Another important opportunity to do something good for the world, to improve the national image of the US, and thereby our national security, as well as our collective humanity has been squandered. Thanks to the administration of good ole georgie porgie.

Hope and Sadness as World Trade Talks Collapse
Jeffrey Allen
OneWorld US
Tue., Jul. 25, 2006

The Bush and Blair administrations, along with other global powers, have long touted trade as a central element in the fight against global poverty. Many international aid and development organizations agree, but disagree with the approach the world's wealthier nations have taken on the issue, arguing that the global trading system is set up largely to benefit the global "haves" at the expense of the "have nots."

As the primary forum where the rules of global trade are set, the World Trade Organization (WTO) can play a key role in either exacerbating or eliminating poverty. The latest negotiations centered largely around the subsidies wealthy countries offer their farmers, which allow them to undercut most farmers in poorer countries. This makes it virtually impossible for farmers in poorer countries to compete on international markets and often even on their home turf, thus decimating their hopes of earning a decent living through their crops.

Global aid groups have taken varying positions on Sunday's "collapse" of trade negotiations. Some had held out hopes that a poverty-reducing deal could be hammered out; others believed that wealthy countries would never agree to such a deal, and so the suspension of talks was the best possible outcome. Here are some of their reactions to the news.


From ActionAid:

"We must now look to the future for global trade--which remains a central element in the fight against poverty. There must now be root-and-branch reform of the WTO if it is to be a force for good in the world, rather than a forum for the rich to exploit the poor....

"ActionAid estimates that the EU and US still spend $100 billion per year on farm subsidies that undercut producers in poor countries. All rich countries promised was a re-packaging of existing domestic support rather than real cuts to the amount of money going to rich farmers and corporations....

"The WTO will still exist--it is only these particular negotiations that have been put on ice. But their suspension does offer an opportunity for root-and-branch reform that bans exclusive meetings and makes the organisation more inclusive and democratic."

[Read the whole Q & A: ''Where Next for World Trade?'']


From the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI):

"The collapse of the WTO talks represents a huge setback for developing countries. The agricultural trade policies of the industrialized countries harm the economies of many developing nations, where millions of poor people are dependent on agriculture for food and income. But too much is at stake, especially for the world's small-scale farmers, to play the "blame game" and point fingers. Instead, we need to look forward and identify the opportunities that lay ahead....

"First, if free access of least-developed countries to wealthy-country markets is increased from 97 percent of imports to 100 percent, as proposed by the E.U., world income would increase by an additional $14 billion over the compromise scenario. Most important, about half of these additional gains would go to the poorest countries, increasing their income dramatically from $1 billion to $7 billion.

"Second, if the percentage of agricultural products defined as sensitive and special were reduced from 5 percent to 1 percent, as proposed by the U.S., world income would increase by an additional $7.3 billion over the compromise scenario. This would especially benefit developing countries where agriculture is an important source of employment and export earnings--most notably in middle-income countries.

"While the talks have collapsed for now, it is far from the end of the Doha Development round. The negotiations will continue, because ultimately reduction of agricultural protectionism and subsidies is in the interest of most countries, industrialized and developing alike."

[Read the whole statement from IFPRI.]


From the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development, CAFOD

"The Catholic aid agency is bitterly disappointed that talks have collapsed and said hopes for achieving a development outcome lie in tatters due to the failure of rich countries to put the longer term interests of developing countries and the global economy before the short-term and selfish interests of domestic lobby groups....

"The U.S. gave the rest of the world a choice between agreeing to unacceptable proposals or seeing the multilateral system collapse. This is no way to show global leadership or create an international trading system that meets the needs of all.

"The EU must also take responsibility for the talks reaching this sad point. They consistently put the needs of their own farmers and business above the needs of the poor....

"CAFOD partner Jack Jones Zulu from the Jesuit Centre for Theological Reflection (JCTR) in Zambia says: 'The collapse of the talks takes us backwards and will impact heavily on development in the South as we continue to trade under an oppressive system.'"

[Read the whole statement from CAFOD.]


From Oxfam America, the U.S. arm of the international aid group Oxfam:

"What distinguishes this failure, and makes it a tragedy according to the organization, is that these trade negotiations were launched for the express purpose of benefiting millions of poor people in developing countries around the world. The U.S. and other countries made this commitment at the launch of these negotiations in 2001 and although the trade deal was supposed to be finished by 2004, talks have continued on life support, deadline after missed deadline.

"'The once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to bring about an international trading system that is not rigged for the rich and hurting the poor has been put on ice,' said Raymond C. Offenheiser, president of Oxfam America. 'Five years of haggling and debating have ended in a sad display of political failure.'

"At the G8 meeting in St. Petersburg only a week ago, a spark of hope was lit when heads of state sent their trade ministers back to the table to negotiate, arming them with orders to be flexible. But today's impasse shows that it was not enough. The central hurdle was, and remains, the trade distorting agricultural subsidy programs maintained by rich countries like the U.S. and the agriculture tariffs maintained by the EU."

