Eskimos Seek Answers to Land Contamination
During the Cold War, the U.S. military created early-warning radar sites along Alaska’s western coast. Now the local Yup’ik Eskimos suspect that abnormalities in the fish and wildlife, and their own health problems, are related to contaminants left behind by the military. As NPR’s Elizabeth Arnold reports, they’re determined to find out for themselves. See photos of Alaska’s Hooper Bay area.
By David Goldstein
Knight Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON
Sexual health is getting more attention these days. Research has shown that medical conditions such as heart disease and nerve damage can interfere with how you respond sexually to another person.
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: November 29, 2003
drum roll, please: It’s time to announce the results of the Name That War Contest.
In a column 10 days ago about Iraq, I expressed frustration at the absence of a good name for our war there. So I offered prizes (Iraqi 250-dinar notes with Saddam’s picture) and invited readers to send in entries.
Then I fled to Guatemala and El Salvador, and when I returned to the office this week, there were 4,000 entries from all over the world.
Hundreds of people offered “Bush’s Folly,” “Burning Bush,” “Bush League War,” “Bubba’s War,” “Shrub’s War,” “Operation Quicksand” or “The Crawford Conflict.” Then there were zillions of “Iraqmire,” “Iraqgate” and “Iraqnam.”
Lois from New Zealand suggested “Operation Bushwhack Iraq.” Avie Hern of California offered “Bushkrieg.”
Some people suggested that instead of Operation Iraqi Freedom, this is “Operation Iraqi Liberation.” I thought they were hawks until I recognized the acronym: OIL. Also on the petroleum front, Peter Wilson of Pennsylvania offered “Mother of Oil Wars.”
BY LOUIS DUBOSE
Unless you’ve been reading the Houston Chronicle society page, it’s unlikely you’ve seen any current news about Neil Bush. The third Bush sibling has been almost as invisible as his apolitical brother Marvin, a venture capitalist living in northern Virginia, and his sister Dorothy “Doro” Koch, the youngest of the five Bush siblings, who quietly raises funds for charities in a Maryland suburb near Washington. While Jeb was governor of Florida and George W. was twice elected governor of Texas, Neil was either part of the late Maxine Mesinger’s “crème de la crème crowd” at a Houston social event, or a stale S&L footnote: “the director of Silverado Banking, Savings and Loan when it crashed in 1988 at a cost of $1 billion to taxpayers.”
In 1990, Bush paid a $50,000 fine and was banned from banking activities for his role in taking down Silverado, which actually cost taxpayers $1.3 billion. A Resolution Trust Corporation Suit against Bush and other officers of Silverado was settled in 1991 for $26.5 million. And the fine wasn’t exactly paid by Neil Bush. A Republican fundraiser set up a fund to help defer costs Neil incurred in his S&L dealings. Friends and relatives contributed — but not then-President and Barbara Bush, which would have been unseemly. Since then, the Bush political combine has done such a remarkable job keeping Neil in the background that what seemed like a 10-year news blackout didn’t end until mid-February, when the Austin Business Journal reported that Bush “quietly is heading a local start-up that’s raising at least $10 million in second-round funding.” According to the business newsweekly, Bush has already raised $7.1 million from 53 investors underwriting Ignite! Inc., an educational software company. After being banned from banking and all but airbrushed out of the family portrait — or at least the family news profile — Neil Bush is back.
Bush wasn’t just an average S&L exec drawing a big salary and recklessly pushing a federally insured institution beyond its lending limits. As a director of a failing thrift in Denver, Bush voted to approve $100 million in what were ultimately bad loans to two of his business partners. And in voting for the loans, he failed to inform fellow board members at Silverado Savings & Loan that the loan applicants were his business partners. Federal banking regulators later followed the trail of defaulted loans to Neil Bush oil ventures, in particular JNB International, an oil and gas exploration company awarded drilling concessions in Argentina — despite its complete lack of experience in international oil and gas drilling. It probably helped that the Bush family had cultivated close ties with the fabulously corrupt Carlos Menem, former president of Argentina.
Listen to the entire program for Thursday, November 27, 2003
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Howard Zinn and the Omissions of U.S. History
The Thanksgiving holidays are a time when Americans traditionally reflect how far we’ve come and the distance we have yet to go. But too often we only scratch the surface of yesterday. One academic who has measured the past in arguably broader terms is Howard Zinn — historian, social activist, playwright and author of the critically acclaimed A People’s History of the United States. Professor Zinn joins NPR’s Tavis Smiley to discuss what Zinn contends are some of the great “omissions” of United States History.
