Tea Party-Backed Candidate Steps Into a Political Quagmire Over Remarks on Civil Rights Act Just 24 Hours After Winning Kentucky GOP Senate Primary, While Tea Party Express Leader Mark Williams Ignites a Furor of His Own When He Blasts Proposed Mosque Near New York’s Ground Zero and Says Muslims Worship ‘9/11 Terrorists’ Monkey-God’

When Rand Paul (left), son of Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas), won the Kentucky Republican U.S. Senate primary last week, the Tea Party movement-backed candidate, after trouncing the GOP party establishment-backed candidate, Trey Grayson, said on primary night: “I have a message from the Tea Party. A message that is loud and clear and does not mince words: We have come to take our government back.” But less than 24 hours later, Paul ignited a firestorm of controversy with remarks on civil rights, reinforcing the Tea Party’s negative public image as a radical fringe movement. It didn’t help when Tea Party Express leader Mark Williams (right) touched off a firestorm of his own two days later with remarks that Muslims worship “the 9/11 terrorists’ monkey-god.” Williams has repeatedly refused to apologize for making incendiary remarks about President Obama, calling him a racist, traitor, and a Muslim. (Photos courtesy Politico.com and KTracy.com)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Tuesday, May 25, 2010)

By SKEETER SANDERS

What should have been a time of triumph for the Tea Party movement, with Rand Paul’s stunning rout of Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson in last Tuesday’s Republican U.S. Senate primary, has turned within 72 hours into a massive public-relations disaster, further solidifying the Tea Party’s negative public image as a radical fringe movement.

Just 24 hours after triumphantly proclaiming in his victory speech last Tuesday night that “I have a message from the Tea Party. A message that is loud and clear and does not mince words: We have come to take our government back,” Paul, the 47-year-old son of Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas), ignited a firestorm of outrage when, appearing on MSNBC’s “Rachael Maddow Show,” he said that he opposed the anti-discrimination provisions of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act being imposed on private businesses.

And 48 hours after that, a prominent national Tea Party leader touched off a furor of his own by blasting a proposed mosque and Islamic cultural center to be built in New York near Ground Zero, the site of the 2001 terrorist attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center and killed more than 3,000 people.

The New York Daily News, citing a blog posting on his Web site, reported Thursday that Mark Williams, the chairman of the Tea Party Express, branded the proposed mosque and Islamic cultural center a “monument” to the 9/11 terrorists and said that Muslims worship “the terrorists’ monkey-god.”

PAUL DUCKS OUT OF ‘MEET THE PRESS’ AMID FIRESTORM

Paul canceled a series of media interviews — including a scheduled appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, becoming only the third guest ever to back out from appearing on the venerable public-affairs program in its 63-year history. The cancellations followed a cascade of criticism over remarks he made on the Maddow show that he opposes Title II of the Civil Rights Act with respect to “public accommodations.”

Title II outlaws discrimination in hotels, motels, restaurants, theaters, and all other public accommodations engaged in interstate commerce. It exempts private clubs, although it does not define the term “private.” Many states have since adopted similar laws of their own.

As the interview with Maddow continued, Paul became increasingly uncomfortable as Maddow pressed him to clarify remarks he made in a previous interview on National Public Radio’s evening news program “All Things Considered” broadcast earlier on Wednesday.

Asked by NPR’s Robert Siegel that, based on his previously-reported remarks that the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act “was an overreach by the federal government” when it came to banning discrimination by private businesses, the 1964 Civil Rights Act was similarly an “overreach,” Paul replied, “I think a lot of things could be handled locally. . . I think when you get to the solutions like that, the more local the better, and the more common sense the decisions are, rather than having the federal government make those decisions.”

Asked point-blank by Maddow if he believed “that a private business has a right to say, ‘We don’t serve black people,'” Paul responded that he opposed discrimination in any form and that the government is right to bar discrimination by public institutions, but that it is wrong to impose that non-discriminatory standard on private businesses.

Paul told Maddow the he opposes Title II of the Civil Rights Act, which bans businesses from discriminating on the basis of race. “If we want to harbor in on private businesses and their policies,” he said, “then you have to have the discussion about: do you want to abridge the First Amendment as well. Do you want to say that because people say abhorrent things — you know, we still have this. We’re having all this debate over hate speech and this and that. Can you have a newspaper and say abhorrent things?”

PAUL ALSO OPPOSED FAIR HOUSING ACT

In a blog posting on Thursday, conservative Washington Post blogger David Wiegel noted that Title II of the Civil Rights Act wasn’t the only piece of federal civil rights law the newly-minted Kentucky GOP U.S. Senate nominee  opposed.

Wiegel disclosed that Paul, in a 2002 letter to the editor of his hometown newspaper, blasted the paper’s editors for endorsing the Fair Housing Act, which outlaws housing discrimination.

In his letter, published in May 30, 2002 edition of the Bowling Green Daily News (available from the newspaper’s online archives only through a paywall), Paul wrote that “a free society will abide unofficial, private discrimination, even when that means allowing hate-filled groups to exclude people based on the color of their skin.”

He accused the newspaper’s editors — as well as the law itself — of ignoring “the distinction between private and public property. Should it be prohibited for public, taxpayer-financed institutions such as schools to reject someone based on an individual’s beliefs or attributes? Most certainly. Should it be prohibited for private entities such as a church, bed and breakfast or retirement neighborhood that doesn’t want noisy children? Absolutely not.”

Jesse Benton, a spokesman for the Paul campaign, said that the candidate’s views on federal anti-discrimination laws should not be interpreted as meaning that he favors repealing them — a point that Paul himself made clear in a statement issued on Friday. “I unequivocally state that I will not support any efforts to repeal the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” he said.  

GOP CHAIRMAN: PAUL’S VIEWS ‘GOT IN THE WAY OF REALITY’

GOP National Chairman Michael Steele — no stranger to controversy himself — said Sunday that Paul’s libertarian views on the role of government and civil rights were “misplaced in these times” and that they were out of step with the rest of the country.

Appearing on ABC’s “This Week,” Steele, the Republican National Committee’s first African-American chairman, noted that “The country litigated the issue of ‘separate but equal,’ the country litigated the rights of minority people in this country to access the free-enterprise system in accommodations and all of that. That was crystallized in the Civil Rights Act [of 1964] and the Voting Rights Act [of 1965].”

Steele said that Rand Paul’s philosophy “got in the way of reality, and the reality of it is that was important legislation at the time, put in place important benchmarks for the progress of free people.”

LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON? RON PAUL’S OWN CONTROVERSY OVER RACE

Meanwhile, Rand Paul’s father, who ran unsuccessfully for the 2008 GOP presidential nomination, called the criticism of his son’s remarks on civil rights “unfair” and branded the controversy as “contrived” and an attempt by liberals to discredit him.

“I think it’s contrived because he’s done so well and the left has to knock him down,” Ron Paul said Thursday in an interview with the Congressional Quarterly. “It’s not fair.”

Ron Paul said that as a father, it was difficult for him to see his son “pilloried on the national stage” and to see his libertarian views characterized as racist. “Politics can sometimes be nasty and I think there is a lot of resentment because he all of a sudden became a star,” he told the Quarterly.

But Ron Paul has himself been embroiled in a major racially-charged controversy during the 2008 campaign. In January 2008, the elder Paul came under fire after old newsletters bearing his name and containing anonymously-written racist rants were revealed by CNN and The New Republic magazine.

Ron Paul adamantly insisted in s subsequent interview with CNN that he wasn’t the author of the screeds, but within days, The ‘Skeeter Bites Report revealed that the elder Paul, in an interview with a Dallas newspaper in 1996, acknowledged having written them and insisted that his writings were being taken out of context.

In his interview with The Dallas Morning News, published on May 22, 1996, the elder Paul — who at the time was running to regain his House seat that he had given up more than a decade earlier — acknowledged writing in a 1992 issue of his newsletter, The Ron Paul Political Report, that “95 percent of the black men in Washington, D.C., are semi-criminal or entirely criminal.”

He defended his writings by insisting that they were being taken out of context by his critics. “It’s typical political demagoguery,” he told the Morning News. “If people are interested in my character … come and talk to my neighbors.”

The elder Paul made his admission after copies of The Ron Paul Political Report were being circulated among Texas Democrats in the heat of the 1996 election campaign, according to the newspaper.

The ‘Skeeter Bites Report and other bloggers also revealed that several prominent white supremacists and other far-right extremists — including former Ku Klux Klan leaders David Duke and Don Black — were openly backing Ron Paul’s run for the White House.

The elder Paul, who adamantly insists that he opposes racism, nonetheless has, to this day, refused to either distance himself from the white supremacists who backed his presidential candidacy or to return their financial contributions to his campaign.

ANOTHER MAJOR HEADACHE FOR THE TEA PARTY MOVEMENT: MARK WILLIAMS

For the Tea Party movement, the Rand Paul controversy is a major public-relations disaster. Long accused by liberal critics of doing little to stem overtly racist expressions against President Obama at its rallies in the past year, the movement must decide how to deal with the fallout over Paul’s remarks.

But Rand Paul isn’t the Tea Party movement’s only headache. It also has to deal with an increasingly bellicose, foul-mouthed figure who’s emerged as one of the public faces of the movement — and who ignited a firestorm of his own in New York.

Mark Williams, chairman of the Tea Party Express, in a blog post on his Web site, MarkTalk.com, denounced as “a monument to the 9/11 terrorists” a proposed mosque and Islamic cultural center to be built near the World Trade Center site.

“The monument would consist of a mosque for the worship of the terrorists’ monkey-god,” Williams wrote, according to the Daily News.

The 13-story glass-and-steel building, which includes a 500-seat theater and athletic center, would be built just two blocks from the where twin towers of the World Trade Center were destroyed on September 11, 2001, when two hijacked California-bound jetliners crashed into them and exploded in massive fireballs of jet fuel, killing more than 3,000 people.

Imam Feisel Abdul Rauf, who helped found the Cordoba Initiative following the 9/11 attacks and whose organization is spearheading the project, said the proposed Islamic center is intended to foster better relations between the West and Muslims and that it would be open to the general public.

WILLIAMS’ ANTI-MUSLIM REMARKS SPARK OUTRAGE

Williams’s anti-Muslim postings sparked outrage from Muslims across the country  and a sharp rebuke from New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

“It would be shocking if such ignorant comments failed to elicit a strong response not only from Tea Party leaders, but from other parties throughout the political spectrum,” Corey Saylor, national legislative director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told the Daily News.

Ibrahim Hooper, a New York-based spokesman for the Muslim civil-rights group, also told the newspaper that this was the only the latest in an ongoing series of highly inflammatory anti-Muslim comments Williams has written on his Web site. Among them: A remark in which he calls Islam “a seventh-century death cult” and the Prophet Mohammed “a psychotic pedophile.”

Daniel Squadron, a New York state senator whose district includes lower Manhattan, also denounced Williams. “To be clear, religious intolerance, demagoguery, and fearmongering have no place in the discussion about development on and around the World Trade Center site,” Squadron said in a statement to The New York Times on Wednesday.

