Tax Credit in Doubt, Wind Power Industry Is Withering
“I hope they call us back because they are really, really good jobs,” said Miguel Orobiyi, who was furloughed from Gamesa. Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times
Wind turbine hubs being assembled by Gamesa in Fairless Hills, Pa., where most workers have been furloughed. Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times
Vending machines are used to distribute tools at the Gamesa plant, built on the grounds of a shuttered U.S. Steel factory. Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times
Workers prepare the bottom casing of a nacelle, a camper-size device that is designed to capture energy from slow winds. Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times
By DIANE CARDWELL Published: September 20, 2012
FAIRLESS HILLS, Pa. — Last month, Gamesa, a major maker of wind turbines [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/w/wind_power/index.html ], completed the first significant order of its latest innovation: a camper-size box that can capture the energy of slow winds, potentially opening new parts of the country to wind power.
But by the time the last of the devices, worth more than $1.25 million, was hitched to a rail car, Gamesa had furloughed 92 of the 115 workers who made them.
“We are all really sad,” said Miguel Orobiyi, 34, who worked as a mechanical assembler at the Gamesa plant for nearly five years. “I hope they call us back because they are really, really good jobs.”
Similar cuts are happening throughout the American wind sector, which includes hundreds of manufacturers, from multinationals that make giant windmills to smaller local manufacturers that supply specialty steel or bolts. In recent months, companies have announced almost 1,700 layoffs.
At its peak in 2008 and 2009, the industry employed about 85,000 people, according to the American Wind Energy Association, the industry’s principal trade group.
About 10,000 of those jobs have disappeared since, according to the association, as wind companies have been buffeted by weak demand for electricity, stiff competition from cheap natural gas and cheaper options from Asian competitors. Chinese manufacturers, who can often underprice goods because of generous state subsidies, have moved into the American market and have become an issue in the larger trade tensions between the countries. In July, the United States Commerce Department imposed tariffs on steel turbine towers from China after finding that manufacturers had been selling them for less than the cost of production.
And now, on top of the business challenges, the industry is facing a big political problem in Washington: the Dec. 31 expiration of a federal tax credit that makes wind power more competitive with other sources of electricity.
The tax break, which costs about $1 billion a year, has been periodically renewed by Congress with support from both parties. This year, however, it has become a wedge issue in the presidential contest. President Obama has traveled to wind-heavy swing states like Iowa to tout his support for the subsidy. Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee, has said he opposes the wind credit, and that has galvanized Republicans in Congress against it, perhaps dooming any extension or at least delaying it until after the election despite a last-ditch lobbying effort from proponents this week.
Opponents argue that the industry has had long enough to wean itself from the subsidy and, with wind representing a small percentage of total electricity generation, the taxpayers’ investment has yielded an insufficient return.
“Big Wind has had extension after extension after extension,” said Benjamin Cole, a spokesman for the American Energy Alliance, a group partly financed by oil [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/energy-environment/oil-petroleum-and-gasoline/index.html ] interests that has been lobbying against the credit in Washington. “The government shouldn’t be continuing to prop up industries that never seem to be able to get off their training wheels.”
But without the tax credit in place, the wind business “falls off a cliff,” said Ryan Wiser, a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who studies the market potential of renewable electricity sources.
The industry’s precariousness was apparent a few weeks ago at the Gamesa factory, as a crew loaded the guts of the company’s newest model of the component, a device known as a nacelle, into its fiberglass shell. Only 50 completed nacelles awaited pickup in a yard once filled with three times as many, most of the production line stood idle, and shelves rated to hold 7,270 pounds of parts and equipment lay bare.
“We’ve done a lot to get really efficient here,” said Tom Bell, the manager of the plant, which was built on the grounds of a shuttered U.S. Steel factory that was once a bedrock of the local economy. “Now we just need a few more orders.”
Industry executives and analysts say that the looming end of the production tax credit, which subsidizes wind power by 2.2 cents a kilowatt-hour, has made project developers skittish about investing or going forward. That reluctance has rippled through the supply chain.
On Tuesday, Siemens, the German-based turbine-maker, announced it would lay off 945 workers in Kansas, Iowa and Florida, including part-timers. Last week Katana Summit, a tower manufacturer, said it would shut down operations in Nebraska and Washington if it could not find a buyer. Vestas, the world’s largest turbine manufacturer, with operations in Colorado and Texas, recently laid off 1,400 workers globally on top of 2,300 layoffs announced earlier this year. Clipper Windpower, with manufacturing in Iowa, is reducing its staff by a third, to 376 from 550. DMI Industries, another tower producer, is planning to lay off 167 workers in Tulsa by November.
Wind industry jobs range in pay from about $30,000 a year for assemblers to almost $100,000 a year for engineers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The industry’s contraction follows several years of sustained growth — with a few hiccups during the downturn — that has helped wind power edge closer to the cost of electricity from conventional fuels. The number of turbine manufacturers grew to nine in 2010 from just one in 2005, according to the United States International Trade Commission, while the number of component makers increased tenfold in roughly the same period to almost 400, according to the Congressional Research Service.
Aside from Clipper Windpower and General Electric, most of the turbine manufacturers operating in the United States have headquarters overseas, especially in Europe, where wind power took off first, spurred by clean energy policies and generous subsidies.
As the United States put in place mandates and subsidies of its own, several large outfits, including the Spanish company Gamesa, set up shop stateside. Because the turbines, made of roughly 8,000 parts, are so large and heavy — blades half the length of a football field, towers rising hundreds of feet in the air, motors weighing in the tons — they are difficult and expensive to transport.
As a result, manufacturers invested billions to develop a supply chain in the United States. More than 100 companies contribute parts to Gamesa’s 75-ton devices, which are the most expensive and complex major components of high-tech windmills.
Some longtime Gamesa partners like Hine Hydraulics followed the company from Spain, investing millions in building plants in the United States and sending workers to Spain for expensive training.
Rich Miller, who works for Hine in Quakertown, Pa., said that when he went to Spain to learn how to build and test power units for its hydraulic systems, it was his first trip out of the country.
“That was quite an experience in itself,” said Mr. Miller, who is 58, adding that he probably learned more in four years at Hine than at previous jobs.
Now he worries about having to move on. “Hopefully it will go back to the way things were.” Losing his job at his age, he said, “would be devastating for me.”
Montana ranchers see biggest fears realized as Asian energy demands fuel coal export boom
By Associated Press, Published: September 21m 2012
ROUNDUP, Mont. — The big mining companies first came knocking on Ellen Pfister’s door in the 1970s, ready to tap the huge coal deposits beneath her family’s eastern Montana ranch.
Pfister and others successfully fended them off, and as the coal industry retreated domestically, it appeared their battle might be won. But now, a fast-growing market in exporting coal to Asia has Pfister and other ranchers seeing their long-held fears become reality.
With the once-shuttered Bull Mountain Mine under new ownership, mining activity beneath Pfister’s 300-head cattle ranch is in full swing, on target to produce more than 9 million tons of coal this year. At least once a day on average a coal train more than a mile long pulls out of the mine that sits atop an estimated one billion tons of the fuel. Sixty percent is destined for overseas markets, including Asia.
Pfister’s biggest worry is that mining could permanently damage her water supplies — a crucial necessity on a ranch set in an arid landscape of sandstone, sage brush and ponderosa pine trees stunted by periodic drought.
“I’m trying to figure out how to protect myself,” said Pfister. “If you don’t have water, you have to go someplace else.”
U.S. coal exports hit their highest level in two decades last year, with 107 million tons of coal sent primarily to Asia and Europe. Some project volumes to double again in the next five years as the industry moves aggressively to build and expand coal ports on the West Coast and Gulf of Mexico.
Coal’s opponents are waging a political public relations battle to squash the export ambitions, and success for the industry could be undermined if the global energy market wanes. But for Pfister, the changes she’s long feared are here.
Trucks rumble along access roads to the mine carved into the rocky coulees that lace through the ranch, which Pfister inherited from her mother and runs with husband, Don Golder. Giant fissures have appeared where portions of the mine collapsed after coal was removed. About ten acres have been cleared for an emergency escape portal for miners and for ventilation equipment.
Mine owner Signal Peak Energy controls the mineral rights under portions of Pfister’s property, and federal law gives the company extraction rights and Pfister little or no compensation for her trouble. Pfister said she’s made other concessions, as well, including easements for the escape portal and installation of a gas pipeline network to clear the mine of dangerous carbon monoxide. She worried miners could get killed otherwise, she said.
Signal Peak president John DeMichiei said the company will address any concerns raised by Pfister, but has to access the mine through her property to deal with unexpected events such as the high carbon monoxide levels.
The mine also has pledged to provide water to Pfister if her springs run dry. Pfister said that could end up cancelling her legal rights to those springs in the future, making her forever dependent on the mine.
For the industry, Bull Mountain and other export mines in Wyoming and Montana represent a bet that overseas sales could reverse the industry’s downward spiral.
It’s a different world than when the Interior Department laid out a sweeping plan for coal development that ranchers said would sacrifice their livelihoods. In 1971, the agency-commissioned North Central Power Study called for building huge strip mines across the Northern Plains to serve 10,000-megawatt power plants spread across four states.
The effort was aimed at fueling the development of the American West. But while some strip mines were built, the plan was never fully realized as local residents rallied in opposition, new mining restrictions were adopted and energy markets shifted in favor of other fuels.
Once the undisputed king in electricity generation, coal has seen its share of the U.S. market drop sharply in recent years. Domestic demand for the fuel has fallen by about a third since its peak in 2007 as the U.S. relies more heavily on cheap, natural gas. With more coal plants closing because of rising costs and tighter regulations — including this week’s announcement that a 154-megawatt plant south of Bull Mountain in Billings would be mothballed — the prospects of coal reclaiming its historical throne are doubtful.
Analyst Jonny Sultoon with energy consultant Wood Mackenzie described the outlook for burning coal in the U.S. as “pretty bleak.”
Backing the industry are the railways that ship coal; unions that want more mining, shipping and construction work; and lawmakers from both sides of the aisle who see political advantage in joining the push for jobs. Pfister is among only about 40 ranchers and others make up the Bull Mountain Land Alliance that has opposed Signal Peak. That compares to more than 300 jobs created since the mine re-opened.
Montana is well positioned to tap into the export market with its relative proximity to the West Coast and an estimated 120 billion tons of coal — more than any other state and most countries. Only China and Russia have more. The industry has enjoyed almost eight years of solid support from Gov. Brian Schweitzer, who pushed tax breaks for Signal Peak and is a close associate of the mine’s owners, the Boich family.
Schweitzer is a strong advocate for renewable energy. Still, he argues exports can bring economic development without additional pollution. Coal plants in Korea, India and China will be built regardless of where the fuel comes from, he says.
“They’re not building new boilers just for Montana coal,” he said. “But we would be creating jobs in Montana.”
Lined up against exports are conservation groups and politicians in some cities and states along shipping routes.
Beyond the impacts of mining, they warn a parade of coal trains will cause significant traffic delays in bigger cities and alter rural communities. And they say pushing more coal onto the international market will boost emissions of poisonous mercury and climate-changing greenhouse gases.
“Economics 101 tells you when you increase the supply of something, the price will go down and people will consume more of it,” said Eric de Place, a researcher with the Seattle-based Sightline Institute.
Bull Mountain plans to ramp up production in coming years to 15 million tons annually. Cloud Peak Energy and Arch Coal, Inc. are seeking to build new export mines in southeastern Montana. In neighboring Wyoming, Arch and Peabody Energy have recently started shipping coal once slated for U.S. markets to the Gulf Coast for export.
