NATIONAL & WORLD DIGEST October 7, 2007

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The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Republicans-AP-Poll.html?pagewanted=print

Analysis: Giuliani Lead No Guarantee

October 7, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 5:32 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Don't be fooled by Rudy Giuliani's ranking atop nationalpolls. A lot can shake up the GOP presidential field -- and his opponentsare counting on it.

Among the factors:

--Fred Thompson is giving chase to Giuliani nationally. Thompson, MittRomney and John McCain are in strong contention in early voting states.Romney leads in Iowa, while New Hampshire and other early states are up forgrabs.

--Influential conservatives who historically have dominated GOP primarieshave not coalesced around one candidate.

--Roughly 18 percent of Republicans remain undecided, including more womenthan men, according to a new Associated Press-Ipsos poll.

--Money is on Romney's side; the multimillionaire already has given $17.5million to his campaign.

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The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/weekinreview/07goodstein.html?pagewanted=print

The Nation

For a Trusty Voting Bloc, a Faith Shaken

October 7, 2007
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

AFTER the 2004 elections, religious conservatives were riding high. Newlyanointed by pundits as "values voters" - a more flattering label than"religious right" - they claimed credit for propelling George W. Bush to twoterms in the White House. Even in wartime, they had managed to fixate thenation on their pet issues: opposition to abortion, gay marriage and stemcell research.

Now with the 2008 race taking shape, religious conservatives say they sensethey have taken a tumble. Their issues are no longer at the forefront, andtheir leaders have failed so far to coalesce around a candidate, as they didaround Mr. Bush and Ronald Reagan.

What unites them right now is their dismay - even panic - at the idea ofRudolph W. Giuliani as the Republican nominee, because of his support forabortion rights and gay rights, as well as what they regard as a troublinghistory of marital infidelity. But what to do about it is where they againdiverge, with some religious conservatives last week threatening to bolt toa third party if Mr. Giuliani gets the nomination, and others arguing thatthis is the sure road to defeat.

Many religious conservatives were proud to claim the mantle that Karl Rovebestowed on them as "the base of the Republican Party." Now they fear theymay have lapsed unwittingly into the same role that African-Americans playin the Democratic Party: a dependable minority constituency that is courtedby candidates but never really gets to call the shots.

The candidates are certainly sending signals to that effect. While they'reeager to get as many conservative religious votes as they can, they're nodoubt aware of a shift since 2004 - that perhaps these voters aren't thebloc they were once taken to be, that they don't all answer to the sameleaders, and that they might even be more pragmatic than in the past, morewilling to sacrifice purity for viability in a candidate.

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The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/opinion/07sun1.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogin

On Torture and American Values

October 7, 2007
Editorial

Once upon a time, it was the United States that urged all nations to obey the letter and the spirit of international treaties and protect human rights and liberties. American leaders denounced secret prisons where people were held without charges, tortured and killed. And the people in much of the world, if not their governments, respected the United States for its values.

The Bush administration has dishonored that history and squandered that respect. As an article on this newspaper's front page last week laid out in disturbing detail, President Bush and his aides have not only condoned torture and abuse at secret prisons, but they have conducted a systematic campaign to mislead Congress, the American people and the world about those policies.

After the attacks of 9/11, Mr. Bush authorized the creation of extralegal detention camps where Central Intelligence Agency operatives were told to extract information from prisoners who were captured and held in secret. Some of their methods - simulated drownings, extreme ranges of heat and cold, prolonged stress positions and isolation - had been classified as torture for decades by civilized nations. The administration clearly knew this; the C.I.A. modeled its techniques on the dungeons of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Soviet Union.

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The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/opinion/07rich.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

Nobody Knows the Lynchings He's Seen

October 7, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
By FRANK RICH

WHAT'S the difference between a low-tech lynching and a high-tech lynching? A high-tech lynching brings a tenured job on the Supreme Court and a $1.5 million book deal. A low-tech lynching, not so much.

Pity Clarence Thomas. Done in by what he calls "left-wing zealots draped in flowing sanctimony" - as he describes anyone who challenged his elevation to the court - he still claims to have suffered as much as African-Americans once victimized by "bigots in white robes." Since kicking off his book tour on "60 Minutes" last Sunday, he has been whining all the way to the bank, often abetted by a press claque as fawning as his No. 1 fan, Rush Limbaugh.

We are always at a crossroads with race in America, and so here we are again. The rollout of Justice Thomas's memoir, "My Grandfather's Son," is not happening in a vacuum. It follows a Supreme Court decision (which he abetted) outlawing voluntary school desegregation plans in two American cities. It follows yet another vote by the Senate to deny true Congressional representation to the majority black District of Columbia. It follows the decision by the leading Republican presidential candidates to snub a debate at a historically black college as well as the re-emergence of a low-tech lynching noose in Jena, La.