A spokesman for Mayor Bloomberg called Williams’ screed “appalling” and noted that the proposed mosque is perfectly legal. The land that the mosque would be built on is private and is zoned by the city for various uses, including a house of worship.

Plans call for the mosque to be completed in time for the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in 2011. When completed, the mosque could house as many as 2,000 people for Friday prayers.

WILLIAMS A FLAME-THROWER WHEN IT COMES TO RACE AND RELIGION

The virulence of Williams’ anti-Muslim attacks have gotten him into trouble before. He’s also come under fire for making racially-charged remarks against President Obama.

And through it all, Williams — who hosts a conservative talk-radio show in California — has steadfastly refused to apologize for them.

He has referred to the president as an “enemy of America,” lumping him with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — despite the Obama administration’s increasingly get-tough policy toward Iran’s nuclear program — the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and even former President Jimmy Carter, whose recent book on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, has come under sharp criticism by supporters of Israel as being biased in favor of the Palestinians.

Williams has also referred to Obama as “an Indonesian Muslim-turned-welfare thug and a racist-in-chief . . . Two things you can always count on: I will defend my record on race to no one, under any circumstances and I will call out any racist, any time without regard to who they are . . . and that includes our half-white, racist president.”

If the Tea Party movement is to be taken seriously as a legitimate mainstream political movement, then it has to do something about off-the-wall people in its midst like Rand Paul and Mark Williams, for the more negative attention they draw to themselves, the more Americans are likely to dismiss the Tea Party movement as being way out on the radical fringe.

# # #

Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

It’s the Best of Times for One Paper and the the Worst of Times for the Other as The Washington Blade Makes a Triumphant Return Five Months After Former Parent Company’s Bankruptcy Shut it Down, While The Washington Times Totters on the Brink of Extinction After Church Cuts Off its $35 Million-a-Year Subsidy and is Now on the Selling Block

GOING IN OPPOSITE DIRECTIONS — Five months after it was abruptly shut down in late November when its former parent company declared Chapter 7 bankruptcy, The Washington Blade resumed publishing on April 30 under the ownership of a new company formed by longtime staffers of the 40-year-old LGBT community weekly. Across town, The Washington Times is tottering on the brink of folding. The conservative daily last fall lost its $35 million annual subsidy from the Unification Church — which owns the Times’ parent company — forcing massive layoffs, the elimination of its local news and sports sections and the firings of top editors and executives. Now the Times is up for sale, but it has never made a profit in its 28-year history. It loses a reported $80 million a year and its circulation has plunged dramatically since the crisis began. (Left Photo: Joe Tresh Photography; Right Photo: National Press Photographers Association)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Tuesday, May 11, 2010)

By SKEETER SANDERS

In recent months, the nation’s capital has borne witness to a tale of two of its newspapers worthy of one of Charles Dickens’ most famous novels.

Call it “A Tale of Two Newspapers.”

With apologies to the 19th century British author, what’s been happening to the two newspapers can best be described by the opening paragraph of Dickens’ novel about  events that transpired in London and Paris during the French Revolution.

For one paper, it is the best of times. For the other, it is the worst of times.

WASHINGTON BLADE MAKES A COMEBACK FIVE MONTHS AFTER SHUTDOWN. . .

On April 30, The Washington Blade, the capital’s LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) community weekly that had been the nation’s LGBT newspaper of record for 40 years before it was abruptly shut down last November when its former parent company filed for bankruptcy, made a triumphant return to Washington-area newsstands and vending boxes on April 30, with a new look and a new slogan — “Still Sharp After 40 Years.”

A group of longtime Blade staffers formed a new, locally-based company to publish a new weekly newspaper for the city’s LGBT community immediately after Atlanta-based Window Media, the Blade’s parent company, filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy and shut down all of its newspapers, including the Blade. The new newspaper published under the name DC Agenda.

The new company, Brown Naff Pitts Omnimedia, Inc., was founded by Blade Publisher Lynne Brown, Editor Kevin Naff, sales executive Brian Pitts and other longtime Blade employees.

. . .WHILE WASHINGTON TIMES TOTTERS ON BRINK OF FOLDING  

Meanwhile, across town, Washington’s longtime conservative daily newspaper, The Washington Times, is tottering on the brink of extinction following months of turmoil after the Unification Church, which owns News World Communications Inc., the Times’ parent company, cut off its $35 million-a-year subsidy to the newspaper, amid a bitter feud among the children of the church’s 90-year-old founder, Reverend Sun Myung Moon.

After sinking more than $3 billion into the newspaper it launched in 1982, the Unification Church has put the Times up for sale. But the paper has never turned a profit in its 28-year history and loses upwards of $80 million a year.

Moreover, the Times’ paid circulation, which posted an anemic 67,000 in its last report to the Audit Bureau of Circulations last September — compared to the rival Washington Post’s 702,000 — plunged dramatically since the crisis began to 42,000, with only 25,000 home subscribers, according to Times sources who spoke to The ‘Skeeter Bites Report on condition of anonymity.

BLADE’S REVERSAL OF FORTUNE IS RARE GOOD NEWS FOR A BATTERED NEWSPAPER INDUSTRY

For the Blade, its phoenix-like rise from the ashes of Window Media’s bankruptcy is a rare instance of good fortune in an industry that has suffered — and continues to suffer — staggering losses. Figures released in April by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, which monitors newspaper sales to the public, found average weekday circulation fell 8.7 percent in the six months that ended March 31, compared with the same period a year earlier.

Circulation of Sunday newspapers also fell, by 6.5 percent.  Even free-circulation newspapers, most of them weeklies, have seen declines in both circulation and advertising revenues. The Blade was no exception to this trend, but has remained financially healthy, according to publisher Lynn Brown.

Over its 40 years, the Blade built a reputation as the newspaper of record if you wanted to know the latest news of the LGBT community in the nation’s capital and around the world.

With its straightforward, no-nonsense, in-depth style of reporting, the Blade became known as “The New York Times of the gay press” — the one LGBT newspaper that the mainstream media — and much of Washington’s  heterosexual society — took seriously.

SUDDEN SHUTDOWN OF BLADE LAST NOVEMBER CAME AS A SHOCK

On November 15 — just weeks after it celebrated its 40th anniversary in October — the Blade’s nearly two-dozen employees arrived for work at the newspaper’s offices in the National Press Building in downtown Washington and were  stunned to be told by an executive of parent company Window Media that the company had filed for liquidation under Chapter 7 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Act and was shutting down all of its publications.  

Staffers had until 3 p.m. that afternoon to clear out their desks.

BLADE ITSELF WAS FINANCIALLY HEALTHY, BUT ITS PARENT COMPANY WAS MIRED IN  DEBT

The Atlanta-based Window Media, which purchased the Blade for a reported $2 million in 2001, was also closing the Southern Voice of Atlanta, the Houston Voice, the South Florida Blade of Miami and several magazines.

The Blade’s Web site, washingtonblade.com, was also shut down.

A Window Media spokesman did not disclose a reason for the sudden shutdown, but it had been known for months that the company was saddled with major debts. Ironically, the Blade itself was financially healthy, with a weekly circulation reported at about 25,000 and its average 80-to-100-page issues thick with advertising. Its Web site was even more successful, drawing about a million visitors a month.

Founded in October 1969, just four months after the Stonewall Riots in New York’s Greenwich  Village that is credited as the beginning of the modern gay rights  movement, the Blade — originally named The Gay Blade — first rolled off a mimeograph machine as a four-page newsletter.

BLADE STAFF RALLIES, LAUNCHES NEW PAPER TO REPLACE BLADE

Determined to preserve the Blade’s 40-year legacy, a group of Blade employees, led by Brown and executive editor Kevin Naff —  with the backing of many businesses and LGBT community organizations — launched DC Agenda to fill the void left by the Blade’s sudden demise. Without missing a week, on November 20, the first issue of DC Agenda hit the streets on what would have been the first Friday without the Blade.

The newspaper’s staff formed Brown Naff Pitts Omnimedia Inc. to buy the rights and assets of the Blade. They succeeded in late February, when the fledgling company purchased the newspaper’s name, copyrights, trademarks, 40-year-old archives, computers and office furniture under the auspices of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Atlanta for $15,000.

On April 30, 25,000 copies of a new, redesigned 56-page Blade rolled off the presses. “A lot of people really have an emotional connection to the Blade and the outpouring since it closed was overwhelming and was really what led us to carry on,” Naff told The Washington Post..

“We’ll be a leaner publication and we’ll grow as we can afford to grow,” Naff continued. “But [this first] issue is 56 pages — which is remarkable considering [that] DC Agenda launched with just eight pages.”

WHILE BLADE SOARS, TIMES CRASHES

It’s a totally different story at The Washington Times offices on New York Avenue in northeast Washington. On the very same day that the Blade made its return, it was announced that the Times was up for sale.  

Nicholas Chiaia, a member of the conservative daily’s two-person board of directors, announced the sale just as Times president and publisher Jonathan Slevin was shown the door — the second chief executive of the newspaper to be fired in five months.

Slevin was named the Times’ president and publisher last November after his predecessor, Thomas McDevitt, along with longtime chief financial officer Keith Cooperrider and board chairman Dong Moon Joo, were fired personally by Preston Moon, president of parent company News World Communications Inc. and the youngest son of the company’s founder, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon.

CRISIS AT TIMES TRACED TO BITTER FEUD BETWEEN SONS OF REVEREND MOON

The chaos at the Times began in October, when the Unification Church announced that the 90-year-old Reverend Moon, who founded the church in 1954, was essentially retiring, turning over control of the church and his global business empire to his three American-born sons.

Hyung-jin Moon, 30, was put in charge of the church itself. Kook-jin (Justin) Moon, 39, was tapped to run the church’s businesses ventures in South Korea. Hyun-jin (Preston) Moon, 40, runs the church’s overseas businesses — including News World Communications.

There have been numerous reports — most notably on TalkingPointsMemo.com — of a bitter feud between Preston and the rest of the Moon family.

IS POLITICAL SPLIT ROOT OF MOON FAMILY FEUD?

The reason for the feud is not known, but according to a Wikipedia page about the new Unification Church leader, Hyung-jin Moon is said to have broken from his family’s longtime support for conservative Republicans to back President Obama.

“I am very proud as an American to have a black president,” he is quoted by Wikipedia as saying. “I was born and raised in America. I am a part of a minority. To see a minority representative being the president of the United States of America is extremely inspiring. It’s just miraculous.”

The ‘Skeeter Bites Report was unable to independently confirm the quote.

Whatever reason for the feud, it apparently led Hyung-jin Moon in October to cut off the church’s subsidy to keep the Times afloat — a hefty $35 million a year. In its entire 28-year history, the Times has never made a profit and, according to Times sources, loses between $75 million and $80 million a year.