[Read the whole statement or visit Oxfam's ''Make Trade Fair'' site and see what you can do to help.]


From Christian Aid:
"Christian Aid said that the collapse of the trade talks removed the single most important weapon in the fight against global poverty....Poor countries desperately needed a fair trade deal so that they could grow out of poverty and not rely on hand outs. This tawdry squabbling at the rich world's high table has now put paid to that....

"How can this allegedly great trading organisation continue to function when it cannot perform the basics of what it was designed for? This is an extremely serious matter and I suspect we are back to the drawing board on trade--with all the damaging consequences that will have for poor countries."

[Read the whole statement from Christian Aid.]


From Friends of the Earth International:

"Campaigners from Friends of the Earth International today welcomed the collapse of the World Trade Organisation (WTO)’s trade negotiations. This means that there is now time to review and reconsider the multilateral trading system in its entirety.

"This will be welcome news to millions of people around the world who feared that a WTO deal would have further impoverished the world’s poorest people and caused irreparable damage to the environment. Developing countries, including India, also fear that a WTO deal would cause immense harm to millions of small and subsistence farmers....

"Ronnie Hall, Trade Campaigner at Friends of the Earth International added: 'The delay created by the failure of the Doha negotiations must be used to review past negotiations and analyse the flaws in the WTO system as a whole. It will allow us to reflect on how to develop multilateral governance systems that will genuinely promote fair and sustainable societies that benefit everyone.'"

[Read Friends of the Earth's complete statement here.]


From the Center for Global Development:

"The U.S. should not be on the defensive in these talks and it cannot take a leading role as long as it is. Washington should take the offensive and thereby shift the spotlight back to the EU's much higher agricultural support and to India’s failure to engage seriously. U.S. negotiators could still do this relatively easily...

"What happens next?

"If I'm right that fear of losses in this fall's mid-term elections is keeping the [Bush] administration from offering even minor concessions, then the trade talks are unlikely to get serious again until early 2007. But then France holds presidential elections in April and similar political constraints there could mean that serious negotiations are not revived until mid-2007....Sadly, unless something unexpected changes in the next few weeks, I think that the next chance for a pro-development multilateral trade deal won’t arise until after the U.S. presidential elections in 2008. I hope I'm wrong."

[Read the whole Q & A with Kimberly Elliott, author of ''Delivering on Doha: Farm Aid and the Poor.'']

I love the word – upstander. We need far more upstanders in this world. I admire and applaud the efforts, however small or however large, of people who do more than just sit and watch with shock and awe (now, where have we heard that before?) It is very encouraging to at least and at last see more happening from the US administration and other quarters as well.

I feel immensely grateful that there are 12 and 13 year olds in America taking a stand and getting actively involved. I also feel humbled that I am personally not doing more. What will I tell my own children when they turn 12 or 13 and asked what was I doing as the world sat and watched this horror unfold. This article was in the Op-Ed of the May 7th 2006 IHT.

Heroes of Darfur
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

For three grueling years, Eric Reeves has been fighting for his life, struggling in a battle with leukemia that he may eventually lose. And in his spare time, sometimes from his hospital bed, he has emerged as an improbable leader of a citizens' army fighting to save hundreds of thousands of other lives in Darfur.

Pressure from that citizen army helped achieve a breakthrough on Friday: a tentative peace deal between the Sudanese government and the biggest Darfur rebel faction, brokered in part by U.S. officials. We should be skeptical that this agreement will really end the bloodshed — past cease-fires and promises have not been honored — but also rejoice in a glimpse of sun over the most wretched place in the world today.

If the violence does diminish — and that will take hard work in the months and years ahead — part of the credit will go to Mr. Reeves, a scholar of English literature at Smith College who has used an arsenal of e-mail messages, phone calls and Web pages to battle the Sudanese government and American indifference. He was the first person I know to describe the horrors of Darfur as genocide, and he financed his quixotic campaign by taking out a loan on his house.

Perhaps the most striking distinction in the history of genocide is not between those who murder and those who don't, but between "bystanders" who avert their eyes and "upstanders" who speak out. Professor Reeves has been a full-time upstander on Sudan since 1999, back when the people being slaughtered there were Christians in the south of the country. He noticed immediately in 2003 that Sudan had diversified into butchering Muslims in Darfur, and his frantic blowing of the whistle helped alert me and others. Visit his Web site, sudanreeves.org, but be careful — his fury may set your computer smoking.