“As long as it’s in the ground there,” Pfister said, “there is somebody that wants to get it out and do something with it because they see a dollar there.”
It’s the wild card in the renewables vs. fossil fuels debate: What price to put on carbon dioxide, which exacts social costs that escape capture by the free market?
The United States has estimated CO2’s toll to be $21 per ton, but a new analysis [ http://www.springerlink.com/content/863287021p06m441/fulltext.pdf ] [PDF] says the true cost is actually between $55 and $266 per ton – numbers that if accepted, would make renewables a far more competitive player in the energy marketplace.
“The analysis shows that if the well-being of future generations is properly taken into consideration, the benefits of cleaner electricity sources are greater than their upfront costs, both for new generation, and for replacing our dirtiest plants,” Laurie Johnson, chief economist in the climate and clean air program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, writes in a blog post [ http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/ljohnson/co2pollutioncost_part1.html ] that explains the study she co-authored. “In contrast, using the government’s estimate of CO2 damage costs tends to favor dirtier energy sources, and an ever riskier climate.”
What accounts for the vast difference with the government’s figure? It comes down to what economists call “discounting.” This is a standard practice of shrinking – discounting – the value of things to reflect how much more a dollar today, in real terms, is worth than a dollar tomorrow. (Johnson explains the concept nicely as “compound interest running in the opposite direction.” She writes: “if you deposited $41,200 into a bank account today it would grow to approximately $100,000 in thirty years. You’d have a real net gain of $58,800. Economists thus say that $100,000 in thirty years should be valued today at $41,200.”)
The impact of this can be profound. Johnson points out that the government’s “lowest discount rate of 2.5 percent per year would value $100,000 worth of climate damages happening thirty years from now at approximately $48,000 (and at one hundred years roughly $8,500).” (You can download a PDF of the government report here [ http://www.epa.gov/oms/climate/regulations/scc-tsd.pdf ].)
Johnson makes a host of wonky econ arguments as to why this discounting is excessive, but the heart of the argument is that the trade-offs we’re talking about here are intergenerational. As Johnson says: “many of the people benefitting from emitting CO2 today are not the same people as those that will be harmed by it in the future.”
So instead of using the government’s annual discount rates of 2.5, 3 and 5 percent, the new study uses 1, 1.5 and 5 percent. With the lower discount rates, even natural gas, at outrageously low prices now due to the shale gas boom, loses its edge.
“At our two lowest discount rates (1 and 1.5 percent), we find that the real cost (i.e. generation costs inclusive of pollution damages) of building new electricity generation from natural gas (what the market currently favors) is higher than for wind or natural gas with (carbon capture and sequestration),” Johnson writes. “At 1 percent, solar photovoltaic and coal with CCS would also be cheaper. These findings are driven by differences in climate change costs only, as SO2 pollution from coal with capture is small, and negligible for natural gas. When the government’s (higher) discount rates are used, conventional natural gas appears to be cheaper than these cleaner technologies.”
I was infuriated reading David Brooks' column today in the NYT .. http://matt.bo.lt/the_conservative_mind_nytimes_com . According to Brooks', "life is best organized as a series of daring ventures from a secure base". Allow me to paraphrase: "You are infants, and we will make sure we keep you away from power so you don't get hurt."
Conservatives have been infantilizing for as long as power has existed. But Brooks is somehow more irritating and corrosive than even Burke. Burke was obviously a member of an upper class that was truly blind to the world. He grew up in privilege, and the lens through which he saw the world was abject fear of chaos and disorder. No society for more than 1,000 years had survived without a monarch or similar, so his support for aristocracy had the same legitimacy as support for Newtonian physics until Quantum physics came alone - rigid power structures around religion and class did seem to promise more stability than constant tribal and small-state warfare.
But Brooks, this is the 21st century. We have the French and American revolutions, the emergence of democratic Europe from Fascism, the Internet, and countless other examples that prove that while the rule of law is essential for the prosperity and happiness, rigid societal order is not. You know better, but you promote worse.
Before we knew that men and women could prosper in liberal democracy, Conservatism was a legitimate theory - neither proven nor disproven. At this point, its predictive ability as a model is false, and like any theory that fails to predict real-world behavior, it must be abandoned.
More below
Frankly, I think that Brooks' conservatism is as deep as market testing. He started with BOBOs then moved to Kansas. During his spiritual pilgrimage to the heartland of America he had a revelation like Paul of Tarsus - "Hey! Middle America is a much better market! They want someone who seems smart to tell them they are right and the West Coast is a bunch of superior you know whats"
But as he criticizes Conservatism in his editorial, he intellectual fatuousness just folds over on itself, lie over self-deception over delusion. For example, in his "two branches of conservatism" argument, he claims one branch:
Because they were conservative, they tended to believe that power should be devolved down to the lower levels of this chain. They believed that people should lead disciplined, orderly lives, but doubted that individuals have the ability to do this alone, unaided by social custom and by God. So they were intensely interested in creating the sort of social, economic and political order that would encourage people to work hard, finish school and postpone childbearing until marriage.
Lets try to parse this - exactly who is it in the conservative party that believes "power should be devolved" to a lower level? Does he read what he is writing? Conservatives may believe that power is in patriarchy, because they need a father-figure. But the root of Conservatism is power - the Calvinist "chosen" - not in devolution. If a person cannot lead an orderly life alone, and requires social, economic, and political order, how is that devolution?
David, my sweet, sweet friend, read what you are writing. You cannot claim that you believe power needs to be devolved to the individual if you also believe that the individual needs a suffocating matrix of rules. Who, pray tell, writes and enforces these rules? What if the power, once devolved, becomes self-aware and realizes that the social structures like aristocracy and plutocracy, are actually parasites?
There is a place for structure and order, and Lord knows our primitive brains crave it, but it is an element of society, it is not society. Burke was honest - he just believed that everything should be in a rigid structure - a tree that grows for 100s of years with light pruning. Everyone knowing their place. He was wrong, but at least he was honest. David, you are in a position to actually read and understand modern history. Unlike Burke, you do not have to fear chaos when everyone is given the vote, because you can see that greater suffrage tends to lead to better outcomes. You do not have to yearn for the stolid hand of a father-figure, because you can see how children have created some of the most transformative technologies and young people have driven profound cultural change.
Conservatism isn't failing because of conflict with two branches of conservatism. Conservatism is failing because it can no longer contain its own contradictions. Like newtonian physics in a quantum world or a medieval cosmology in the age of the Hubble, its model has to face that what it imagined (and what it feared) as true was simply wrong, and the contortions required to keep it on life support are tortured, contradictory, primitive and wrong.
Originally posted to madmadmad on Wed Sep 26, 2012 at 09:11 AM PDT.
Paul Ryan betrays his own views on income inequality - Ezra Klein .. one bit ..
Ryan’s presentation was persuasive. He’s right that the growth of social spending on the elderly is crowding out spending on the poor. And he was more convincing because he seemed to admit a hard truth that Republicans often deny: that government programs for the poor are a crucial way of ensuring income mobility, and as they get squeezed, so, too, do the life chances of those born at the base of the income ladder.
But it is difficult to believe that Ryan’s budget was written by the same guy who wrote this paper. Because in Ryan’s budget, Social Security is untouched. The cuts to Medicaid and other health programs for the poor are twice the size of those to Medicare. The cuts to education, to food stamps, to transportation infrastructure and to pretty much everything else besides defense are draconian. As for the tax reform component, it cuts taxes on millionaires by more than $250,000, but it doesn’t name a single loophole or tax break that Ryan and the Republicans would close.
In the end, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that 62 percent of the cuts come from programs for low-income Americans and 37 percent of the tax benefits go to the few Americans earning more than $1 million. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=74028392
Wisconsin, Aurora, Virginia Tech, Columbine. We all know these place names and what happened there. By the time this column appears, there may well be a new locale to add to the list. Such is the state of enabled and murderous mayhem in the United States.
With the hope of presenting the issue of guns in America in a novel way, I’m going to look at it from an unusual vantage point: the eyes of a nurse. By that I mean looking at guns in America in terms of the suffering they cause, because to really understand the human cost of guns in the United States we need to focus on gun-related pain and death.
Every day 80 Americans die from gunshots and an additional 120 are wounded, according to a 2006 article in The Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. Those 80 Americans left their homes in the morning and went to work, or to school, or to a movie, or for a walk in their own neighborhood, and never returned. Whether they were dead on arrival or died later on in the hospital, 80 people’s normal day ended on a slab in the morgue, and there’s nothing any of us can do to get those people back.
In a way that few others do, I became aware early on that nurses deal with death on a daily basis. The first unretouched dead bodies I ever saw were the two cadavers we studied in anatomy lab. One man, one woman, both donated their bodies for dissection, and I learned amazing things from them: the sponginess of lung tissue, the surprising lightness of a human heart, the fabulous intricacy of veins, arteries, tendons and nerves that keep all of us moving and alive.
I also learned something I thought I already knew: death is scary. I expected my focus in the lab to be on acquiring knowledge, and it was, but my feelings about these cadavers intruded also. I had nightmares. The sound of bones being sawed and snapped was excruciating the day our teaching assistant broke the ribs of one of them to extract a heart. Some days the smell was so overwhelming I wanted to run from the lab. Death is the only part of life that is really final, and I learned about the awesomeness of finality during my 12 weeks with those two very dead people.
Of course, in hospitals, death and suffering are what nurses and doctors struggle against. Our job is to restore people to health and wholeness, or at the very least, to keep them alive. That’s an obvious aim on the oncology floor where I work, but nowhere is the medical goal of maintaining life more immediately urgent than in trauma centers and intensive-care units. In those wards, patients often arrive teetering on the border between life and death, and the medical teams that receive them have fleeting moments in which to act.
The focus on preserving life and alleviating suffering, so evident in the hospital, contrasts strikingly with its stubborn disregard when applied to lives ended by Americans lawfully armed as if going into combat. The deaths from guns are as disturbing, and as final, as the cadavers I studied in anatomy lab, but the talk we hear from the gun lobby is about freedom and rights, not life and death.
Gun advocates say that guns don’t kill people, people kill people. The truth, though, is that people with guns kill people, often very efficiently, as we saw so clearly and so often this summer. And while there can be no argument that the right to bear arms is written into the Constitution, we cannot keep pretending that this right is somehow without limit, even as we place reasonable limits on arguably more valuable rights like the freedom of speech and due process.
No one argues that it should be legal to shout “fire” in a crowded theater; we accept this limit on our right to speak freely because of its obvious real-world consequences. Likewise, we need to stop talking about gun rights in America as if they have no wrenching real-world effects when every day 80 Americans, their friends, families and loved ones, learn they obviously and tragically do.
Many victims never stand a chance against a dangerously armed assailant, and there’s scant evidence that being armed themselves would help. Those bodies skip the hospital and go straight to the morgue. The lucky ones, the survivors — the 120 wounded per day — get hustled to trauma centers and then intensive care units to, if possible, be healed. Many of them never fully recover.
A trauma nurse I know told me she always looked at people’s shoes when they lay on gurneys in the emergency department. It struck her that life had still been normal when that patient put them on in the morning. Whether they laced up Nikes, pulled on snow boots or slid feet into stiletto heels, the shoes became a relic of the ordinariness of the patient’s life, before it turned savage.
So I have a request for proponents of unlimited access to guns. Spend some time in a trauma center and see the victims of gun violence — the lucky survivors — as they come in bloody and terrified. Understand that our country’s blind embrace of gun rights made this violent tableau possible, and that it’s playing out each day in hospitals and morgues all over the country.
