Tribune twists truth
Don’t believe the Tribune’s happy headline (“Proposed Spending Plans Benefit Colleges, Parks”), and don’t be distracted by their little list of spending line items that might come to area colleges.
Hillsborough Community College stands to get millions. So does the University of South Florida. There's also money set aside for cultural and historic preservation projects, as well as the court system and parks.
The proposed spending plans set for debate in each chamber of the Florida Legislature this week contain a little something for everyone. But the competing budget proposals - $56.5 billion in the Senate and $57.6 billion in the House - paint two different pictures.
Much will change between now and April 30, when this year's legislative session is scheduled to conclude. But the initial proposals are considered a good guide to how communities will fare.
``It's a rosier budget picture than we had last year - we seem closer together,'' said Rep. Bob Henriquez, D-Tampa. ``But you never know.''
Keep in mind the The Tribune is a very conservative newspaper, a backer of both Jeb! and W, so their agenda is to make the Bush brothers and the Republican dominated legislature look good. Nice try, but Florida students are not smelling the roses:
State senators bemoaned another year of tuition increases for university students Thursday as they discussed a budget with hikes of 7.5 percent for undergraduate residents and up to 12.5 percent for out-of-state and grad students.
The Senate's spending plan for higher education guarantees per-credit costs for Florida-resident university students would climb to $68.16. And that could increase if a university's board of trustees exercises its right in the bill to heap another 2.5 percent on its state-resident students.
"We're financing education on the backs of students by raising tuition and increasing fees," said Sen. Ron Klein, D-Delray Beach, during debate on the appropriations bill.
Ex-felons beg Governor for basic rights
Florida’s racist law which disenfranchises felons who have served their sentences and are otherwise considered rehabilitated is garnering some much deserved national attention. NYT
Gov. Jeb Bush looked out over a roomful of felons appealing to him for something they had lost, and tried to reassure them.
"Don't be nervous; we're not mean people," the governor said as some fidgeted, prayed, hushed children or polished their handwritten statements. "You can just speak from the heart."
And they did: convicted robbers, drunken drivers, drug traffickers and others, all finished with their sentences, standing up one by one in a basement room at the State Capitol and asking Mr. Bush to restore their civil rights. Their files before him, Mr. Bush asked one man about his drinking, another about his temper, and so on.
Four mornings a year, this unusual scene unfolds in front of the governor and his cabinet, as they review the requests of some of the thousands of felons whom Florida has stripped of their rights to vote, serve on a jury and hold public office.
Since daybreak on Nov. 8, 2000, when the nation awoke to the shock of a presidential race ending in a virtual tie, Florida's voting laws and practices have been the subject of intense debate and scrutiny. The disputed election results led the state to adopt sweeping changes in how votes are cast and counted and how voter rolls are maintained.
Yet as Florida becomes an election-year battleground again, with Governor Bush vowing to ensure victory here for his brother and Democrats eager to reclaim the state, its electoral practices — including its felon disenfranchisement law — are drawing renewed attention.
In one lingering puzzle from 2000, an unknown number of legal voters were removed from Florida's rolls leading up to the presidential election, after a company working for the state mistakenly identified the voters as felons. At the same time, some counties mistakenly allowed actual felons to vote or turned away legitimate voters as suspected felons. A lawsuit filed in January 2001 sought to prevent similar errors, while another, filed just before the 2000 election, charged that the ban on felons voting discriminated against blacks and should be overturned.
Critics say that President Bush would have lost in 2000 if disenfranchised felons had been allowed to vote. A 2001 report by a University of Minnesota sociologist counted more than 600,000 in Florida, not including those still in prison, on parole or on probation. More than one in four black men here may not vote, the report found. The state says it is impossible to know how many disenfranchised felons live here, because some have died or moved.
Emperor Jeb! sitting on his throne and deciding whether to grant the basic rights that these people deserve to have back. I wonder if party affiliation is included in those files?
Conscientious objector faces charges
The U.S. Army has charged Staff Sgt. Camilo Mejia of North Miami -- who extended a two-week leave into a five-month absence -- with desertion from the war in Iraq, authorities said Friday.
Mejia, 28, was the first soldier to refuse to go back to the war and publicly declare himself a conscientious objector.
He was absent without leave for five months before surfacing and returning last week to his unit in Fort Stewart, Ga.
Lt. Col. Clifford Kent, a public affairs officer at Fort Stewart, said senior commander Maj. Gen. William Webster referred Mejia's case to a special court-martial.
If convicted, the maximum sentence Mejia could face: a year in confinement and a bad conduct discharge.
''The next step is for a military judge to docket the case,'' Kent said. ``Because they are so busy, it's hard to predict when the case will go to trial.''
''The defense for Sgt. Mejia will have to decide whether to request a trial by other soldiers or by the military judge alone,'' Kent said.
