speck of dust

The real reason Spitzer was exposed

Hope and Change scam

Obama's Mercenary Position

Jeremy Scahill

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080317/scahill


Obama campaign and Senate staffers characterize this as an inherited problem with no good alternatives. "We are in a situation where, because of bad planning and a series of disastrous policy choices by the Bush Administration, we're forced to rely on private security contractors," says the senior adviser. "What we're focused on at the moment is getting the legal architecture in place that will hold these guys accountable to the same standard that [applies to] enlisted US military personnel."

In Iraq right now, the number of private contractors is basically equal to the number of US troops. While Obama advisers say they plan to "have a serious look" at the role of contractors in Iraq, one adviser seemed to indicate that unarmed contractors would continue to operate at significant levels. "These contractors are not only providing private security functions like Blackwater. They're rebuilding schools, they are serving food, they're doing logistics, they're driving trucks, and the important question is, If you take those 100,000-plus contractors out of Iraq, what do you replace them with? Inevitably the answer is, You replace them with US military."

But, the senior adviser notes, "ideally we would have diplomatic security personnel, US government personnel, not subcontracted but US Bureau of Diplomatic Security agents providing security to all our ambassadors."

CONTINUED BELOW
Says another Obama adviser, "If we could start this whole war from the beginning, what would we have done versus what can we do now, now that we're in the middle of it? In an ideal world, we would not have these contractors, but that's not the world we operate in right now."

The State Department has only an estimated 1,450 diplomatic security agents worldwide who are actual government employees, and only thirty-six are deployed in Iraq. In contrast, Blackwater has nearly 1,000 operatives in Iraq alone, not to mention the hundreds more working for DynCorp and Triple Canopy. Moreover, the State Department says it could take years to identify prospective new agents, vet them, train them and deploy them. In short, this would be no small undertaking by a President Obama. As Ambassador Ryan Crocker said in late 2007, "There is simply no way at all that the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security could ever have enough full-time personnel to staff the security function in Iraq. There is no alternative except through contracts."

Making diplomatic security a military operation would pose serious challenges as well. As the New York Times reported late last year, "the military does not have the trained personnel to take over the job." Even if the military trained a specialized force for executive protection and bodyguarding in Iraq, this arrangement would mean more US military convoys traveling inside Iraq, potentially placing them in deadly conflict with Iraqi civilians on a regular basis.

The private security industry knows well that it has become a central part of US policy in Iraq and Afghanistan. Extricating the firms from this position would require a major and aggressive undertaking with significant Congressional support, which is by no means guaranteed. In fact, Blackwater appears to see a silver lining in the prospect of US forces being withdrawn or reduced in Iraq. Joseph Schmitz, chief operating officer of Blackwater's parent company, The Prince Group, said, "There is a scenario where we could as a government, the United States, could pull back the military footprint, and there would then be more of a need for private contractors to go in." The Obama senior adviser called Schmitz's comment "an unfortunate characterization."

Illinois Democrat Jan Schakowsky, one of Congress's sharpest critics of the war contracting system, says of Schmitz's remark, "That's why some of us have been really careful about not just talking about a troop withdrawal but a contractor withdrawal as well." Obama, she says, should make it impossible for Schmitz and others "to think that Barack Obama would be creating new opportunities for Blackwater after our troops are withdrawn." The clearest way for him to do that would be to endorse legislation banning the use of Blackwater and other mercenary firms in Iraq. In November Schakowsky and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders introduced the Stop Outsourcing Security (SOS) Act, which mandates that US personnel undertake all diplomatic security in Iraq within six months of enactment. The bill has twenty-three co-sponsors in the House and one--Sanders--in the Senate. Sanders said he'd "love" it if Obama and Clinton signed on. "If either of them came on board, we'd certainly see more Democratic support," says Sanders. Will Obama do that before November? "The answer is no, in all candor," says the senior Obama adviser. "Obviously it's a dynamic situation, and he'll continue to analyze it."