TIMES QUICKLY WITHERS AFTER CHURCH’S MONEY CUTOFF

The results have been disastrous for the paper. With the church’s largesse — which reportedly totals $3 billion since the Times was founded in 1982 — now dried up, on top of sharply declining advertising and circulation that has plagued newspapers from coast to coast, Preston Moon was forced to drastically cut costs in a desperate attempt to keep the conservative daily alive.

In quick succession, more than 60 percent of the Times’ staff was laid off — far more than previously reported. The paper stopped publishing on Sundays, becoming a Monday-through-Friday daily only, much like USA Today.

But the most radical cutback, however, was one that Times readers noticed right away: It ceased to be a full-service daily, eliminating its metropolitan news and sports sections.

In particular, the end of the Times’ highly-regarded sports section — it published for the last time on December 27 — might have been the final straw with readers: Circulation plummeted, from 67,000 last September to 42,000 now, according to Times sources. Home-delivery subscriptions nosedived to 25,000. Even the Times’ Web site saw a dramatic decline in visitors.

The capital’s conservative community — the paper’s core readership base, as well as many of the paper’s longtime conservative columnists — abandoned the Times in droves, with many switching to the Washington Examiner, the city’s other conservative daily owned by billionaire Phillip Anschutz’s Clarity Media.

Now, the Times is up for sale. But given the fact that it’s never made a profit in its 28-year history; it loses up to $80 million a year; its circulation has dropped like a stone; and the economic climate for daily newspapers appears to get worse by the month, who in their right business mind is going to buy it?

Certainly not Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corporation owns a highly profitable television station in Washington (WTTG Fox Channel 5) and FCC cross-ownership rules would bar a purchase of the newspaper without selling off the station.

Besides, Murdoch already owns a money-losing newspaper — the New York Post — which hasn’t made a profit in 36 years and loses an estimated $55 million to $60 million a year. Murdoch can’t really afford to subsidize two money-losing dailies. Unlike Reverend Moon, Murdoch has News Corporation shareholders he has to answer to — and they would not likely be happy with such a purchase.

The Times’, for all intents and purposes, is in a coma. It would be very surprising if the paper isn’t gone by September, if not sooner.

# # #

Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

Internal BP E-Mails and Other Company Documents Reveal Claims By Former Contractor That the British Oil Giant Violated Federal Workplace Safety Laws and Its Own Internal Policies by Failing to Keep Critical Safety Data On Its Other Offshore Oil Rigs in the Gulf of Mexico

“GREEN” IMAGE DESTROYED — Oil giant BP Plc, formerly known as British Petroleum, has for the past several years engaged in a public-relations campaign to create an environmentally-friendly image of itself, even adopting a play on its initials with the slogan “Beyond Petroleum.” But a disastrous explosion and fire April 20 that destroyed an offshore rig leased by BP in the Gulf of Mexico — the latest in a series of workplace disasters to hit the company — threatens to escalate into the worst man-made environmental catastrophe in American history. Internal company e-mails and other documents reveal that BP failed to maintain critical safety procedures for its other rigs in the gulf. (Photo courtesy World News Network)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Tuesday, May 4, 2010)

By JASON LEOPOLD

Truthout

(Republished under a Creative Commons license)

A former contractor who worked for BP Plc claims the British oil conglomerate broke federal workplace-safety laws and violated its own internal procedures by failing to maintain crucial safety and engineering documents related to one of the firm’s other deep-water production projects in the Gulf of Mexico, according to internal e-mails and other documents obtained by the online news service Truthout.

The whistleblower, whose name has been withheld at his request because the contractor still works in the oil industry and fears retaliation, first raised concerns about safety issues related to BP Atlantis, the world’s largest and deepest semi-submersible oil and natural gas platform, located about 200 miles south of New Orleans, in November 2008.

It was then that the whistleblower, who was hired to oversee the company’s databases that housed documents related to its BP Atlantis project, discovered that the drilling platform had been operating without a majority of the engineer-approved documents it needed to run safely, leaving the platform vulnerable to a catastrophic disaster that would far surpass the massive oil spill that began April 20 following a deadly explosion on a BP-operated drilling rig.

BP Atlantis, which began production in October 2007, has the capacity to produce about 8.4 million gallons of oil and 180 million cubic feet of natural gas per day.

BP CEO BLAMES RIG OWNER FOR EXPLOSION, LEAK

Confronted with the staggering cost of cleaning up the massive oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico — as well the likelihood of multi-million-dollar lawsuits — the head of BP insisted Monday that the owner of the Deepwater Horizon rig that exploded and sank April 20 is responsible for the failure of a device that was designed to prevent such a catastrophe.

In an interview on NBC’s “Today” show, BP Group CEO Tony Hayward said that while BP was taking responsibility for cleaning up the leak, the accident that triggered the disaster was the fault of the rig’s owner, Transocean.

“It wasn’t our accident, but we are absolutely responsible for the oil, for cleaning it up, and that’s what we intend to do,” Hayward said. “That rig was run by their [Transocean’s] people, their processes.”

Transocean refused to comment on Hayward’s allegations. Guy Cantwell, a Transocean spokesman, said that his company “will await all the facts before drawing conclusions and we will not speculate.”

E-MAILS SHOW BP OFFICIALS KNEW OF DANGER TO ITS GULF RIGS

BP’s own internal communications show that company officials were made aware of the issue and feared that the document shortfalls related to Atlantis “could lead to catastrophic operator error” and must be addressed.

Indeed, according to an August 15, 2008, e-mail sent to BP officials by Barry Duff, a member of BP’s deep-water Gulf of Mexico Atlantis subsea team, the piping and instrument diagrams (PIDs) for the Atlantis subsea components “are not complete” and “there are hundreds if not thousands of subsea documents that have never been finalized, yet the facilities have been” up and running.

PID documents form the foundation of a hazards analysis BP is required under the federal Occupational Safety and Health Act to undertake as part of its safety and environmental management program related to its offshore drilling operations. The drawings provide the schematic details of the project’s piping and process flows, valves and safety critical instrumentation.

‘CATASTROPHIC OPERATOR ERRORS’ LIKELY

Duff’s e-mail to company officials Bill Naseman and William Broman warned that “The risk in turning over drawings that are not complete are [that] the operator will assume the drawings are accurate and up to date. This could lead to catastrophic operator errors due to their assuming the drawing is correct.

“Turning over incomplete drawings to the operator for their use,” the e-mail continued, “is a fundamental violation of basic document control, [internal standards] and process safety regulations.”

BP officials did not respond to repeated requests by Truthout for comment. Despite the claims that BP did not maintain proper documentation related to Atlantis, federal regulators authorized an expansion of the drilling project.

REVIEW BY OUTSIDE CONSULTANT IN 2009 FINDS MOST PROCEDURES WERE UNAPPROVED

A year ago, Mike Sawyer, a Texas-based engineer who works for Apex Safety Consultants, voluntarily agreed to evaluate BP’s Atlantis subsea document database and the whistleblower’s allegations regarding BP’s engineering document shortfall related to Atlantis.

Sawyer concluded that of the 2,108 PIDs BP maintained that dealt specifically with the subsea components of its Atlantis production project, 85 percent did not receive engineer approval.

Even worse, 95 percent of Atlantis’ subsea welding records did not receive final approval, calling into question the integrity of thousands of crucial welds on subsea components that, if they were to rupture, could result in an oil spill 30 times worse than the one triggered by the April 20 explosion on Deepwater Horizon.

In a report Sawyer prepared after his review, he said BP’s “widespread pattern of unapproved design, testing and inspection documentation on the Atlantis subsea project creates a risk of a catastrophic incident threatening the [Gulf of Mexico] deep-water environment and the safety of platform workers.” Moreover, “the extent of documentation discrepancies creates a substantial risk that a catastrophic event could occur at any time.”

‘SUBSTANTIAL RISK OF LARGE-SCALE DAMAGE’ TO ENVIRONMENT DUE TO ‘BP’S RECKLESSNESS’

“There is no valid engineering justification for these violations and shortcuts,” he added.

Sawyer explained that the documents in question — welding records, inspections and safety shutdown logic materials — are “extremely critical to the safe operation of the platform and its subsea components.” He said the safety shutdown logic drawings on BP Atlantis, a complex computerized system that, during emergencies, is supposed to send a signal to automatically shut down the flow of oil, were listed as “requiring update.”

“BP’s recklessness in regards to the Atlantis project is a clear example of how the company has a pattern of failing to comply with minimum industry standards for worker and environmental safety,” Sawyer said.

The oil spill now blanketing roughly 4,000 square miles in the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon explosion that killed 11 workers was exacerbated, preliminary reports suggest, by the failure of a blowout preventer to shut off the flow of oil on the drilling rig and the lack of a backup safety measure, known as a remote-control acoustic shut-off switch, to operate the blowout preventer.

Representative Henry Waxman (D-California), chairman of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, sent a letter Thursday to BP Chairman and President Lamar McKay seeking documents related to inspections on Deepwater Horizon conducted this year and BP’s policy on using acoustic shut off switches in the Gulf of Mexico.

The circumstances behind the spill are now the subject of a federal investigation.

GULF RIG EXPLOSION IS LATEST IN LONG HISTORY OF BP DISASTERS

Whether it’s the multiple oil spills that emanated from BP’s Prudhoe Bay operations in Alaska’s North Slope or the March 2005 explosion at the company’s Texas City, Texas refinery that killed 15 employees and injured 170 people, BP’s critics have long accused the company of having consistently put profits ahead of safety.

On October 25, 2007, BP pleaded guilty to a criminal violation of the Clean Water Act and paid a $20 million fine related to two separate oil spills that occurred in Alaska’s North Slope in March and August of 2006, the result of a severely corroded pipeline and a safety valve failure.

BP formally entered a guilty plea in federal court on November 29, 2007. U.S. District Court Judge Ralph Beistline sentenced BP to three years probation and said oil spills were a “serious crime” that could have been prevented if BP had spent more time and funds investing in pipeline upgrades and a “little less emphasis on profit.”

Also on October 25, 2007, BP paid a $50 million fine and pleaded guilty to a felony in the 2005 Texas City refinery explosion. An investigation into that incident concluded that a warning system was not working and that BP sidestepped its own internal regulations for operating the tower. Moreover, BP has a prior felony conviction for improperly disposing of hazardous waste.

BP REPEATEDLY FINED FOR VIOLATIONS OF SAFETY PROCEDURES

In 2007, the federal Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service (MMS), the agency that monitors offshore drilling practices, fined BP $41,000 for not properly training employees in well-control management related to a near-blowout due to a rise in gas pressure on the Ocean King Rig in the Mediterranean off the coast of Croatia five years earlier that forced the evacuation of all 65 workers for two days and halted drilling for a week.

According to the MMS, Diamond Offshore Drilling, the Houston-based owner-operator of the rig, and BP did not know that the critical safety procedures they employed to try and stop the increase in gas pressure on the Ocean King Rig could also have caused a blowout.

The environmental publication Clean Skies [which erroneously located the Ocean King Rig in the Gulf of Mexico] reported that the MMS “cited BP for what it called ‘no formal procedures’ and ‘no written guideline’ to follow in case of an emergency. The MMS also cited BP and contract workers in the incident for what they said was a ‘lack of knowledge of the system, and lack of pre-event planning and procedures.'”