I don't agree with every bit of Mr. Reeves's analysis, and sometimes I flinch at his stridency. But there's no better excuse for stridency than genocide.
While Darfur has been incredibly depressing, the grass-roots movement in this country to stop the genocide is immensely inspiring. (To join, go to Web sites like www.savedarfur.org or www.genocideintervention.net.) The activist kids just bowl me over: girls like Rachel Koretsky, a 13-year-old who organized a rally in Philadelphia, distributed circulars and conducted a raffle to raise money for Darfur as her bat mitzvah charity project. So far, Rachel has raised $14,000 for Darfur.

Or kids like Tacey Smith, a 12-year-old in the farm town of Gaston, Ore. After seeing the movie "Hotel Rwanda," she formed a Sudan Club with a few friends and has raised $400 for Darfur by selling eggs, washing cars and asking for donations instead of birthday presents. Her best friend's Christmas present to her was raising $50 for Darfur. Now
Tacey is organizing a Darfur fair next month.

President Bush has been more active lately on Darfur, and without the administration's relentless pushing the peace deal on Friday would have been impossible. But by and large, there has been a vacuum of leadership on Darfur over the last few years, and ordinary Americans — particularly young people — have tried to fill it. I don't know whether to be sad or inspired that we can turn for moral guidance to 12-year-olds.

Then there are the entertainers. Frankly, I think it's bizarre that we turn to movie stars for guidance on international relations. But in this case, I bow low to George Clooney, who had the guts to travel to the Darfur area last month, and to Angelina Jolie, who has visited the Darfur area twice and is pushing for action on Darfur more forcefully than almost anyone in Washington.

It gets weirder: "CBS Evening News" decided that genocide wasn't newsworthy, devoting only two minutes to coverage of Darfur in all of 2005 — but there's excellent coverage on MTV's university network and in episodes of the TV show "E.R." set in Darfur. And one of the best presentations of life in Darfur is in an extraordinary video game developed with help from MTV and available free at www.darfurisdying.com. In the game, you're a Darfuri, trying to survive as Sudan's janjaweed militias hunt you down.

So that's how the response is unfolding to the first genocide of the 21st century: a video game is one of the best guides to understanding the slaughter, and our moral vacuum is filled by teenyboppers and movie stars.
Someday we will look back at this motley army of children and celebrities, presided over by a man struggling with leukemia, and thank them for salvaging our national honor.

I should no longer be surprised, yet I am. I am still surprised and outraged every time I read about yet another riduculous move made by the Bush Administration. His proposed budget makes significant cuts and many of the most important areas -- education and healthcare, especially for the poor and aged, for example. How can this happen? The most needy can't afford high priced lobbyists.

These cuts are mainly so the wealthy and elite in the US can save a few dollars, that they don't need, in tax. And the money for the war? According to recent reports much of the oil money from Sadam that was supposed to be helping to pay for the rebuild is missing and unaccounted for as well. Sloopy and suspicious. And US tax payers have to foot the rest of the bill.

Disasters are looming around every corner for the US if we do not do something and soon. I confess I did not actually watch the State of Union address but I was cautiously hopeful when I saw they headlines talking about the need to cut our foreign oil dependency and talking not just about drilling but conservation. But, it was all smoke. His spin team has been back-tracking every step. There is very little chance he will push, or even allow, one or both of two measures that are needed to cut our consumption -- fuel standards and gasoline tax. The dollars he talked about committing to research in renewable energy is apparently less than was actually already allocated.

As for the deficit, according to an article I read in the Miami Herald, the budget bill won't reduce the deficit with its projected $38.8 billion in savings over five years. Pending tax-cut measures that will cost between $60 billion to $95 billion over five years not only will wipe out any savings but actually increase the deficit.

No big secret what team bush priorities are. What are yours???

You want to talk about terror? I find this whole article a bit terrifying. Is the fact that Bush claims to be a brother in god enough to therefore give him the green light among the faithful to proclaim whatever he wants to be true and to justify whatever act he wishes? No god that I would believe in and love would support war without an overwhelming justification and need based on indisputable facts.


January 20, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
Wayward Christian Soldiers
By CHARLES MARSH
Charlottesville, Va.

IN the past several years, American evangelicals, and I am one of them, have amassed greater political power than at any time in our history. But at what cost to our witness and the integrity of our message?

Recently, I took a few days to reread the war sermons delivered by influential evangelical ministers during the lead up to the Iraq war. That period, from the fall of 2002 through the spring of 2003, is not one I will remember fondly. Many of the most respected voices in American evangelical circles blessed the president's war plans, even when doing so required them to recast Christian doctrine.

Charles Stanley, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Atlanta, whose weekly sermons are seen by millions of television viewers, led the charge with particular fervor. "We should offer to serve the war effort in any way possible," said Mr. Stanley, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention. "God battles with people who oppose him, who fight against him and his followers." In an article carried by the convention's Baptist Press news service, a missionary wrote that "American foreign policy and military might have opened an opportunity for the Gospel in the land of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob."

