Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele has been reaching out to key Republican leaders in recent days, urging them to continue directing resources to his U.S. Senate bid.

In an interview yesterday, Steele confirmed what some people close to his campaign have said privately -- that tightening races in other key states have taken priority in the year since high-ranking Republicans persuaded Steele to run, in part by promising the party's lasting financial support.

"I understand that they didn't know what the landscape was going to look like a year away," Steele said. "The dynamics have changed."

Steele said he is confident that he will have the money to run competitively. But sources close to his campaign said concerns about the availability of national money increased recently, especially when national Democrats invested $750,000 in television ads for his opponent, Baltimore area U.S. Rep. Benjamin L. Cardin, in the days following Cardin's primary victory.

"They've made the commitment to have Sen. [Hillary] Clinton come here, Sen. [Barack] Obama come here. The natural question is: 'This is what these guys are doing; what are you prepared to do?' " Steele said.

..........................................

"A lot of people were watching what happened to Kweisi," Steele said yesterday, adding that those voters will want to know, "Will my party be bold in its effort to show that it's commitment is different from theirs?"

posted by Steve @ 10:56:00 AM

TOKYO — For those who view Japan's swelling nationalism through suspicious eyes, there is plenty of evidence that the World War II loser is straining at its pacifist shackles.

New Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has vowed to rewrite Japan's war-renouncing constitution. He yearns for a robust role in world affairs, and has even mused about the possibility of a pre-emptive military strike against North Korean missile sites.

Abe's talk of a "new Japan" also includes a plan to inculcate patriotism in schools and put an end to teaching what he calls a "masochistic" version of Japanese history. His newly minted Cabinet tilts so far to the hawkish side of Japanese politics that Mizuho Fukushima, the opposition socialist leader, has christened it "a Cabinet to prepare for war."

So as Abe took power this week, wary observers warned of a virulent form of nationalism they say is moving into the mainstream for the first time since Japan's defeat in 1945. Those voices came from American and European analysts, not just from China and Korea (the usual suspects, to Abe supporters), where memories of Japan's imperial aggression still burn. When Abe suggested during the summer that it might be necessary to take out North Korea's missile bases in self-defense, South Korea's government spokesman said the declaration "unveiled Japan's expansionist nature."

Is Japan sliding back to the dark days of the militarist 1930s? Are the Japanese really prepared to surrender their breathtaking materialism for the sort of foreign adventures that brought ruin upon their grandparents' generation?

Absurd, the Abe crowd responds.

"No single Japanese person thinks we are going back to that period," says Yoshihide Suga, one of the governing Liberal Democratic Party's most conservative members and someone who was an early Abe ally on the need to take a hard line with North Korea. "Other countries accuse us of going in a militarist direction, but we are just trying to become a normal country."

Those who dispute parallels with the 1930s point out that military spending then was the largest single budget item, whereas now it is less than 1% of Japan's gross domestic product. And unlike the 1930s, Japan no longer has a command economy tailored to the needs of the armed forces, and civilian leaders do not bend to the will of the army and navy.

Yet Abe's supporters do want to roll history's clock back if only as far as 1945. Their quarrel is with the political culture that was thrust on Japan after the war. Their targets are the American-imposed constitution and an accompanying education system they accuse of weakening traditional Japanese values and leading to a morally flabby nation.

"When we mention conservative politics, it is not the same as prewar politics or militarism," says Hakubun Shimomura, deputy chief Cabinet secretary of Abe's new government. "It is not an arrogant nationalism. We are not hostile to other cultures. But we want Japanese people to respect traditional Japanese culture, a culture that goes back more than 2,000 years but which has been weakened in the last 60 years."

It is a recurring theme with this new generation of nationalists. Yes, we got rich under the postwar American umbrella, they say. But the excesses of foreign values also infused an individualistic streak that diluted the social harmony at the core of Japanese society.

Foreigners look upon Japan as a remarkably cohesive society, but conservatives here see runaway egotism. And they complain that it has led to more broken families, a dearth of discipline in schools, youths adrift without jobs or hope — and even children who kill their parents.

And they fret that a rapacious capitalism accompanying globalization is undermining Japan's business culture, which has traditionally been far less cutthroat.

"Abe's stance is that postwar Japan is bad," says Takashi Tachibana, a commentator and author who has written about Japan's prewar intellectual class and is a critic of the new prime minister. Tachibana says Abe sees the constitution and the 1947 basic education law as the underpinnings of a stunted postwar era, "the root of all evils that need to be fixed."