The State of Indigenous People, Part I: American Indians
In part one of a two-part series on the political and economic status of indigenous people in the United States, producer Phillip Martin focuses on Native Americans. Many in the American Indian community believe they can influence political outcomes through sheer numbers — and with profits from casino gambling. But they also acknowledge the limits of Native American clout, as reflected in their relatively small population numbers and the general economic conditions on most reservations.
Equating criticism with cowardice is dirty politics at its absolute lowest.
By Robert Scheer
What nerve of President Bush to question the patriotism of his Democratic opponents, two of whom are highly decorated Purple Heart and Bronze and Silver Star veterans and all of whom have labored long to make this a better country.
But the television ad that the Republican Party is running on Bush’s behalf in Iowa this week does just that, making the outrageous insinuation that critics of the president’s policies are in fact supporters of terrorists.
“Some are now attacking the president for attacking the terrorists,” the ad states. “Some call for us to retreat, putting our national security in the hands of others.” The ad urges viewers to tell Congress “to support the president’s policy of preemptive self-defense.”
This is dirty politics at its absolute lowest, equating criticism with cowardice.
The irony is that the ad features the president delivering the 2003 State of the Union speech, which has turned out to be an enormous embarrassment of admitted distortions, including one claim, based on a forged document, that Iraq was a nuclear threat. It was in that speech that the president touted the imminent threat of Iraq’s so-far-undiscovered weapons of mass destruction while implying that Saddam Hussein collaborated with al-Qaida on the 9/11 attacks — a charge that the president himself recently conceded was without foundation.
Ask not what the U.S. can do for Tony Blair — or for the sick and elderly.
By Sidney Blumenthal
Nov. 22 marked the much commemorated 40th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. “For of those to whom much is given, much is required,” he famously remarked in 1961. It was his idea not only of the citizen’s relationship to the nation, but of the United States’ obligation in the world. But George W. Bush has changed the maxim, at least in regard to Britain: For of those of whom much is required, nothing is given.
In London, in the days before the anniversary, Bush stood before a scrim reading “United Kingdom.” The words, endlessly reproduced, were not there for the benefit of his hosts, who presumably knew where they were, but as a subliminal backdrop for possible TV commercials to be used in the Bush-Cheney campaign to prove his diplomatic mastery by virtue of traveling to another land. The British visit was Bush’s latest variation on his landing on the USS Lincoln aircraft carrier, attired in flight costume, banner unfurled behind him reading: “Mission Accomplished.” From Buckingham Palace to Tony Blair’s working-class district of Sedgefield, the “United Kingdom” became his campaign theme park.
In his Nov. 18 speech at Banqueting Hall (avoiding an appearance before Parliament where backbenchers might make rude noises), Bush freely displayed his erudition, citing Shaftesbury and Wilberforce, Tyndale and Wesley, to cast himself as a liberal idealist and internationalist in the tradition of Woodrow Wilson. “We’re sometimes faulted for a naive faith that liberty can change the world,” he said. “If that’s an error, it began with reading too much John Locke and Adam Smith.” One wonders how often Bush has perused the “Second Treatise of Civil Government.” Certainly his speech was a repudiation of his father’s foreign policy realism: the Oedipal Doctrine.
Putting his volume of Locke aside, Bush entered into negotiations with Blair to act out something more resembling Thomas Hobbes’ “Leviathan.”
Joe Conason’s Journal
The fascinating details of Neil Bush’s business affairs evoke memories of the “China scandals” that once plagued the Clintons.
Bush’s little brother and the Clinton rules
On certain days, we seem to be living in a strange parody of the Clinton era. Like today, for instance, which brings news of the fortunes and misfortunes of President Bush’s brother Neil.
As fans of the ruling dynasty know, Neil Bush is winding up an exceptionally messy divorce. Lawyers representing his ex-wife Sharon have extracted fascinating details of his current business affairs, evoking memories not only of his involvement with the infamous Silverado Savings and Loan but also of the “China scandals” that once plagued the Clintons. Apparently the presidential sibling is now on the payroll of a Taiwan-based company with powerful connections in Beijing.
Sharon Bush’s attorneys questioned her former husband last March, but the documents that included his deposition weren’t released until yesterday. According to this Reuters dispatch, Neil Bush admitted under oath that he made a highly lucrative deal in August 2002 with Grace Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. That company, which is reportedly “backed by Jiang Mianheng, the son of former Chinese President Jiang Zemin,” recently opened a large manufacturing plant in Shanghai.
Bush explained that he had been invited to join Grace’s board by Winston Wong, a co-founder of the company and son of the chairman of Taiwan’s largest business group, Formosa Plastics. His consulting contract with Grace will eventually provide Bush with $2 million in stock. (Wong has also provided financing — along with numerous other Asian and Arab investors — for Ignite!, Bush’s educational software company.)
