The words of Phillips Brooks's Christmas carol, "O Little Town of Bethlehem" have had a mysterious power for me since I first heard them sung, as a small child.
Brooks, I later learned, wrote the carol as a poem on a visit to Bethlehem in 1868. He was most famous in his time for a sermon he delivered, in that same period, on the subject of the Civil War dead.
Now I associate the silent, dark streets he describes with the silence of the young men missing from little towns all over the North and the South:
O little town of Bethlehem, How still we see thee lie! Above thy deep and dreamless sleep The silent stars go by; Yet in thy dark streets shineth The everlasting Light; The hopes and fears of all the years Are met in thee to-night.
See you in 2004 — a monumentally important year for all our hopes and fears.
During more than two years of investigating two campaign committees that Attorney General John D. Ashcroft maintained when he was in the Senate, the Federal Election Commission never directly questioned Ashcroft or obtained a sworn statement from him even though the issue of his personal ownership of a mailing list and the income it produced were central to the inquiry.
Ellen L. Weintraub, chairwoman of the FEC, said she and the other two Democrats on the panel did not have the required four votes to carry a motion to interview Ashcroft. In addition, she said, all the commissioners did not want to be seen as "harassing the attorney general of the United States" and so never sought to question him.
Critics of the commission say the handling of the case illustrates the FEC's reluctance to aggressively investigate people in power -- a tendency exacerbated by the partisan split among the six commissioners. By law, three are from each party.
"The FEC is known to be 'squeamish' about bothering people in the administration," said Lawrence M. Noble, a former FEC general counsel and now executive director of the Committee for Responsive Politics. Noble said the first choice when dealing with someone central to an investigation would be a deposition; second would be written questions; third would be an affidavit; and the last choice would be a statement from his lawyer.
"They bypassed all these," Noble said, "and the result is a weak ending to an important case."
$100 million for Whitewater, $3 million for 9-11-01... is anybody investigating anything worth revealing anymore?
Darleen Druyun was a hot prospect when she retired from the Department of the Air Force in November 2002.
In three decades in various acquisition roles there, the lanky, no-nonsense civilian administrator had negotiated billion-dollar weapons contracts and amassed valuable insights into Pentagon policy and the strengths and weaknesses of defense contractors. At a retirement lunch at an Italian restaurant in northern Virginia near the Pentagon, more than a hundred industry executives and government officials gathered, some anxiously scanning the room for clues as to where she might land next.
By that Nov. 21 fete, Ms. Druyun had quietly talked about job opportunities with three of the nation's largest defense contractors -- Boeing Co., Lockheed Martin Corp. and Raytheon Co. Lockheed President Robert Stevens attended. So did Boeing Chief Financial Officer Michael Sears and James Albaugh, the head of the company's space and defense businesses. When Mr. Sears sat down at Ms. Druyun's table to chat with her family, other executives in the room took note.
[...]
Talk of a job at Boeing for Ms. Druyun began as early as Sept. 3, 2002, more than two months before she recused herself from overseeing Boeing contracts, according to people familiar with the investigation.
While those job negotiations were under way, she was also continuing to push a controversial $21 billion plan to have the government lease and later buy 100 Boeing-made airplanes. Separately, Pentagon investigators are looking into whether Ms. Druyun broke the law by sharing a rival company's information with Boeing.
[...]
Ms. Druyun remained a high-profile champion of the defense industry during the 1990s cutbacks in military spending. In the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the subsequent slump in the aviation industry, Ms. Druyun became an active promoter of a plan to have the Air Force lease 100 modified Boeing jets as air-refueling tankers. Critics of the plan said it was merely a bailout for Boeing and would cost taxpayers billions more than buying the planes outright. Top Air Force officials, including Ms. Druyun, contended the tankers were urgently needed to replace an aging fleet and that leasing would get them into service sooner.
On Sept. 3, 2002, an e-mail arrived in Mr. Sears's inbox. The sender, a 26-year-old employee in Boeing's St. Louis operation named Heather McKee, wrote that "mom" was making post-retirement plans. In a tone described by people familiar with it as a "friendly heads-up," the note told Mr. Sears that the woman was negotiating with other companies but would rather "live in Chicago," where Boeing is based.