Abe's is not a minority view. Polls show nearly two-thirds of Japanese support a new education law that would require schools to teach patriotism. Although teachers have resisted school board directives ordering them to stand, face the flag and sing the national anthem at school ceremonies, others see patriotic education as simply code for restoring discipline in classrooms gone wild.

posted by Steve @ 3:51:00 AM

WASHINGTON, Sept. 28 — The White House ignored an urgent warning in September 2003 from a top Iraq adviser who said that thousands of additional American troops were desperately needed to quell the insurgency there, according to a new book by Bob Woodward, the Washington Post reporter and author. The book describes a White House riven by dysfunction and division over the war.

The warning is described in “State of Denial,” scheduled for publication on Monday by Simon & Schuster. The book says President Bush’s top advisers were often at odds among themselves, and sometimes were barely on speaking terms, but shared a tendency to dismiss as too pessimistic assessments from American commanders and others about the situation in Iraq.

As late as November 2003, Mr. Bush is quoted as saying of the situation in Iraq: “I don’t want anyone in the cabinet to say it is an insurgency. I don’t think we are there yet.”

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld is described as disengaged from the nuts-and-bolts of occupying and reconstructing Iraq — a task that was initially supposed to be under the direction of the Pentagon — and so hostile toward Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, that President Bush had to tell him to return her phone calls. The American commander for the Middle East, Gen. John P. Abizaid, is reported to have told visitors to his headquarters in Qatar in the fall of 2005 that “Rumsfeld doesn’t have any credibility anymore” to make a public case for the American strategy for victory in Iraq.

The book, bought by a reporter for The New York Times at retail price in advance of its official release, is the third that Mr. Woodward has written chronicling the inner debates in the White House after the Sept. 11 attacks, the invasion of Afghanistan, and the subsequent decision to invade Iraq. Like Mr. Woodward’s previous works, the book includes lengthy verbatim quotations from conversations and describes what senior officials are thinking at various times, without identifying the sources for the information.

Mr. Woodward writes that his book is based on “interviews with President Bush’s national security team, their deputies, and other senior and key players in the administration responsible for the military, the diplomacy, and the intelligence on Iraq.” Some of those interviewed, including Mr. Rumsfeld, are identified by name, but neither Mr. Bush nor Vice President Dick Cheney agreed to be interviewed, the book says.

Robert D. Blackwill, then the top Iraq adviser on the National Security Council, is said to have issued his warning about the need for more troops in a lengthy memorandum sent to Ms. Rice. The book says Mr. Blackwill’s memorandum concluded that more ground troops, perhaps as many as 40,000, were desperately needed.

It says that Mr. Blackwill and L. Paul Bremer III, then the top American official in Iraq, later briefed Ms. Rice and Stephen J. Hadley, her deputy, about the pressing need for more troops during a secure teleconference from Iraq. It says the White House did nothing in response.

posted by Steve @ 3:45:00 AM

To hear Jeanine F. Pirro’s supporters tell it, she is a wronged woman leg-shackled to a loser, an ambitious and effective wife brought low by her badly behaved husband, Albert.

Now her fears about his philandering have set off a federal investigation into possible eavesdropping and have threatened to derail her quest to become New York attorney general.

But to many people who have been watching the couple for decades, the Pirros look a lot like an echo of that other Westchester power couple, the Clintons, who are also political and financial partners whose fates and fortunes are profoundly intertwined. The Pirros live in Rye, the Clintons in Chappaqua.

When it comes to the Pirros, “There’s no question they are partners, there’s no question it’s a symbiotic relationship,” said Murray Richman, a Bronx defense lawyer who knows both of the Pirros. “There’s no question Jeanine would never be where she is without Al.”

Mr. Pirro, 59, a lawyer and lobbyist, has provided money and political contacts for his wife’s career and has financed their way of life: the fancy cars, the expensive houses, the pampered pot-bellied pigs. Her campaigns have been heavily financed by his business associates in Westchester, where he has a hand in many real estate projects. She, in turn, reflected her glamour and political power onto him.

“Picture those two as the celebrities, the royalty, the power brokers in Westchester,” said Bennett L. Gershman, a former prosecutor and professor of law at Pace University who has been a frequent critic of Ms. Pirro, 55.

The Pirros’ relationship has often come with a cost to Ms. Pirro, starting two decades ago when she dropped her bid for lieutenant governor in the face of questions about her husband’s ties to a company in the garbage-hauling business, an activity that was often linked to the mob. (At the time, she said Mr. Pirro was not comfortable revealing his clients.)