Schakowsky is pressing Obama to support the bill and says that if he becomes President she will urge him to "cancel" any remaining Blackwater contract in Iraq: "There's plenty of justification to say this company is trouble, and there's no point in continuing our contract with them."

The senior adviser said, "Senator Obama is concerned that Blackwater remains in Iraq, and he's concerned that they remain in Iraq and other countries totally unaccountable to US law and totally unaccountable to the law in the country in which they are operating." Which raises the question: If he's so concerned, why not throw his support behind a ban on the use of these forces in Iraq?



about
Jeremy Scahill

Jeremy Scahill, a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute, is the author of the bestselling Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, published by Nation Books. He is an award-winning investigative journalist and correspondent for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now!.

Chelsea

http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/articles/20080208_2

February 8-10, 2008 -- Chelsea Clinton takes higher profile in mother's campaign

During the Clinton presidency, first daughter Chelsea Clinton was the subject of repeated ugly attacks from the Republican attack machine, including Rush Limbaugh, John McCain, and National Review contributing editor John Derbyshire.

However, now that Chelsea Clinton, who is almost 28, has taken a leading part in her mother's presidential campaign, Chelsea Clinton's employment record is becoming an issue in the campaign.

Chelsea, who lives in the Manhattan west side chic neighborhood of Chelsea, worked for the management efficiency consulting firm McKinsey & Co. from 2003 to 2006, reportedly for a six-figure salary. McKinsey has been one of the worst nightmares for progressives and the labor movement around the world and throughout the United States.

Known as "the Firm," McKinsey maintains offices in North and South America, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and Australia. McKinsey's clients are traditionally a well-kept secret.

McKinsey's past executives include US ambassador to Germany Richard Burt, also an adviser to the Carlyle Group and the founder of Diligence LLC, a company that profited handsomely from the Iraq occupation. Its past employees include Michael Hague, the head of the British Conservative Party from 1997 to 2001; and Bobby Jindal, the Republican Governor of Louisiana;

However, McKinsey's propensity to offer its clients streamlining recommendations has often resulted in massive lay-offs and the cutting of important activities, some of which are related to safety. The company places primary emphasis on shareholder value over customer service. With the bent towards outsourcing, this prioritization of profits over everything else has met with disaster by some companies. When McKinsey urged British Railtrack, formed after the state-owned British Rail was privatized, to maximize profits for shareholders by reducing investments in infrastructure, the firm cut back its rail improvement. The result was deadly train crashes at Southall in 1997, Ladbroke Grove in 1999, and Hatfield in 2000.

McKinsey was also hired by British Prime Minister Tony Blair to reorganize the Cabinet Office. The Financial Times quoted a senior civil servant who criticized the hiring of McKinsey. The officials said McKinsey are "people who come in and use PowerPoint to state the bleeding obvious."

McKinsey has also been criticized for recommending the auto insurance industry reject medical claims involving soft tissue injuries. The firm's work for the British National Health Service has also resulted in charges that critical care elements are being eliminated under the British health care system. Observers are concerned that a Hillary Clinton presidency will feature her daughter's old pals at McKinsey wielding cost cutting axes in crafting a health care program for the United States.

In 2006, Chelsea left McKinsey to take a job with Marc Lasry's Avenue Capital Group, a $12 billion hedge fund. Lasry, a financial donor to the Democrats and the Clintons, was a founder of Amroc, a "distressed stock broker." Amroc's partner included Keystone, Inc., an investment firm linked to the Robert M. Bass Group. Robert M. Bass is the billionaire son of Texas oil tycoon, Perry Richardson Bass. Robert M. Bass is a long time contributor to George W. Bush's political campaigns. His brother Ed was a Yale classmate of Bush and remains a close friend. Robert Bass is founder of Aerion Corp., a Pentagon contractor.