Before leaving, make sure to look at the patients’ shoes. Remember that at the start of the day, before being attacked by a person with a gun, that patient lying on a stretcher writhing helplessly in pain was still whole.
Election to Decide Future Interrogation Methods in Terrorism Cases
Mitt Romney said he plans to "use enhanced interrogation techniques which go beyond those that are in the military handbook right now," at a news conference in Charleston, S.C., in December. Stephen Morton for The New York Times
By contrast, Mr. Romney’s advisers have privately urged him to “rescind and replace President Obama’s executive order” and permit secret “enhanced interrogation techniques against high-value detainees that are safe, legal and effective in generating intelligence to save American lives,” according to an internal Romney campaign memorandum.
While the memo is a policy proposal drafted by Mr. Romney’s advisers in September 2011, and not a final decision by him, its detailed analysis dovetails with his rare and limited public comments about interrogation.
The campaign policy paper does not specify which techniques Mr. Romney should approve, saying more study was needed because Mr. Obama had “permanently damaged” the value of some by releasing memorandums detailing Bush-era techniques [ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/17/us/politics/17detain.html ] in April 2009.
After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Bush administration lawyers approved as legal, despite antitorture laws, such tactics as prolonged sleep deprivation, shackling into painful “stress” positions for long periods while naked and in a cold room, slamming into a wall, locking inside a small box, and the suffocation tactic called waterboarding [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/t/torture/waterboarding/index.html ]. The goal was to break the will to resist of detainees believed to be withholding information.
When disclosed, the Bush policies ignited a heated debate that continues to flare. The policy’s supporters say they were lawful and extracted valuable information that helped save lives. Critics contend that they were illegal and damaged the United States’ moral standing, and that the same or better information could have been obtained with nonabusive tactics.
The Romney campaign document, obtained by The New York Times, is a five-page policy paper titled “Interrogation Techniques [ http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/441318-romney-campaign-interrogation-policy.html ].” It was a near-final draft circulated last September among the Romney campaign’s “national security law subcommittee” for any further comments before it was to be submitted to Mr. Romney. The panel consists of a brain trust of conservative lawyers, most of whom are veterans of the George W. Bush administration.
The Romney campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
The policy paper acknowledges that it is hard to know what would be different had Mr. Bush’s interrogation policy continued. But it argues that Mr. Obama’s approach has “hampered (or will hamper) the fight against terrorism” by forbidding techniques “that we should feel, as a nation, that we have a right to use against our enemies.”
In particular, it criticizes Mr. Obama for restricting interrogators to a “one-size-fits-all approach” designed for routine battlefield captures by ordinary soldiers, not high-level terrorist operatives in the custody of the Central Intelligence Agency. It also notes that the Army Field Manual is available on the Internet, so enemies can study it.
Last December, Mr. Romney was asked about [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iDzPy32wAo (above)] waterboarding at a town-hall meeting in Charleston. He replied that he would “do what is essential to protect the lives of the American people” but would not list “for our enemies around the world” what techniques the United States would use.
That comment appeared to align Mr. Romney with a practice by the executive branch, under President Bush, of defining torture narrowly and saying the harsh treatment it inflicted on detainees fell short of that level. By contrast, Mr. Obama has embraced a more expansive conception of the suffering that is off-limits.
Uncertainties remain. One open question is whether a Romney administration would wait to decide which additional techniques to authorize until an important terrorism suspect is captured alive. That could take a while: the government’s counterterrorism apparatus has, under Mr. Obama, centered on tactics that kill, like drone strikes.
Moreover, the Central Intelligence Agency could give “a certain amount of passive-aggressive resistance” to any directive to restart any aggressive interrogation practices that could leave it exposed if political winds shift again, said Mark Lowenthal [ http://www.theintelligenceacademy.net/about/faculty-bios/ ], who was its assistant director for analysis and production from 2002 to 2005.
Finally, because the Bush administration’s interrogation policy evolved, it is not clear which techniques a Republican-style Justice Department would consider lawful.
The next year, the agency proposed restarting a more limited version of its program, using sleep deprivation, withholding solid food, slapping and head grabbing. Mr. Bradbury approved that shorter list of tactics [ http://www.justice.gov/olc/docs/memo-warcrimesact.pdf ]. It remained ambiguous whether the others, too, were still legally permissible if a policy maker wanted to use them.
Mr. Bradbury, who declined to comment, was one of 18 lawyers on the Romney campaign’s national security law subcommittee when its “Interrogation Techniques” paper was circulated.
A distribution e-mail said that the paper “reflects input from several members of the subcommittee” without specifying them or saying whether anyone disagreed with it.
Mr. Romney has consistently opposed ruling out interrogation techniques. At a debate in 2007, he sparred with Senator McCain [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbQLuZ28EEM (next below)]
“I support the use of appropriate and necessary interrogation techniques to obtain information from high-value terrorists who possess knowledge critical to our national defense,” Mr. Romney said. “I do not believe it is wise for our country to reveal all of the precise interrogation methods we may authorize for use against captured terrorists, and I strongly condemn the actions taken by President Obama to do so.”
GOP Volunteer In Florida Tells Voters: Don't Vote For Obama, He's A Medicare-Killing Muslim (AUDIO) 09/28/2012 [...] "Y'all sound like y'all are senior citizens, right? Yeah. You don't want Obama. You really don't want Obama. Because he'll get rid of your Medicare. You might as well say goodbye to it," she says. "I don't know if you've done any research on Obama or not, but he is a Muslim, um, he is, um, gotta socialistic view on the, ya know, economy, the government, the whole nine yards. If he had his way, we'd be a socialistic country." [...] "Pay attention to Fox News. If you can get out and watch that movie '2016' do so," she says. [...] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/28/gop-volunteer-florida-obama-muslim_n_1924051.html [with audio embedded, and comments]
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Republican Jewish Coalition Gives iPads To Woo 'Volunteers' 09/28/2012 WASHINGTON -- The Republican Jewish Coalition [ http://www.rjchq.org/ ] on Thursday began offering "volunteers" who work the phones in key battleground states "awesome thank-you incentives" for their time helping to defeat President Barack Obama in November. Put in at least 20 hours at an official RJC phone bank in California, Florida, Pennsylvania, New York or here in Washington and receive a $100 American Express gift card. Up that to 30 hours and one gets an older model iPad 2 (worth about $200). And to volunteers who dial up Jewish voters for 50 hours or more, the RJC will give a new 32GB iPad 3, worth $599. Less time gets a lesser tablet, with 40 hours on the phone equaling a 16GB iPad 3 ($499). If the Romney supporters were being paid, that would add up to between $5 and $12 an hour. But the RJC said the swag is just "our way of saying thank you for volunteering your valuable time." [...] Asked whether his volunteers were being similarly rewarded, David Harris, president and CEO of the National Jewish Democratic Council, said, "Oh my goodness, no. When we've done phone banking with local volunteers over many hours, we've offered cheese pizza for dinner, water. That's it. No American Express cards, no iPad 3s, no iPad 2s. "The difference may be that folks volunteering for us and helping us out may feel deeply committed to the cause," Harris said. "I've not seen the need to offer high-end consumer electronics or American Express cards to garner so-called volunteers." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/28/republican-jewish-coalition-ipads_n_1923870.html [with comments]
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Todd Akin's Pollster Compares His Situation To That Of Cult Leader David Koresh [UPDATE]
Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin (R)
By Laura Bassett Posted: 09/28/2012 2:53 pm EDT Updated: 09/28/2012 5:35 pm EDT
The day after Akin made the "legitimate rape" remark "was like the Waco with David Koresh situation, where they’re trying to smoke him out with the SWAT teams and the helicopters and the bad Nancy Sinatra records," Conway told Family Research Council President Tony Perkins [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/gop-pollster-advised-akin-withstand-controversy-david-koresh-faced-atf-waco ] on the "Washington Watch Weekly" radio show. "Then here comes day two, and you realize the guy’s not coming out of the bunker. Listen, Todd has shown his principle to the voters."
Koresh, a religious cult leader and accused child rapist, died with 54 other adults and 28 children in his compound in 1993 after a 51-day standoff with the FBI in Waco, Texas.
"You saw former speaker Gingrich there on Todd’s behalf at a fundraiser on Monday, saying it’s just 'conventional idiocy' that’s preventing people from backing Todd," she told Perkins. "And he predicts that come mid-October, everyone will be following yours and his lead back to Missouri, with their money."
Akin's spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
UPDATE: 4 p.m. -- Conway told The Huffington Post that she did not mean to compare the two men. "My comparison was to the tactics used to push Akin from the race, not to the men involved," she wrote in an email. "I would never compare David Koresh to Todd Akin."
Christian conservatives hold “America for Jesus” prayer rally in Philly ahead of election
By Associated Press, Published: September 27 | Updated: Friday, September 28, 2:08 PM
Christian conservatives who blame “moral depravity” for everything from the recession to terrorism are converging on Philadelphia for a rally they hope will spark a religious revival as Election Day nears.
Called “America for Jesus 2012,” the prayer assembly on Independence Mall is attracting support across a spectrum of Protestant clergy and activists. Among the scheduled speakers are religious broadcaster Pat Robertson and Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, along with preachers such as Cindy Jacobs of Generals International ministry who say they’re prophets with a direct line to God. Many backers had also endorsed “The Response,” the prayer rally hosted last year by Texas Gov. Rick Perry just before he entered the GOP presidential primary.
John Blanchard, national coordinator for “America for Jesus 2012,” said the two-day event starting Friday night is nonpartisan. It’s modeled after the 1980 “Washington for Jesus” rally, considered a pivotal show of organizational strength by the then-fledgling Christian right. Bishop Anne Gimenez, whose late husband John helped lead the 1980 assembly, is a lead organizer of the Philadelphia gathering.
“We are praying that God would touch America,” said Blanchard, executive pastor of Rock Church International in Virginia, which the Gimenez family founded. “We’re not Democrats and Republicans. We’re Christians.”
Still, many of those offering prayers at the event have been outspoken critics of President Barack Obama. Steve Strang, the influential Pentecostal publisher of Charisma magazine, wrote in a blog post inviting readers to join him in Philadelphia that America is under threat from a “radical homosexual agenda” and Obama “seems to be moving toward some form of European socialism.”
Jacobs blamed a mysterious Arkansas bird-kill last year on Obama’s repeal of the policy known as “don’t ask, don’t tell,” enabling gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military.
David Barton, a self-taught historian who emphasizes the Christian roots of the U.S., is another rally supporter. Barton wrote in a Feb. 29 article that Obama has shown “hostility toward Biblical people of faith” while giving “preferential treatment” to Muslims. (Obama has said he was raised in a nonreligious home and later became Christian.) The publisher Thomas Nelson last month withdrew Barton’s book, “The Jefferson Lies,” citing historical errors. The book challenged the belief that Jefferson was largely secular and promoted the separation of church and state.
Anne Gimenez said in a phone interview that although the event is Christian, the assembly will not advocate that the U.S. government be limited to Christians.
“I have no boundaries or limitations on that. I would just like to see someone who is God-fearing” in public office, she said.
Gimenez said Philadelphia was chosen because of its importance in U.S. history. The rally will be held outside the building where the Declaration of Independence was signed. Pennsylvania is also where evangelist George Whitefield preached during the first Great Awakening, the 18th-century religious revival that spread through the American colonies. Blanchard said his group successfully petitioned Pennsylvania lawmakers to declare Saturday “William Penn Day” in honor of Pennsylvania’s founder, who championed religious freedom.
“America is in a state of emergency evidenced by the symptoms of widespread moral depravity and economic meltdown,” organizers wrote on the rally’s website. “Education, government, and man’s wisdom cannot solve this problem.”