During Mr. Pirro’s 2000 trial on charges of tax evasion, it became clear that she had benefited from his largess. But prosecutors said they were not accusing her of knowing that her husband improperly deducted as business expenses items ranging from her two-seater Mercedes to a $135 gold mirror. More recently, mobsters were caught on tape claiming that Mr. Pirro had tipped them off to an investigation conducted by the Westchester district attorney’s office when Ms. Pirro ran it, a claim he denied.

Ms. Pirro’s loyalty to her husband has confounded those inside and outside the political world, and this week she hinted at why she stood by her man. At a news conference on Wednesday, she confirmed that she had talked to Bernard B. Kerik, the former New York police commissioner who is now a security consultant, about planting a listening device on her husband’s boat. But she said no taping was done, and claimed that federal investigators looking into the matter were conducting a “political witch hunt.”

Then she said she was tired of having to justify her relationship with her husband. He is a “great father” to their children, she said — a teenage son and a daughter in college. “These are personal choices that I have made, and I shouldn’t have to keep explaining them.”

But earlier in her career, she was happy to talk about Mr. Pirro, whom she once described as “the most exciting person I knew: quick, bright, always doing, very much an activist.”

posted by Steve @ 3:27:00 AM

Thu Sep 28, 2006 at 09:37:58 PM PDT

Creeeeeeeeepy. This is approaching "live boy" territory.

A 16-year-old male congressional page concerned about the appropriateness of an e-mail exchange with a congressman alerted Capitol Hill staffers to the communication.

Congressman Mark Foley's office says the e-mails were entirely appropriate and that their release is part of a smear campaign by his opponent.

In the series of e-mails, obtained by ABC News, between the page and Rep. Foley (R-FL), Foley asks the page how old he is, what he wants for his birthday and requests a photo of him.

The concerned page alerted congressional staffers to the e-mails. In one e-mail, the page writes to a staffer, "Maybe it is just me being paranoid, but seriously. This freaked me out."

Foley's office acknowledges that Foley wrote the e-mails to the page but says they were completely innocent and that Foley is only guilty of being overly friendly.

The e-mails were sent from Foley's personal AOL account. In one, Foley writes, "did you have fun at your conference...what do you want for your birthday coming up...what stuff do you like to do."

In another Foley writes, "how are you weathering the hurricane...are you safe...send me an email pic of you as well..."

The page forwarded that e-mail to a congressional staffer saying it was "sick sick sick sick sick."

Aravosis has the emails (follow the link above to read them), and has one in which Mark Foley emails the page to tell him how hot his (the page's) friend is.

I just emailed will...hes such a nice guy...acts much older than his age...and hes in really great shape...i am just finished riding my bike on a 25 mile journey now headed to the gym...whats school like for you this year?

This story has hit the district press. Bizarre? Yeah. But it has legs.ge

What a crazy election this has become.

On the web: Tim Mahoney for Congress (Democratic candidate in the district)

posted by Steve @ 1:42:00 AM

posted by Steve @ 12:10:00 AM

posted by Steve @ 8:09:00 PM

All this talk of torture reminds me of the impotence of the blogosphere. Sure, we can raise money, but we have almost no voice in policy and that is because we lack money. NARAL, HRC, they can come to us for support and money, but do nothing to support us.

The reason people are so frustrated with the torture vote is because we have no real pressure on sitting senators and house members. If we could run ads in their districts about torture, a lot of minds would have been forced to stand up to Bush on this issue.

But the liberal money people don't understand what we do and are wedded to old methods. They want to underpay staff and expect miracles. Some rich people need to admit they're rich and start paying the people who do politics like they pay their personal staff. The day of underfunded staff has to end.

You guys pay your fair share and more, where are the rich liberals? When do they kick in? When do they realize that their methods suck.

Postscript: Thanks for all the offers of help on getting a Mac. I just bought a 1.83 Ghz Mac with 1G of memory, which I installed myself. Jen is still deciding on a desktop, which has to be PC-based because of work. Maybe Jen will buy one as a holiday treat.:)

Any recommendation on software? If anyone had an OEM or duplicate Windows XP disk they no longer have installed on their machine or a Student edition of Office, I wouldn't be upset. Jen can avoid a dual boot system, but I can't

Oh yeah, how hard are hard drive upgrades.

posted by Steve @ 10:56:00 AM

posted by Steve @ 10:56:00 AM

BAGHDAD, Sept. 27 — The radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr has lost control of portions of his Mahdi Army militia that are splintering off into freelance death squads and criminal gangs, a senior coalition intelligence official said Wednesday.