There was a time when Chelsea Clinton was off-limits in the political scheme of things. However, with recent revelations concerning her father's dodgy business deals with Kazakhstan dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan uranium mining deals for Clinton big mining Canadian pal Frank Giustra, and Bill Clinton's dubious Sustainable Growth Initiative, Chelsea's own dubious relationships with New York's most powerful hedge funds and Bush political allies raise further questions about all three Clintons' "ties that bind."

Immigration commentary

Immigrants Come Here Because Globalization Took Their Jobs Back There By Jim Hightower

Posted on February 7, 2008 by dandelionsalad

Dandelion Salad

By Jim Hightower
AlterNet.org
Hightower Lowdown
February 7, 2008

Seal-the-border hysteria is everywhere. Instead of blaming immigrants for America’s problems, let’s look at executives on both sides of the border.
The wailing in our country about the “invasion of immigrants” has been long and loud. As one complainant put it, “Few of their children in the country learn English …The signs in our streets have inscriptions in both languages … Unless the stream of the importation could be turned they will soon so outnumber us that all the advantages we have will not be able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious.”

That’s not some diatribe from one of today’s Republican presidential candidates. It’s the anxious cry of none other than Ben Franklin, deploring the wave of Germans pouring into the colony of Pennsylvania in the 1750s. Thus, anti-immigrant eruptions are older than the United States itself, and they’ve flared up periodically throughout our history, targeting the Irish, French, Italians, Chinese, and others. Even George W’s current project to wall off our border is not a new bit of nuttiness — around the time of the nation’s founding, John Jay, who later became the first chief justice of the Supreme Court, proposed “a wall of brass around the country for the exclusion of Catholics.”

Luckily for the development and enrichment of our country, these past public frenzies ultimately failed to exclude the teeming masses, and those uproars now appear through the telescope of time to have been some combination of ridiculous panic, political demagoguery and xenophobic ugliness. Still, this does not mean that the public’s anxiety and simmering anger about today’s massive influx of Mexicans coming illegally across our 2,000-mile shared border is illegitimate. However, most of what the politicians and pundits are saying about it is illegitimate.

Wedge issue

There is way too much xenophobia, racism and demagoguery at play around illegal immigration, but such crude sentiments are not what is bringing this problem to a national political boil. Polls show — as do conversations at any Chat & Chew Cafe in the country — that there is a deep and genuine alarm about the issue among the nonxenophobic, nonracist American majority. In particular, workaday families are fearful about what an endless flow of low-wage workers portends for their economic future, and they’re not getting good answers from Republicans, Democrats, corporate leaders or the media.

For the GOP candidates in this year’s presidential run, the contest is coming down to who can be the most nativist knucklehead. They accuse each other of not wanting to punish immigrant children enough, of not being absolutists on “English-only” proposals, of having coddled illegal entrants in the past with amnesty proposals and sanctuaries, and of not being hawkish enough on sealing off and militarizing the border.

The leader of the anti-immigrant Republican pack is Tom Tancredo, a Colorado congress-critter who based his ill-fated presidential campaign on immigrant bashing. This goober is so nasty he’d scare small children. His website screeched that immigrants are “pushing drugs, raping kids, destroying lives,” and his campaign slogan is a sledgehammer demand: “Deport those who don’t belong. Make sure they never come back.” As for illegal immigrants, Tom thinks that the term “illegal” is too soft, preferring to demonize immigrants as “aliens.” Tancredo doesn’t merely rant, he foams at the mouth, maniacally warning about waves of Mexican terrorists who are “coming to kill me and you and your children.” Accused of trying to turn America into a gated community, he exulted, “You bet!”

At least he’s taken a position, even if it’s un-American and loopy. Democratic leaders, on the other hand, have mostly tried to do a squishy shuffle, wanting to beef up law enforcement against illegal immigrants while also mouthing soothing words about the good work ethic of our friends south of the border and offering a bureaucratic rigmarole to allow some of the younger ones to gain permanent residency in our country. Worse, such corporate Democrats as Rep. Rahm Emanuel urge the party’s candidates either to adopt the Republican’s punitive message or simply to try ducking the issue.