Why would Winston Wong and Jiang Mianheng procure the costly services of Bush, who barely escaped prosecution and whose business history ranges from moribund to disastrous? That same question occurred to Marshall Davis Brown, a lawyer for Sharon Bush.
Medicare reform
Nov 27th 2003 | WASHINGTON, DC
From The Economist print edition
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This week’s law-making may have helped George Bush win next year’s election—providing voters don’t do the sums
ACCORDING to Otto von Bismarck, the making of laws, like the making of sausages, should never be watched. Congress this week illustrated his point. The Republican leaders were very keen to pass two laws that would help the White House—the energy bill and a huge extension of the Medicare programme—before adjourning for Thanksgiving. To do so, they subjected the world’s most powerful democratic body to a messy mixture of arm-twisting, procedural manipulation and special-interest politicking.
Despite these sterling efforts, the Republicans actually failed on energy. Some 40 senators, including six Republicans, stood firm against the proposed law, enough to delay it by filibuster if necessary. A costly law that does little for America’s energy problems, but piles subsidies and tax breaks in the lap of every conceivable business connected to energy, has been shelved—at least until January.
The mammoth Medicare bill, however, squeaked through. It passed the House of Representatives at 5.53am on Saturday, November 22nd, after an unprecedented three hours of voting. Normally, congressmen have 15 minutes or so to cast their votes. This time, the House Republican leaders held the roll-call open for three hours while they bullied the fainthearted. George Bush, just back from Britain, stayed up unusually late on Friday to lobby congressmen, and was woken before dawn on Saturday morning to plead with a few more. Disillusioned Democrats accused the Republicans of “stealing” the vote, just as they were supposed to have stolen the 2000 election.
The vote in the Senate was less dramatic. The Democrats’ attempt at another filibuster was fended off, and the Medicare bill passed by 54 votes to 44 on November 25th, to the White House’s jubilation.
More than any other piece of Mr Bush’s domestic agenda, the expansion of Medicare to include prescription drugs is seen as the key to electoral victory next year. This is the biggest expansion of the government’s health-care plan for the elderly since it was introduced in 1965, and the elderly may account for one in four of the votes cast in the election. By bundling a big new benefit into Medicare, Mr Bush has shown that he gets things done in Washington (unlike those useless Democrats, who talked about drug coverage for years but failed to deliver).
Health care is a leading issue for many voters; it ranks higher than tax cuts, for instance. In the Democratic primary debates the contenders queue up to bash Mr Bush’s bill. Not only has health care been seen as Democratic turf, but also older Americans especially have distrusted the Republicans on Medicare, believing they meant to undermine the entitlement. After all, didn’t Newt Gingrich once hope in the 1990s that Medicare’s bureaucracy would “wither on the vine”?
Corporate scandals
Nov 27th 2003
From The Economist print edition
Another week, another disaster for Boeing, as Airbus soars to new heights
“EITHER you are ethical or you are not. You have to make that decision; all of us do. And there is no in-between.” So says a book on management, “Soaring Through Turbulence: A New Model for Managers Who Want to Succeed in a Changing Business World,” by an aerospace executive, Mike Sears, and a lawyer called Thomas Schweich. On November 24th, as review copies were being circulated, Mr Sears was fired from his job as chief financial officer of Boeing for misconduct. The book is being withdrawn.
Boeing said the dismissal was for violating company policies by communicating with a government official about future employment at Boeing while she was still dealing with purchases of tanker aircraft from Boeing. Moreover, the firm found that Mr Sears and the official, Darleen Druyun, who later joined Boeing’s missile division, had attempted to conceal from an internal inquiry their illicit contacts in September and October last year. Ms Druyun has also been fired.
At first glance, and unless there was worse behaviour yet to emerge, this might seem like summary justice and overkill for a technical breach of the firm’s ethics code. After all, if Mr Sears had waited until November, when Ms Druyun recused herself from Boeing dealings at the Pentagon, there would have been no breach. On November 26th, Mr Sears issued a statement denying he had violated company policy.
But following other recent investigations into its defence business, Boeing needs to prove itself whiter than white. And the pair’s attempt to cover things up compounded the original offence.
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
emo to: President Bush
From: Saddam Hussein
Dear Bush: Well, it’s been a while since we last communicated. It’s not easy getting tapes out from this basement in Tikrit, but I thought it was time we had a little chat. Heard your speech on Arab democracy on the BBC Arabic Service. I’ll give you this, Bush, you and Blair do understand the stakes. It’s your willpower I doubt.