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The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/opinion/07judt.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

From Military Disaster to Moral High Ground

October 7, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
By TONY JUDT

THE "liberal hawks" are back. These, of course, are the politicians and pundits who threw in their lot with George W. Bush in 2003: voting and writing for a "preventive war" - a war of choice that would avenge 9/11, clean up Iraq, stifle Islamic terrorism, spread shock, awe and democracy across the Middle East and re-affirm the credentials of a benevolently interventionist America. For a while afterward, the president's liberal enablers fell silent, temporarily abashed by their complicity in the worst foreign policy error in American history. But gradually they are returning. And they are in a decidedly self-righteous mood.

Yes, they concede, President Bush messed up his (our) war. But even if the war was a mistake, it was a brave and good mistake and we were right to make it, just as we were right to advocate intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo.

("The difference between Kosovo and Iraq isn't between a country that wanted peace and one that didn't," the Slate editor and onetime war cheerleader Jacob Weisberg, now tells us. "It was a matter of better management and better luck.") We were right to be wrong - and that's why you should listen to us now.

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The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/opinion/07meacham.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

October 7, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
A Nation of Christians Is Not a Christian Nation
By JON MEACHAM

JOHN McCAIN was not on the campus of Jerry Falwell's Liberty University last year for very long - the senator, who once referred to Mr. Falwell and Pat Robertson as "agents of intolerance," was there to receive an honorary degree - but he seems to have picked up some theology along with his academic hood. In an interview with Beliefnet.com last weekend, Mr. McCain repeated what is an article of faith among many American evangelicals: "the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation."

According to Scripture, however, believers are to be wary of all mortal powers. Their home is the kingdom of God, which transcends all earthly things, not any particular nation-state. The Psalmist advises believers to "put not your trust in princes." The author of Job says that the Lord "shows no partiality to princes nor regards the rich above the poor, for they are all the work of his hands." Before Pilate, Jesus says, "My kingdom is not of this world." And if, as Paul writes in Galatians, "there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female: for you are all one in Christ Jesus," then it is difficult to see how there could be a distinction in God's eyes between, say, an American and an Australian. In fact, there is no distinction if you believe Peter's words in the Acts of the Apostles: "I most certainly believe now that God is not one to show partiality, but in every nation the man who fears him and does what is right is welcome to him."

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The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/opinion/07cuomo.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

How Congress Forgot Its Own Strength

October 7, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
By MARIO M. CUOMO

SENATORS Jim Webb of Virginia and Hillary Clinton of New York are right to demand that the president go before Congress to ask for a "declaration of war" before proceeding with an attack against Iran or any other nation. But there is no need for this demand to be put into law, as the two Democrats and their colleagues are seeking to do, any more than there is need for legislation to guarantee our right of free speech or anything else protected by the Constitution.

Article I, Section 8 already provides that only Congress has the power to declare war. Perhaps the founders' greatest concern in writing the Constitution was that they might unintentionally create a president who was too much like the British monarch, whom they despised. They expressed that concern in part by assuring that the president would not have the power to declare war.

Because the Constitution cannot be amended by persistent evasion, this mandate was neither erased nor modified by the actions or inactions of timid Congresses that allowed overeager presidents to start wars in Vietnam and elsewhere without making a declaration.

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The Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/05/AR2007100501896.html

'A Way Out' for Iran

By David Ignatius
Sunday, October 7, 2007; B07

If you read the liberal blogosphere, and even the stately New Yorker magazine, you get the impression that the Bush administration is itching to drop a bomb on Iran. But talking with senior administration officials this week, I hear a different line:

They worry about Iranian actions, and they are disappointed that diplomatic overtures to Iran so far have resulted in little progress. They believe that Washington and Tehran remain on a collision course over Iran's nuclear program and its destabilizing activities in Iraq. But senior officials say they are seeking to avoid military conflict.

The administration wants Iran to make a strategic shift -- by changing its nuclear policy so that it doesn't have the potential to make weapons, stopping its support for terrorism and working with the United States to stabilize Iraq. Officials continue to believe that the regime is capable of such a shift, despite its internal divisions. But they have concluded that Iran won't bargain unless it feels more pressure -- from tougher economic sanctions and from credible threats of military power.

The bottom line, officials say, is that the United States must avoid a future situation in which its only options are to accept a nuclear Iran or go to war.

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The Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/06/AR2007100600940.html

More Torture Memos

The Bush administration's secret legal decisions defy Congress and the courts.
Sunday, October 7, 2007; B06

PRESIDENT BUSH said Friday, as he has many times before, that "this government does not torture people." But presidential declarations can't change the facts. The record shows that Mr. Bush and a compliant Justice Department have repeatedly authorized the CIA to use interrogation methods that the rest of the world -- and every U.S. administration before this one -- have regarded as torture: techniques such as simulated drowning, induced hypothermia, sleep deprivation and prolonged standing.