[...]
...Boeing turned over more than 8,000 e-mails, including many involving Ms. Druyun. Many of the e-mails, which Mr. McCain later made public, indicated that internal Air Force memos about the tanker negotiations were passed on to senior Boeing executives. One April 2002 e-mail from a Boeing executive working on the deal to a colleague said that Ms. Druyun had told Boeing executives about rival company bids. The e-mail said that Ms. Druyun had told the company "several times" that rival European Aeronautic Defense and Space Co.'s offering of Airbus planes "was $5 million to $17 million cheaper" per aircraft than Boeing's tanker bid.
[from the timeline accompanying the article:]
Sept. 2002: Her daughter, a Boeing employee, e-mails Boeing CFO Michael Sears about her mother's retirement and job search. "
Oct. 2002: Ms. Druyun negotiates a NATO aircraft order that went to Boeing. Two days later, she and Mr. Sears meet to discuss employment. She agrees to sell her house to a Boeing attorney working on tanker deal.
Nov. 2002: Ms. Druyun officially recuses herself from Boeing decisions, retires mid-month.
Postscript: One of the ironies of the Druyun debacle is that her highly unethical mentor Michael Sears was about to publish a business self-help book that dealt with management ethics. Publisher Wiley has since pulled the web page advertising Sears's book Soaring through Turbulence.
Forget content. As Jack Welch and dozens of other market cannibals have demonstrated, the celebrity of power is all you need to get a book contract. With a publisher as clueless as Wiley, Michael Sears proved that the metastatic corruption of defense contracting can be parlayed in more ways than one would expect.
Saddam Hussein spent the final weeks before the war writing a novel predicting that he would lead an underground resistance movement to victory over the Americans, rather than planning the defense of his regime.
As the war began and Saddam went into hiding 40,000 copies of Be Gone Demons! were rolling off the presses.
Most were destroyed by bombing and looting but the Daily Telegraph has obtained one of the few remaining copies of the novel -- a historical epic that reveals both Saddam's increasing detachment from the world and his inflated sense of self.
The narrative meanders through the history of Iraq and is filled with paranoid invectives against the Jews, who delight in inciting troubles between Muslim nations and encouraging the Romans -- a synonym for the Americans -- to attack Iraq.
Cheney's novel (begun while he was in hiding following 9-11-01): Be Gone Democrats!
Bush, incapable of giving even a credible interview (see "what's the difference?" on page 2 of his sitdown with Diane Sawyer), isn't writing a novel, but reading one: Go Dog Go!
Saddam's capture was the latest salvo fired between the toppled Iraqi dictator and the Bush family. As president, the elder Bush helped gather a coalition of countries for the 1991 Persian Gulf War to oust Saddam's troops from Kuwait, which the Iraqi leader invaded in August 1990. U.S.-led coalition forces drove the Iraqis from the oil-rich emirate, but Saddam remained in power in Iraq.
In June 1993, the United States launched a missile attack against a government intelligence center in Baghdad as retaliation for what President Clinton said was "compelling evidence" of an Iraqi plot to assassinate the elder Bush in retaliation for the Gulf War.
Clinton said a car-bomb plot against Bush had been uncovered during Bush's April 1993 visit to Kuwait. The plan, devised by the Iraqi government, was foiled by Kuwaiti security personnel. Clinton said the plot amounted to an attack on the United States.
Clinton's behavior has nothing whatever to do with how Democrats are now routinely characterized by right-wing supporters of the current administration.
Clinton's actions were based on an adult, nonpartisan assessment of national security, not because Hussein "tried to kill my dad."
The Pentagon has refused to release documents to the Senate Commerce Committee investigating a Defense Department contract to lease, then buy, Boeing Co. refueling tankers.
The committee requested documents from Chicago-based Boeing and the Pentagon in an effort to gain insight into the decision making on the contract and to determine how much influence Boeing had on the debate, congressional aides said.
The Pentagon's delay has angered key senators and raised the prospect that the committee will seek a subpoena for the documents.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), chairman of the commerce committee, has accused the Air Force of acting as an advocate for Boeing instead of taxpayers in the negotiations on the program. "It's very important, given the swirl of allegations and appearances of impropriety, that we get the complete story," McCain said. "We can only do that by getting these documents."