Which brings us to the wall, both figuratively and literally. The fact that we are resorting to the construction of an enormous fence between two friendly nations admits to an abject failure by policy makers, who are so bereft of ideas, honesty, courage and morality that all they can do is to try walling off the problem.

We’ve had experience here in Texas with the futility of tall border fences. Molly Ivins reported a beer-induced incident that took place in 1983. Walling off Mexico had been proposed back then by the Reaganauts, and a test fence had been built way down in the Big Bend outpost of Terlingua. This little town also happened to be the site of a renowned chili cookoff that Molly helped judge, and it attracted a big crowd of impish, beer-drinking chiliheads.

There stood the barrier, 17 feet tall and topped with barbwire. It didn’t take many beers before the first-ever “Terlingua Memorial Over, Under, or Through the Mexican Fence Climbing Contest” was cooked up. Winning time: 30 seconds.

Yet here come the border sealers again. Bush & Co. (including Democrats who have allowed the funding) is putting up an initial $1.2 billion to start building this version of the wall, which is projected to cost up to $60 billion over the next 25 years to build and maintain. It’s a monster wall — two or three 40-foot-high rows of reinforced fencing that take a swath of land 150 feet wide and stretch for 700 miles.

The Mexican government and people are insulted and appalled by the wall; ranchers, mayors and families living on either side of the border hate it; environmentalists are aghast at its destructive impact on the ecology of the area. Still, it’s being built. Indeed, a 2005 federal act contained a little-noticed section authorizing Bush’s Homeland Security czar to suspend any laws that stand in the way of building the wall. Current czar Michael Chertoff has already used this unprecedented authority to waive 19 statutes, including the Endangered Species, Clean Water and National Historic Preservation Acts.

All this for something that will not work. As Gov. Janet Napolitano of Arizona put it, “Show me a 50-foot wall and I’ll show you a 51-foot ladder.” People have literally been dying to cross into the United States, and it’s not possible to build a wall tall enough to stop them. They will keep coming.

Why?

The question that policy makers have not faced honestly is this one: Why do these immigrants come? The answer is not that they are pulled by our jobs and government benefits, but that they are pushed by the abject poverty that their families face in Mexico. That might seem like a mere semantic difference, but it’s huge if you’re trying to develop a policy to stop the human flood across our border.

Although you never hear it mentioned in debates on the issue, you might start with this reality: Most Mexican people really would prefer to live in their own country. Can we all say, duh? Pedro Martin, who has seen most of the young men and women in his small village depart for El Norte, put it this way: “Up north, even though they pay more, you’re not necessarily living as well. You feel out of place. Here you can walk around the whole town, and it’s comfortable. Life is easier.”

Their family, language, culture, identity and happiness is Mexican — yet sheer economic survival requires so many of them to abandon the place they love.

Again, why? Because in the last 15 years, Mexico’s longstanding system of sustaining its huge population of poor citizens (including small self-sufficient farms, jobs in state-owned industries and subsidies for such essentials as tortillas) has been scuttled at the insistence of U.S. banks, corporations, government officials and “free market” ideologues. In the name of “modernizing” the Mexican economy, such giants as Citigroup, Wal-Mart, Tyson Foods and GE — in cahoots with the plutocrats and oligarchs of Mexico — have laid waste to that country’s grass-roots economy, destroying the already-meager livelihoods of millions.