Two weeks ago, the ministry coalition behind the assembly distributed food and offered medical care throughout Philadelphia as part of the run-up to the gathering. Attendees will be asked to start 40 days of prayer and fasting, through the Nov. 6, election, to help turn the nation toward God. Preachers representing Messianic Judaism, which teaches that Christ is the Messiah, a belief at odds with traditional Judaism, will blow the shofar, a ram’s horn used in Jewish ritual.
The major speakers are scheduled for Saturday. Joel Osteen, the Texas megachurch pastor, has sent a video prayer message to the event. An executive with the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association is also among those offering prayers. A message of support from 93-year-old evangelist Billy Graham will be read.
Thousands Pray for US at 'America for Jesus' Rally
Dharma Bohall, 13, extends her arms in prayer during the America for Jesus prayer rally, Friday Sept. 28, 2012, on Independence Mall in Philadelphia. Christian conservatives who blame “moral depravity” for everything from the recession to terrorism are converging on Philadelphia for a rally they hope will spark a religious revival as Election Day nears. (AP Photo/ Joseph Kaczmarek)
By MARYCLAIRE DALE Associated Press PHILADELPHIA September 30, 2012 (AP)
Thousands of conservative Christians gathered Saturday on Independence Mall in Philadelphia to pray for the future of the United States in the weeks before the presidential election.
Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson and Family Research Council president Tony Perkins topped a full day of speakers at "The America for Jesus 2012" prayer rally.
Robertson, a former Republican candidate for president, called the election important, but didn't mention either major political party or candidate by name.
"I don't care what the ACLU says or any atheists say. This nation belongs to Jesus, and we're here today to reclaim his sovereignty," said Robertson, 82, who founded the Christian Coalition and Christian Broadcasting Network, and ran for president in 1988.
Organizers plan another prayer rally Oct. 20 in Washington, D.C., two weeks before President Barack Obama faces Republican Mitt Romney in the presidential election.
Perkins asked the crowd to pray for elected officials including Obama.
"We pray that his eyes will be open to the truth," Perkins said.
A number of event organizers, though, have been vocal critics of the Democratic president.
Steve Strang, the influential Pentecostal publisher of Charisma magazine, which was distributed at the rally, recently wrote in a blog post that America is under threat from a "radical homosexual agenda." He also said Obama "seems to be moving toward some form of European socialism."
And speaker Cindy Jacobs has blamed a mysterious Arkansas bird-kill last year on Obama's repeal of the policy known as "don't ask, don't tell," which allows gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military.
Speakers throughout the day condemned abortion, gay marriage and population control as practiced by Planned Parenthood. Christian rock music filled the historic mall as speakers challenged the crowd to overcome the seven deadly sins: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and slothfulness.
The rally was held outside of Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence was signed. Pennsylvania is also where evangelist George Whitefield preached during the first Great Awakening, the 18th-century religious revival that spread through the American colonies.
Andrew Beacham, Kentucky House Candidate, Airs Shock Ad Featuring Dismembered Fetus
By Nick Wing Posted: 09/28/2012 2:28 pm EDT Updated: 09/28/2012 2:33 pm EDT
If you think President Barack Obama is a baby murderer who has a lot in common with Adolf Hitler and serial killer Ted Bundy, Kentucky has a congressional candidate with just the ad for you.
His name is Andrew Beacham, an independent candidate running for Kentucky's 2nd Congressional District. He has no real chance of winning, but that's just fine by him, because that's not what his campaign is actually about. He admitted as much in a recent interview with the Associated Press [ http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505245_162-57520081/anti-abortion-ad-to-begin-airing-wednesday-in-ky/ ].
"Clearly, our main goal is to cause Obama's defeat," Beacham said. "But if I were to get elected, that would be great."
Instead, Beacham, an Indiana resident and cohort of anti-abortion crusader Randall Terry, can use his infeasible candidacy to skirt the Federal Communications Commission's indecency regulations and run graphic ads depicting such things as dismembered fetuses.
And that's not all. Beacham's spot compares Obama to Hitler and Bundy, as well as Al Capone, and shows photos of slain Christians and Jews. Beacham claims that the president is akin to these notorious historical figures because he allows federal funding for Planned Parenthood, which provides abortions along with a large number of other health services.
“If you vote for Obama, the real question is, what are you smoking?” a bearded Beacham says, puffing a cigar.
And while his ad seems extreme, there's not much local stations do to stop it from airing. The AP reports that it cost about $5,000 to purchase airtime for to run the spot about 22 times in three Kentucky markets. Bowling Green's WKBO has said it can't refuse to show it. The station is instead looking into including a disclaimer about the offensive nature of the content.
Maybe it's time for the comedy writers in New York and Los Angeles to move to Texas. They need to be closer to their source material because Texas Governor Rick Perry is making it easy for everyone to be a comic. Of course, it might not be Perry; it could just be Satan making Perry look like a clown, assuming, of course, you think Satan exists. (And if he does, is Satan important enough to be capitalized?)
Regardless of whether you believe Perry's assertion [ http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Perry-discusses-tuition-freeze-budget-3885035.php ] that the horned one stalks the universe, the governor's arguments about faith and government are even funnier than him insisting the devil is trying to make politics the province of only evil types. Hell, look at what Perry's administration has done to Texas in recent years with regards to making health care unobtainable for the poor, cutting school budgets so he could run for president, and forcing women to get sonograms before abortion procedures; he's a case study in the evil nature of politics. Perry appears to have given Satan a blowtorch and made taxpayers put on gasoline suits.
"I believe in Satan," the governor said at the Texas Tribune Festival. "And I hope most of the people in here do, too. The great trick that Satan pulls is making people believe that he didn't (sic) exist. It's a very interesting discussion we need to have as a country."
Yes, of course, one out of every four people living in Texas is without health care [ http://www.texastribune.org/texas-health-resources/health-reform-and-texas/texas-reacts-health-care-ruling/ ], we have the highest number of people over age 25 without high school diplomas [ http://www.literacytexas.org/index.php/Resources/literacy_facts/ ], we are firing teachers, our roads are being turned into cash machines for corporations because the Perry administration won't fight to have the state fund them, and he wants to talk about Satan. Perry believes that there is no doubt Satan is trying to keep people of faith out of government. Satan appears to be about as competent as Perry, however, since our political stages continue to be tread by Mike Huckabee, Barack Obama, Michele Bachmann, Mitt Romney, and others who make their Christian faith a part of what informs their politics, though the interpretations of what is Christian vary wildly in political parties.
Satan can't be all that smart if he has Rick Perry doing his PR.
My Christian faith teaches me that. The idea that you believe that Satan could be involved in every act and decision in the world, it's not out of the ordinary for those of us of the Christian faith, and if he's trying to keep people out of the public arena any way he can by hook or crook or lying or whatever you wanna put out there. I believe he's certainly capable of that. That's my belief and I don't apologize for it.
Perry has too many other things he needs to apologize for. But his misdirection call is, "Hey look, Bub, it's Beelzebub." Nobody's ever asked him to abandon his faith. What's annoying and destructive is when he tries to force his faith into the institutions of government because he thinks it's what best for Texas and the rest of the country. It's easy to figure out what his opinion on that idea would be if we had a Jewish or Muslim governor. Perry's not talking about people of faith, he's referring to people of his Christian religion, and he thinks the law is virtually persecuting Christians and keeping them from practicing their religion in the U.S.
"When there's a directive that comes down from a federal court that says you can't pray at a public event," he explained, "that's basically saying people of faith should not be involved in the public arena. There's case after case where folks have been pushed back on from standpoint of being engaged in prayer."
Those of us who believe in the separation of church and state will continue to hope that the court will keep prayer away from public institutions. If you are Jewish or Muslim or Hindu and pay taxes, why would you want to pay for buildings and public venues where Christians pray and you don't? Perry is no different than other Christian evangelicals and wants his belief system adopted by, not just all Americans, but the entire world. At a political event in San Antonio several years ago, he was asked by a Jewish reporter about the pastor's claim from the pulpit that anyone who didn't believe in Jesus Christ as their savior was "bound to burn in hell." Perry, less than subtle, let the Jewish journalist know he didn't have much of a future.
"I believe that no one goes to heaven unless they have Jesus Christ as their savior," he said.
That same Jewish reporter and I had traveled on many presidential and gubernatorial campaigns together and I always winced when we were in taxpayer-funded buildings, like schools, and he had to tolerate Christian invocations before he then tolerated the political rally.
Perry, like many others who are religiously intolerant of different belief systems, constantly refers to America's Founding Fathers as his argument for prayer in schools and public places, oblivious, of course, to the sentiments of Thomas Jefferson. In his letter to the Danbury Baptists of Connecticut, who complained to the president that they were not being allowed to practice their brand of Christianity, Jefferson made clear that faith and government ought not ever be wed, and he cast the phrase that has guided our country on this matter for more than two centuries.
'I contemplate with sovereign reverence," Jefferson wrote, "that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church & State."
The line is hardly subject to misinterpretation but it suffers an abundance of distortions. Both the Constitution and one of its designers wanted to prevent the government from doing anything that promotes any religion, and praying, especially organized prayer, in a public institution, or at a high school football game, or before convening a legislative body in a taxpayer funded capitol, is offering sustenance to a belief system that is not held by everyone who submits to the tax laws. It is, therefore, wrong.
But it's possible I forgot to sign off my computer and Satan wrote this while I was runnin' around sinnin' somewhere.
By EDWARD J. BLUM and PAUL HARVEY Published: September 26, 2012
THE murders of four Americans over an amateurish online video about Muhammad, like the attempted murder of a Danish cartoonist who in 2005 had depicted the prophet with a bomb in his turban, have left many Americans confused, angry and fearful about the rage that some Muslims feel about visual representations of their sacred figures.
The confusion stems, in part, from the ubiquity of sacred images in American culture. God, Jesus, Moses, Buddha and other holy figures are displayed in movies, cartoons and churches and on living room walls. We place them on T-shirts and bumper stickers — and even tattoo them on our skin.
But Americans have had their own history of conflict, some of it deadly, over displays of the sacred. The path toward civil debate over such representation is neither short nor easy.
The United States was settled, in part, by radical Protestant iconoclasts from Britain who considered the creation and use of sacred imagery to be a violation of the Second Commandment against graven images. The anti-Catholic colonists at Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay refused to put images of Jesus in their churches and meetinghouses. They scratched out crosses in books. In the early 1740s, English officials even marched on an Indian community in western Connecticut, where they cross-examined Moravian missionaries who reportedly had a book with “the picture of our Saviour in it.”
The colonists feared Catholic infiltration from British-controlled Canada. Shortly after the Boston Tea Party, a Connecticut pastor warned that if the British succeeded, the colonists would have their Bibles taken from them and be compelled to “pray to the Virgin Mary, worship images, believe the doctrine of Purgatory, and the Pope’s infallibility.”
It was not only Protestants who opposed sacred imagery. In the Southwest, Pueblo Indians who waged war against Spanish colonizers not only burned and dismembered some crucifixes, but even defecated on them.
In the early Republic, many Americans avoided depicting Jesus or God in any form. The painter Washington Allston spoke for many artists of the 1810s when he said, “I think his character too holy and sacred to be attempted by the pencil.” A visiting Russian diplomat, Pavel Svinin, was amazed at the prevalence of a different image: George Washington’s. “Every American considers it his sacred duty to have a likeness of Washington in his home,” he wrote, “just as we have images of God’s saints.”