Military trials are typically open to the public unless national security issues arise, he said. Then a judge can close the proceeding. Mejia has been assigned to administrative duties in the meantime, he said.
Army officials have also restricted Mejia to Fort Stewart and have barred him from conducting face-to-face interviews with the media, said Tod Ensign, a leading national GI rights advocate and one of his attorneys.
Air Force tanker details come to light
The Air Force gave the Boeing Co. five months to rewrite the official specifications for 100 aerial refueling tankers so that the company's 767 aircraft would win a $23.5 billion deal, according to e-mails and documents obtained by Knight Ridder.
In the process, Boeing eliminated 19 of the 26 capabilities the Air Force originally wanted, and the Air Force acquiesced in order to keep the price down.
The Air Force then gave Boeing competitor Airbus 12 days to bid on the project and awarded the contract to Boeing even though Airbus met more than 20 of the original 26 specifications and offered a price that was $10 billion less than Boeing's.
Follow the link for all the details.
Bush just keeps letting Bin Ladens go
First we had that flight of Saudis out of the country. Then this.
The swiftness and ferocity of the Bush White House's attack on Richard Clarke tells you two things: his story may be largely true, and the Bush administration is terrified that the American people will believe it.
The central allegation - that Mr Bush was so obsessed with going after Saddam Hussein that he openly challenged his counter-terrorism adviser to find a link between September 11 and Iraq the day after the attacks took place - is serious.
It threatens the fundamental platform of the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign: that you are safer with them than you are with the Democrats.
......The fact that the Pentagon pulled the fighting force most equipped for hunting down Osama bin Laden from Afghanistan in March 2002 in order to pre- position it for Iraq cannot be denied.
Fifth Group Special Forces were a rare breed in the US military: they spoke Arabic, Pastun and Dari. They had been in Afghanistan for half a year, had developed a network of local sources and alliances, and believed that they were closing in on bin Laden.
Without warning, they were then given the task of tracking down Saddam. "We were going nuts on the ground about that decision," one of them recalls.
"In spite of the fact that it had taken five months to establish trust, suddenly there were two days to hand over to people who spoke no Dari, Pastun or Arabic, and had no rapport."
Along with the redeployment of human assets came a reallocation of sophisticated hardware. The US air force has only two specially-equipped RC135 U spy planes. They had successfully vectored in on al-Qaida leadership radio transmissions and cellphone calls, but they would no longer circle over the mountains of the Pakistan/Afghanistan border.
The Bush White House has banked on all who were privy to these details keeping the code of silence. But too many people outside the White House sphere of influence are too well informed, be they commandos on the ground or career civil servants at the state department and CIA.
Leaders call for Aristide kidnapping investigation
Caribbean nations are calling for an U.N investigation into the coup that removed Jean-Bertrand Aristide:
Caribbean leaders said the U.N. General Assembly should investigate Jean-Bertrand Aristide's claims that the United States staged a coup in Haiti and forced the ouster of the country's first democratically elected president.
The 15-nation Caribbean Community also said it was considering rejecting the U.S.-backed government of Haiti.
At the first day of a two-day summit Thursday, Caribbean leaders said they were focusing on whether to recognize a government that praises the rebels who helped oust Aristide.
Jamaican officials said Aristide will take permanent asylum in South Africa, but not until it holds general elections next month. Aristide has been in temporary exile in Jamaica since March 15, despite protests from U.S. and Haitian officials.
Caribbean leaders are ``still upset and uncomfortable'' about Aristide's departure, and made that clear to U.N. special envoy Reginald Dumas when he listened to their debate, St. Kitts and Nevis Prime Minister Denzil Douglas told The Associated Press.
``We are prepared to discuss the possibility of identifying exactly what were the circumstances,'' Douglas said. ``We are taking this matter to the U.N. General Assembly for clarification.''
Conference officials said the 15-nation regional bloc wants the General Assembly to investigate rather than the Security Council, where the United States or France could veto the proposal.
The Caribbean can expect support from the 53-member African Union, which last month echoed its demand.
The officials say Aristide has told Caribbean leaders that he was abducted at gunpoint by U.S. agents and put on a U.S.-chartered aircraft that carried him to the Central African Republic.
Cost of cheap laughs: over 500 American lives
W attended a Washington dinner last night where the sitting President traditionally makes fun of himself...
It's standard fare humor. Bush says he is preparing for a tough election fight; then on the large video screens a picture flashes showing him wearing a boxing robe while sitting at his desk. Bush notes he spends "a lot of time on the phone listening to our European allies." Then we see a photo of him on the phone with a finger in his ear. There were funny bits about Skull and Bones, his mother, and Dick Cheney. But at one point, Bush showed a photo of himself looking for something out a window in the Oval Office, and he said, "Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere."