The 1994 imposition of NAFTA was particularly devastating. Just as Bill Clinton and the corporate elites did here, Mexico’s ruling elites touted NAFTA as a magic elixir that would generate growth, create jobs, raise wages and eliminate the surge of Mexican migrants into the United States. They were horribly wrong:

• Economic growth in Mexico has been anemic since ‘94, and the benefits of any growth have gone overwhelmingly to the wealthiest families.
• Since NAFTA, Mexico has created less than a third of the millions of decent jobs it needs.
• Average factory wages in Mexico have dropped by more than 5 percent under NAFTA.
• Unemployment has jumped, and unskilled workers are paid only $5 a day.
• U.S. agribusiness corporations have more than doubled their shipment of subsidized crops into Mexico, busting the price that indigenous farmers got for their production and displacing some 2 million peasant farmers from their land.
• Huge agribusiness operations, many owned by U.S. investors, now control Mexican agricultural production and pay farmworkers under $2 an hour.
• Since NAFTA passed, there has been a flood of business bankruptcies and takeovers in Mexico as predatory U.S. chains have moved in. U.S. corporations now control 40 percent of the country’s formal jobs, with Wal-Mart reigning as the No. 1 employer.
• Nineteen million more Mexicans live in poverty today than when NAFTA was passed.

So, here’s the deal: Thanks to Mexico’s newly corporatized economy, wage earners there get poverty pay of $5 a day (about $1,600 a year), while a few hundred miles north, they might draw that much in an hour. What would you do?

The wrong debate

In our national imbroglio over Mexican immigration (yes, some illegal migrants come from elsewhere, but more than three-fourths are from Mexico), our “leaders” have set us up to look down at impoverished working people forced to leave their homeland and risk death in order to help their families escape poverty.

Instead of coming down on them, why not start looking up — up at the executive suites on both sides of the border. Up is where the power is. The moneyed elites in those suites are the profiteering few who have rigged all of our trade and labor policies to knock down workers, farmers and small businesses, not merely in Mexico but in our country as well.

In the United States, the middle class feels imperiled because … well, because it is imperiled. Politicians, economists and the richly paid pundits keep telling us that the American economy is robust and that people’s financial pessimism and anxieties are irrational. At the kitchen table level, however, folks know the difference between chicken salad and chicken manure. Yes, these are boom times for the luxury class, but the middle class is imploding. In a recent letter to the editor, a working stiff in California put it this way:

“We’ve replaced steaks with corn flakes; we can’t afford to get sick; our kids can’t afford health insurance; we hope that our 10-year-old van keeps running because we can’t afford a new one; our kids can’t buy a home because housing prices are exorbitant; our purchasing power continually regresses; and worst of all, the poverty and near-poverty classes are growing.”

It’s this economic fragility that anti-immigrant forces play on. But even if there were no illegal workers in our country — none — the fragility would remain, for poor Mexican laborers are not the ones who:

• Downsized and offshored our middle-class jobs.
• Perverted our bankruptcy laws to let corporations abrogate their union contracts.
• Stopped enforcement of America’s wage and hour laws.
• Perverted the National Labor Relations Board into an anti-worker tool for corporations.
• Illegally reclassified millions of employees as “independent contractors,” leaving them with no benefits or labor rights.
• Subverted the right of workers to organize.
• Turned a blind eye to the re-emergence in America of sweatshops and child labor in everything from the clothing industry to Wal-Mart.
• Made good healthcare a luxury item.
• Let rich campaign donors take over both political parties.
• Passed by hook and crook a continuing series of global-trade scams to enrich the few and knock down the many.

Powerless immigrants didn’t do these things to us. The richest, most-powerful, best-connected corporate interests did them. Judy Ancel, director of the Institute for Labor Studies at the University of Missouri, offers this example of Iowa Beef Processors (IBP), the largest meatpacker in the United States, now owned by the multibillion-dollar conglomerate Tyson Foods:

Until the late 1970s, meatpacking was a high-wage industry, with highly skilled workers in charge. Factories were in union cities, union contracts provided good wages and benefits, and unions set professional standards for everything from worker training to safety conditions. Then IBP’s executives transformed this beneficial model into today’s profiteering system. The factories moved to nonunion cities and rural areas, and lower-skilled workers were hired to do repetitive cuts on speeded-up assembly lines. With Reagan as president, meat-industry lobbyists were able to emasculate labor laws, and unions lost their influence over the workplace, which became much less rewarding and more dangerous. IBP began intensive recruiting of Mexican workers (legal or not) to do what had become very nasty work. In only 20 years, meatpacking wages dropped by roughly half, the union was ousted, and the rate of workplace injury became one of the highest of any industry (more than a fourth of meatpacking workers now suffer “accidents”).