In separate incidents, “BP was also fined $75,000 in 2003 for not having adequate water pressure on one rig’s fire protection system as well as another $80,000 fine for bypassing safety alarms that could have indicated dangerously high pressure, similar to what caused the near-blowout in 2002,” according to MMS data cited by Clean Skies in a recent report.

BP IGNORED REPEATED WARNINGS OF SAFETY VIOLATIONS SINCE 1999

The incident involving Deepwater Horizon may end up being the latest example of BP’s safety practices run amok.

The issues related to the repeated spills in Prudhoe Bay and elsewhere were revealed by more than 100 whistleblowers who, since as far back as 1999, said the company failed to take seriously their warnings about shoddy safety practices and instead retaliated against whistleblowers who registered complaints with their superiors.

In September 2006, days before BP executives were scheduled to testify before Congress about an oil spill from a ruptured pipeline that forced the company to shutdown its Prudhoe Bay operations, BP announced that it had tapped Stanley Sporkin, a former federal judge, to serve as an ombudsman and take complaints from employees about the company’s operations.

It was Sporkin to whom the whistleblower complained via e-mail about issues related to BP’s Atlantis operations in March 2009, a month after his contract was abruptly terminated. The whistleblower believes his termination was directly related to his complaints to management about BP’s failure to obtain the engineering documents on Atlantis and to his defense of “a female employee who was being discriminated against and harassed.”

WHISTLEBLOWER: BP DIDN’T WANT TO SPEND $2M TO SECURE SAFETY DOCUMENTS

The whistleblower alleged that the $2 million price tag was the primary reason BP did not follow through with a plan formulated months earlier to secure the documents.

“We prepared a plan to remedy this situation but it met much resistance and complaints from the above lead engineers on the project,” the whistleblower wrote in a March 4, 2009, e-mail to Pasha Eatedali of the BP ombudsman’s office.

Additionally, the whistleblower hired an attorney and contacted both the Interior Department’s inspector general and the MMS, telling officials there that BP lacked the required engineer-certified documents related to the major components of the Atlantis subsea gas and oil operation.

In 2007, the MMS had approved the construction of an additional well and another drilling center on Atlantis. But the whistleblower alleged in his March 4, 2009, e-mail to Eatedali that documents related to this project needed to ensure operational safety were missing and that amounted to a violation of federal law as well as a breach of BP’s Atlantis Project execution plan. The ombudsman’s office agreed to investigate.

BP ACCUSED OF NOT FULLY COOPERATING WITH FEDERAL PROBE

The MMS, acting on the whistleblower’s complaints, contacted BP on June 30, 2009, seeking specific engineering related documents. BP complied with the request three weeks later.

On July 9, 2009, the MMS requested that BP turn over certification documents for its subsurface safety valves and surface-controlled subsea safety valves for all operational wells in the Atlantis field. MMS officials flew out to the platform on the same day and secured the documents, according to an internal letter written by Karen Westall, the managing attorney on BP’s Gulf of Mexico legal team.

But according to the public advocacy group Food & Water Watch, a Washington, DC-based nonprofit, which became involved in the case last July, BP did not turn over a complete set of materials to the MMS.

“BP only turned over ‘as-built’ drawings for [Atlantis’] topsides and hull, despite the fact that the whistleblower’s allegations have always been about whether BP maintains complete and accurate engineer-approved documents for its subsea components,” Food & Water Watch said in a 19-page letter it sent to William Hauser, the head of the MMS’ regulations and standards branch.

During two visits to the Atlantis drilling platform last August and September, MMS inspectors reviewed BP’s blowout preventer records. Food & Water Watch said they believe MMS inspectors reviewed the test records and failed to look into the whistleblower’s charges that engineering documents were missing. The blowout preventer, however, is an issue at the center of the Deepwater Horizon spill.

An MMS spokesperson did not return calls for comment.

Last October, Food & Water Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act request for expedited processing, seeking documents from the MMS that indicate BP “has in its possession a complete and accurate set of ‘as-built’ drawings … for its entire Atlantis Project, including the subsea sector.”

“As-built” means lead engineers on a specific project have to make sure updated technical documents match the “as-built” condition of equipment before its used.

The MMS denied the FOIA request. In a response letter dated October 30, 2009, the agency wrote that it “does not agree with your assessment of the potential for imminent danger to individuals or the environment, for which you premise your argument [for expedited response]. After a thorough review of these allegations, the MMS, with concurrence of the Solicitor’s Office, concludes your claims are not supported by the facts or the law.”

The MMS said that although some of its regulatory requirements governing offshore oil and gas operations do require “as-built” drawings, they need not be complete or accurate and, furthermore, are irrelevant to a hazard analysis BP was required to complete.

Unsatisfied with the MMS’ response, Food & Water Watch contacted Representative Raul Grijalva (D-Arizona), a member of the House Committee on Natural Resources and chairman of the Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands, about the issues revolving around BP’s Atlantis operations and provided his office with details of its own investigation into the matter.

BP ATTORNEY: ALLEGATIONS AGAINST COMPANY ‘UNSUBSTANTIATED’

On January 15, Westall, the BP attorney, wrote a letter to Deborah Lanzone, the staff director with the House Subcommittee on Energy and Minerals, to address the allegations leveled by Food & Water Watch as well as indirect claims made by the whistleblower.

Westall said BP “reviewed the allegations” related to “noncompliant documentation of the Atlantis project … and found them to be unsubstantiated.”

Westall noted in her letter that “all eight BP-operated Gulf of Mexico production facilities” received safety awards from MMS in 2009.

“Maintenance and general housekeeping were rated outstanding and personnel were most cooperative in assisting in the inspection activities,” MMS said about BP’s Gulf of Mexico drilling facilities. “Platform records were readily available for review and maintained to reflect current conditions.”

Westall maintained that the whistleblower as well as Food & Water Watch had it all wrong. Their charges about missing documents has nothing to do with Atlantis’ operational safety. Rather, Westall seemed to characterize their complaints as a clerical issue.

Westall said in her letter to Lanzone. “The [August 15, 2008] e-mail [written by Duff] which was provided to you to support [Food & Water Watch’s] allegations relates to the status of efforts to utilize a particular document management system to house and maintain the Atlantis documents. The document database includes engineering drawings for future phases, as well as components or systems which may have been modified, replaced, or not used.”

ATTORNEY’S RESPONSE CONTRADICTS BP’S OWN OMBUDSMAN

But Westall’s response directly contradicts the findings of Billie Pirner Garde, BP’s deputy ombudsman, who wrote in an April 13 e-mail to the whistleblower that his claims that BP failed to maintain proper documentation related to Atlantis “were substantiated” and “addressed by a BP Management of Change document.”

Garde did not say when that change occurred. But he added that the whistleblower’s complaints weren’t “unique” and had been raised by other employees “before you worked there, while you were there and after you left.”

CONGRESSMAN UNIMPRESSED WITH BP AND DEMANDS ANSWERS

Congressman Grijalva was not swayed by Westall’s denials. He continued to press the issue with the MMS, and in February, he and 18 other lawmakers signed a letter calling on the MMS to probe whether BP “is operating its Atlantis offshore oil platform … without professionally approved safety documents.”

Grijalva wrote that the MMS has not “done enough so far to ensure worker and environmental safety at the site, in part because it has interpreted the relevant laws too loosely.”

“[C]ommunications between [the] MMS and congressional staff have suggested that while the company by law must maintain ‘as-built’ documents, there is no requirement that such documents be complete or accurate,” Grijalva wrote.

“This statement, if an accurate interpretation of MMS authorities, raises serious concerns” and requires “a thorough review at the agency level, the legal level and the corporate level,” Grijalva continued. “The world’s largest oil rig cannot continue to operate without safety documentation. The situation is unacceptable and deserves immediate scrutiny.

“We also request that [the] MMS describe how a regulation that requires offshore operators to maintain certain engineering documents, but does not require that those documents be complete or accurate, is appropriately protective of human health and the environment,” the letter concluded.

On March 26, the MMS launched a formal investigation and is expected to file a report detailing its findings next month.

Zach Corrigan, a senior attorney with Food & Water Watch, said in an interview with Truthout on Thursday that he hopes MMS “will perform a real investigation” and if the agency fails to do so, Congress should immediately hold oversight hearings “and ensure that the explosion and mishap of the Horizon platform is not replicated.”

“MMS didn’t act on this for nearly a year,” Corrigan said. “They seemed to think it wasn’t a regulatory or an important safety issue. Atlantis is a real vulnerability.”

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Special Report Copyright 2010, Truthout. Republished under a Creative Commons license.

The ‘Skeeter Bites Report Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

Republican Chairman Michael Steele’s Admission That the Party of Lincoln Betrayed African-Americans by ‘Focusing on the White Male Vote in the South’ for 40-Plus Years Predictably Draws Fire From White GOP Conservatives, But the Republicans Are Still Using Their ‘Southern Strategy’ — This Time Against Hispanic Americans

Demonstrators hold up a giant American flag during a mass demonstration in support of comprehensive immigration reform on the National Mall in Washington in March. In an extraordinary admission, Republican National Chairman Michael Steele acknowledged that his party — founded in 1854 as an anti-slavery party — betrayed African-American voters in 1968 by openly appealing to conservative Southern whites opposed to the civil rights movement. But the party’s infamous “Southern Strategy” is far from dead. With GOP-dominated Arizona’s newly-enacted crackdown on illegal immigrants, combined with incendiary anti-Latino rhetoric by several prominent Republicans on the immigration issue, the GOP is now running a serious risk of permanently alienating Hispanic Americans — the nation’s fastest-growing voting bloc. (Photo: Ryan Roderick Beiler/Sojourners Magazine)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Tuesday, April 27, 2010)

By SKEETER SANDERS

An extraordinary thing happened in Chicago last Tuesday night.

In a speech at DePaul University, Michael Steele, the Republican Party’s first African-American national chairman, told some 200 students that black voters “really don’t have a reason” to vote for Republicans.

“We [Republicans] haven’t done a very good job of really giving you one,” he said.

In a remarkably candid assessment of his party’s standing with black voters, Steele told his audience that the GOP had lost sight of “the historic, integral link between the party and African-Americans.”

Noting that the Republican Party was founded in Ripon, Wisconsin in 1854 by anti-slavery activists, “This party was co-founded by blacks, among them Frederick Douglass,” Steele said. “The Republican Party had a hand in forming the NAACP, and yet we have mistreated that relationship. People don’t walk away from parties, Their parties walk away from them.”

CONSERVATIVES BLAST STEELE — FOR TELLING THE TRUTH

Steele’s candor didn’t sit well with a number of conservatives. In an e-mail to Washington Post blogger David Weigel, conservative economist Bruce Bartlett slammed Steele’s remarks as “his biggest gaffe so far.”