Only in the late 19th century did images of God and Jesus become commonplace in churches, Sunday school books, Bibles and homes. There were many forces at work: steam printing presses; new canals and railroads; and, not least, the immigration of hundreds of thousands of Catholics who brought with them an array of crucifixes, Madonnas and busts of saints. Protestants began producing their own images — often, to appeal to children — and gradually became more comfortable with holy images. In the 20th century, the United States began exporting such images, most notably Warner Sallman’s 1941 “Head of Christ,” which is one of the most reproduced images [ http://www.warnersallman.com/collection/images/head-of-christ/ ] in world history.
But there was also resistance. When Hollywood first started portraying Jesus in films, one fundamentalist Christian fumed, “The picturing of the life and sufferings of our Savior by these institutions falls nothing short of blasphemy.” Vernon E. Jordan Jr., an African-American who was later president of the National Urban League and an adviser to President Bill Clinton, recalled that white audience members gasped when he played Jesus as an undergraduate at DePauw University in Indiana in the 1950s.
In fact, race has been a constant source of conflict over American depictions of Jesus. In Philadelphia in the 1930s, the black street preacher F. S. Cherry stormed into African-American churches and pointed at paintings or prints of white Christs, shouting, as one observer recounted, “Who in the hell is this? Nobody knows! They say it is Jesus. That’s a damned lie!”
During the civil rights era, black-power advocates and liberation theologians excoriated white images of the sacred. A 1967 “Declaration of Black Churchmen” demanded “the removal of all images which suggest that God is white.” As racial violence enveloped Detroit that year, African-American residents painted the white faces of Catholic icons black.
More recently, there have been uproars over the Nigerian-British painter Chris Ofili’s “Holy Virgin Mary” and the New York artist and photographer Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ.” Mr. Serrano’s image of Jesus on the crucifix, submerged in the artist’s own urine, roused a crusade against the National Endowment for the Arts in the late 1980s. Mr. Ofili’s painting of a dark-skinned Madonna with photographs of vaginas surrounding her enraged Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani. The mayor, who mistakenly claimed that elephant dung was smeared on the image when it in fact was used at the base to hold the painting up, tried to ban it [ http://blogs.artinfo.com/culturalaffairs/2012/09/12/after-attacks-in-egypt-and-libya-what-the-state-department-can-learn-from-the-art-world/ ] from being displayed at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, in 1999. (One upset Christian smeared [ http://artcrimes.net/holy-virgin-mary ] white paint over it.)
Images of the sacred haven’t caused mass violence in the United States, but they have generated intense conflict. Our ability to sustain a culture supersaturated with visual displays of the divine, largely without violence, came only after massive technological change, centuries of immigration and social movements that forced Americans to reckon with differences of race, ethnicity and religion.
Voter ID Laws Could Delay Outcome Of Close Election
Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted (R), says his office is trying to reduce the number of provisional ballots. (AP Photo/Jay LaPrete)
By STEPHEN OHLEMACHER 09/26/12 12:22 PM ET EDT
WASHINGTON — New voting laws in key states could force a lot more voters to cast provisional ballots this election, delaying results in close races for days while election officials scrutinize ballots and campaigns wage legal battles over which ones should get counted.
New laws in competitive states like Virginia, Florida, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin could leave the outcome of the presidential election in doubt – if the vote is close – while new laws in Kansas, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee could delay results in state or local elections.
Some new laws requiring voters to show identification at the polls are still being challenged in court, adding to the uncertainty as the Nov. 6 election nears.
"It's a possibility of a complete meltdown for the election," said Daniel Smith, a political scientist at the University of Florida.
Voters cast provisional ballots for a variety of reasons: They don't bring proper ID to the polls; they fail to update their voter registration after moving; they try to vote at the wrong precinct; or their right to vote is challenged by someone.
These voters may have their votes counted, but only if election officials can verify that they were eligible to vote, a process that can take days or weeks. Adding to the potential for chaos: Many states won't even know how many provisional ballots have been cast until sometime after Election Day.
Voters cast nearly 2.1 million provisional ballots in the 2008 presidential election. About 69 percent were eventually counted, according to election results compiled by The Associated Press.
Provisional ballots don't get much attention if an election is a landslide. But what if the vote is close, as the polls suggest in the race between President Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney?
Most of today's voting nightmares go back to Florida in 2000, when the results of balloting and thus the winner of the presidential contest were not known for weeks after Election Day. Questions about recount irregularities and the validity of ballots with hanging chads – paper fragments still attached to punch-card ballots – preceded the eventual declaration that George W. Bush had won the state by 537 votes and was the next president.
"In a close election, all eyes are going to be on those provisional ballots, and those same canvassing boards that were looking at pregnant chads and hanging chads back in 2000," Smith said. "It's a potential mess."
The federal election law passed in response to the 2000 presidential election gives voters the option to cast a provisional ballot, if poll workers deny them a regular one. Voter ID laws could slow the count even more.
In Virginia and Wisconsin, voters who don't bring an ID to the polls can still have their votes counted if they produce an ID by the Friday following Election Day. Pennsylvania's law gives voters six days to produce an ID. The Wisconsin and Pennsylvania laws are being challenged in court.
In Ohio, which has competitive races for both president and the Senate, provisional voters have up to 10 days following the election to bring an ID to the county board of elections.
If voters in Florida don't bring an ID to the polls, they must sign a provisional ballot envelope. Canvassing boards then will try to match the signatures with those in voter registration records, a process that conjures up images of the 2000 presidential election in Florida.
"Americans have gotten used to the expectation that you could turn on the TV and you would know that night who won the election, even after Florida in 2000," said Edward B. Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University. "But this could be an election in which we don't know the answer for several days."
Florida could see a big increase in provisional ballots because the state has tightened its change-of-address requirements. This year, voters who move from one county to another in Florida without updating their voter registration will have to cast provisional ballots. In previous elections, they could change their address on Election Day and cast a regular ballot.
Four years ago, Florida voters cast about 36,000 provisional ballots. About half of them were eventually counted, though the percentages varied greatly from county to county.
This year, Florida could have 300,000 provisional ballots, said Michael McDonald, an election expert at George Mason University.
"You want to see chaos in Florida? There it is," McDonald said.
In Ohio, address changes were the biggest reason voters cast provisional ballots in 2008, said Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted. Ohio voters cast about 207,000 provisional ballots in the 2008 presidential election – second only to California. About 130,000 of them were cast because voters moved and didn't update their voter registration, Husted said.
In 2004, the number of provisional ballots cast in Ohio was larger than Bush's margin of victory over Democrat John Kerry. Kerry didn't concede until the following morning, when the provisional ballot picture became clear.
In 2008, the number of provisional ballots cast in North Carolina was larger than Obama's margin of victory over Republican John McCain. The Associated Press didn't declare the state for Obama until the day after Election Day, though Obama had already won enough states to claim the presidency.
Husted said his office is trying to reduce the number of provisional ballots in Ohio by using change-of-address information from the Postal Service to send out more than 300,000 postcards to Ohio voters, reminding them to update their registration.
"If we can potentially reduce the number of ballots cast provisionally, then you lessen the likelihood that there will have to be a prolonged process as it relates to those ballots," Husted said. "Understand, a provisional ballot is a second chance because you didn't do it right the first time, meaning that you didn't update your address, you didn't bring in the proper form of ID, there's something that the voter didn't do at the onset that prevented them from voting a regular ballot."
Associated Press writer Connie Cass and AP election research coordinator Christina Bryant contributed to this report.
This is how voter intimidation worked in 1966 [ http://www.pfaw.org/sites/default/files/thelongshadowofjimcrow.pdf ]: White teenagers in Americus, Ga., harassed black citizens in line to vote, and the police refused to intervene. Black plantation workers in Mississippi had to vote in plantation stores, overseen by their bosses. Black voters in Choctaw County, Ala., had to hand their ballots directly to white election officials for inspection.
This is how it works today: In an ostensible hunt for voter fraud, a Tea Party group, True the Vote, descends on a largely minority precinct and combs the registration records for the slightest misspelling or address error. It uses this information to challenge voters at the polls, and though almost every challenge is baseless, the arguments and delays frustrate those in line and reduce turnout.
The thing that’s different from the days of overt discrimination is the phony pretext of combating voter fraud. Voter identity fraud is all but nonexistent, but the assertion that it might exist is used as an excuse to reduce the political rights of minorities, the poor, students, older Americans and other groups that tend to vote Democratic.
In 2009 and 2010, for example, the group focused on the Houston Congressional district represented by Sheila Jackson Lee, a black Democrat. After poring over the records for five months, True the Vote came up with a list of 500 names it considered suspicious and challenged them with election authorities. Officials put these voters on “suspense,” requiring additional proof of address, but in most cases voters had simply changed addresses. That didn’t stop the group from sending dozens of white “poll watchers” to precincts in the district during the 2010 elections, deliberately creating friction with black voters.
On the day of the recall election of Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, the group used inaccurate lists to slow down student voting at Lawrence University in Appleton with intrusive identity checks. Three election “observers,” including one from True the Vote, were so disruptive that a clerk gave them two warnings, but the ploy was effective: many students gave up waiting in line and didn’t vote.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 prohibits intimidation or interference in the act of voting, but the penalties are fairly light. Many states have tougher laws, but they won’t work unless law enforcement officials use them to crack down on the illegal activities — handed down from Jim Crow days — of True the Vote and similar groups.
Voter Law In New Hampshire Sparks William O'Brien, New Hampshire House Speaker, To Challenge Attorney General
The New Hampshire capitol dome in Concord.
By John Celock Posted: 09/29/2012 12:16 pm EDT Updated: 09/29/2012 12:26 pm EDT
The Tea Party speaker of the New Hampshire House of Representatives, William O'Brien (R-Mont Vernon), is asking a state court to force the state attorney general to accept his interpretation of a new voter registration law relating to college students.
Legislators passed the law -- over the veto of Gov. John Lynch (D) -- earlier this year to require those registering to vote to obtain residency in the state, including a driver's license and car registration. The previous law said that living in the state -- including living in a dorm room -- was sufficient to vote.
O'Brien is objecting [ http://www.fosters.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120929/GJNEWS_01/709299896 ] to a state judge's ruling -- and state Attorney General Michael Delaney's view -- on the law the Legislature passed because the ruling does not change the state's definition of "residency' and "domicile" in the Granite State, Foster's Daily Democrat reports. The law was challenged in court with Delaney arguing that O'Brien's interpretation is not included in the version of the law passed.
Foster's Daily Democrat reports [id.]:
The judge ruled New Hampshire law continues to distinguish between having a "domicile" and being a "resident." He called the new wording on the voter registration form an "inaccurate and confusing expression of the law," and said it "does not pass constitutional muster."
Associate Attorney General Richard Head, who handled the court case for the state, did not attempt to persuade [the judge that] O'Brien's interpretation of the law is correct, nor did he advance it in court.
"My office is only able to defend the law that the Legislature actually passed, not the law that the Speaker wishes had been passed," Delaney said in a prepared statement. "The law that the Legislature passed did not, in any way, modify the definition of residency in New Hampshire. The Speaker's position is simply not supported by the law and will weaken our position in defending the law. We will not present it in court."
"The attorney general's office is turning the Constitution on its head in order to compel the court to gag the Legislature from providing a defense that the people deserve for a duly passed law either because the attorney general is unable or unwilling to provide that defense," O'Brien said. "The people of New Hampshire deserve not to have non-residents wandering around diluting their votes."