The fix

Immigration reform cannot be separated from labor and trade reform. We can’t fix the former without dealing with the other two. We must stop the exploitative NAFTAfication of such aspiring economies as Mexico and instead develop genuine grass-roots investment policies that give people there an ability to remain in their homeland. Then we must enforce our own labor laws — from wage and hour rules to the NLRB — so as to empower American workers to enforce their own rights.

Eliminating the need to migrate from Mexico and rebuilding the middle-class ladder, here is an “immigration policy” that will work. But it requires us to go right at the corporate kleptocracy that now owns Washington and controls the debate.

We must challenge Democrats, especially, to broaden the debate and to recognize that they must choose sides — to be for workers or for more trade imperialism. Right now, the Democratic leadership is siding with imperialism and exacerbating the economic causes of Latino migration. For example, just last month, Speaker Nancy Pelosi engineered a vote to extend NAFTA to Peru, a corporate favor that could be called the Tom-Rahm Bipartisan Axis of Immigration Stupidity, for it drew enthusiastic support from both Tom Tancredo and Rahm Emanuel.

America’s immigration problem is not down on the border, it’s in Washington and on Wall Street.
From “The Hightower Lowdown,” edited by Jim Hightower and Phillip Frazer, January 2008. Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator, writer, public speaker and author of the new book Swim Against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go With the Flow. (Wiley, March 2008)

Mitt's farewell

leon endorses Barack

Bush spending plan for Fortress USA

Bush Unveils $3.1 Trillion Spending Plan
Feb 4 01:24 PM US/Eastern
By MARTIN CRUTSINGER
AP Economics Writer


WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush sent the nation's first-ever $3 trillion budget proposal to Congress on Monday, contending that the spending blueprint will fulfill his chief responsibility to keep America safe.

The $3.1 trillion proposed budget projects sizable increases in national security but forces the rest of government to pinch pennies. It seeks $196 billion in savings over five years in the government's giant health care programs—Medicare and Medicaid.

But even with those restraints, the budget projects the deficits will soar to near-record levels of $410 billion this year and $407 billion in 2009, driven higher in part by efforts to revive the sagging economy with a $145 billion stimulus package.

Bush called the document, which protects his signature tax cuts, "a good, solid budget" But Democrats, and even a top Republican, attacked the plan for using budgetary gimmicks to claim the budget can return to balance in 2012, three years after Bush leaves office.

Democrats called Bush's final spending plan a continuation of this administration's failed policies which wiped out a projected 10-year surplus of $5.6 trillion and replaced it with a record buildup in debt.

"Today's budget bears all the hallmarks of the Bush legacy—it leads to more deficits, more debt, more tax cuts, more cutbacks in critical services," said House Budget Committee Chairman John Spratt, D-S.C.

For his last budget, Bush, as a money-saving measure, stopped the practice of providing 3,000 paper copies of the budget to members of Congress and the media, instead posting the entire document online at http://www.budget.gov. Democrats joked that Bush cut back on the printed copies because he ran out of red ink.

"This budget is fiscally irresponsible and highly deceptive, hiding the costs of the war in Iraq while increasing the skyrocketing debt,' said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.

"The president proposes more of the same failed policies he has embraced throughout his time in office—more deficit-financed war spending, more deficit-financed tax cuts tilted to benefit the wealthiest and more borrowing from foreign nations like China and Japan," said Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D.