Bartlett acknowledged that “The term ‘Southern strategy’ is such a loaded term, like ‘states’ rights,’ that it’s hard to use it without conveying a certain racial stereotype. The fact that Steele used that term is, therefore, significant in and of itself.”

“Ironically,” Bartlett noted, “the Voting Rights Act is what made it possible for Republicans to compete in the South. Once blacks could no longer be kept from voting in primaries [where winning the Democratic nomination was tantamount to election], there was no longer any reason for whites to remain Democrats. Many found the Republican Party more attractive. Of course, the national party reached out to them, but the idea that they used racial code words like ‘law and order’ is nonsense. . .”

Bartlett said he thought that it was “too bad that Steele gave Democrats reason to believe that their distorted vision of how Republicans came to dominate the South is correct. It may be his biggest gaffe so far.”

Greg Alexander, a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise institute think tank, was even more dismissive in his own e-mail to Weigel. “For four decades, national GOP strategists and candidates have certainly valued Southern white voters,” Alexander wrote. “At the margins, that’s meant accommodating them on some racial issues. But notice that Nixon did not repeal and instead enforced the ’64 [Civil Rights] Act, did not ‘retreat’ on school desegregation nearly the way he has been indicted for doing, and launched affirmative action and minority business contracting as we now know them.”

BLACK REPUBLICANS DID HAVE A HAND IN FOUNDING THE NAACP  

Steele was historically inaccurate about Frederick Douglass. He wasn’t a co-founder of the GOP, but he was a staunch supporter of the party until his death in 1895 and often conferred with President Abraham Lincoln — and even his Democratic successor, Andrew Johnson — on the treatment of black U.S. soldiers during and after the Civil War.

But Steele was right about Republicans having a hand in the founding of the NAACP. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the nation’s oldest civil-rights organization, was co-founded on February 12, 1909 — the centennial anniversary of Lincoln’s birth — by several prominent black Republicans, including W.E.B. DuBois, Ida B. Wells and Archibald Grimke.

The NAACP was founded six months after a deadly race riot in Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield, Illinois in 1908, in which angry white mobs attacked and burned the city’s black residential and business district to the ground, killing scores of the city’s black residents.

BLACKS REMAINED LOYAL TO THE GOP — UNTIL AFTER WORLD WAR II

For nearly a century after its founding, African-Americans were the Republican Party’s most loyal voting constituency. This was, after all, the party of the “Great Emancipator.” The fact that the Democratic Party was far from friendly to blacks — especially in the Deep South, where Democrats wrote, passed and strictly enforced the region’s blatantly racist “Jim Crow” segregation laws — didn’t leave African-American voters (That is, those outside the South who could vote) much of a choice.

Things began to change in 1947, when President Harry S. Truman, a Democrat, issued an executive order to desegregate the Army and introduced civil-rights legislation to Congress the following year. This resulted in conservative southern white delegates walking out of the 1948 Democratic National Convention in protest. The southerners later formed the States’ Rights Party — which came to be known as the “Dixiecrats” — with South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond as its presidential nominee.

By the 1960s, the Democratic Party was a house bitterly divided — pitting northern liberals against southern conservatives — over civil rights for African-Americans. It took the support of Republicans in Congress, mostly northern and midwestern liberals and moderates, to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

President Lyndon Johnson, a southerner from Texas, confided to his aide, Bill Moyers (now a prominent TV newsman and commentator) after signing these two landmark bills into law, that “We’ve lost the South for a generation.”

By “we,” Johnson meant his Democratic Party. But what Johnson didn’t anticipate was that the Republicans were about to lose Black America for a generation — and longer — when Barry Goldwater won the GOP nomination in 1964. Goldwater voted against both the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act (which he publicly regretted years later).

The damage to the GOP’s standing with African-Americans had only just begun.

A TOTAL REVERSAL OF FORTUNE FOR BOTH MAJOR PARTIES      

Enter Richard Nixon. In a bold and determined comeback bid eight years after losing his first run for the White House to John F. Kennedy in 1960, Nixon devised an electoral strategy for victory in 1968 that forever altered the character of the Republican Party — and turned the fortunes of both major parties completely upside-down.

It was a formula best described by Kevin Phillips, a top Nixon campaign strategist, in a 1970 interview with The New York Times: “From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the [African-American] vote and they don’t need any more than that… but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act.

“The more [blacks] who register as Democrats in the South,” Phillips continued, “the sooner the [anti-black] whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.”

NOW REPUBLICANS RISK LOSING LATINOS OVER IMMIGRATION

But after more than four decades — and despite the election of a black man as its national chairman — the Republicans’ “Southern Strategy” is still very much alive and now threatens to alienate another entire segment of the electorate: Hispanic Americans.

Unlike blacks, however, Latinos are the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population — and of the electorate. A recently-released study of U.S. Census Bureau data by the University of New Hampshire predicts that non-white births will likely outpace white births sometime this year — and that the Latino birth rate already is outpacing the white birth rate in the Southwest, particularly California.

Republicans in California have been paying a devastatingly high political price ever since they pushed through Proposition 187, a 1994 ballot initiative designed to prohibit illegal immigrants from using the state’s social services, health care, and public education.

The measure, introduced by Republican state Assemblyman Dick Mountjoy and strongly backed by Republican Governor Pete Wilson, passed with 59 percent of the vote — only to be struck down by the federal courts on the grounds that immigration is the exclusive domain of the federal government.

With the California Republican Party having so strongly backed Prop. 187, Hispanic voters — who now comprise 40 percent of the state’s electorate — have severely punished Republicans at the ballot box, handing control of both houses of the legislature and four of the five top statewide offices to the Democrats in every statewide election since Prop. 187 passed.

In that same period, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger — a moderate who is himself an immigrant from Austria — is the only Republican who’s escaped Latino voters’ wrath and win a statewide race in California.

IMMIGRATION ISSUE TRIGGERS A REVOLT INSIDE GOP THAT BURNS BUSH

The debate over illegal immigration proved too hot for Republican President George W. Bush to handle. For Bush — who has a sister-in-law and two nieces who are Latina — the issue became personal. He lobbied hard for Congress in 1997 to pass a comprehensive immigration-reform bill that would pave the way for many of the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants living in the U.S. to become legal residents.

But an open revolt by conservatives in his own party sank the measure.

In one of his last interviews before leaving office, Bush warned his fellow Republicans not to turn the GOP into an “anti-immigrant party.” Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” Bush said the GOP “should be open-minded about big issues like immigration reform, because if we’re viewed as anti-somebody — in other words, if the party is viewed as anti-immigrant — then another fellow may say, ‘Well, if they’re against the immigrant, they may be against me.'”

But Bush’s warning to his fellow Republicans has apparently fallen on deaf ears.

OUTRAGE OVER NEW ANTI-IMMIGRANT LAW IN ARIZONA

Last week, Arizona’s Republican governor, Jan Brewer, signed into law a measure passed by the GOP-controlled legislature which allows police to question and detain anyone in the state they believe may be an illegal immigrant.

Critics of the new law warn that it would lead to widespread discrimination against Latinos, including Mexican-Americans, who make up nearly a third of the state’s population, according to 2007 American Community Survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Police in Phoenix reported Monday that vandals smeared refried beans into the shape of a Nazi swastika onto the glass doors of the state Capitol building. Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon, a sharp critic of the new law, accused many supporters of the measure as being not just misguided but also racist.

“It’s just morally wrong,” Gordon, a Democrat, told CBS News Monday. “This country is not about having people wear arm bands with Jewish stars or in this case, Hispanic brown symbols.”

Gordon branded the law “clearly unconstitutional.”

GOP FACES HUGE LATINO BACKLASH AT THE BALLOT BOX

The Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) has vowed to challenge the measure in court. And — in a possible repeat of what happened in California — Latino community and political groups across the state have vowed an all-out campaign to oust Republican lawmakers who voted in favor of it.

Even a Fox News analyst openly warned that the new law will be “a disaster for Arizona” and trigger a huge backlash against Republicans by Latino voters.

Appearing Friday on “Your World with Neal Cavuto,” Napolitano, a former federal judge, bluntly warned that “Hispanics — who have a natural home in the Republican Party because they are socially conservative — will flee [the GOP] in droves.”

The new law is “gonna bankrupt the Republican Party and the state of Arizona,” Napolitano predicted. “Look at what happened to the Republicans in California with Proposition 187!”

Napolitano added that the measure “is so unconstitutional that I predict a federal judge will prevent Arizona from enforcing it as soon as they attempt to do so.”

# # #

Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

New Demographic Survey Finds Tea Party Movement Is Essentially the GOP’s Voter Base: Affluent, Overwhelmingly White, Predominantly Male, Mostly Middle-Aged and Older, Fiercely Conservative — and, At Only 18 Percent of the Electorate, More Likely to Wreak Havoc in the Spring Republican Primaries Than in the November General Election

Tea Party protesters march through Washington,  D.C. last September. Strong anecdotal evidence, based on attendance at its rallies across the country, that the Tea Party movement does not represent a broad demographic cross-section of the American electorate were confirmed last week by a new survey of the movement by The New York Times and CBS News that found that Tea Party supporters are overwhelmingly white, predominantly male, middle-aged and older, fiercely conservative and heavily Republican — essentially the GOP’s electoral base. The survey also found that the Tea Party movement, which comprises less than a fifth of the total nationwide electorate (18 percent), is economically more affluent than the general U.S. population. (Photo: Aaron Wiener/The Washington Independent)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Tuesday, April 20, 2010)

By SKEETER SANDERS

Who’s afraid of the big, bad Tea Party movement?

If you guessed the Democrats, you’d be dead wrong. On the contrary, it’s the Republicans who need to be worried.

A new demographic survey of the Tea Party movement released last week by The New York Times and CBS News confirms what many observers of Tea Party rallies have said anecdotally about the movement: That it does not represent a broad cross-section of the American electorate, let alone a majority.

To the contrary, the movement more closely resembles the electoral base of today’s Republican Party: Overwhelmingly white (89 percent), predominantly male (59 percent), mostly middle-aged and older (75 percent) and fiercely conservative (73 percent).

And while a separate poll by the Pew Center for the People and the Press released Monday shows that 80 percent of Americans overall are highly critical of government, a clear partisan divide exists over whether the public considers the government to be a threat to them.

More Republicans (30 percent) than Democrats (nine percent) and independents (25 percent) are angry with government, the Pew survey found, with 43 percent of Republicans, 18 percent of Democrats and 33 percent of independents believe the government is a threat to them.

Significantly, the Pew study found, independents who lean Republican are far more hostile toward government (37 percent angry, 50 percent feeling threatened) than independents who lean Democratic (15 percent angry, 21 percent feeling threatened).

Tea Party supporters are by far the most angry and hostile toward government, with 43 percent of Tea Party supporters angry and a stunning 57 percent of them feeling threatened.

REPUBLICANS IN CONGRESS FARING WORSE THAN DEMOCRATS — BUT NOT BY MUCH

Chief reasons for the ill feelings are economic fears wrought by the recession and high unemployment and frustration with the partisan gridlock in Washington — the latter of which has resulted in record-high negative ratings for Congress.