Dragon Lady Darleen Druyun and her mentor Boeing CFO Michael Sears, both mentioned later in the above article, have been a particular subject of focus here in Skimbleland for the reasons articulated by Sen. McCain's accusations.
The U.S. military said on Monday Vice President Dick Cheney's former company Halliburton was allocated $222 million more last week for work in Iraq, at the same time as a Pentagon audit found the firm may have overbilled for some services there.
Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root has now clocked up $2.26 billion under its March no-bid contract with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to rebuild Iraq's oil sector.
Army Corps of Engineers spokesman Bob Faletti said a new task order was made for KBR last week worth up to $222 million for the "restoration of essential infrastructure."
Halliburton spokesperson Wendy Hall said that as far as fuel is concerned, on each gallon of gas Halliburton made "only a few cents." Students of public relations, take note: these are highly paid professionals making creative use of the words "only," "a few," and "cents."
We can only wish that someday a humiliated Cheney will be pulled from his undisclosed location (i.e., spider hole) and checked for lice. Meanwhile, besides directing the Halliburton war crimes, in his spare time he kills over 70 pheasants in a single morning at Pennsylvania's Rolling Rock Club and Game Preserve.
No longer taking a discreet table in the corner of La Griglia, former Enron CEO Ken Lay stepped into the power-lunch spotlight Friday [Dec. 12] when he invited former Mayor Bob Lanier and Elyse Lanier to join him there for a leisurely bite at a central table. No one missed the giant step forward.
Now that the political climate is warmer, punch line Ken Lay is undoubtedly preparing for his next foray into organized pickpocketing via market manipulation, energy policy manipulation, election manipulation, accounting manipulation, regulatory manipulation, and just plain ol' lying.
While we're on the subject of Enron, consider the subject of profitably driving people to suicide. Isn't it odd that you can still find current stories on Vince Foster, who died in 1993, but none on Enron's J. Clifford Baxter, who died in 2002?
Hard time will soon be hallowed time for nearly 800 Florida inmates who will be given the option of repaying their debt to society in the nation's first prison dedicated entirely to faith-based rehabilitation programs.
Gov. Jeb Bush made the surprise announcement Friday at a White House-sponsored news conference in Tampa that spotlighted President Bush's attempts to give religious organizations a greater role in solving social problems.
"I believe that when people commit violent acts, it is appropriate to enforce the laws and that people should be punished for their actions," Gov. Bush said. "But I also believe that lives can be changed.
"For those individuals who are motivated to change their lives, programs like this can make a tremendous difference and create a pathway out of the criminal justice system."
Under the governor's plan, the entire Lawtey Correctional Institution in rural Bradford County, with its eight prison dormitories and 791 inmates, will house inmates who have volunteered for the program. To be eligible, they will have to be within three years of completing their sentences and have had a clean prison record for the previous 12 months, said Florida Department of Corrections spokesman Sterling Ivey.
"To our knowledge, there is no other correctional system in the country that is operating a prison exclusively with faith-based programming," Ivey said.
Prisoners who meet the minimum requirements will be offered space at the facility on a first-come, first-served basis. Once accepted, they will receive religion-based classes in everything from parenting and character building to job training, Ivey said.
[...]
But critics were quick to condemn the move. Among them was the Washington-based Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which last month successfully sued to remove a replica of the Ten Commandments from the Alabama State Supreme Court, a legal battle that eventually cost that state's chief justice his job.
Eight months ago, the group filed a federal lawsuit challenging a program in the Iowa prison system that is similar to the existing Florida program. That suit has yet to be heard.
Spending taxpayer dollars on a faith-based prison violates Florida and federal constitutional bans on establishment of a state religion, said the group's executive director, Barry Lynn, who predicted his group would succeed easily if it challenges the Florida program.
Ivey said the state expects the program to survive legal challenges. "We understand the legalities involved here, but we're operating under a voluntary program," he said.
But Lynn said: "The voluntary aspect is almost of no consequence. It is government-supported religion, and it is just as unconstitutional in a prison as it would be in a public housing project...."