As if working from a slate of evangelical talking points, both Franklin Graham, the evangelist and son of Billy Graham, and Marvin Olasky, the editor of the conservative World magazine and a former advisor to President Bush on faith-based policy, echoed these sentiments, claiming that the American invasion of Iraq would create exciting new prospects for proselytizing Muslims. Tim LaHaye, the co-author of the hugely popular "Left Behind" series, spoke of Iraq as "a focal point of end-time events," whose special role in the earth's final days will become clear after invasion, conquest and reconstruction. For his part, Jerry Falwell boasted that "God is pro-war" in the title of an essay he wrote in 2004.

The war sermons rallied the evangelical congregations behind the invasion of Iraq. An astonishing 87 percent of all white evangelical Christians in the United States supported the president's decision in April 2003. Recent polls indicate that 68 percent of white evangelicals continue to support the war. But what surprised me, looking at these sermons nearly three years later, was how little attention they paid to actual Christian moral doctrine. Some tried to square the American invasion with Christian "just war" theory, but such efforts could never quite reckon with the criterion that force must only be used as a last resort. As a result, many ministers dismissed the theory as no longer relevant.

Some preachers tried to link Saddam Hussein with wicked King Nebuchadnezzar of Biblical fame, but these arguments depended on esoteric interpretations of the Old Testament book of II Kings and could not easily be reduced to the kinds of catchy phrases that are projected onto video screens in vast evangelical churches. The single common theme among the war sermons appeared to be this: our president is a real brother in Christ, and because he has discerned that God's will is for our nation to be at war against Iraq, we shall gloriously comply.

Such sentiments are a far cry from those expressed in the Lausanne Covenant of 1974. More than 2,300 evangelical leaders from 150 countries signed that statement, the most significant milestone in the movement's history. Convened by Billy Graham and led by John Stott, the revered Anglican evangelical priest and writer, the signatories affirmed the global character of the church of Jesus Christ and the belief that "the church is the community of God's people rather than an institution, and must not be identified with any particular culture, social or political system, or human ideology."

On this page, David Brooks correctly noted that if evangelicals elected a pope, it would most likely be Mr. Stott, who is the author of more than 40 books on evangelical theology and Christian devotion. Unlike the Pope John Paul II, who said that invading Iraq would violate Catholic moral teaching and threaten "the fate of humanity," or even Pope Benedict XVI, who has said there were "not sufficient reasons to unleash a war against Iraq," Mr. Stott did not speak publicly on the war. But in a recent interview, he shared with me his abiding concerns.

"Privately, in the days preceding the invasion, I had hoped that no action would be taken without United Nations authorization," he told me. "I believed then and now that the American and British governments erred in proceeding without United Nations approval." Reverend Stott referred me to "War and Rumors of War, " a chapter from his 1999 book, "New Issues Facing Christians Today," as the best account of his position. In that essay he wrote that the Christian community's primary mission must be "to hunger for righteousness, to pursue peace, to forbear revenge, to love enemies, in other words, to be marked by the cross."

What will it take for evangelicals in the United States to recognize our mistaken loyalty? We have increasingly isolated ourselves from the shared faith of the global Church, and there is no denying that our Faustian bargain for access and power has undermined the credibility of our moral and evangelistic witness in the world. The Hebrew prophets might call us to repentance, but repentance is a tough demand for a people utterly convinced of their righteousness.

Charles Marsh, a professor of religion at the University of Virginia, is the author of "The Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice, from the Civil Rights Movement to Today."



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Most of my posts have been negative so its time for some warm fuzzies.

Life is not all bad. It is just that the “news” very often is. In fact, my life in particular is wonderful. But rather than go on at length at how awesome my husband and children are, even though they are awesome, or how spoiled I am to have a great nanny and therefore time to do volunteer work, or how I never want and probably never will want for food or shelter or a safe and peaceful life etc., I will mention a briefing I attended this morning.

The briefing was with a high-ranking official in USAID. It was interesting and informative and part of it was certainly “glum” in as much as we discussed the sheer magnitude of the tragedies and disasters that have occurred in the world recently. But let’s not focus on that. Instead let’s focus on the warm fuzzies. The official mentioned, almost in passing, the heroic efforts and dedication of the US military in places just as earthquake struck Pakistan. He said we would be proud.

Great! I want to be proud. Especially in light of stories such as my last post about the air-strike in Pakistan that killed innocent civilians including women and children. We need more of that kind of information filtering down – both inside and outside of the US. He also talked about the amazingly heroic efforts of the Pakistani army. These are the stories that my soul wants to hear. I would like to hear more of them.

p.s. How are you? And, more importantly, who are you? : -) just wondering who might be reading these posts. Send me a message!

What can we do about the current state of our government? How much credibility does the US have saying we are trying to promote democracy abroad when the democratic process in our own country is full of corruption? Who represents the needs and concerns of "everyman" these days? We do not only need to worry about separation of church and state but now also separation of special interests and state. I found the below article interesting. I hope you take the time to read it.