The audience laughed. I grimaced. But that wasn't the end of it. After a few more slides, there was a shot of Bush looking under furniture in the Oval Office. "Nope," he said. "No weapons over there." More laughter. Then another picture of Bush searching in his office: "Maybe under here." Laughter again.
Disapproval must have registered upon my face, for one of my tablemates said, "Come on, David, this is funny." I wanted to reply, Over 500 Americans and literally countless Iraqis are dead because of a war that was supposedly fought to find weapons of mass destruction, and Bush is joking about it. Instead, I took a long drink of the lovely white wine that had come with our dinner. It's not as if I was in the middle of a talk-show debate and had to respond. This was certainly one of those occasions in which you either get it or don't. And I wasn't getting it. Or maybe my neighbor wasn't.
U.S. Senate attacks Roe v Wade
Yahoo! News - Senate Passes Fetus Protection Bill
The Senate voted Thursday to make it a separate crime to harm a fetus during commission of a violent federal crime, a victory for those seeking to expand the legal rights of the unborn.
......
The key obstacle was an amendment by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., that would have imposed the same tougher penalties for attacks on pregnant women as outlined in the DeWine bill but made no attempt to define the beginning of life.
Feinstein said that by defining when life begins, the bill was "the first step in removing a woman's right to choice, particularly in the early months of a pregnancy before viability." She said it could also chill embryonic stem cell research.
The Senate also defeated an amendment by Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., that would require employers to give unpaid leave, and states to pay unemployment benefits, to women when they or family members are victims of domestic or sexual violence.
Richard Clarke has Bushites running scared
They have no answer to his charges, so all they can do is call him names and attempt to impugn his character while straining to cast any doubt that they can on his credibility through surrogates like Fox News:
Shortly before the hearing, the White House violated its long-standing rules by authorizing Fox News to air remarks favorable to Bush that Clarke had made anonymously at an administration briefing in 2002. The White House press secretary read passages from the 2002 remarks at his televised briefing, and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, who has declined to give public testimony to the commission, called reporters into her office to highlight the discrepancy. "There are two very different stories here," she said. "These stories can't be reconciled."
Back at the hearing, former Illinois governor James R. Thompson, a Republican member of the commission, took up the cause, waving the Fox News transcript with one hand and Clarke's critical book in the other. "Which is true?" Thompson demanded, folding his arms and glowering down at the witness.
Clarke, appearing unfazed by the apparent contradiction between his current criticism and previous praise, spoke to Thompson as if addressing a slow student.
"I was asked to highlight the positive aspects of what the administration had done, and to minimize the negative aspects of what the administration had done," he explained. "I've done it for several presidents."
Funny: Condoleezza has time to attack Clarke, but no time to testify under oath to this same commission.
Condaleeza Rice will not testify but has no reluctance to appear on every TV show that would have her and most would. Imus this morning criticized Fox’s Sean Hannity for doing a poor job of questioning. I didn’t see the attacks she launched on Clarke as “scurrilous”. I did see how well Clarke stood up on the barrage of attacks he is being subjected to. The National Security Advisor Ms Rice led the demolition derby aimed at Clarke
MoveOn has a new ad planned to get Richard Clarke’s message out to the people:
“Frankly, I find it outrageous that a president is running for re-election on the grounds that he'd done such great things on terrorism. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done something to stop 9/11"
This is a direct quote from Clarke’s 60 Minutes interview.
And from Daily Kos:
Despite the assists of hacks like Lehman and the slimeballs at Fox News, this whistleblower will be hard to marginalize and ignore. The political heart of the Bush presidency is counter-terrorism, and their former counter-terrorism expert may have just ripped out their heart.
Richard Clarke is a hawk, appears to have been a Republican, and most balanced summaries of his career show him to have been a bit of a loose cannon too smitten by covert actions and insufficiently respectful of civil liberties. But he's the type of knowledgeable, dogged, and passionate analyst on whom every successful administration must rely for honest and non-ideological appraisals and advice. However, this administration doesn't value analysts, it values acolytes. Thus, it's not surprising this outraged insider has so effectively exposed the rank incompetence and rotten dishonesty at the center of the Bush administration. Furthermore, this administration doesn't respect people who aren't cynical idolaters of power like themselves; it's to be expected that they wouldn't heed the advice of someone whose character and motivations are so different from their own. The leaders of the Bush administration wouldn't listen to Richard Clarke because, as he proved today, he is fundamentally what they will never be. Richard Clarke is a mensch, and Richard Clarke is a patriot.
Delay done?
Rumor has it that House Majority leader Tom Delay may have to step down, at least temporarily, from his post: (from Roll Call via Political Animal)
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) has begun quiet discussions with a handful of colleagues about the possibility that he will have to step down from his leadership post temporarily if he is indicted by a Texas grand jury investigating alleged campaign finance abuses.
...Republican Conference rules state that a member of the elected leadership who has been indicted on a felony carrying a penalty of at least two years in prison must temporarily step down from the post.