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Curses, Foiled Again

Curses, foiled again.

posted by Jerry Bowles 6:03 PM

Clinton-style “I feel your pain” tactics help Clark in AZ

Conducted during a major Clark TV ad blitz, an Eyewitness News 4/Arizona Daily Star poll by SurveyUSA indicates that out of 412 voters “certain” to cast ballots in Arizona’s February 3 primary, 39 percent said they would vote for Wes Clark while 32 percent said they would back Howard Dean. Released yesterday, the poll has a margin of error of 4.9 percent. This coencides with a poll released in New Hampshire which indicates that Clark is gaining on Dean.

In previous Arizona polls that found Clark running behind Dean but close to the margin of error the Arizona Daily Star and other Arizona newspapers referred to the poll results as a “statistical dead heat. Now, with Clark ahead among 412 voters by two percentage points above the margin of error the Arizona Daily Star headline reads “Clark beats Dean in AZ poll.” Fair and balanced…

Clark’s surge can be attributed to two factors, namely, angry attacks from other Democratic party candidates who accuse Howard Dean of having an “anger problem” and Clark’s well-crafted “soft and cuddly” ads where he mimics Bill Clinton, reaching out with a casual voice to convince “average Americans” that he understands their predicament and feels their pain. Let's see what happens to Dr. Dean after Jimmy Carter lays on hands.

posted by Groom 5:36 PM

Pray for Dr. Dean

Go to your local Baptist Church tonight, it's Wednesday and the faithful gather for a mid-week prayer meeting. Dr. Dean needs our prayers. I just heard CNN report that he's going to a Sunday School class taught by Jimmy "lusted-in-my-heart" Carter as part of the photo op on Sunday. Is this a Dukasis moment or what?

Note to Dean: Don't confuse Job with jobs, and stick to the gospel according to Dr. Luke. (As the son of a preacher man I know that the credited author of the Gospel of Luke was a physician in the Dean mode.)

posted by Josh 4:39 PM

What Kind of a President Would Clark Make?

While much is known about Dean's management style, we know little about how Wes Clark would manage the U.S. government. Some may say the question doesn't matter because the photo op in Plains, Georgia, with Dean and former President Carter this coming Sunday is the kind of endorsement that will put Dean over the top and pave the way for one big happy bandwagon--big enough for everyone except Gephardt. (P.S. Just don't schedule it during the football playoffs!) Others may believe the presidency should not be occupied by anyone in the military, although a dozen past presidents have been generals, including our alpha president George Washington.

I contend it does matter, especially now that Dean poll watchers should be looking over their shoulders because someone is rapidly gaining on them. The Wall Street Journal reports today that Clark is closing in on Dean having gained eight percentage points within the past two weeks. The gap is now only four percentage points, almost within the margin of error in the polling. And New Hampshire is in Dean's back yard. All Clark has to do is come in a close second or third to be in serious contention.

So what do we know about the kind of president Clark would make? I don't know the man and haven't worked for him, but there are two key elements in his style that I have studied over the years and they signal that Clark would be a very different kind of president from both Dean and the current temporary resident of the White House. One, Clark talks about leadership, not the presidency or being commander-in-chief. Two, Clark, by discipline, training and experience is a trainer and a leader--30 years worth.

Much was made about Bush as the first MBA president and his management style. His MBA was the result of a few years of classroom training and he obviously hasn't applied much of what he learned. Now we have a real MBA observer, Paul O'Neill, to thank for further insights on Bush's indifferent leadership style. Dean, on the other hand, had a few more years of classroom training and residency application, then became a doctor-governor, maybe the first in the nation. Dean says his medical training informs his policies and practices, but he downplays, for better or for worse, his medical discipline.

Clark, a Rhodes Scholar like Clinton, is schooled in the theory and practice of scenario planning and scenario training. While this highly sophisticated management technique was first developed by Shell Oil Company in the 80s, the U.S. Army has developed it into a science. All Army officers are required to go through the training and then train others in return. All untested Army programs and all new Army situations need to go through scenario planning and testing BEFORE they are used or implemented.

In the U.S. Army scenario planning is a form of participative management (democracy) that openly assesses the effectiveness of new programs or strategies before they are implemented or adopted. The process involves an comprehensive assessment of what work in the dry run and what didn't work and why. And this is the key dimension: the analysis is on multiple fronts to determine if the failure was a function of leadership, training, communications, technology, or other factors. Once identified, corrective action can be taken collectively.

I'm familiar with the general process of scenario planning and I've been through a few exercises. With Clark making a move now in the primaries, I sense he has taken his troops through this process to assess why he fell back in the pack after a good start. What we are now seeing is Clark benefiting from his own scenario analysis. Look out, Dr. Dean.

posted by Josh 1:29 PM

Healthy Marriages

Having saved the environment through his "Healthy Forests" initiative, our con-man-in- chief now proposes to revitalize the institution of marriage with $1.5 billion election year sop to the Christian right designed, supposedly, to promote "healthy" marriages. No definition of a healthy marriage was immediately forthcoming but one assumes that it is the kind of marriage where Ozzie, Harriet, Dave and Rickie turn off the TV and gather around the table at 6 o'clock every night and Ozzie says grace and everybody tells amusing anecdotes about what they did that day. ("Gee, dad, I blew coach in the shower after basketball practice.") Oops, how did that "homosexual" stuff get in there. There are no gay Republican Christians. Everyone knows that.