January 19, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
If You Give a Congressman a Cookie
By NORMAN ORNSTEIN and THOMAS E. MANN
CONGRESSIONAL Republicans are suddenly taking a strong interest in lobbying reform. Speaker Dennis Hastert and the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, are rallying behind a reform package that will include measures like increasing disclosure and doubling the length of time after leaving Congress before lawmakers and staff can lobby their colleagues. These are commendable and desirable reforms. But to get to the root of what ails Washington's political culture, a more basic change is necessary.

The two of us have been immersed in Washington politics for more than 36 years. We have never seen the culture so sick or the legislative process so dysfunctional. The plea deals of Jack Abramoff and Michael Scanlon, the indictment of Tom Delay and his resignation as House majority leader, and the demise of Representative Randy Cunningham notwithstanding, this is not simply a problem of a rogue lobbyist or a pack of them. Nor is it a matter of a handful of disconnected, corrupt lawmakers taking favors in return for official actions.

The problem starts not with lobbyists but inside Congress. Over the past five years, the rules and norms that govern Congressional deliberation, debate and voting - what legislative aficionados call "the regular order" - have routinely been violated, especially in the House of Representatives, and in ways that mark a dramatic break from custom.

Roll call votes on the House floor, which are supposed to take 15 minutes, are frequently stretched to one, two or three hours. Rules forbidding any amendments to bills on the floor have proliferated, stifling dissent and quashing legitimate debate. Omnibus bills, sometimes thousands of pages long, are brought to the floor with no notice, let alone the 72 hours the rules require. Conference committees exclude minority members and cut deals in private, sometimes even adding major provisions after the conference has closed. Majority leaders still pressure members who object to the chicanery to vote yea in the legislation's one up-or-down vote.

To be sure, bills have been passed under this regime, on party-line votes with slender majorities. But the results have not always been true to party objectives or conservative ideals. Democrats aren't the only ones undermined by a process whose methods, like the cynical use of earmarks for pet projects, serve to bloat government bureaucracies.

Some of the abuses are straightforward breaches of the rules. The majority Republicans bypass normal procedures and ignore objections that parliamentary rules have been violated. They then reframe substantive issues as procedural matters that demand party discipline. Other abuses do not violate the rules, but they do transgress longstanding practice. For example, House rules don't set a maximum period of 15 minutes for most roll call votes. But since the advent of electronic voting in 1973, 15 minutes has been the norm.

In 1987, when the majority Democrats once - and only once - stretched a budget vote to 30 minutes because they found themselves unexpectedly down by one vote when time was supposed to expire, the minority Republicans loudly protested, with their whip, Dick Cheney, saying it was the worst abuse of power he had ever seen in Congress. Now it is routine to bring up a bill and troll for enough votes to pass it, even when a clear majority of the House - 218 members - has voted nay.

What has all this got to do with corruption? If you can play fast and loose with the rules of the game in lawmaking, it becomes easier to consider playing fast and loose with everything else, including relations with lobbyists, acceptance of favors, the use of official resources and the discharge of governmental power.

We saw similar abuses leading to similar patterns of corruption during the Democrats' majority reign. But they were neither as widespread nor as audacious as those we have seen in the past few years. The arrogance of power that was evident in Democratic lawmakers like Jack Brooks of Texas - the 21-term Democrat who was famed for twisting the rules to get pork for his district - is now evident in a much wider range of members and leaders, who all seem to share the attitude that because they are in charge, no one can hold them accountable.

Indeed, Mr. Hastert showed open contempt for the House ethics process last year when he fired the Republican chairman of the ethics committee and ousted two Republican members after they did their duty and reprimanded Tom DeLay for three violations of standards. Mr. Hastert then appointed two members to the committee who had given large sums to the DeLay legal defense fund - when the main matter pending before the committee involved Representative DeLay.

The same attitude produced the K Street Project, in which the new Republican majority, led by Mr. DeLay, used its governmental power to demand that trade associations and lobbying groups fire Democratic lobbyists and hire designated Republicans, who could then be expected to show their gratitude by contributing generously to party candidates and committees. Jack Abramoff was one of the progenitors of that initiative.

What can be done? First, Mr. Hastert; Representative David Dreier, the Rules Committee chairman; and the new House majority leader should declare that there will be a return to the regular order and to a reasonable deliberative process. And they must be prepared to follow through on that declaration.

But there are also rules reforms that would help. Two- or three-hour votes should become a thing of the past. Any major bill should be presented at least three days before it is considered, unless a supermajority votes to waive that rule. Votes should be required on objections to excessive earmarking in bills, and members should be required to declare that they have no personal interest in the earmarks they promote. Real debate and reasonable amendments must be allowed on most bills, and the integrity of conference committees needs to be reestablished. Finally, if there is to be real and credible ethics oversight, that process, too, must be overhauled.