Only 40 percent of Democrats have faith in their elected representatives in Congress, the lowest positive rating by the majority party in the history of the Pew survey. But the GOP fares worse, with only 37 percent of Republicans expressing faith in their congressional representatives.

This is bad news for the GOP, for it means that the Tea Party movement, rather than pose a threat to Democrats in next fall’s midterm elections, is more likely to wreak havoc in the upcoming Republican primaries this spring — most of which are closed to independent voters.

The likely result is a Republican Party going into the November election saddled with hard-line right-wing nominees sure, particularly in Senate races, to turn off moderate voters — whose support is absolutely vital in order for the minority party to win back control of Congress.

Already, two GOP stalwarts — Florida Governor Charlie Crist and Arizona Senator John McCain — are in serious danger of suffering humiliating primary defeats at the hands of Tea Party-backed insurgents.

Crist has fallen behind conservative Florida House speaker Marco Rubio in the GOP primary and is reported to be seriously considering running as an independent in November. McCain — the 2008 GOP presidential nominee — is fighting for his political life against right-wing radio talk-show host J.D. Hayworth, with a new Rasmussen Poll showing McCain leading Hayworth by only five points, 47-42 percent, down from a 48-41 percent lead in March.

SCORES OF TEA PARTIERS MOUNTING STIFF PRIMARY CHALLENGES TO GOP REGULARS

Crist and McCain are far from alone. Scores of other GOP incumbents and party establishment-backed Republican candidates in open races are also confronting right-wing Tea Party-backed primary challengers.

In Kentucky, Tea Party-backed candidate Rand Paul, the 47-year-old son of Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas), is favored to win the state’s May 18 GOP Senate primary against GOP establishment candidate Trey Grayson, the Kentucky secretary of state. “There’s a Tea Party tidal wave coming, and when it comes, it’s going to sweep a lot of people out,” Grayson told the McClatchy Newspapers.

In the Democratic primary, state Attorney General Jack Conway is battling Lieutenant Governor Daniel Mongiardo. Recent polls show Conway and Mongiardo running neck and neck, while Paul holds a commanding 15-point lead over Grayson.

State Republican leaders fear that a primary victory by Paul — who’s considerably to the right of Grayson — could lead to a loss of the Senate seat now held by the retiring Jim Bunning to the Democratic nominee in the fall election. Bunning has endorsed Paul. Grayson was endorsed by former Vice President Dick Cheney as “the real conservative” in the race.

Even Fox News — now embroiled in a conflict-of-interest scandal involving talk-show host Sean Hannity’s open promotion of a Tea Party event he planned to participate in, only pull out at the last minute on the orders of Fox News executives — has, ironically, taken note of the growing Tea Party threat to the Republicans.

Appearing on Glenn Beck’s program in March, former Bush political guru Karl Rove said that “The Republican Party, like any party that doesn’t control the White House, will not have a single voice or a single leader until the 2012 presidential election, and frankly, I don’t want one person [in that position] now.”

Beck expressed his fear that the Tea Party movement could ultimately coalesce into a third major political party in its own right — at the GOP’s expense. Noting that independents now outnumber both Democrats and Republicans, “I think that having a third party — it could be a nightmare [for the Republicans],” he said. “There are so many conservatives who are saying ‘Please, Republicans, get your stuff together!'”

SURVEY FINDS NEAR-TOTAL LACK OF DIVERSITY IN TEA PARTY MOVEMENT    

Only one percent of Tea Party members are African-American, Times/CBS News survey found  — a figure much lower than the four percent of blacks who identify as Republicans. Ditto for Asian-Americans. The survey did not specifically identify Latinos in the movement, instead listing six percent of Tea Party members as “other.”

Given the incendiary anti-Latino and anti-immigrant rhetoric by former Representative Tom Tancredo (R-Colorado) at the recent Tea Party convention in Nashville (Not to mention a fiercely personal attack by Tancredo on President Obama at a Tea Party rally in South Carolina that’s been roundly condemned as racist) — as well as extremely inflammatory rhetoric and signs at other Tea Party protests in recent months — it’s easy to see why blacks and Latinos are, for the most part, shunning the movement like the plague.

More than a third of Tea Party members hail from the Deep South — where support for the GOP and opposition to Obama is strongest. Not surprisingly, Tea Partiers are far more hostile toward the president than the electorate as a whole.  Only seven percent of Tea Party supporters approve of the president’s job performance (compared to 50 percent of voters overall), while a whopping 88 percent of Tea Partiers disapprove (compared to 40 percent of voters overall).

SURVEY REVEALS SHARP CLASS DIVIDE BETWEEN TEA PARTIERS, VOTERS IN GENERAL

Significantly, the survey found that Tea Party members are more affluent economically than the nation as a whole, with more than half earning more than $50,000 a year and a fifth earning more than $100,000 a year. Twelve percent of Tea Party supporters earn more than $250,000 a year — precisely the income brackets whose taxes are going up, while everyone earning less than that are seeing their taxes go down.

In sharp contrast, the survey found, voters in general were considerably less affluent than Tea Party supporters. While 35 percent of Tea Partiers earned less than $50,000 a year, nearly half of voters in general (48 percent) fall into that category. Only 25 percent of voters in general earn more than $100,000 a year compared to the 32 percent of Tea Partiers in that category.  

The Times/CBS News survey found several telltale signs of class bias: While 54 percent of voters in general said that raising taxes on those earning more than $250,000 a year was a good idea, a whopping 80 percent of Tea Party supporters said it was a bad idea.

And while voters in general were evenly divided on whether the Obama administration favors the poor or treats all classes equally (27 percent each), Tea Party supporters were quite adamant (56 percent) in their belief that the administration favored the poor. Only nine percent of Tea Party supporters felt the administration was treating all classes equally.

OTHER SHARP DIFFERENCES BETWEEN TEA PARTIERS, GENERAL ELECTORATE

The figures stand in sharp contrast to voters in general in the Times/CBS News poll, 77 percent of whom identify as white, 12 percent black, three percent Asian and seven percent “other” (presumably Latino).

Fifty-one percent of voters in general are women, while 49 percent are men. In terms of age, the general electorate is evenly split, 50-50, between those under 45 and those over 45.

While 73 percent of Tea Party supporters identify as conservative, only 34 percent of voters in general do. Thirty-eight percent of voters in general identify themselves as moderate (compared to only 20 percent of Tea Party supporters) and 20 percent of voters in general identify as liberal (compared to only four percent of Tea Party supporters).

At Tea Party rallies across the country, activists have boldly asserted that their movement represents “the majority of the American people.” But the Times/CBS News survey shows that only 18 percent of Americans identify with the Tea Party movement.

And with Tea Party supporters coming largely from the ranks of Republicans — who themselves constitute only 23 percent of the electorate — it’s difficult to see how this movement can pose a threat to the Democrats in November, especially if, for the rest of this year, the economy picks up and joblessness goes down.

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Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

Little-Noticed Items in FY2011 Budget Call For, Among Other Things, Millions to be Spent on New Arms Sales, Programs to Beef Up Anti-Terror Efforts in Africa and to Professionalize Continent’s Military Officer Corps

Training: An unidentified U.S. soldier (left) directs Mali army troops during a training exercise. Mali is one of nine African nations whose armies are being trained to combat al-Qaida by U.S. forces. The training is part of an overall expansion of U.S. military assistance to Africa — including arms sales and training programs — in the 15 months since President Obama took office. (Photo: Luc Gnago/Reuters)  

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Tuesday, April 13, 2010)

By DANIEL VOLMAN

Inter-Press Service

When President Obama took office 15 months ago, it was widely expected that he would dramatically change, or even reverse, the militarized and unilateral security policy that had been pursued by the Bush administration toward Africa, as well as toward other parts of the world.

After more than a year in office, however, it is clear that the Obama administration is following essentially the same policy that has guided U.S. military policy toward Africa for more than a decade. Indeed, the Obama administration is seeking to expand U.S. military activities on the continent even further.

In its fiscal year 2011 budget request for security-assistance programs for Africa, the Obama administration is asking for $38 million for the foreign military financing program to pay for U.S. arms sales to African countries.

The administration is also asking for $21 million for the international military education and training program to bring African military officers to the United States, and $24.4 million for anti-terrorism assistance programs in Africa.

U.S. HIKES SUPPLIES OF ARMS TO SOMALI ARMY TO FIGHT INSURGENTS

The Obama administration has also taken a number of other steps in the past year to expand U.S. military involvement in Africa.

Last June, administration officials revealed that Obama had approved a program to supply at least 40 tons of weaponry and provide training to the forces of the transitional government of Somalia through several intermediaries, including Uganda, Burundi, Djibouti, Kenya, and France.

In September, Obama authorized a U.S. Special Forces operation in Somalia that killed Saleh Ali Nabhan, an alleged al-Qaida operative who was accused of being involved in the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998, as well as other al-Qaida operations in east Africa.

In October, the Obama administration announced a major new security assistance package for Mali – valued at 4.5 to 5.0 million dollars – that included 37 Land Cruiser pickup trucks, communication equipment, replacement parts, clothing and other individual equipment and was intended to enhance Mali’s ability to transport and communicate with internal security forces throughout the country and control its borders.

Although ostensibly intended to help Mali deal with potential threats from al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), it is more likely to be used against Tuareg insurgent forces.

PENTAGON CONSIDERING NEW MARINE STRIKE FORCE FOR AFRICA, IF NEEDED

Last December, U.S. military officials confirmed that the Pentagon was considering the creation of a 1,000-strong Marine rapid deployment force for the new U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), based in Europe, which could be used to intervene in African hot spots.

Two months ago, in his testimony before a hearing by the Africa Subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Johnnie Carson declared, “We seek to enhance Nigeria’s role as a U.S. partner on regional security, but we also seek to bolster its ability to combat violent extremism within its borders.”

Also in February, U.S. Special Forces troops began a 30-million-dollar, eight-month-long training programme for a 1,000-man infantry battalion of the army of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) at the U.S.-refurbished base in Kisangani.

Speaking before a Senate Armed Service Committee hearing in March 2010 about this training programme, General William Ward, the commander of AFRICOM, stated “should it prove successful, there’s potential that it could be expanded to other battalions as well.”

During the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Ward also discussed AFRICOM’s continuing participation in Ugandan military operations in the DRC against the Lord’s Resistance Army. Despite the failure of “Operation Lightning Thunder,” launched by Ugandan troops in December 2008 with help of AFRICOM (included planning assistance, equipment, and financial backing), Ward declared, “I think our support to those ongoing efforts is important support.”

And in March 2010, U.S. officials revealed that the Obama administration was considering using surveillance drones to provide intelligence to government troops in Somalia for their planned offensive against al-Shabaab. According to these officials, the Pentagon may also launch air strikes into Somalia and send U.S. Special Forces troops into the country, as it has done in the past.

NEW MOVES REFLECT U.S. EYEING AFRICA AS NEXT BATTLEGROUND AGAINST AL-QAIDA

This growing U.S. military involvement in Africa reflects the fact that counterinsurgency has once again become one of the main elements of U.S. security strategy.

