disprove Liddell-Hart on this count. June 30, 2005 Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D., [send her mail] is a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, who spent her final four and a half years in uniform working at the Pentagon. She lives with her freedom-loving family in the Shenandoah Valley, and among other things, writes a bi-weekly column on defense issues with a libertarian perspective for militaryweek.com. Copyright © 2005 LewRockwell.com How the Mighty Have Fallen
Ralph Reed, the former Golden Boy of the Christian Coalition, and George Bush’s longtime political adviser, is under investigation in Washington and taking fire at home Ralph Reed had it all going for him in the 1990s: Boyish good looks, soft-spoken demeanor, and an image as a squeaky-clean spokesperson for the religious right. As Executive Director of Pat Robertson’s powerful Christian Coalition (website), Reed offered an articulate and often calming television persona . More often than not he had the mainstream media eating out of his hands -- even while defending one of his boss Pat Robertson's frequent loopy commentaries. Reed was smart, media savvy and a remarkable political strategist. Time magazine called him "the right hand of God" in a 1995 cover story. These days Time readers might be wondering which God Reed was really worshipping. He is locked in the grip of a scandal focused on his longtime friend, lobbying titan Jack Abramoff, involving taking money from one Indian tribe to kill the gambling operations of another tribe. At the same time Reed is now being urged by a former Georgia Republican state representative and House minority leader to withdraw from the race for lieutenant governor. Despite playing a soft-spoken, conciliatory spokesperson during many of his public appearances, Reed occasionally revealed what he and his Christian right colleagues were set on achieving, and how they would go about it: “It's like guerrilla warfare. If you reveal your location, all it does is allow your opponent to improve his artillery bearings,” he told the Los Angeles Times in March 1992. A few months earlier, he told the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot: “I want to be invisible. I do guerrilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You don't know it's over until you're in a body bag. You don't know until election night.” During a routine speech to the Montana Christian Coalition in the mid-1990s, Reed suggested that the group pay attention to the words of the ancient Chinese military philosopher Sun Tzu. "The first strategy and in many ways the most important strategy for evangelicals is secrecy," Reed suggested. "Sun Tzu says that's what you have to do to be effective at war and that's essentially what we're involved in, we're involved in a war. It's not a war fought with bullets, it's a war fought with ballots." Going for the Jugular In 1997, Reed was prescient enough to read the tea leaves and move on from the Christian Coalition. He founded the Duluth, Georgia, based Century Strategies, a political consulting firm. At Century Strategies, Reed has been a tenacious operator: According to a recent posting at the A La Gauche blog, the Washington Post reported that “In the 1998 Georgia Lt. Governor’s race between Mark Taylor and Mitch Skandalakis, Reed ‘ran controversial ads showing his Democratic candidate Mark Taylor, with Atlanta's black mayor Bill Campbell as an announcer said: ‘First, Taylor...fought to preserve discriminatory racial quotas. Then, he was solidly endorsed by the homosexual newspaper, Southern Voice.’ That race was called "possibly the most negative campaign in Georgia's political history." His client even had to pay $50,000 fine for libel.” During the rough GOP presidential primary campaign in 2000, when George W. Bush needed a smashing victory in South Carolina over a hard-charging Sen. John McCain, Reed came through for the Bush. He delivered the necessary ground troops and votes to defeat McCain and do away with his challenge. Reed continued to serve the Bush-Cheney team in 2000, and was a senior official during the 2004 presidential campaign. Reed was serving as Chairman of the Georgia Republican Party when Saxby Chambliss ran for U.S. Senate in 2002, a campaign that will be remembered for its vicious slandering of Democratic incumbent Senator Max Cleland, a Vietnam War hero. According to A La Gauche, “the low point was a Chambliss TV ad that showed an image of...Cleland together with those of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, and implied the three were made of the same cloth.” The Tide Turns These days, Ralph Reed is not only being investigated for his connection to Jack Abramoff, who himself is under a series of investigations, but he recently was read the riot act from Bob Irvin, a former Republican state representative and House minority leader from Georgia, who urged him to “withdraw” his “candidacy for Georgia lieutenant governor.” Irvin said that Reed should drop out of the election -- which is more than a year away -- “in order to avoid a grievous, majority-wrecking split in the [state’s] Republican Party.” In the intervening years between resigning from the Christian Coalition and his current run for the GOP’s nomination for lieutenant governor, Reed has managed to garner headlines on a regular basis. The Gambling Scandal: Perhaps the most damaging recent revelations about Reed revolve around his relationship with Jack Abramoff. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s deputy editorial page editor and columnist Jay Bookman, “In 2001 and 2002, Abramoff secretly hired Reed...to gin up a morality-based ‘grassroots coalition’ to pressure Texas officials to close an Indian casino in El Paso. The casino, run by the dirt-poor Tigua tribe, competed with casinos in Louisiana and Mississippi that were clients of Abramoff. He wanted the Tigua casino closed, and he paid Reed $4 million to do the hit.” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Alan Judd recently filled in some of the details: “Reed, a longtime gambling opponent, apparently mounted a radio campaign in 2001 that prompted Texans to inundate their legislators with anti-casino telephone calls. He organized pastors in 2002 to provide what he called ‘cover" for the Texas attorney general, who had filed a lawsuit to close the Tiguas' casino. Reed once wrote an e-mail to Abramoff suggesting they ‘budget for an ataboy’ for the attorney general. “As the Tigua campaign unfolded, Abramoff and Reed exchanged e-mails that paint an unvarnished picture of their work together." “‘I wish those moronic Tiguas were smarter in their political contributions,’ Abramoff wrote to Reed in a 2002 message that since has been widely circulated.”I'd love us to get our mitts on that moolah!! Oh well, stupid folks get wiped out." "’Got it,’ Reed replied." “Nothing, however, raises more questions among Reed's critics than the trip to Scotland.” According to Judd, Reed, Abramoff and four others, including Ohio Republican congressional representative, Bob Ney, flew to Scotland where they shared meals and played golf. Reed denies knowing anything about Abramoff’s “effort to reopen the casino, an assertion that leaves his critics incredulous.” Is it possible that Reed, “as one of just six travelers on a trans-Atlantic golf trip, could have been oblivious to Abramoff's plan to reopen the casino he had allegedly helped close”? "How could he not know?" Carlos Hisa, lieutenant governor of the Tiguas' tribal council, said of Reed. "I'm pretty sure in conversation it had to come up once or twice." Given the nature of the company, Suzii Paynter, a lobbyist for Texas' Southern Baptists who oppose expanded gambling, figures that Reed must have known what the trip was really about. "I'm nowhere near as sophisticated a political operative as Ralph Reed is, and I know better than to go too far down the road with an unknown source of money," Paynter told the Atlanta Journal Constitution’s Judd. "I do not believe somebody walks up to you with $4 million and you don't ask the question, 'Where is this money coming from?' That is just unbelievably naive." Enron: In a January 26, 2002 story, CNN reported that, “The White House acknowledged...that in 1997, as George W. Bush was deciding whether to run for president, his senior political adviser Karl Rove recommended GOP strategist Ralph Reed for a consulting job with Enron Corp.” According to the New York Times, Reed made from $10,000 to $20,000 a month while working for Enron. The Associated Press reported that Reed might have taken in as much as $300,000 before the energy company's collapse. Stand for Israel: In late-May 2002, Reed joined forces with Rabbi Yehiel Eckstein, president of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (IFCJ), to found "Stand for Israel." The Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz reported that "Stand for Israel" hoped to become a "Christian version of the pro-Israel lobby on Capitol Hill, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).” One of the group's primary activities will be to counter what they see as media bias against Israel-a long-held belief shared by both Israelis and Christian right activists. Microsoft: Earlier this year, it was revealed that Bill Gates’ Microsoft had paid Reed a $20,000 monthly retainer. Reed’s work with the company dovetailed neatly with the company’s temporary refusal to support a gay-rights bill in Olympia, Washington, which failed. In early June, the Seattle Weekly reported that if Reed “ever had anything to do with Microsoft's role, or lack thereof, in this state's gay-rights debate, he won't next time....[since] [h]e's being deleted from the Redmond software giant's payroll.” Although Microsoft wouldn’t “confirm” Reed's termination, company spokesperson Ginny Terzano conceded that Reed’s firm was "no longer on retainer.” Involvement with Jack Abramoff: While Reed’s stint at, and ultimate dismissal from Microsoft, brought the company and lobbyist unwelcome headlines, those stories pale next to the pounding Reed is taking for his alleged involvement with Jack Abramoff -- the lobbying titan under investigation in a number of cases. According to the Seattle Weekly: Reed is “now caught up in the influence-peddling scandal in D.C., which includes accusations he worked in concert with two other top Republicans also once engaged by Microsoft. One of them, Jack Abramoff, lobbied for Microsoft in the late 1990s while a member of the Seattle law and lobbying firm Preston Gates Ellis -- the firm of Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates' father, William H. Gates II. Abramoff is under investigation for possibly bilking millions of dollars from former Indian tribal clients and improperly using his friendship with House Speaker Tom DeLay, who is facing ethics charges and is the subject of federal investigations. Abramoff's questioned activities include a suspected money-laundering scheme that involves both Reed and fellow Microsoft adviser and lobbying superstar Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform. Reed, Abramoff and Norquist “go way back,” the Seattle alternative newspaper reported. They met during the 1980s as leaders of the College Republicans. Norquist was Abramoff's campaign manager in a successful election as chair of the national campus organization. Later, Reed led the group. Abramoff, a self-described ultraconservative Orthodox Jew, and Norquist began ascending with the 1994 Republican revolution in Congress. They launched what was called the K Street Project to persuade lobbying firms to increase their Republican connections; Abramoff lived across the street from a Preston Gates partner, who quickly hired him. Norquist, a close ally of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia, that year helped draw up the GOP's (ultimately voided) "Contract With America." Reed, meanwhile, became a Bush campaign official and private consultant after leaving the Christian Coalition in 1996... Seeking a Political Foothold In his op-ed piece in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Bob Irvin made his case for Reed’s withdrawal based on his observation that “Reed is four things that Georgians do not elect”:
Reed was no doubt looking ahead to future electoral challenges when he decided to run for the lieutenant governor’s position. Marshall Wittmann, who worked with Reed at the Christian Coalition but now works for the Democratic Leadership Council, told the Associated Press that he thinks Reed wants to be president. "He knew he couldn't go from the Christian Coalition, so he became a political consultant, then Georgia GOP chairman, then coordinator for the Bush campaign. The next logical step is to win a political office. This is what's available, but it's clearly a stepping stone to higher office," Wittmann said. ENDS
Rep. Obey puts Rove in right place
As you may have read in E.J. Dionne's column on this page earlier
this week, Wisconsin Congressman Dave Obey doesn't kowtow to despots, no matter
what their political stripe.
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