Quick and decisive Congressional actions could minimize the damage done by the explosion of scandals related to Mr. Abramoff. But lobbying reform alone is a temporary solution. The real solution is for Congress to behave like the deliberative body it is supposed to be.

Norman Ornstein is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Thomas E. Mann is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. They are co-authors of the forthcoming "The Broken Branch."



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A Republican controlled house and congress creates a poor system of checks and balances on our current president's power, especially when you have a president that thinks he is above the law. The article copied below is from Elisabeth Bumiller in does IHT.


WASHINGTON Shortly after 8 p.m. on Friday, Dec. 30, 2005, the White House sent out an e-mail message with an innocuous "Statement by the President" in the subject line. As might be expected of a seemingly routine announcement released in the dead time before New Year's weekend, almost no one paid attention.

But last week, Washington opened its eyes. President George W. Bush's quiet little statement not only set off fireworks at the Supreme Court nomination hearings of Judge Samuel Alito Jr., but also has ignited a new debate about the Bush administration's drive to expand the powers of the president.

To start at the beginning, Congress late last year passed what became known as the torture amendment, sponsored by Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, to ban cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody. Bush at first opposed the amendment, but gave in when it became clear that it had overwhelming support from both parties on Capitol Hill.

The president then invited McCain, his old political nemesis, to the Oval Office to announce that he agreed with him and "to make clear to the world that this government does not torture."

But on Dec. 30, after signing the legislation into law with no ceremony at his Texas ranch, Bush issued an accompanying "signing statement" - the 8 p.m. e-mail - that Democrats and some Republicans say asserted that he could ignore the law if he wished.

Specifically, the statement said that the administration would interpret the amendment "in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the president to supervise the unitary executive branch and as commander in chief and consistent with the constitutional limitations on judicial power."

McCain issued a strong statement rejecting Bush's assertion, even as the White House has repeatedly declined to say what the president meant. But Senator Edward Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, had no doubts and told Alito at the hearings that Bush had in essence stated that "whatever the law of the land might be, whatever Congress might have written, the executive branch has the right to authorize torture without fear of judicial review."

Alito was not just an interested observer at a hearing. In 1986, as a lawyer in the Reagan administration's Justice Department, he had helped Edwin Meese 3rd, then attorney general, develop a new theory that signing statements could be used to advance the president's interpretation of legislation.

Before then, the statements had been largely triumphal proclamations. Alito wrote that the new signing statements would "increase the power of the executive to shape the law" even as they created resentment in Congress.

At his hearings, Alito distanced himself from the memo, calling it the work of a government employee, and sidestepped questions about his current view on the statements. At this point, their legality is largely untested.

But one thing is clear: Bush has issued more than 100 of them, which scholars believe may be more than any other president. (Signing statements have been around since at least the administration of Andrew Jackson.) More significant, scholars say, Bush has greatly expanded the scope and character of the signing statement, even from the time of the Reagan administration.

"The whole history of American government is one of trying to figure out what executive power actually is, so here is the president saying, 'Well, it's my job to tell you what that power is,"' said Andrew Rudalevige, an associate professor of political science at Dickinson College and the author of "The New Imperial Presidency: Renewing Presidential Power After Watergate."

Scholars say that many of Bush's most significant signing statements have been attached to national security and intelligence legislation and that he frequently uses them to assert that the administration regards requirements to turn over information as purely advisory.

For example, in signing the legislation that created the independent commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush said that while the law established "new requirements for the executive branch to disclose sensitive information," he would interpret the law "in a manner consistent with the president's constitutional authority to withhold information" for national security.

As the members of the Sept. 11 commission soon learned, they had a difficult time obtaining information from the White House.

"Now, we can't prove that the reason the administration held back the information was because of the signing statement, but it announced its intentions quite clearly," said Phillip Cooper, a professor of public administration in the Mark O. Hatfield School of Government at Portland State University and the author of "By Order of the President: The Use and Abuse of Executive Direct Action."

Bush also used a signing statement, in November 2003 to assert that an inspector general created for oversight of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S.-led administration that governed Iraq, should "refrain" from audits or investigations into matters of intelligence or counterintelligence.

In December 2004, Bush used a signing statement to say that in the act that created the new post of national intelligence director, he considered "advisory" those provisions setting forth how - and from whom - he received intelligence information.

Or as Rudalevige put it, "The president is basically saying that those structural changes are nice, but I don't have to listen to anybody in particular."

The following is from "The New Red, White and Blue" by Thomas Friedman, which appears in the January 6th edition of the Times [this is actually copied from somebody elses blog who retyped it, so may not be exactly verbatim!). I of course realize it is a bit partisan but it is Repubicans who are in the driver's seat at the moment.