Bush defended his record, saying it supported a strong defense and, if his policies are followed, will produce a budget surplus of $48 billion in 2012.

"Two key principles guided the development of my budget—keeping America safe and ensuring our continued prosperity," Bush said in his budget message to Congress.

Reviewing the budget with his Cabinet, Bush said it would keep the economy growing and protect the U.S. militarily. He called it "innovative" because it was dispatched to Congress electronically.

Bush's final full budget is for the 2009 fiscal year, which begins on Oct. 1. It proposes spending $3.1 trillion, up 6 percent from projected spending of $2.9 trillion in the current budget year.

Part of the deficit increase this year and next reflects the cost of a $145 billion stimulus package of tax refunds for individuals and tax cuts for business investment that Bush is urging Congress to pass quickly to try to combat a threatened recession.

White House budget director Jim Nussle, briefing reporters on the spending plan, said that the quick bipartisan agreement reached on the stimulus package in the House showed what could happen when Democrats wanted to work with the White House to get things done. The stimulus plan has yet to clear the Senate.

Democrats said the forecast of a budget surplus in 2012 was based on flawed math that only included $70 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2009 and no money after that. It also failed to include any provisions after this year for keeping the alternative minimum tax, originally aimed at the wealthy, from ensnaring millions of middle-class taxpayers. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that fixing the AMT in 2012 would cost $118 billion, more than double the surplus Bush is projecting for that year.

White House press secretary Dana Perino told reporters that the war effort in 2009 would "certainly" cost more than the $70 billion included in the budget.

Even some Republicans faulted Bush's budget sleight of hand to project a balanced budget in 2012.

"They've obviously played an inordinate number of games to try to make it look better," Sen. Judd Gregg, the top Republican on the Budget Committee, said in an interview with The Associated Press.

"Let's face it. This budget is done with the understanding that nobody's going to be taking a long, hard look at it," said Gregg, R- N.H.

Bush's spending blueprint sets the stage for what will probably be epic battles in the president's last year in office, as both parties seek to gain advantages with voters heading into the November elections. Some have suggested that Democrats, unable to override Bush's expected vetoes, might choose to keep the government operating with a stopgap funding bill in hopes that a Democrat more amenable to their priorities will be elected in November.

The 6 percent overall increase in spending for 2009 reflects a continued surge in spending on the government's huge benefit programs for the elderly—Social Security and Medicare, even with the projected five-year savings of $196 billion over five years. Those savings are achieved by freezing payments to hospitals and other health care providers. A much-smaller effort by Bush in this area last year went nowhere in Congress.

While Bush projects that total security funding in the areas of the budget controlled by annual appropriations will go up by 8.2 percent, he projects only a 0.3 percent increase in discretionary spending for the rest of government.

To achieve such a small boost, Bush would hold hundreds of programs well below what is needed to keep up with inflation. He also seeks to eliminate or sharply slash 151 programs he considers unnecessary.

Nussle said that Congress had agreed to eliminate 29 of 141 programs Bush targeted last year, which he said was a good start.

This year, the largest number of program terminations—47—are in education including elimination of programs to encourage arts in schools, bring low-income students on trips to Washington and provide mental health services.


Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Rove Passes Up Commencement Speech at Choate After the Students Object

By THOMAS KAPLAN

Published: January 29, 2008

WALLINGFORD, Conn. — When 17-year-old Alessio Manti heard that Karl Rove, the former chief political adviser to President Bush, would be delivering the commencement address this spring to his class at Choate Rosemary Hall — the elite boarding school that produced such liberal giants as John F. Kennedy and Adlai Stevenson — he was shocked.

“I thought it was a joke,” Mr. Manti said. “Commencement is not the place for him.”

He was not alone. Although Mr. Rove played a major role in helping President Bush capture two terms in the White House, he could not gain the support of the senior class here. With students threatening to walk out on graduation, the school announced on Monday that Mr. Rove would not speak at commencement.