The question of how tightly Mr. Sadr holds the militia, one of the largest armed groups in Iraq, is of critical importance to American and Iraqi officials. Seeking to ease the sectarian violence raging across the country, they have pressed him to join the political process and curb his fighters, who see themselves as defenders of Shiism — and often as agents of vengeance against Sunnis.

But as Mr. Sadr has taken a more active role in the government, as many as a third of his militiamen have grown frustrated with the constraints of compromise and have broken off, often selling their services to the highest bidders, said the official, who spoke to reporters in Baghdad on condition of anonymity because he was not permitted to speak publicly on intelligence issues.

“When Sadr says you can’t do this, for whatever political reason, that’s when they start to go rogue,” the official said. “Frankly, at that point, they start to become very open to alternative sources of sponsorship.” The official said that opened the door to control by Iran.

Mr. Sadr’s militia — dominated by impoverished Shiites who are loosely organized into groups that resemble neighborhood protection forces — has always operated in a grass-roots style but generally tended to heed his commands. It answered his call to battle American forces in two uprisings in 2004, and stopped fighting when he ordered it. But as the violence in Iraq has spread, evidence of freelancing Shiites has accumulated.

After the bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra in February, bands of militants dressed in black, the favorite color of Sadr loyalists, drove into neighborhoods, kidnapping and killing Sunnis. Mr. Sadr, who was abroad at the time, returned home and gave a rare public speech calling on his followers to stop, even proposing joint prayer sessions with Sunni clerics. Still, the rampage continued.

In Basra, a province in southeastern Iraq, Mr. Sadr has less direct control over militiamen, and they have tended to operate to suit their own agenda. Local leaders there have said that he has disciplined some members and fired others, but with little overall effect. He has run through four different leaders in Basra, according to the intelligence official, and has even had to shut offices temporarily, when local leaders ignored him and acted on their own.

Mr. Sadr is still immensely powerful, with as many as 7,000 militiamen in Baghdad, the official said. And the cleric has turned that firepower into political might. His candidate list won about 30 seats in Parliament this year, one of the largest shares. The participation was a central goal for American officials, who tried for months to persuade him to stop fighting and enter politics.

Still, six major leaders here no longer answer to Mr. Sadr’s organization, according to the intelligence official. Most describe themselves as Mahdi Army members, the official said, and even get money from Mr. Sadr’s organization, but “are effectively beyond his control.” Some of those who moved away from Mr. Sadr saw him as too accommodating to the United States. Others saw him as too bound by politics, particularly as killings of Shiite civilians in mixed neighborhoods began to soar.

posted by Steve @ 9:59:00 AM

French President Jacques Chirac has announced that the pensions of foreign soldiers who fought in the French army are to be brought into line with those of French ones.

The pensions were frozen in 1959 - "crystallised", in the official language - meaning that 80,000 veterans in 23 countries receive less than one-third of the amount given to their French counterparts.

In spite of a long campaign from veterans' associations, successive governments refused to budge.

In 2002 a partial "de-crystallisation" adjusted foreign pensions to take account of the standard of living in the relevant countries, but they still lagged well behind.

In the end, what has pushed the president to act is a new film, called Les Indigenes, telling the story of North African soldiers who helped to liberate France in World War II.

According to some of the cast who attended a private screening at the Elysee Palace, President Chirac was visibly moved by the movie. So too was his wife, Bernadette.

"Jacques, we must do something," she reportedly said.

Powerful scenes

The announcement on pensions comes on the day Les Indigenes is released in France.

The word means "natives", the term commonly given to African soldiers at the time.

The film is about the campaign from Provence through to Alsace in 1944-45 as seen through the eyes of four soldiers, who leave their homelands in Algeria and Morocco to fight for France.

The Hollywood-esque nature of the film is reflected in its English title, Days of Glory. The fear and courage of the men is evident amid the powerful battle scenes.

There is discrimination but also a warm welcome from the French people. One soldier hopes to marry a French girl he meets in Provence but is forced to leave her behind.

The film also recounts the love-hate relationship between a young Moroccan recruit and his French superior.

The symbolism of some of the scenes is striking.

African soldiers with only a limited command of the French language sing the Marseillaise and hoist the French flag with pride.