You see, Bush, this really is “The Mother of All Battles.” You may not have meant to, but you have triggered a huge civilizational war
Wednesday November 26, 2003
The Guardian
The US administration’s defence authorisation bill for fiscal year 2004 was signed into law by George Bush this week. In all, it totals $401.3bn. Amazingly, this figure does not include one-off appropriations for US operations in Iraq and Afghanistan of approximately $150bn. Overall US defence expenditure under Mr Bush is at record levels. It is higher, in relative terms, than equivalent, average American spending during the cold war years when a hostile Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact confronted the US and its allies with thousands of nuclear warheads deployed on land, at sea and in the air, as well as chemical and biological weapons and vast conventional forces. Yet Mr Bush suggested that terrorism now represented the most potent threat in the history of the US. “The war on terror is different than (sic) any war America has ever fought,” he said. “This threat to civilisation will be defeated. We will do whatever it takes.” So much for the peace dividend.
Mr Bush’s knowledge of history is not a matter that should detain us here, no more than is the meaning in this context of the word civilisation which, like Jack Straw, he presumably uses “advisedly”. It is clear that Mr Bush senses a very great menace; and that he will take every opportunity between now and the next election to tell American voters how much they have to fear. This is an unusually disconcerting, manipulative message. His campaign slogan could almost be: “Vote for Bush. It’s really scary”.
(Read the article)
Andrew Kramer
WARM SPRINGS, Ore. (AP) —
Jason Hintsala was living in his cousin’s crowded house with his girlfriend and nine relatives when U.S. census takers passed through the Warm Springs Indian reservation in 2000. Later, he moved with his family to his parents’ trailer.
“We have no choice but to bounce from house to house” because the waiting list for tribal housing is so long, Hintsala said.
Indian reservations posed a multitude of problems to census takers, not the least of which were big, ever-changing households, frequent moves, mistrust of government officials, and differing definitions of who is an Indian. As a result, the head count of Indians had some of the highest error rates for any minority group in the country.
For the first time, however, tribes will not have to accept the official census numbers, which are used by Washington in doling out federal aid.
More than 100 tribes around the country are challenging the 2000 census results and conducting their own head counts, hoping ultimately to win more federal money for such things as health care and housing.
The secret resignation letters of fed-up Bush officials
By Arianna Huffington
Dear Friends,
Many of you have written to ask when I’ll be returning to my column. The answer is: Jan. 7.
Up until then, I’m working around the clock on my new book, “Fanatics, Fools and Alpha Males,” which will be published in March by Miramax Books.
In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I’m sending you a succulent slice from the book (you’ll have to provide your own stuffing). It’s a collection of resignation letters written by disaffected members of the Bush administration who so disagreed with administration policies that they preferred the uncertainty of the unemployment line to toeing the party line.
I’ve also taken the liberty of including excerpts from what I imagine the first drafts of these letters might have looked like.
So thanks to these unsung heroes, and Happy Thanksgiving to you.
Arianna
By James P. Miller
Tribune staff reporter
In business, timing matters.
Just ask Michael Sears. Or his publisher.
On the very day Boeing Co. pink-slipped its second-highest official, reporters were opening galley copies of “Soaring Through Turbulence,” a book containing Sears’ advice on how to be an effective corporate manager.
The cover of “Soaring,” which Sears co-wrote with attorney Thomas A. Schweich, features a photo of the hard-charging executive in front of a Boeing-made Navy fighter jet. It promises “A New Model for Managers Who Want to Succeed in a Changing Business World.”
“Soaring” had been scheduled for publication early next year, according to publisher John Wiley & Sons of New York. But that was before Boeing’s board voted to throw the book’s author overboard.
Chicago Tribune Editorial
Even before the Senate votes were cast Tuesday on the historic expansion of the Medicare program, President Bush was touting the new prescription drug benefit as a boon to senior citizens. The bill, the president said on Monday, will “enable us to say to seniors we kept our promise.”
Maybe so. But the president and Republican-controlled Congress are also breaking even bigger promises to the rest of America. One promise was to control spending and not undertake huge new entitlements without saying how they would pay for them. Another was to significantly overhaul Medicare, not simply add an expensive new benefit.
On both counts, this Medicare bill fails.
The bill, which now heads to the president’s desk, is woefully short on real reform and long on spending–a combination that does nothing but hasten the projected fiscal catastrophe for Medicare as the Baby Boomers begin retiring less than decade from now.
The Republicans who crafted the bill and stiff-armed it through an often recalcitrant Congress crowed on Tuesday about the biggest expansion of Medicare since 1965. But creating a huge new federal entitlement without injecting a massive dose of private competition into Medicare is no cause for celebration.
(Read the article)
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Fold, Spindle, Mutilate, has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Fold, Spindle, Mutilate, endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
ASHINGTON, Nov. 28
The Tavis Smiley Show