Instead, he has accepted an invitation to speak on campus next month, said the school’s headmaster, Edward J. Shanahan. “He was more than understanding,” Dr. Shanahan wrote in an e-mail message to students. “He was gracious and generous in his thinking about you and ‘your day.’ ”

In a telephone interview on Monday, Dr. Shanahan emphasized that he never rescinded Mr. Rove’s invitation and would not have done so even if Mr. Rove were not willing to reschedule. Dr. Shanahan will take Mr. Rove’s place at graduation.

The change caps a monthlong saga at Choate, where Mr. Rove was not the first choice as commencement speaker. School officials turned to him after trying to book Senator John W. Warner, Republican of Virginia.

At a meeting last week, a clear majority of the graduating class of about 230 said it opposed Mr. Rove’s invitation, students who were at the meeting said.

In an editorial titled “Rove in ’08: We Think Not,” the campus newspaper, The News, urged the school to withdraw the invitation.

“Faculty members approached me and said, ‘We really need you to do something,’ ” the editor of the paper, Elliott August, said in an interview. “People around our community were really heated about this.”

Scores of students banded together on the social networking Web site Facebook to protest Mr. Rove’s appearance. On Choate’s 450-acre campus, dotted with Georgian-style dormitories, students whispered about walking out on graduation, turning their chairs around when Mr. Rove took the podium or wearing T-shirts with a message protesting the speech.

“I myself thought of not going,” said Jack Fallon, 18, a senior from Santa Rosa, Calif.

Other students said they were ready to explore other options, like bringing the comedian Stephen Colbert to campus to speak at an alternative commencement.

Politics at Choate have been known to trend decidedly blue. In a mock election in 2004, Senator John Kerry was the favorite of students over President Bush by 22 percentage points. Among the faculty, Mr. Kerry got 86 percent of the vote.

“It wasn’t really about that he was a Republican,” said Jillian Ruben, the president of the Choate Young Democrats, said of Mr. Rove. “It was that I feel that he goes against all the things that Choate has spent the last four years teaching me.”

Until Monday, it appeared that the school was not prepared to replace Mr. Rove. In the Sunday editions of The Hartford Courant, Dr. Shanahan wrote an article for the op-ed page titled “Rove Deserves to Be Heard.”

“It is my hope that, even amid the swarm of controversy that surrounds him, Mr. Rove will identify for our students a perspective that will encourage them to engage politics more, and to put their shoulders to the wheels of leadership our country so desperately needs,” the headmaster wrote.

But on Monday, Dr. Shanahan said that after meeting with students last week and reading e-mail messages from them, it was clear that students “wanted to have an opportunity to engage him about his public life and not just hear him give them a parting message.”

Students were also worried that the graduation might be interrupted by outsiders, he said. Dr. Shanahan said he relayed their concerns to Mr. Rove over the weekend and asked, “What about coming up here at another time?”

“He said, ‘Sure,’ ” Dr. Shanahan said.

In a statement released by the school, Mr. Rove said he was looking forward to visiting Choate next month.

“I would not want 12 minutes of remarks to be used as an excuse by a small group to mar what should be a wonderful day of celebration for the members of the 2008 graduating class and their families,” he said.

Mr. Rove was one of President Bush’s longest-serving and closest aides — and also one of the most controversial — when he left the White House in August. Students said that among their issues with Mr. Rove were his aggressive campaign tactics.

Mr. Manti, one of the students organizing opposition to Mr. Rove, said on Monday that he was “extremely appreciative” that the school changed course.

But not everyone felt that way.

“No one really gave him a chance,” said Christophe Lirola, 17, a senior who is a member of the Choate Young Republicans.

But he found solace in what he called disappointing news.

“I do think it says a lot about Karl Rove,” he concluded, “the fact that he’s still willing to come to campus.”

720 million dollar question