O'Brien and the Tea Party-controlled House have been pushing stronger voter identification laws and other conservative leaning laws since taking office in 2011. In May, the Legislature overturned Lynch's veto of O'Brien's voter ID law in a contentious debate that included state Rep. Steve Vaillancourt (R-Manchester) giving O'Brien a Nazi salute [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/15/steve-vaillancourt-new-hampshire-lawmaker-voter-id_n_1518432.html ] on the House floor after O'Brien blocked him from opposing the bill.
MIAMI — The number of Florida counties reporting suspicious voter registration forms connected to Strategic Allied Consulting, the firm hired by the state Republican Party [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/r/republican_party/index.html ] to sign up new voters, has grown to 10, officials said, as local election supervisors continue to search their forms for questionable signatures, addresses or other identifiers.
outside a store in Colorado Springs recently telling a potential voter that she wanted to register only Republicans and that she worked for the county clerk’s office. The woman was fired, said Ryan Call, chairman of the Colorado Republican Party.
The Florida Division of Elections [ http://election.dos.state.fl.us/ ] has forwarded the reports of possible fraud to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement for investigation. Prosecutors in some affected counties are also investigating. It is unclear how many forms have been forwarded, in all: in Palm Beach County, the election supervisor found 106 suspicious forms, but the number in several other counties is far lower.
Bay County has found eight suspicious forms with the Republican Party registration code connected to Strategic Allied. In Pasco County, three have been found.
The state Republican Party, which paid the company $1.3 million to register voters here, said it would file an elections fraud complaint against Strategic Allied, which is based in Tempe, Ariz.
Mr. Sproul was once the executive director of the Arizona Republican Party. In 2004, his voter registration project was investigated by the Justice Department and the attorneys general in Arizona, Nevada and Oregon after widespread allegations of fraud surfaced, but no charges were brought.
Questions are now being raised about how the company’s employees were paid to register voters.
Mary Blackwell, a volunteer for the League of Women Voters [ http://www.lwvokaloosa.org/ ] in Okaloosa County, said she was registering voters this month at Northwest Florida State College. Sitting nearby was a man who said he was registering voters for the Republican Party of Florida. The man told her he received $12 an hour but had to bring in at least 10 forms to get paid.
Paul Lux, the election supervisor for Okaloosa County, a Republican who is still combing through registration forms in his office, said he was told by several “concerned citizens,” including Ms. Blackwell, that the employees were being paid for the number of forms they brought back.
In Florida, it is illegal to pay someone per registration form.
“I told my friends in the party then that paying people to do this was a bad idea, and it almost inevitably leads to problems,” Mr. Lux said. “Unfortunately, I was not proven wrong.”
Fred Petti, a lawyer for Strategic Allied, said the employees were paid only by the hour, with no quota attached. He added that they also were instructed to register anyone from any political party, not just the Republican Party.
Previous investigations of Mr. Sproul’s operations focused on efforts to register only Republicans or allegations that Democratic forms were torn up. Mr. Petti also said that Mr. Sproul cooperated with the Palm Beach County election supervisor to find out who was at fault and has offered to do the same with other election supervisors.
In Palm Beach County, one person was responsible for the fraudulent forms, officials said. Mr. Petti said he does not yet know how widespread the problem is in other counties.
Election supervisors said they have come across forms with handwriting that did not match previous registration forms, bogus addresses and other identifiers like driver’s license numbers that appeared to be invalid. But in other cases, the forms were just incomplete, which does not constitute fraud.
“Until we see what the cards are, it’s hard for us to comment,” Mr. Petti said.
Mark Anderson, the Bay County supervisor, said he has found eight questionable forms in his county, but he is looking for more. The forms had either unchecked boxes for party affiliation or signatures that looked different from previous ones. He said he had also received calls from voters who said they had not changed their party affiliation, although it appeared they had. “I don’t believe there is going to be massive numbers,” Mr. Anderson said.
Election supervisors are able to pinpoint the group responsible for the questionable forms because of a 2011 state law that tightened rules on voter registration groups. The law, which sparked lawsuits and controversy, requires groups to register with the state and have their registration number on the forms they distribute.
A provision that required groups to turn in registration forms within 48 hours was struck down in court this year. “The Republican Legislature was beaten up pretty badly, partially by myself,” Mr. Lux said. “But they seem to have been doing something to improve the process.”
RNC cuts ties to firm after voter fraud allegations
Voters mark their ballots in Hialeah, Fla, during primary elections. (Alan Diaz / Associated Press)
By Joseph Tanfani, Melanie Mason and Matea Gold September 27, 2012, 4:02 p.m.
WASHINGTON – The Republican National Committee has abruptly cut ties to a consulting firm hired for get-out-the-vote efforts in seven presidential election swing states after Florida prosecutors launched an investigation into possible fraud in voter registration forms.
Working through state parties, the RNC has sent more than $3.1 million this year to Strategic Allied Consulting, a company formed in June by Nathan Sproul, an Arizona voting consultant. Sproul has operated other firms that have been accused in past elections of improprieties designed to help Republican candidates, including dumping registration forms filled out by Democrats [ http://www.latimes.com/topic/politics/parties-movements/democratic-party-ORGOV0000005.topic ], but none of those allegations led to any criminal charges.
Sean Spicer, spokesman for the RNC, said the party, has “zero tolerance” for voter fraud and cut ties to the firm on Wednesday, urging state parties to do the same. The forms in question in Florida were all submitted by one worker and were not the result of an effort to suppress votes, he said.
“If you don’t do it right, it doesn’t assist us in any way,” he said.“When the allegations yesterday were brought to our attention, we severed our relationship. We acted swiftly and boldly.”
Strategic Allied Consulting was hired to do voter registration drives in Florida, Virginia, Colorado, North Carolina and Nevada, and had been planning get-out-the-vote drives in Ohio and Wisconsin, according to Sproul.
Sproul owns another company, Lincoln Strategy Group, that was paid about $70,000 by the Mitt Romney [ http://www.latimes.com/topic/politics/government/mitt-romney-PEPLT007376.topic ] campaign during the primaries to gather signatures. He said he created Strategic Allied Consulting at the request of the Republican National Committee because of the bad publicity stemming from the past allegations. In 2004, there were allegations in states such as Nevada and Oregon that employees of his firm -- which had a similar contract with the RNC -- registered Democratic voters and then destroyed their forms. (Sproul noted that no criminal charges were ever filed.)
Strategic Allied was set up at an address in Glen Allen, Va., and Sproul does not show up on the corporate paperwork.
“In order to be able to do the job that the state parties were hiring us to do, the [RNC] asked us to do it with a different company’s name, so as to not be a distraction from the false information put out in the Internet,” Sproul said.
Sproul said his company has a vigorous quality control system that includes running criminal background checks on all employees, requiring viewing instructional videos on registration laws (an example of which can be seen here [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7yHJhQjNaY ]) and cataloging voter cards with serial numbers that identify who collected each registration. That quality check, Sproul said, enabled the company to quickly determine the individual who submitted the problematic cards in Palm Beach County.
The RNC’s rapid decision to distance itself from the company derailed a major voter registration drive just six weeks before the presidential election, which could hinge on voter turnout in about eight battleground states. It also comes as Republicans [ http://www.latimes.com/topic/politics/parties-movements/republican-party-ORGOV0000004.topic ] around the country have sought to make voter fraud an issue, in part by pressing for voter identification laws.
In Florida, the state party fired the firm on Tuesday after election workers in Palm Beach County discovered numerous registration forms that appeared to be filled out in the same handwriting, some including wrong addresses and birthdays. Some of the forms switched addresses and party registrations, including changes from Democratic or independent to Republican, said county elections supervisor Susan Bucher.
The company helped identify 106 forms submitted by the same worker. Bucher turned them over to Palm Beach County prosecutors, who have begun a criminal investigation.
Five Republican state parties, all in key battleground states, recorded payments to the firm, often soon after large transfers from the national Republican Party.
In Nevada, for example, the RNC transferred $167,000 to the state party on July 25. The next day, the state party made a nearly identical payment -- $166,665— to Strategic Allied Consulting.
A similar pattern occurred in Florida. On July 12, the same day the Florida GOP received $667,000 from the national Republican party, it paid Strategic Allied Consulting $667,597.
In all, the consulting firm received at least $3.1 million in July and August from the Republican parties of Florida, Nevada, Virginia, North Carolina and Colorado. No payments in Ohio or Wisconsin have yet shown up on reports.
“The Colorado Republican Party takes any threat to the voting process very seriously,” said Justin Miller, a spokesman for the Colorado GOP.
In Election 2012, Game-Change Is Status Quo, Senators Say
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) say that if Democrats maintain control of the Senate and White House in the 2012 election, it will be a game-change. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
By Michael McAuliff Posted: 09/25/2012 12:01 am EDT Updated: 09/25/2012 11:21 am EDT
WASHINGTON -- Before U.S. senators fled the Capitol for the campaign trail early Saturday, members of each party made an unusual prediction: If this year's election changes nothing in the alignment of national elected offices, it will be a game-changer.
Their takes on whether that would be good varied, but they agreed it would be better for Democrats.
On the Republican side, outspoken South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham said that by every economic standard, Mitt Romney should be headed for a win over President Barack Obama, with coattails for down-ticket offices.
But in acknowledging a trend in the polls [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/24/2012-polls-obama-bounce_n_1910146.html ] against the GOP standard-bearer, Graham said it would show that America's demographics have so changed -- in Democrats' favor -- that a president's stewardship of the economy no longer is a deciding factor.
"If we lose this election, performance as president doesn't matter like it used to," Graham said in a discussion with The Huffington Post and several other reporters outside the Senate chamber last week.
"There's a reason no president has ever been reelected with an economy like this," Graham said. "It would tell me that it's more of a demographic race for president than it is a performance-based race. And that may be where we're at as a nation, and maybe where we are as a party, and we just don't know it."
It's a startling admission from a Southern white politician, but one he stood by. "If he's able to do this, President Obama's rewritten history," Graham said. "If we lose as Republicans, we're going to have to ask ourselves, who are we going to be? If we don't beat this guy, who are we going to be?"
Democrats also agreed that keeping both the White House and the Senate in Democratic hands -- even without taking back the House -- would mark a turn in the nation's political makeup.
But they argued it would be for the better, signaling what they predicted would be a return to a more bipartisan, compromising style of politics that became anathema to the Tea Party movement that swept the GOP to control of the House in 2010.
"You have two groups of Republicans in House and Senate -- there are no moderates left," said Sen. Chuck Schumer in a late-week news conference. "Half of them are hard-right Tea Party types. Half of them are what I call mainstream conservatives."
Schumer argued that the Tea Party has essentially outflanked the mainstream for the last two years. That would change if Democrats keep what they have. "If we keep the Senate and the president wins -- and even better if we take the House -- the mainstream Republicans are going to be strengthened -- they've told me that," Schumer said.
Schumer predicted that "they're going to want to reach out and work with us because the embrace of the Tea Party that Mitt Romney has done -- that is in my view dragging down all of their candidates -- will have failed."
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), said the Tea Party argument has become so unpopular that the name of its movement has gotten to be a dirty word.
"The Tea Party candidates never use the word Tea Party anymore," Durbin told reporters. "They can't get elected that way. They're running as bipartisan candidates. [If] they come back, do you think they're going to revert to Tea Party roots? Go ahead and test the 'Tea Party' phrase across America. People despise it. It is just the symbol of obstruction."
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) speculated that once Democrats hold the Senate -- a prospect that is looking more likely than it did half a year ago -- then the Senate Republican leader -- who Reid suggested might not be current Minority Leader Mitch McConnell -- would work much more readily with Democrats to head off things like the looming fiscal cliff and to come up with mutually agreeable deficit-cutting plans.
"Maybe whoever is the Republican leader will want to legislate for the good of the country, not try to defeat Obama again," Reid said.