The New York Times reported last week that the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel issued two classified memos in 2005 to justify techniques that the Central Intelligence Agency had used when interrogating terrorism suspects abroad -- and to undercut a law passed by Congress that outlawed "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment." Those opinions form part of a continuing pattern, beginning in 2002 and extending until this past summer, of secret -- and highly questionable -- legal judgments by Bush-appointed lawyers intended to circumvent U.S. law, treaty commitments, legislation passed by Congress and Supreme Court decisions -- all of which should have prevented the abuse of prisoners.

The administration has essentially been operating its own clandestine legal system, unaccountable to Congress or the courts. The resulting violations of basic human rights have cost the country incalculable prestige abroad and put its own citizens in danger of being subjected to similarly harsh treatment. That is particularly true since July, when Mr. Bush signed an executive order that allowed the CIA to resume using "enhanced interrogation techniques" on prisoners after a hiatus of more than 18 months.

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The Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/06/AR2007100600937_pf.html

Mr. Craig Stays

And his Republican colleagues squirm.

Sunday, October 7, 2007; B06

THE SORDID saga of Larry Craig in the bathroom stall seems certain to continue, now that the Idaho Republican senator has reversed his decision to resign and said he will serve the remainder of his term. Mr. Craig's zigzags have only added to the circus atmosphere: First he said he'd quit; then he said he'd remain if his attempt to withdraw his guilty plea succeeded; then -- after a judge, as expected, rejected that move -- he said he was staying put anyway. We suspect that many, if not most, of Mr. Craig's constituents would have preferred that he had stuck with Plan A. Certainly, his Republican Senate colleagues, who have enough trouble without having to endure bathroom jokes, are none too pleased.

All that said, this was Mr. Craig's call and he is entitled to make it. For the same reasons that we had qualms about the basis for his prosecution, we think demands that he leave or be ousted from the Senate are overblown and unwarranted. Mr. Craig's behavior in a Minneapolis airport restroom was almost certainly the prelude to something criminal -- not homosexual conduct but sex in a public place -- but we are sympathetic to his argument that the ballet of toe-tapping did not rise to the level of criminal disorderly conduct.

The Senate ethics committee will now have to deal with the case and consider whether it warrants disciplinary action and, if so, of what magnitude. This is bound to be an uncomfortable process. The phone number of one of Mr. Craig's colleagues, Louisiana Republican David Vitter, recently turned up in the records of a woman accused of running a prostitution ring. Mr. Vitter wasn't charged, but he acknowledged committing a "very serious sin." Does the ethics committee really intend to scrutinize Mr. Craig's case while ignoring that of Mr. Vitter?

Mr. Craig's lawyer, Stanley Brand, notes that the ethics panel has never taken up a case involving a misdemeanor, much less one that has nothing to do with a lawmaker's official duties. The ethics committee should think more than twice before getting involved in an investigation of Mr. Craig's unseemly escapades.



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The Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/05/AR2007100501677_pf.html

Sure, He's Got Guns for Hire. But They're Just Not Worth It.

Sunday, October 7, 2007; B01
To: Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense
cc: Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State
Subject: Breaking Our Blackwater Addiction

The more we hear about the deadly Sept. 16 shootout in Baghdad involving contractors from the private military firm Blackwater USA, the worse it sounds. Despite investigations by the Iraqi government, the FBI and your department and last week's House hearings, we may never fully know what happened in the chaos that hospital records show left at least 14 Iraqis dead and 18 wounded. (The contractors claim that they were fired on first, while Iraqi witnesses and officials say that the Blackwater guards opened fire on a small car, carrying a couple and their child, that wouldn't get out of the way in a busy traffic circle.) But by now, we do know a great deal about the business of relying on hired guns -- more than enough to convince you that the Pentagon and State Department urgently need to change their ways.

By your own department's count, more than 160,000 for-hire personnel are working in Iraq today, which, amazingly, is greater than the number of uniformed military personnel there. These private forces perform all sorts of key functions, such as moving fuel, ammunition and food, as well as protecting top U.S. officials and guarding bases and convoys. Handing those tasks over to U.S. troops would further overstretch a military that you've warned is already dangerously overstretched. Hence the allure of outsourcing the jobs to private firms. But while we can't go to war without 'em, we also can't win with 'em. Our military outsourcing has become an addiction, and we're headed straight for a crash.