Arab men sacrifice their lives to liberate a village in Alsace, but the survivors are ignored as official photographers snap the white French troops who arrive on the scene afterwards.

posted by Steve @ 3:26:00 AM

BAGHDAD, Sept. 27 -- A $75 million project to build the largest police academy in Iraq has been so grossly mismanaged that the campus now poses health risks to recruits and might need to be partially demolished, U.S. investigators have found.

The Baghdad Police College, hailed as crucial to U.S. efforts to prepare Iraqis to take control of the country's security, was so poorly constructed that feces and urine rained from the ceilings in student barracks. Floors heaved inches off the ground and cracked apart. Water dripped so profusely in one room that it was dubbed "the rain forest."

The Baghdad Police College was built so poorly that feces and urine trickle from the ceilings, and floors rise inches off the ground and crack apart.
The Baghdad Police College was built so poorly that feces and urine trickle from the ceilings, and floors rise inches off the ground and crack apart.

"This is the most essential civil security project in the country -- and it's a failure," said Stuart W. Bowen Jr., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, an independent office created by Congress. "The Baghdad police academy is a disaster."

Bowen's office plans to release a 21-page report Thursday detailing the most alarming problems with the facility.

Even in a $21 billion reconstruction effort that has been marred by cases of corruption and fraud, failures in training and housing Iraq's security forces are particularly significant because of their effect on what the U.S. military has called its primary mission here: to prepare Iraqi police and soldiers so that Americans can depart.

Federal investigators said the inspector general's findings raise serious questions about whether the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has failed to exercise effective oversight over the Baghdad Police College or reconstruction programs across Iraq, despite charging taxpayers management fees of at least 4.5 percent of total project costs. The Corps of Engineers said Wednesday that it has initiated a wide-ranging investigation of the police academy project.

The report serves as the latest indictment of Parsons Corp., the U.S. construction giant that was awarded about $1 billion for a variety of reconstruction projects across Iraq. After chronicling previous Parsons failures to properly build health clinics, prisons and hospitals, Bowen said he now plans to conduct an audit of every Parsons project.

"The truth needs to be told about what we didn't get for our dollar from Parsons," Bowen said.

posted by Steve @ 2:49:00 AM

WASHINGTON — The Army's top officer withheld a required 2008 budget plan from Pentagon leaders last month after protesting to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that the service could not maintain its current level of activity in Iraq plus its other global commitments without billions in additional funding.

The decision by Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army's chief of staff, is believed to be unprecedented and signals a widespread belief within the Army that in the absence of significant troop withdrawals from Iraq, funding assumptions must be completely reworked, say current and former Pentagon officials.

"This is unusual, but hell, we're in unusual times," said a senior Pentagon official involved in the budget discussions.

Schoomaker failed to submit the budget plan by an Aug. 15 deadline. The protest followed a series of cuts in the service's funding requests by both the White House and Congress over the last four months.

According to a senior Army official involved in budget talks, Schoomaker is now seeking $138.8 billion in 2008, nearly $25 billion above budget limits originally set by Rumsfeld. The Army's budget this year is $98.2 billion, making Schoomaker's request a 41% increase over current levels.

"It's incredibly huge," said the Army official, who, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity when commenting on internal deliberations. "These are just incredible numbers."

Most funding for the fighting in Iraq has come from annual emergency spending bills, with the regular defense budget going to normal personnel, procurement and operational expenses, such as salaries and new weapons systems.

About $400 billion has been appropriated for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars through emergency funding measures since Sept. 11, 2001, with the money divided among military branches and government agencies.

But in recent budget negotiations, Army officials argued that the service's expanding global role in the U.S.-declared war on terrorism — outlined in strategic plans issued this year — as well as fast-growing personnel and equipment costs tied to the Iraq war, have put intense pressure on its normal budget.

"It's kind of like the old rancher saying: 'I'm going to size the herd to the amount of hay that I have,' " said Lt. Gen. Jerry L. Sinn, the Army's top budget official. "[Schoomaker] can't size the herd to the size of the amount of hay that he has because he's got to maintain the herd to meet the current operating environment."

The Army, with an active-duty force of 504,000, has been stretched by the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. About 400,000 have done at least one tour of combat duty, and more than a third of those have been deployed twice. Commanders have increasingly complained of the strain, saying last week that sustaining current levels will require more help from the National Guard and Reserve or an increase in the active-duty force.

posted by Steve @ 12:29:00 AM

Buttons fixed

posted by Steve @ 8:59:00 PM