Mitt Romney Fundraising Efforts Focus On California
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney speaks at a fundraiser at the Grand Del Mar Court resort September 22, 2012 in San Diego, California. (MANDEL NGAN/AFP/GettyImages)
By STEVE PEOPLES 09/22/12 11:07 PM ET EDT
DEL MAR, Calif. — Facing criticism that he's too focused on raising campaign cash, Mitt Romney is about to launch what advisers call an "intense battleground state schedule." But on Saturday, the Republican presidential nominee focused exclusively on courting donors in a state that hasn't supported a Republican presidential candidate in almost a quarter century.
Speaking to roughly 650 supporters gathered at Grand Del Mar, a luxury hotel north of San Diego, Romney said his campaign schedule has been hectic.
"I'm not even going to be able to go home today," he said of his second home in nearby La Jolla. "We're just coming to town to see you and keep the campaign going. It's nonstop."
Later at fundraising event in the Los Angeles-area, Romney criticized President Barack Obama for failing to "fix Washington."
"The truth is, he has proven he cannot fix Washington from the inside," Romney said at an event at the Beverly Hilton Hotel that his campaign said raised about $6 million.
The former Massachusetts governor's schedule, particularly his focus on fundraising over campaigning in battleground states with voters, has drawn criticism from some Republicans who fear the campaign is moving in the wrong direction less than seven weeks before Election Day. President Barack Obama on Saturday campaigned in Wisconsin, which has emerged as a swing state, where he also raised money. Polls suggest that Obama has a narrow lead in several key states.
Romney adviser Kevin Madden defended the fundraising focus, while highlighting a shift in the coming days
"We're here raising the resources we're going to need to compete in all those battleground states through Election Day," Madden said. "That's also been matched with a really intense battle ground state schedule that's going to be coming up starting Sunday night. We're keeping very busy."
Over the last week, Romney has attended five public events and at least a dozen fundraisers.
Cognizant of the criticism, his campaign added a Colorado rally to his Sunday night schedule ahead of a three-day bus tour in Ohio. He'll also campaign in Virginia next week. All three states are considered highly competitive.
The shift comes as Romney works to get his campaign back on track.
Already facing reports of campaign infighting, Romney suffered another setback early in the week after his remarks surfaced in an unauthorized video declaring that almost half of Americans are dependent upon government and believe they are victims. On Friday, Romney released his 2011 tax returns showing income of $13.6 million, largely from investment income.
Romney seemed to be trying to move past his video-taped remarks on Saturday.
"This is a tough time," he told donors. "These are our brothers and sisters. These are not statistics. These are people. The president's policies -- these big-government, big-tax monolithic policies -- are not working."
Earlier in the week, conservative columnist Peggy Noonan called Romney's campaign "incompetent."
"Romney doesn't seem to be out there campaigning enough. He seems_in this he is exactly like the president_to always be disappearing into fund-raisers, and not having enough big public events," wrote the former Ronald Reagan speechwriter.
Romney's California fundraising chairman sought to ease donors' concerns that the GOP nominee's campaign was headed in the wrong direction. Thomas Tellefsen told the crowd at the Beverly Hilton he understood they are "probably feeling a bit worried" and frustrated by coverage of the 2012 race.
"I wanted to share some thoughts with you tonight. They can provide you with some comfort," he said. "Polls are not elections. The voters have not yet spoken."
Romney, who would be among the wealthiest presidents ever elected, has struggled to shed the image of an out-of-touch millionaire.
At the Saturday fundraiser in the San Diego-area, where donors paid as much as $25,000 to attend, Romney did little to help that image. He told the audience he spent the night before raising money at a San Francisco area mansion.
"Property up there is, I'm sure, very, very expensive. And we got to her driveway – it was at least a mile long, up and up, it's like, Oh my goodness, how in the world?" Romney said. "And then we came to the home, and it was like San Simeon, you know, the Hearst castle. It was this beautiful home with gardens, manicured gardens, and a pool and a topiary and so forth."
Romney charged that the president is taking America on a "pathway to become like Europe," adding a jab at his audience's home state.
"Europe doesn't work there. It's never going to work here," Romney said. "It's even possible we could be on a pathway to become California – I don't want that either."
He later said he was joking.
And before promising that he was done raising money in the San Diego area, Romney encouraged his California donors to help him reach voters in more competitive states.
"I need you to find someone who voted for Barack Obama, maybe in a swing state, and give him a call, and tell him to go to the polls and support this effort," he said.
My white male millionaire friend is voting for WHO!?!
by 4democracyFollow Mon Sep 17, 2012 at 08:19 AM PDT
I got a call from my buddy last night to come watch Sunday Football, drink a couple beers, and just catch up. We talk politics like we watch football: We mutually respect each other's right to be who we are, but also take great pleasure in giving each other crap about our teams, our candidates, and our economic philosophies.
On my way over last night, I was smiling to myself while coming up with my top ten list of reasons why he should vote for Obama. Not to change his vote, mind you, but just to get him riled up and fire something back over beers. Deep down, I knew he was going to vote for Romney. His business ventures put him in the top one percent, income-wise; He is a big critic of the welfare state; He's a socially-moderate, fiscally conservative Catholic (rarely attending, though); He thinks and works hard to fulfill his own self-interest in his business and personal life, and feels no need to apologize for that.
So, I got to his place and settled into my beer, passed a round of chewing tobacco over to him (you can take the boy out of Missouri, but you can't take the Missouri out of the boy), smiled a smartass smile, and asked him the question I had been waiting for.
"So, who are you voting for for president?"
"I'm not sure," he said completely seriously, "but I think I'm going to vote for Obama."
I nearly choked on my Skoal.
If there's a slam dunk vote for Romney, I thought, this guy was it. I even half-heartedly tried to talk him out of it (I wasn't going to give up easily on having at least SOME sort of debate), telling him that his income bracket would seem to lend itself to Romney's economic promises just as much as his business management needs would find relevance with Romney's promises to ease the regulations governing short-term lending or whether he provided his employees with health-care. I talked about how critics of Obama's economic policies say that all of this uncertainty about government intervention/regulation makes banks/investors more skeptical about investment and has slowed the recovery. As devoid of legitimate talking points as the (R) platform is, there's enough nuggets there when, turned over the right way, are worthy of debate. I mean, who did he think he was, ruining my sparring match by freaking agreeing with me?
But, aside from not really liking that Romney is a Mormon, he said that his decision was based on, of all things, economics and prospects for his business. Without revealing too much personal information about him, his business caters to low to middle class families in an area with a large (nearly 50%) Latino population. He just said matter of factly (to paraphrase) - "I'm a numbers guy - and my numbers have been better under Obama, just like they were under Clinton. If those guys keep my customers coming through the door, I'll pay the 35% tax and not blink."
He added that a big part of it was that he can take (the equivalent of) food stamps for his business as well, so in a way the artificially-expanded middle class as a result of low-income entitlements is a big help to his bottom line. As long as a government is committed to maintaining a certain level of support for low income people, he will maintain the volume he needs to succeed as a business. In addition, he provides health care voluntarily anyway for all of his full-time employees ("It's just smart", he says, "because it allows me to find the right people, keep them healthy and happy, and keep them around."), so he's really not worried about Obamacare running him out of business - it will actually save him money to the extent that it makes health care cheaper.
On the Latino population, he also worried about what the immigration crusade mentality will do to his customer and employee base. This includes losing business from undocumented, poorly documented, or even legally documented families depending on how far the anti-immigration people (which includes Romney and more prominently Ryan) take that. In an area with a 50% latino base, this could devastate him. He also related a story to me of one of his regular employees, a green card holder who is paying the $800 to get her citizenship process dealt with. She was really nervous about the test and figuring out where to get the cash to go through the process, but she was more nervous about what people who advise that community are saying will likely happen if Romney is elected. Though most people think Obama is going to win, she didn't want to take the chance of being too far back in the line for citizenship that would rapidly form if Romney is elected and the Republicans start trying to get rid of Mexicans.
Posted by Tom Engelhardt at 9:32am, November 20, 2012. Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch.
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: The next post from this site will appear on Sunday night, November 25th. Have a fine Thanksgiving. Tom]
The Fall of the American Empire (Writ Small) History, Farce, and David Petraeus By Tom Engelhardt
History, it is said, arrives first as tragedy, then as farce. First as Karl Marx, then as the Marx Brothers. In the case of twenty-first century America, history arrived first as George W. Bush (and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith and the Project for a New America -- a shadow government masquerading as a think tank -- and an assorted crew of ambitious neocons and neo-pundits); only later did David Petraeus make it onto the scene.
It couldn’t be clearer now that, from the shirtless FBI agent to the “embedded” biographer and the “other other woman,” the “fall” of David Petraeus is playing out as farce of the first order. What’s less obvious is that Petraeus, America’s military golden boy and Caesar of celebrity, was always smoke and mirrors, always the farce, even if the denizens of Washington didn’t know it.
Until recently, here was the open secret of Petraeus’s life: he may not have understood Iraqis or Afghans, but no military man in generations more intuitively grasped how to flatter and charm American reporters, pundits, and politicians into praising him. This was, after all, the general who got his first Newsweek cover (“Can This Man Save Iraq?”) in 2004 while he was making a mess of a training program for Iraqi security forces, and two more before that magazine, too, took the fall. In 2007, he was a runner-up to Vladimir Putin for TIME’s “Person of the Year.” And long before Paula Broadwell’s aptly named biography, All In, was published to hosannas from the usual elite crew, that was par for the course.
You didn’t need special insider’s access to know that Broadwell wasn’t the only one with whom the general did calisthenics. The FBI didn’t need to investigate. Even before she came on the scene, scads of columnists, pundits, reporters, and politicians were in bed with him. And weirdly enough, many of them still are. (Typical was NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams mournfully discussing the “painful” resignation of “Dave” -- “the most prominent and best known general of the modern era.”) Adoring media people treated him like the next military Messiah, a combination of Alexander the Great, Napoleon, and Ulysses S. Grant rolled into one fabulous piñata. It’s a safe bet that no general of our era, perhaps of any American era, has had so many glowing adjectives attached to his name.
Perhaps Petraeus’s single most insightful moment, capturing both the tragedy and the farce to come, occurred during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He was commanding the 101st Airborne on its drive to Baghdad, and even then was inviting reporters to spend time with him. At some point, he said to journalist Rick Atkinson, “Tell me how this ends.” Now, of course, we know: in farce and not well.
For weeks, the news has been filled with his ever-expanding story, including private rivalries, pirate-themed parties, conspiracy theories run wild, and investigations inside investigations inside investigations. It’s lacked nothing an all-American twenty-first-century media needs to glue eyeballs. Jill Kelley, the Tampa socialite whose online life started the ball rolling and ended up embroiling two American four-star generals in Internet hell, evidently wrote enough emails a day to stagger the imagination. But she was a piker compared to the millions of words that followed from reporters, pundits, observers, retired military figures, everyone and anyone who had ever had an encounter with or a thought about Petraeus, his biographer-cum-lover Paula Broadwell, Afghan War Commander General John Allen, and the rest of an ever-expanding cast of characters. Think of it as the Fall of the House of Gusher.
Here was the odd thing: none of David Petraeus’s “achievements” outlasted his presence on the scene. Still, give him credit. He was a prodigious campaigner and a thoroughly modern general. From Baghdad to Kabul, no one was better at rolling out a media blitzkrieg back in the U.S. in which he himself would guide Americans through the fine points of his own war-making.