We've done poorly at a cold cost-benefit analysis here. It's far from clear that contractors save us money; when pressed on this score by the House last week, Blackwater Chairman Erik Prince went from claiming cost savings to pleading ignorance of his own firm's profits. (He did, however, let slip that he makes at least $800,000 per year more than you do, for overseeing a force that's a tiny fraction of the size.) Oversight has been miserably lacking, as has the will to use civilian or military law to hold contractors accountable for bloody messes such as the Baghdad shootings. On balance, for all the important jobs that contractors are doing, Blackwater and its kin have harmed, rather than helped, our troops' counterinsurgency efforts.



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MiamiHerald.com

http://www.miamiherald.com/692/v-print/story/262686.html

Analysis: Giuliani lead no guarantee

Posted on Sun, Oct. 07, 2007
By LIZ SIDOTI

Don't be fooled by Rudy Giuliani's ranking atop national polls. A lot canshake up the GOP presidential field - and his opponents are counting on it.

Among the factors:

-Fred Thompson is giving chase to Giuliani nationally. Thompson, Mitt Romneyand John McCain are in strong contention in early voting states. Romneyleads in Iowa, while New Hampshire and other early states are up for grabs.

-Influential conservatives who historically have dominated GOP primarieshave not coalesced around one candidate.

-Roughly 18 percent of Republicans remain undecided, including more womenthan men, according to a new Associated Press-Ipsos poll.

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The New York Times

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/06/AR2007100601310.html


Hizzoner Sees the GOP Facing A Clinton-Obama Ticket

By Chris Cillizza And Shailagh Murray
Sunday, October 7, 2007; A02

Rudy Giuliani is a politician, not a prognosticator, but that doesn't stop Hizzoner from throwing out a guess or two about the Democratic presidential field.

"Absolutely," the former New York mayor responded when asked during an interview late last week whether he believed that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton would be the Democratic standard-bearer. "I believe she will be the nominee, and Senator Obama will be the vice presidential nominee."

It's no surprise that Giuliani thinks his fellow New Yorker will be the party's pick -- every Republican operative The Fix can find agrees -- but his choice for veep is more intriguing.

Why Barack Obama? "He's kind of earned it," Giuliani said. "He brings a kind of enthusiasm to the ticket that everyone desires and likes to have."

While Giuliani derided Clinton as "going more socialist" of late in her policy proposals, he admitted a healthy respect for her political operation as well as the potential strengths of a Clinton-Obama ticket in '08. "That's the candidacy we are going to be facing, and that is a very formidable candidacy," he said.

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Los Angeles Times

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-id7oct07,0,2671977.story?coll=la-opinion-leftrail

Against a national ID

Americans, rightly, have always resisted the idea of a national
identification card. Why change now?
October 7, 2007

It's a chilling scene familiar from spy movies, but it also has played out in real-world totalitarian states: Without provocation, a police officer demands that a citizen produce identification papers. The unlucky driver or pedestrian fumbles for his wallet, knowing that the price of being "without papers" could be arrest and imprisonment.

This nightmare scenario helps explain why successive presidents and Congresses have resisted the idea of a national identity card, and why the Supreme Court ruled three years ago that police may require someone to identify himself only if there is "reasonable suspicion" of wrongdoing. Americans don't like having to prove who they are.

But now they are being told, most recently by a federal appeals court, that they need to get over their hang-ups about carrying ID. In an opinion upholding Indiana's requirement that voters produce photo IDs at polling places, Judge Richard Posner of the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals acknowledged that some voters, disproportionately Democrats, were probably discouraged from voting by the ID requirement. But he essentially told them to enter the 21st century.



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The Detroit News

http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071007/OPINION03/710070305/1008/OPINION01

Sunday, October 07, 2007

by Manny Lopez
Lack of practical principles will stall Ron Paul's progress

Dr. Ron Paul is a presidential candidate of absolutes -- sort of.

The Texas congressman is described as principled (to a fault sometimes, his colleagues and admirers say) and a staunch constitutionalist. Unlike most of his associates in politics who've mastered the art of babbling their way around questions, you can ask him what he thinks on an issue and he'll usually answer it directly.

That was the impression I got after the Republican, but Libertarian-leaning, presidential candidate stopped by The News' editorial board for a visit. There was little fanfare surrounding his arrival. He came quietly with his national campaign manager and a few other local folks, but they sat quietly by.

There were no glossy brochures, and he didn't sport any gimmicky buttons extolling the virtues of President Paul. He wore a muted blue blazer with a white shirt and grayish blue tie. His congressional member lapel pin was the only accoutrement that set him apart from any one else who might have been wandering through The News lobby that day.

He stopped by on his way to a Republican function on Mackinac Island, the only candidate to do so. Perhaps that's because he has to work harder than most. He's been pegged as a third-party candidate, even though he's not.

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