This is clearly evident in the new Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) released by the Pentagon in February.

According to the QDR, “U.S. forces will work with the military forces of partner nations to strengthen their capacity for internal security, and will coordinate those activities with those of other U.S. government agencies as they work to strengthen civilian capacities, thus denying terrorists and insurgents safe havens. For reasons of political legitimacy as well as sheer economic necessity, there is no substitute for professional, motivated local security forces protecting populations threatened by insurgents and terrorists in their midst.”

As the QDR makes clear, this is intended to avoid the need for direct U.S. military intervention: “Efforts that use smaller numbers of U.S. forces and emphasise host-nation leadership are generally preferable to large-scale counterinsurgency campaigns. By emphasising host-nation leadership and employing modest numbers of U.S. forces, the United States can sometimes obviate the need for larger-scale counterinsurgency campaigns.”

Or, as a senior U.S. military officer assigned to AFRICOM was quoted as saying in a recent article in the U.S. Air University’s Strategic Studies Quarterly, “We don’t want to see our guys going in and getting whacked…We want Africans to go in.”

Thus, the QDR goes on to say, “U.S. forces are working in the Horn of Africa, the Sahel, Colombia, and elsewhere to provide training, equipment, and advice to their host-country counterparts on how to better seek out and dismantle terrorist and insurgent networks while providing security to populations that have been intimidated by violent elements in their midst.”

Furthermore, the United States will also continue to expand and improve the network of local military bases that are available to U.S. troops under base access agreements.

The resurgence of Vietnam War-era counterinsurgency doctrine as a principal tenet of U.S. security policy, therefore, has led to a major escalation of U.S. military involvement in Africa by the Obama administration that seems likely to continue in the years ahead.

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Daniel Volman is the Director of the African Security Research Project in Washington. He is the author of numerous articles and reports and has been studying U.S. security policy toward Africa and African security issues for more than 30 years.

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Special Report Copyright 2010, Inter-Press Service. reposted by permission.

Federal Judge Appointed By Bush’s Father Declares NSA Program of Wiretapping Without Court Warrants Violates 1978 FISA Statute — But Ducks Broader Issue of Its Blatant Unconstitutionality Under the Fourth Amendment; Obama’s Refusal to End the Practice Is a Gross Dereliction of His Oath of Office to ‘Preserve, Protect and Defend the Constitution’

A federal judge in California has ruled that the Bush administration’s warrantless electronic surveillance program — which the Obama administration has continued — violates the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by not obtaining warrants from the special court established under the law. But Judge Vaughn Walker — ironically, an appointee of President George W. Bush’s father — did not rule on the broader issue of the program’s unconstitutionality under the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable government searches and seizures, which a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1972 includes electronic eavesdropping by the government without first obtaining court warrants. That President Obama has chosen to continue the warrantless surveillance, rather than comply with the Constitution he is bound by his oath of office to “preserve, protect and defend,” is a disgrace for which he must be held accountable. (Image courtesy textuality.com)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Tuesday, April 6, 2010)

NOTE TO READERS: After being forced into hiatus for two weeks following the break-in of my Gmail account by hackers in China, The ‘Skeeter Bites Report returns to normal publication today (Tuesday), albeit a day later than its longtime Monday publication schedule. Effective today, The ‘Skeeter Bites Report is changing permanently to Tuesday publication. The reason for the change is one of practicality, made at the request of my wife and family: To eliminate the hassle of working under a weekend deadline — particularly during a long holiday weekend. Not to mention heeding the urging of my doctor to reduce my workload and free up my leisure time — a reduction which began 0n January 28 when I ceased publication of The ‘SBR’s Thursday edition. I thank you for your patience during these past two weeks, during which I, in conjunction with Google (which owns Blogger.com, The ‘SBR’s home site), have taken several measures to protect the privacy of my sources and subscribers and to prevent cyber attacks on The ‘SBR site itself.

By SKEETER SANDERS

It’s been 14 months since the administration of President George W. Bush passed out of power, an administration that turned out to be the most authoritarian government in modern American history, marked by a wholesale and repeated disregard for the Constitution that its officers, from Bush on down, were bound by their oaths of office to “preserve, protect and defend.”

Implicit in that oath is also a binding obligation to obey the Constitution and respect the freedoms that the Constitution guarantees to all Americans.

Among the provisions of the Constitution that every government official, from the president on down, is bound to obey is the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits the government from conducting “unreasonable searches and seizures” on U.S. citizens.

Of course, the nation’s founders could not have possibly forseen in the 18th century the rise of electronic communications — let alone the government eavesdropping on the private telephone and Internet communications of Americans without first obtaining a warrant from a court of law — and doing so without probable cause, as the Constitution requires.

To plug that loophole, Congress, acting within its authority to enforce the Fourth Amendment “with appropriate legislation,” passed two statutes to curb such government abuses: The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA) and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 (ECPA). Both statutes require the government to obtain court warrants to eavesdrop on the private electronic communications of U.S. citizens.

The ECPA was amended, and weakened to some extent, by some provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001 that empowered the federal government to compel telecommunications companies to disclose records about their customers through so-called “national security letters” issued by the Justice Department.

A federal court in New York ruled those provisions of the PATRIOT Act unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment and it remains to be seen whether the fight over the warrantless surveillance will eventually end up in the Supreme Court.

But if you thought that the transfer of power from the Bush administration to the Obama administration meant the end of the warrantless surveillance, think again.

The surveillance is still continuing — and incredibly, the Obama administration is insisting in the courts on maintaining the practice, despite clear and overwhelming evidence that it’s unconstitutional and defies the explicit will of Congress when it acted to enforce the Fourth Amendment with appropriate legislation.

BUSH-APPOINTED FEDERAL JUDGE STRIKES DOWN WARRANTLESS PROGRAM

A federal judge ruled last Wednesday that the federal government’s nearly nine-year-old program of electronic surveillance without warrants violates the FISA statute, because the government — in this case, the super-secret National Security Agency — failed to seek required warrants for the surveillance from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees requests by the government for surveillance warrants against suspected foreign intelligence agents and/or terrorists inside the U.S.

In a 45-page ruling, Judge Vaughn Walker, chief judge of the San Francisco-based U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, rejected the Justice Department’s assertion that a now-defunct Muslim charity’s lawsuit be quashed because allowing it to go forward could result in the revelation of “state secrets.”

Judge Walker — ironically, an appointee of President George H.W. Bush — branded the government’s use of the state-secrets privilege an “unfettered executive-branch discretion” that had “obvious potential for governmental abuse and overreaching.” Walker ruled that it was the expressed will of Congress when it passed the FISA statute in 1978 to “specifically to rein in and create a judicial check for executive-branch abuses of surveillance authority.”

SUPREME COURT STRUCK DOWN NIXON PROGRAM IN ’70S

Yet in issuing his decision, Judge Walker — like other federal courts that have similarly ruled against the warrantless wiretaps — failed to cite a unanimous 1972 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that declared a similar program aimed at domestic radicals by the Nixon administration unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment.

Almost from its inception in December 2005 — just days after The New York Times revealed the Bush administration’s warrantless eavesdropping program’s existence — The ‘Skeeter Bites Report has pointed out again and again and again that the Bush program is every bit as unconstitutional as the Nixon program.

Nixon’s Justice Department, under then-Attorney General John Mitchell, had overheard telephone conversations of anti-Vietnam War activists and other domestic radicals “to gather intelligence information deemed necessary to protect the nation from attempts of domestic organizations to attack and subvert the existing structure of government.”

Mitchell argued that the surveillance was lawful, even though it was conducted without prior judicial approval, “as a reasonable exercise of [Nixon’s] power, exercised through [Mitchell], to protect the national security.”

But the nine justices of the nation’s highest court ruled unanimously that the Nixon program violated the Fourth Amendment’s ban on “unreasonable searches and seizures” by the government.

Justice Lewis Powell, writing for the court, declared that “Civil liberties, as guaranteed by the Constitution, imply the existence of an organized society maintaining public order without which liberty itself would be lost in the excesses of unrestrained abuses…

“These Fourth Amendment freedoms cannot properly be guaranteed if domestic security surveillance may be conducted solely within the discretion of the Executive Branch,” Powell continued. “The Fourth Amendment does not contemplate the executive officers of government as neutral and disinterested magistrates. Their duty and responsibility are to enforce the laws, to investigate and to prosecute.

“But those charged with this investigative and prosecutorial duty should not be the sole judges of when to utilize constitutionally sensitive means in pursuing their tasks,” Powell wrote.”The historical judgement, which the Fourth Amendment accepts, is that unreviewed executive discretion may yield too readily to pressure to obtain incriminating evidence and overlook potential invasions of privacy and protected speech.”

APPEALS COURT EXPANDED RULING TO INCLUDE FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE

The high court’s unanimous decision — which covered only domestic intelligence — was bolstered in 1975 by an equally unanimous ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, the nation’s second-highest court, which declared the Fourth Amendment’s ban on warrantless domestic spying also applied to foreign intelligence gathering by the government on U.S. soil.

The seven-member appeals court ruled that even where foreign affairs and national security were involved, the government must obtain court warrants before it can eavesdrop on the communications of domestic organizations or individual U.S. citizens who were neither agents of or collaborators with foreign powers.

One judge on the appeals court disagreed in part with the ruling, in which six of its 11 judges wrote separate but concurring opinions. Nonetheless, based on the appeals court’s unanimity under the Fourth Amendment — which mirrored that of the Supreme Court’s decision three years earlier — the administration of then-President Gerald Ford chose not to appeal to the Supreme Court, apparently fearing that it would lose. Instead, Ford ordered the Justice Department to comply with the court’s decision.

Ford even indicated that he would support legislation in Congress to require court warrants for all electronic eavesdropping by the government — in part, paving the way for the passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act a year after Ford left office in 1977.

IT’S TIME TO TELL OBAMA: ‘OBEY THE CONSTITUTION ON WIRETAPS’

Yet only the American Civil Liberties Union, The ‘Skeeter Bites Report — and a federal judge in Michigan — appear to have remembered the fact that the Bush (and now Obama) warrantless spying program is every bit as unconstitutional as the Nixon program of four decades ago.

The Obama administration has chosen to not only continue its predecessor’s unconstitutional warrantless spying program, but has shamefully chosen to defend its continuance in court. The time has come to hold this administration accountable for its refusal to obey the Constitution it is sworn by its oath of office to “preserve, protect and defend” — and force it to comply with the Fourth Amendment.