"As we enter 2006, we find ourselves in trouble, at home and abroad. We are in trouble because we are led by defeatists - wimps, actually.

What's so disturbing about President Bush and Dick Cheney is that they talk tough about the necessity of invading Iraq, torturing terror suspects and engaging in domestic spying - all to defend our way of life and promote democracy around the globe.

But when it comes to what is actually the most important issue in U.S. foreign and domestic policy today - making ourselves energy efficient and independent, and environmentally green - they ridicule it as something only liberals, tree-huggers and sissies believe is possible or necessary

Sorry, but being green, focusing the nation on greater energy efficiency and conservation, is not some girlie-man issue. It is actually the most tough-minded, geostrategic, pro-growth and patriotic thing we can do. Living green is not for sissies. Sticking with oil, and basically saying that a country that can double the speed of microchips every 18 months is somehow incapable of innovating its way to energy independence - that is for sissies, defeatists and people who are ready to see American values eroded at home and abroad.

Living green is not just a "personal virtue," as Mr. Cheney says. It's a national security imperative.

The biggest threat to America and its values today is not communism, authoritarianism or Islamism. Its petrolism. Petrolism is my term for the corrupting, antidemocratic governing practices - in oil states from Russia to Nigeria to Iran - that result from a long run of $60-a-barrel oil. ....

... there's a huge difference between what these bad regimes can do with $20-a-barrel oil compared to $60-a-barrel oil. It is no accident that the reform era in Russia under Boris Yeltzin, and in Iran under Mohammad Khatami, coincided with low oil prices. When prices soared again, petrolist authoritarians in both societies reasserted themselves.

We need a persident and a Congress with the guts not just to invade Iraq, but to impose a gasoline tax and inspire conservation at home. That takes a real energy policy with longterm incentives for renewable energies - wind, solar, biofuels - rather than the welfare-for-oil-companies-and-special-interests that masqueraded last year as an energy bill.

Enough of this Bush-Cheney nonsense that conservation, energy efficiency and environmentalism are some hobby we can't afford. I can't think of anything more cowardly or un-American. Real patriots, real advocates of spreading democracy around the world, live green.

Green is the new red, white and blue.

I have been educating myself about education lately as I believe a key strategy to building a better tomorrow lies in the education of the world’s children. I am also concerned from my personal role as a mother. The below is excerpted from great web-site www.newhorizens.org.

It looks at the evolving needs of education from a very “big picture” standpoint. Contrast this with the energy being consumed by arguments over religion in the classroom, intelligent design etc. in the US. Another interesting article on the web-site highlights an interesting program attempting to address some of what Dr. Johnston describes in his article , check out http://www.newhorizons.org/spneeds/gifted/fraserhenry.htm

Erica

In thinking about the future of education, some overarching questions come to mind. These are three interwoven and indeed very big picture questions:
How do we best understand the times in which we live?
What specific skills, perspectives, values, understandings, and sensibilities will we need to meet the critical challenges ahead, the challenges of the future?
How do we educate for these particular skills and sensibilities -- and here I refer not just to the content of education, but equally the processes through which we educate and the nature of the relationships -- student to teacher, student to student, student to community and world -- through which we learn?

When culture is relatively stable, the average person doesn't need to give big picture questions much attention -- we appropriately relegate them to philosophers and the like.

But in times of significant change and challenge, the situation becomes dramatically different. The big picture comes to have ultimate practical importance.
When I look around us, I see change happening at a startling array of levels. Besides the obvious technological changes, we find all sorts of familiar cultural handholds becoming less secure: these from externally defined gender roles, to once and for all moral rules to teach our children, to institutions that we could once generally rely on to fulfill basic needs. Reality today is a newly uncertain and often "messy" quantity.

How do we understand this? Is it good or bad? And what does it mean to educate in such a reality and for the challenges such a reality presents?

Recent statistics show, for example, that while thirty years ago sixty to seventy percent of people in the United States had general confidence in their institutions -- in their schools, their governments, their churches -- today the figures range between twenty and thirty percent.

As a psychiatrist, and someone deeply concerned about youth, I find one statistic particularly troubling, and symbolic: this the more than doubling of teen suicide rates we have witnessed over the last ten years. We face the simple fact that a significant portion of our youth, often many of the best and the brightest, don't see an adequately compelling image of the future to warrant the vulnerabilities of daily life. The times we live in can easily seem at best frightening and overwhelming.

Today's changes ask a lot of us. But at least as I see things, the confusions we feel today are less often ultimately about culture being somehow broken -- about us having gone astray significantly -- than about finding the courage to turn some important next pages in the human story. Once appropriate personal and institutional assumptions have simply become too small for how large human experience has become.
Increasingly culture is not supplying the same kind of ready-made maps. And when we try to use the old ones, more often than not they bring frustration rather than fulfillment.