Where, once upon a time, victorious commanders had to take an enemy capital or accept the surrender of an opposing army, David Petraeus conquered Washington, something even Robert E. Lee couldn’t do. Until he made the mistake of recruiting his own “biographer” (and lover), he proved a PR prodigy. He was, in a sense, the real life military version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay (“the Great”) Gatsby, a man who made himself into the image of what he wanted to be and then convinced others that it was so.
In the field, his successes were transitory, his failures all too real, and because he proved infinitely adaptable, none of it really mattered or stanched the flood of adjectives from admirers of every political stripe. In Washington, at least, he seemed invincible, even immortal, until it all ended in a military version of Dallas or perhaps previews for Revenge, season three.
His “fall from grace,” as ABC's nightly news labeled it, was a fall from Washington’s grace, and his tale, like that of the president who first fell in love with him, might be summarized as all-American to fall-American.
Turning the Lone Superpower Into the Lonely Superpower
David Petraeus was a Johnny-come-lately in respect to Petraeus-ism. He would pick up the basics of the imperial style of that moment from his models in and around the Bush administration and apply them to his own world. It was George W. and his guys (and gal) who first dreamed the dreams, spent a remarkable amount of time “conquering Washington,” and sold their particular set of fantasies to themselves and then to the American people.
They were the original smoke-and-mirrors crew. From the moment, just five hours after the 9/11 attacks, that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld -- in the presence of a note-taking aide -- urged planning to begin against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq ("Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not..."), the selling of an invasion and various other over-the-top fantasies was underway.
First, in the heat of 9/12, the president and top administration officials sold their “war” on terror. Then, after “liberating” Afghanistan and deciding to stay for the long run, they launched a massive publicity campaign to flog the idea that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was linked to al-Qaeda. In doing so, they would push the image of mushroom clouds rising over American cities from the Iraqi dictator’s nonexistent nuclear program, and chemical or biological weapons being sprayed over the U.S. East Coast by phantasmal Iraqi drones.
Cheney and Rice, among others, would make the rounds of the talk shows, putting the heat on Congress. Administration figures leaked useful (mis)information, pressed the CIA to cherry-pick the intelligence they wanted, and even formed their own secret intel outfit to give them what they needed. They considered just when they should roll out their plans for their much-desired invasion and decided on September 2002. As White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card infamously explained, "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."
They were, by then, at war -- in Washington. Initially, they hardly worried about the actual war to come. They were so confident of what the U.S. military could do that, like the premature Petraeuses they were, they concentrated their efforts on the homeland. Romantics about U.S. military power, convinced that it would trump any other kind of power on the planet, they assumed that Iraq would be, in the words of one of their supporters, a “cakewalk.” They convinced themselves and then others that the Iraqis would greet the advancing invaders as liberators, that the cost of the war (especially given Iraq’s oil wealth) would be next to nothing, and that there was no need to create a serious plan for a post-invasion occupation.
In all of this, they proved both masters of public relations and staggeringly wrong. As such, they would be the progenitors of an imperial tragedy -- a deflating set of disasters that would take the pop out of American power and turn the planet’s “lone superpower” into a lonely superpower presiding over an unraveling global system, especially in the Greater Middle East. Blinded by their fantasies, they would ensure a more precipitous than necessary American decline in the first decade of the new century.
Not that they cared, but they would also generate a set of wrenching human tragedies: first for the Iraqis, hundreds of thousands of whom became casualties of war, insurgency, and sectarian strife, while millions more fled into exile; then there were the Afghans, who died attending weddings, funerals, even baby-naming ceremonies; and, of course, tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers and contractors, who died or were injured, often grievously, in those dismal wars; and don’t forget the inhabitants of post-Katrina New Orleans left to rot in their flooded city; or the millions of Americans who lost jobs, houses, even lives in the economic meltdown of 2008, a disaster that emerged from a set of globe-spanning financial fantasies and snow jobs that Bush and his crew encouraged and facilitated.
They were the ones, in other words, who took a mighty imperial power already in slow decline, grabbed the wheel of the car of state, put the pedal to the metal, and like a group of drunken revelers promptly headed for the nearest cliff. In the process -- they were nothing if not great salesmen -- they sold Americans a bill of goods, even as they fostered their own dreams of establishing a Pax Americana in the Greater Middle East and a Pax Republicana at home. All now, of course, down in flames.
In his 1987 Princeton dissertation, David Petraeus wrote this on perception: "What policymakers believe to have taken place in any particular case is what matters -- more than what actually occurred." On this and other subjects, he was certainly no dope, but he was a huckster -- for himself (given his particular version of self-love), and for a dream already going down in Iraq and Afghanistan. And he was just one of many promoters out there in those years pushing product (including himself): the top officials of the Bush administration, gaggles of neocons, gangs of military intellectuals, hordes of think tanks linked to serried ranks of pundits. All of them imagining Washington as a battlefield for the ages, all assuming that the struggle for “perception” was on the home front alone.
Producing a Bedside Manual
You could say that Petraeus fully arrived on the scene, in Washington at least, in that classic rollout month of September (2004). It was then that the three-star general, in charge of training Iraq’s security forces, gave a president in a tight race for reelection a little extra firepower in the domestic perception wars. Stepping blithely across a classic no-no line for the military, he wrote a well-placed op-ed in the Washington Post as General Johnnie-on-the-spot, plugging “tangible progress” in Iraq and touting “reasons for optimism.”
Given George W. Bush’s increasingly dismal and unpopular mission-unaccomplished war and occupation, it was like the cavalry riding to the rescue. It shouldn’t have been surprising, then, that the general, backed and promoted in the years to come by various neocon warriors, would be the military man the president would fall for. Over the first half of the “surge” year of 2007, Bush would publicly cite the general more than 150 times, 53 in May alone. (And Petraeus, a man particularly prone toward those who idolized him -- see: Broadwell, Paula -- returned the favor.)
But there was another step up the ladder of perception that would make him the perfect neocon warrior. While commanding general at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, in 2005-2006, he also became the “face” of a new doctrine. Well, actually, a very old and particularly dead doctrine that went by the name of counterinsurgency or, acronymically, COIN. It had been part and parcel of the world of colonial and neocolonial wars and, in the 1960s, became the basis for the U.S. ground war and “pacification” program in South Vietnam -- and we all know how that turned out.
Amid the greatest defeat the U.S. had suffered since the burning of Washington in 1814, counterinsurgency as a doctrine was left for dead in the rubble of Vietnam. With a sigh of relief, the military high command turned back to the task of stopping Soviet armies-that-never-would from pouring through Germany’s Fulda Gap. Even in the military academies they ceased to teach counterinsurgency -- until Petraeus and his team disinterred it, dusted it off, polished it up, and turned it into the military’s latest war-fighting bible. Via a new Army and Marine field manual Petraeus helped to oversee, it would be presented as the missing formula for success in the Bush administration’s two flailing, failing invasions-cum-occupations on the Eurasian mainland.
It would gain such acclaim, in fact, that the University of Chicago Press would publish it as a trade paperback on July 4, 2007. Already back in Baghdad filling the role of Washington’s savior, the general, who had already written a foreword for that “paradigm shattering” manual, would flog it with this classic blurb: “Surely a manual that’s on the bedside table of the president, vice president, secretary of defense, 21 of 25 members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and many others deserves a place at your bedside too.”
And really, you know the rest. He would be sold (and, from Baghdad, sell himself) to the public the same way Saddam’s al-Qaeda links and weapons of mass destruction had been. He, too, would be rolled out as a product -- our “surge commander” -- and soon enough become the general of the hour, and Iraq a success story for the ages. Then, appointed CENTCOM commander, the military man in charge of Washington’s two wars, by Bush, he made it out of town before it became fully apparent that his successes in Iraq would leave the U.S. out on its ear a few years down the line.
The Fall of the American Empire (Writ Small)
Afghanistan followed as he maneuvered to box a new president, Barack Obama, into a new “surge” in another country. Then, his handpicked war commander General Stanley McChrystal, newly minted COIN believer, “ascetic,” and “rising superstar” (who would undergo his own Petraeus-like media build-up), went down in shame over nasty comments made by associates about the Obama White House. In mid-2010, Petraeus would take McChrystal’s place to save another president by bringing COIN to bear in just the right way. The usual set of hosannas -- and even less success than in Iraq -- followed.
But as with Saddam Hussein's mythical WMDs, it seemed scarcely to matter when there was no there there. Even though Afghanistan’s two COIN commanders had visibly failed in a war against an under-armed, undermanned, none-too-popular minority insurgency, and even though the doctrine of counterinsurgency would soon be tossed off a moving drone and left to die in the Afghan rubble, Petraeus once again made it out in one piece. In Washington, he was still hailed as the soldier of his generation and President Obama, undoubtedly fearing him in 2012, either as a candidate or a supporter of another Republican candidate, promptly stashed him away at the CIA, sending him safely into the political shadows.
With that, Petraeus left his four stars behind, shed COIN-mode just as his doctrine was collapsing completely, and slipped into the directorship of a militarizing CIA and its drone wars. He remained widely known, in the words of Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution (praising Broadwell’s biography), as “the finest general of this era and one of the greatest in modern American history.” Unlike George W. Bush and crew who, despite pulling in staggering speaker's fees and writing memoirs for millions, now found themselves in a far different set of shadows, he looked like the ultimate survivor -- until, of course, books and “bedsides” resurfaced in unexpected ways.
In the Iraq surge moment, the liberal advocacy group MoveOn.org unsuccessfully tried to label him “General Betray Us.” Now, as his affair with Broadwell unraveled into the reality TV show of our moment, he became General Betray Himself, a figure of derision, an old man with a young babe, the “cloak-and-shag-her” guy (as one New York Post screaming headline put it).
So here you have it, the two paradigmatic figures of the closing of the “American Century”: the president’s son whose ambitions were stoked by Texas politics after years in the personal wilderness and the man who married the superintendent’s daughter and rose like a meteor in a military that could never win a war. In the end, as the faces of American-disaster-masquerading-as-success, neither made it out of town before shame caught up with them. It’s a measure of their importance, however, that Bush was finally put to flight by a global economic meltdown, Petraeus by the local sexual version of the same. Again, it’s history vs. farce.
Or think of the Petraeus version of collapse as a tryout for the fall of the American empire, writ very small, with Jill Kelley and Paula Broadwell as our Gibbons and the volume of email, including military sexting, taking the place of his six volumes. A poster general for American decline, David Petraeus will be a footnote to history, a man out for himself who simply went a bridge or a book too far. George W. and crew were the real thing: genuine mad visionaries who simply mistook their dreams and fantasies for reality.
But wasn’t it fun while it lasted? Wasn’t it a blast to occupy Washington, be treated as a demi-god, go to Pirate-themed parties in Tampa with a 28-motorcycle police escort, and direct your own biography... even if it did end as Fifty Shades of Khaki?
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The United States of Fear as well as The End of Victory Culture, his history of the Cold War, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050. You can see his recent interview with Bill Moyers on supersized politics, drones, and other subjects by clicking here.
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: A small bow to several sites that I always find particularly helpful: my daily companion Antiwar.com, Juan Cole’s invaluable Informed Comment blog, the always provocative War in Context run by Paul Woodward, and Noah Shachtman’s Danger Room at Wired magazine. (At that site, I particularly recommend Spencer Ackerman’s mea culpa for having been drawn into the cult of Petraeus. Scores of other journalists and pundits had far more reason to write such a piece -- and didn’t.) By the way, in case you think that, until recently, it wasn’t possible for anyone to see what is now commonly being written about the general, check out a piece I posted in 2008 under the title “Selling the President’s General.”]
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch book, Nick Turse’s The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare.
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