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Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

Security Breach at Google’s Gmail Service  Forces Temporary Shutdown of The ‘Skeeter Bites Report to Protect Sources, Subscribers

(Posted 8:00 p.m. EDT Sunday, March 21, 2010)

Sincerely,

Skeeter Sanders

Editor and Publisher

The ‘Skeeter Bites Report

In Unusually Blunt Language —  The Strongest U.S. Rebuke of Israel in More Than 20 Years — Biden  Blasts Israel’s Decision to Build New Housing for Jews in Arab  Neighborhood of East Jerusalem, Warning That They ‘Undermine’ Not Only  Mideast Peace Process, But Also U.S. War Effort in Iraq and Afghanistan

NOT ON THE SAME PAGE — Vice President Joe Biden (left) meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during the vice president’s trip last week to Israel and the Palestinian Territories. The grim expressions on their faces tell the story: Biden, angered by Israel’s announcement that it was building new housing for Jews in a predominantly Arab neighborhood of East Jerusalem, reportedly blasted Israeli officials during a private meeting, condemning the decision as “undermining” the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. But the vice president went further, reportedly raising — for the first time — the specter of Israeli actions causing serious problems for U.S. forces fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. (Photo: Getty Images)

Rarely have relations between the United States and Israel been this testy. But there was Vice President Joe Biden — during a visit to Israel and the Palestinian Territories — using unusually blunt language last week to condemn Israel’s decision to build new housing for Jews in predominantly Arab East Jerusalem.

Biden’s remarks were the sharpest rebuke of Israel by the U.S. in more than 20 years — and might signal a new “get-tough” policy by the Obama administration on the volatile issue of Israeli settlements in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian Territories.

Read the full story by clicking HERE.

Leaked Plans by Republican National Committee Show Intent to Aggressively Capitalize on Fears of ‘Socialism’ Under Obama to Raise Money for GOP in 2010 Election Cycle; Meanwhile, Group Led by Ex-VP Cheney’s Daughter Comes Under Fire for Web Ad That Attacks Patriotism of Justice Department Lawyers Handling Terrorism Cases

“I have here in my hand a list of 205 people that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party, and who, nevertheless, are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department!” With those words, Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) plunged the nation into a near-panic with his infamous anti-communist “Red Scare” campaign from 1950 to 1954, when McCarthy was ultimately exposed as the fearmongering demagogue he really was. Now, 60 years later, The Republicans have been caught plotting a McCarthy-style “Red Scare” of the 21st century, with revelations of GOP National Committee plans to launch an aggressive fundraising campaign by stoking fears of “socialism” under President Obama and the majority Democrats in Congress. (Archive Photo courtesy Wisconsin Historical Society)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EST Monday, March 8, 2010)

By SKEETER SANDERS

Having lost control of both the White House and the Congress — and under mounting pressure from the Far Right — the Republican Party has been caught plotting to launch an aggressive campaign of stoking fears of the country moving toward “socialism” under President Obama and the majority Democrats in Congress to raise money for the upcoming midterm election cycle.

At the same time, a conservative group with ties to former Vice President Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz has come under fire for launching a blistering Web ad that questions the patriotism of seven Justice Department lawyers assigned to handle the cases of terrorism suspects — branding the unnamed attorneys “the al-Qaida 7” and mocking the DOJ as the “Department of Jihad.”

These two developments have prompted fierce accusations by liberals — and even some former Bush administration attorneys — that the GOP is stooping to outright fearmongering reminiscent of the infamous “Red Scare” whipped up in the early 1950s by late Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin).

PLANS USED CRUDE IMAGE OF OBAMA IN WHITEFACE AS THE JOKER

The Republican National Committee was forced into damage-control mode after plans to raise money for the upcoming midterm election campaign by aggressively pursuing a drive to “save the country from trending toward socialism” under Obama were exposed by Politico.com, which obtained a copy of the plans.

Incredibly, the confidential 72-page document, which was prepared by the party’s finance staff, was left behind at the conclusion of a February 18 party retreat in Boca Grande, Florida. It was picked up by a Democratic operative, who furnished it to Politico.com.

“What can you sell when you do not have the White House, the House, or the Senate…?” the document asks. “Save the country from trending toward Socialism!” comes the reply.

Several of the document’s pages include crude caricatures of top Democratic leaders, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) as Cruella DeVille from the Disney movie “101 Dalmatians” and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) as the cartoon character Scooby-Doo.

Most controversial of all, however, was a caricature of Obama as the Joker, the psychopathic nemesis of Batman in “The Dark Knight.” That caricature of the nation’s first black president in whiteface — employed frequently by Tea Party movement activists — has been denounced by critics of the Tea Party movement as racially offensive.

GOP FORCED INTO DAMAGE-CONTROL MODE AFTER LEAK

Revelation of the RNC fundraising document on Wednesday forced the GOP into full-scale damage-control mode, with RNC Communications Director Douglas Heye frantically issuing an e-mail to major Republican donors and to the media to downplay its significance and seeking to distance GOP National Chairman Michael Steele from it.

“The document was used for a fundraising presentation Chairman Steele did not attend, nor had he seen the document,” Heye wrote in his e-mail. “Fundraising documents are often controversial. Obviously, the Chairman disagrees with the language and finds the use of such imagery to be unacceptable. It will not be used by the Republican National Committee — in any capacity — in the future.”

By Sunday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), confronted with the controversy, acknowledged that the fundraising presentation “was not helpful” to the party. Appearing on ABC’s “This Week,” McConnell said that he “can’t imagine why anybody would have thought that was helpful.”

McConnell refused to say whether he thought that Chairman Steele and others at the RNC should be held accountable for the document. “I don’t run the RNC.  That’s up to them.  But I don’t like it, and I don’t know anybody who does,” he said.

BAD NEWS FOR RNC WHOSE COFFERS ARE DRYING UP

For Steele, the leak of the controversial fundraising document could not have come at a worse time. The GOP national chairman has come under fire from major party donors unhappy with what they say is Steele’s lavish spending habits since he was elected party chairman 14 months ago.

The feud has led to major donors turning away from the RNC and toward other GOP committees. Politico.com reported February 23 that the RNC has raised $24 million since Steele took over as chairman — down significantly from the $46 million it raised in 2005.

To make matters worse, according to campaign finance reports, a $23 million RNC surplus that Steele inherited when he took over has shrunk dramatically to $8.4 million a year later.

CHENEY GROUP’S AD BRANDS JUSTICE DEPARTMENT LAWYERS ‘AL-QAIDA SEVEN’

Meanwhile, a growing number of critics on both the left and the right have denounced a vicious Web ad that attacks the Justice Department for its handling of terrorism cases.

The ad, posted by the right-wing group Keep America Safe — which is led by Liz Cheney and Weekly Standard editor-in-chief Bill Kristol — openly brands as “The al-Qaida 7” seven lawyers hired by the Justice Department to handle terrorism-related cases who previously did pro bono work for Guantánamo detainees.

The ad demands that the identities of the seven lawyers be disclosed — and even goes so far as to refer to the Justice Department’s initials, DOJ, as the “Department of Jihad.”

Posted on YouTube on March 1, the ad has triggered a torrent of angry phone calls to Justice Department headquarters. It came just days after Liz Cheney, appearing at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, unleashed a blistering attack on the Obama administration, openly accusing the president of pursuing a dangerously misguided and ineffective approach to national security.

“We’ve learned he [Obama] wants to go around the world and apologize for this great country of ours,” the daughter of the former vice president said. “We’ve learned he wants to give rights to terrorists, including the right to remain silent. We’ve learned he wants to move dangerous terrorists from Guantanamo onto the American homeland while he investigates and possibly prosecutes the CIA officers who interrogated them. That is not change we can believe in.”

LIZ CHENEY ACCUSED OF JOE MCCARTHY-STYLE SMEAR

Such attacks by Cheney drew an equally blistering counterattack by Ken Gude, a national security expert at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. “It’s not kind of like McCarthyism,” wrote Gude in an e-mail to TalkingPointsMemo.com, “it is exactly what Joe McCarthy did with his anti-communist witchhunts. Cheney accuses the Attorney General of the United States of being a supporter of al-Qaida and running the ‘Department of Jihad.'”

But Gude isn’t alone. Several prominent lawyers who worked for the Bush administration also blasted Cheney. Former Solicitor General Ted Olson called Cheney’s attacks “outrageous” and fiercely defended the DOJ lawyers handling the terror-related cases, saying they were acting “consistent with the finest traditions of the legal profession.”

GOP TRIPS BACK TO MCCARTHY ERA TO REVIVE BLATANT FEARMONGERING

Devoid of fresh ideas to compete with the Democrats and to restore their own credibility, the Republicans — under growing pressure from Tea Party activists and others to move even farther to the right — appear to have decided to go “back to the future” sort to speak — only in this case, back nearly 60 years to the fear-plagued 1950s.

That the new GOP aggressiveness would evoke memories of McCarthy’s demagoguery should surprise no one who is well-versed in American history. The Wisconsin Republican’s career had been marked by making accusations without providing a shred of proof to back them up, according to author Arthur Herman’s 1999 book, Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America’s Most Hated Senator.

Even before his infamous anti-communist witchhunts, McCarthy came under sharp criticism in the late 1940s when he lobbied for the commutation of death sentences given to a group of Nazi soldiers convicted of war crimes for carrying out the 1944 Malmedy massacre of American prisoners of war.

McCarthy was critical of the convictions because of allegations of torture during the interrogations that led to the German soldiers’ confessions. He charged that the U.S. Army was engaged in a cover-up of judicial misconduct, but never presented any evidence to support his accusations.  Shortly after this, a poll of the Senate press corps voted McCarthy “the worst U.S. senator” in office.

McCarthy shot to national prominence on February 9, 1950, when, while delivering a speech to the Republican Women’s Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, he produced a piece of paper that he claimed contained a list of known communists working for the State Department.

MCCARTHY EXPLOITED FEARS GENERATED BY THE COLD WAR

From 1950 until he was censured by the Senate in 1954, McCarthy continued to exploit the fear of communism and to press his accusations that the Truman and later Eisenhower administrations were failing to deal with communists within its ranks. These accusations were made without McCarthy furnishing a shred of evidence to back them up, yet they received wide publicity, increased his approval rating, and gained him a powerful national following.

It was Herbert Block, the longtime editorial cartoonist for The Washington Post, who coined the term “McCarthyism” as a synonym for demagoguery, baseless defamation, and mudslinging. Later, it would be embraced by McCarthy himself and some of his supporters. “McCarthyism is Americanism with its sleeves rolled,” McCarthy said in a 1952 speech, and later that year he published a book titled McCarthyism: The Fight For America.

By 1954 — his demagoguery exposed by the legendary CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow and the televised Army-McCarthy hearings that same year — many of McCarthy’s fellow senators had had enough. On June 1, Senator Ralph Flanders (R-Vermont) blasted McCarthy, comparing him to Adolf Hitler and accusing him of spreading division and confusion. “Were the junior senator from Wisconsin in the pay of the Communists,” said Flanders, “he could not have done a better job for them.”

It was Flanders who introduced the Senate resolution that called for McCarthy’s censure. The resolution passed on December 2, 1954 by a vote of 67 to 22, a greater-than-two-thirds majority in the then-96-member Senate (Alaska and Hawaii had not yet been admitted to the Union). McCarthy never recovered from his rebuke, either politically or physically. He plunged into alcoholism and died from cirrhosis of the liver in 1957.

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Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.