What we have here, friends, is a $1.5 billion taxpayer-funded payoff to the meddling, busybody, bedroom-creepers of the Christian virtue squad to avoid Bush having to say that he supports an constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

posted by Jerry Bowles 10:56 AM

Bremer craps out

In a nation that spends as much per year on dieting as we do on the war in Iraq, “administrator” Paul Bremer has run out of ideas on how to return the oil rich nation back to its people. That’s the price you pay when your boss tries to sell the “fad war” like a “fad diet.” When one factors in the Twin Towers of foreign debt and the trade deficit, Bremer is at the table playing with scared money, money from US taxpayers who had serious objections about how the Bush administration was running the war prior to the capture (which may have possibly been staged if we are to believe the Kurds) of Saddam.

David Mack, a US diplomat who has served two stints in Iraq told The Guardian “They (the Bush administration) are running out of ideas. They had obviously hoped the people they are working closely with in the Iraqi governing council would be able to exercise more influence than they have in brokering some kind of arrangement.”

Wes Clark’s latest ad brags that he’s led troops into battle and that he promises to get us out of this mess. It’s a pretty big stretch from Kosovo to a soon-to-be-balkanized Iraq. Just as he tacitly supported the Bush-Cheney-Rummy lies while a TV analyst, Clark didn’t voice any objections to the crew of crooks, criminals and holier than thous’ who were part of the Iraq lobby when he was soldiering during Clinton’s watch. Do we want to elect a president who might, unwittingly, touch off World War III under the guise of “getting us out of this mess.” It nearly happened in Kosovo.

posted by Groom 5:49 AM

Supremes 1, Immigrants 0

Let’s hope that the Supreme Court was just having a bad day on Friday when it refused to consider whether the government properly withheld names and other details of hundreds of people detained after 9/11. The roundup and detention of more than 1,200 immigrants – most of them Muslim men of Arab or South Asian origin – in the weeks immediately following the September 11 attacks was a grave injustice and an outrageous assault on the Sixth Amendment that cannot be allowed to stand. If John Ashcroft can round up everybody named Mohammed and help them indefinitely without telling their families where they are or allowing them access to a lawyer, he can do the same thing to you and your momma.

More than 700 of those unfortunates swept up in the panic following 9/11 were held for routine visa violations, many under a regulation allowing the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to hold individuals for an extended period without charge. Many were denied prompt access to attorneys and some remained in custody for months pending “clearance” by the government even after immigration judges had granted them bail or issued them with deportation or “voluntary departure” orders.

The choice of immigration court was not accidental. According to the Supreme Court, deportation is not a criminal punishment; therefore all of the full set of rights that apply to the criminal process don't apply. For example, criminal detainees can’t be held in secret but immigration detainees can be…and were. Criminal defendants have a right to a public trial and access to lawyers. The rounded-up immigrants were denied these rights.

In November 2001, the Department of Justice closed immigration hearings to the public and press. Even immediate family members were denied access or information – even though some detainees were not even accused of a crime, but rather were being held as “material witnesses.”

It was not until 18 months later that the public learned the ugly truth—most of the detainees were held for minor immigration violations, deprived of basic rights, and were the victims of serious physical and verbal abuse while they were being held. In April 2003, the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Justice issued a report entitled “The September 11 Detainees: A Review of the Treatment of Aliens Held on Immigration Charges in Connection with the Investigation of the September 11 Attacks.” The report confirmed what everyone with an ounce of common decency said at the time—the Justice Department used 9/11 as a pretext for a scary and pretty much indiscriminate witch hunt for illegal aliens during which time a lot of extremely nasty and “un-American” abuses were tolerated, if not encouraged, by the FBI and Justice Department lawyers.

The OIG report found “significant problems” with the roundup and said that the FBI made little attempt to distinguish between aliens who were subjects of the terrorism investigation and those encountered coincidentally, and that the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) did not consistently serve the detainees with notice of the charges under which they were being held within its stated goal of 72 hours. The average wait for those arrested in New York City and housed in Brooklyn was 15 days, the report said. It took the bureau an average of 80 days to clear prisoners for removal or release because of understaffing and because the process was "not given sufficient priority," the report said.

The report also found that immigrants arrested in New York and housed at the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn faced "a pattern of physical and verbal abuse" from some guards as well as "unduly harsh" detention policies. A total of 184 inmates who were held in Brooklyn were subjected to highly restrictive, 23-hour "lockdown," the report found. They were limited to one phone call a week, and they were put in handcuffs, leg irons and heavy chains any time they moved outside their cells.

A Supplemental Report on September 11 Detainees' Allegations of Abuse at Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York issued by the OIG in December 2003 further confirmed the worst of the treatment. After reviewing tapes kept at the Brooklyn MDC, Inspector General Glenn A. Fine reported that some Bureau of Prisons officers slammed inmates against walls, pressed their heads against walls, bent their hands and wrists into painful positions, lifted them off the floor by the restraints used to bind them, stepped on their leg chains so as to trip them and left detainees in their cells in restraints for hours at a time -- all in violation of bureau rules. They verbally abused them and used strip searches and restraints as punishments. And guards hung a T-shirt on a wall with an American flag and the words "These colors don't run" on it -- and pressed inmates' faces against it while searching them. The report also found that jail personnel improperly taped meetings between detainees and their lawyers and overused strip searches to punish them.

Fortunately, the Supreme Court refusal of this case does not set a precedent and you can bet that this issue will be back around again in some different legal form. There’s too much at stake to just let this one ride.

posted by Jerry Bowles 12:09 AM