The challenges ahead ask a lot of us. And what they ask has the potential to make us more, often in very important ways. What do they ask? Quite a number of things. Let me touch on just a few

• They ask a greater comfort with uncertainty and complexity. (Things like gender roles have protected us by making life a bit smaller -- a bit more manageable. Gender roles dramatically reduce the variables involved in both identity and love. Today, more and more, we are being challenged to surrender such protection, to meet life's fundamental questions unadorned.)

• They ask greater self-knowledge (necessary if we don't have things like gender roles to guide us) -- and equally a greater knowledge of others, of those we engage -- from intimates and coworkers, to other cultures and species.

• They ask a greater completeness, if you will, in our being and our understanding (from relating more as whole people in love -- rather than as two halves that together make a whole -- to a similar greater wholeness and completeness in how we relate as parents, as leaders, as newly global citizens.)

• And they ask a new level of human responsibility. We are being challenged to address a growing array of new and complex moral quandaries -- from very personal concerns to the ultimate question of how we as a species wish to define progress for the future. Our times don't ask us to be God, but they demand more and more that we be willing to engage questions of Godlike consequence.

So today's new questions ask a lot. And they easily overwhelm, have us run from the magnitude of what they ask -- into addiction, diversion, absurdity. They ask big questions, challenge us to be large. (One could argue even that they ask a kind of growing up as a species.)

Recently, I tried out the previously mentioned of four specific questions on some friends and colleagues.. From their responses, they came up with a list of "tasks for education in the future."
I invite you to bounce your reflections off of this list, to challenge it, add to it. They put their seven tasks in the form of -- of course, more questions.

# 1 --Times of change require a capacity to innovate and skill at managing process and uncertainty. How do we educate for greater creativity in this sense -- and not just for the artist types, but for everyone?

# 2 --Increasingly, today's challenges require us not just to be knowledgeable, but to address deep questions of meaning and value, moral questions if you will. How does one teach the engagement of questions of meaning and value and do this without imposing narrow moral dogma on one hand or falling for an empty, anything goes moral relativism on the other?

# 3 --Increasingly, today's questions demand that we step across the lines separating usual domains of understanding -- they are multidisciplinary, systemic, dynamically interwoven. How does one teach for the ability to work with wholes and interrelationships, as much as specifics and parts?

# 4 --Today's challenges more and more require us to engage questions collaboratively -- at all levels, from small work teams, to neighborhoods, to global interaction. How does one teach for the ability to collaborate?

# 5 --The questions ahead require us to better understand diversity of all types -- gender, ethnicity, religious, temperament, learning style, as well as the contradictory complexities of our own psyches. How does one teach for the capacity not just to tolerate diversity and complexity but to be enriched by it, use it powerfully and creatively?

# 6 --Increasingly, today's challenges require us to be facile with new technologies, particularly new communications technologies. These technologies have equally the power to enrich the connections between us and to isolate us from others and ourselves. How does one teach for greatest skill in the use of new technologies, and for the greatest wisdom in that use?

And finally #7 -- and perhaps of greatest importance -- More and more, today's challenges ask us to take responsibility in questions that before have not been human concerns. How does one teach for this degree of personal and social awareness and this degree of personal and social maturity?

As I see it, bring the greatest courage and wisdom to the single question that all of these others are ultimately about: Simply, what does it mean to educate for a future that matters?

In conclusion. Much in the best of education is eternal -- good education is just good education. But as well, if this list gets at anything important, in the decades ahead we will need to be rethinking the goals and processes of education in some fairly fundamental ways.

The following article is based on a keynote address given by Dr. Charles Johnston at the Albuquerque Conference on the Future of Education at the Albuquerque Academy in October, 1996.

Is the tower starting to crumble?

The media is finally waking up and calling shots as they see them, and there are certainly many many shots to be called. This collection of investigations is from Trish Wells and is carried on Yahoo News. I certainly recognize there are corrupt Democrats as well. I support accountable and responsible government, no matter which party.

In fact, I believe party politics is a leading reason of WHY there is so much corruption. Much of it is about staying in power. Anyway.... Here is the list from Trish.

Sen. Tom DeLay's indictment Wednesday isn't the only legal trouble involving Republicans. Among other woes:

-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee is being investigated over whether he used insider information in deciding to sell Hospital Corp of America stock from his blind trust shortly before the price fell. The sale netted him millions.

-Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham of California is under investigation for the sale of his California home to a Pentagon contractor at an inflated price. He's on the House Appropriations subcommittee on defense.

-Rep. Bob Ney of Ohio faces questions over his connections to Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who in turn is being investigated for his business dealings with the Tigua Indians and the funding of trips for members of Congress.

-A special prosecutor is investigating who revealed the name of CIA officer Valerie Plame. The probe has reached as high as White House adviser Karl Rove. No charges have been filed.

-California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger faced conflict-of-interest allegations over a $5 million contract with two bodybuilding magazines.