The Waning Power of Roe v. Wade

November 29, 2005

The Waning Power of Roe v. Wade

Although the landmark ruling survives, the right to abortion has been steadily eroding.

by Dorothy Samuels

A lot has happened since January 22, 1973, when the Supreme Court handed down Roe v. Wade, its momentous 7-to-2 decision that recognized a woman’s constitutional right to make her own child-bearing decisions and legalized abortion nationwide. The cold war ended, and so did apartheid in South Africa. E-mail, cell phones, iPods and Diet Coke appeared. There have been six new presidents in the White House, including two named George Bush.

Yet for all that has happened in the nearly 33 years since the court declared that the constitutional right of personal privacy includes the abortion decision, one thing hasn’t changed: America remains locked in a bitter and seemingly never-ending battle over abortion. Even though polls show that a healthy majority of Americans still support Roe’s essential holding, three decades of clinic violence and relentless harassment, combined with strategic court challenges and muscular political action by anti-choice forces have taken a serious toll.

Technically, Roe v. Wade still stands. But for the moment, at least, its well-organized and well-funded opponents are winning the ground war.

Thanks in large part to Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the practical-minded conservative jurist whom Judge Samuel Alito, Jr. has been nominated to replace, Roe v. Wade’s core holding, placing the abortion decision in the hands of women and their doctors up until fetal viability, remains the law of the land. But wide-ranging restrictions and dwindling access to safe and legal abortion services is rendering reproductive rights merely theoretical for a growing number of women around the country - especially those who are poor, young, or live in rural areas.

Incrementally, and largely under the national radar, formidable obstacles have been placed in the way of women trying to access abortion services. As a result, the fundamental right the Roe decision supposedly protects is progressively disappearing in much of the nation.

Among the most significant roadblocks:

• A shortage of trained doctors and health care facilities offering abortion services.

• Mandatory waiting periods and demeaning state-scripted “counseling” sessions that lack a real medical justification and sometimes require two clinic trips on separate days, creating a special hardship for poor women who lack transportation to easily make multiple clinic visits, and who live in areas without a nearby abortion provider.

• Parental notification and consent laws that are supposed to improve family communication but actually serve to jeopardize the health and well-being of frightened young women, including victims of incest and other abuse who have good reason not to inform the adults in their life.

• Longstanding restrictions on the use of Medicaid, and other government money, to help women pay for abortions.

• So-called “TRAP laws,” which single out abortion providers for onerous and expensive “safety” rules enacted for the purpose of harassing existing providers, and deterring the development of new providers.

The driving force behind these restrictions has been state legislatures, which have enacted more than 400 measures restricting abortions in the last decade alone. But in November 2003, Congress passed the first federal ban on an abortion procedure - an only slightly modified version of Nebraska’s “partial birth” ban the Supreme Court rightly struck down just three years before, with Justice O’Connor casting the deciding vote. The majority found that the broad and imprecise measure, which spawned copycat legislation in at least 30 states, could be read to ban the most common abortion procedure used after the first trimester, and also lacked the constitutionally-required exception to protect the health of the woman.

With Justice O’Connor about to leave the court, and anti-abortion Republicans holding the upper hand in the judicial nomination process, there has naturally been a lot of speculation about whether Roe v. Wade will survive. Roe’s future is undeniably crucial. The situation for women seeking to terminate an unwanted pregnancy would be far worse if Justice O’Connor had not cast the crucial fifth vote in 1992 to save Roe from being overturned. A ruling directly toppling Roe would once again give states authority to ban abortion, and a detailed 2004 analysis by the Center for Reproductive Rights, a leading pro-choice legal advocacy group, suggests as many as 30 states would do so.

But the single-minded focus on Roe - and the tea-leaf reading about where Judge Alito really stands on it - is distracting from the even more immediate practical threat to women’s reproductive freedom posed by the rapidly spreading web of anti-choice restrictions and regulations. There has been a stealthy backdoor repeal of Roe underway for years. As Judge Alito’s confirmation hearing draws closer, the discussion of Roe’s future should broaden into one about the whole array of ways in which abortion rights are under assault.

I. What Roe v. Wade Established

Although Roe is a famous case, its precise holding is not well understood. The court struck down a Texas law that made most abortions illegal. But it neither endorsed abortion nor closed its eyes to the profound nature of the abortion decision or “the deep and seemingly absolute convictions that the subject inspires.” What the court actually did was to strike an astute constitutional compromise: the Roe decision declared that a woman’s right to choose whether to terminate her pregnancy is a fundamental liberty interest but that it must be balanced against the fetus’s growing potential for life.

To establish a framework for evaluating abortion restrictions, the decision divided pregnancy into three trimesters, and delineated the degree of allowable regulation during each. In the first trimester, the court left the abortion decision solely to a woman and her doctor. In the second trimester, the decision permitted state regulations that were narrowly tailored to promote the health of the woman. In the third trimester - the point at which the fetus becomes viable outside the mother’s womb - the decision recognized the state’s authority to impose regulations to protect the fetus, or even ban abortion, provided exceptions were made to protect the life and health of the woman.

It has become fashionable, even among self-proclaimed supporters of abortion rights, to bash Roe v. Wade, and its author, Justice Harry Blackman, for unwarranted “judicial activism” and “legislating from the bench.” These critics fault the Roe majority for inventing a new privacy right found nowhere in the Constitution, and using it to overturn abortion restrictions in 46 states. According to many critics, Roe was also a strategic mistake, truncating a percolating debate in state legislatures nationwide that would have ended criminal restrictions on abortion by democratic vote instead of judicial fiat.

These criticisms make for pithy sound bites, but they don’t hold up. It’s true that dividing pregnancy into three stages and coming up with different levels of permissible regulations for each may have given the decision a legislative feel. But courts engage in this sort of line-drawing all the time. The trimester framework made concrete Roe’s sensible balance between the right of women to control their bodies and government’s legitimate interest in protecting potential life. The decision recognized that the government’s interest increases as a pregnancy proceeds, but prevented government from imposing abortion restrictions prior to viability, except to protect a woman’s health, thereby preserving meaningful reproductive choice. That’s a far better approach than allowing government to smother the abortion option with needless regulation starting in the earliest weeks of pregnancy, as subsequent abortion rulings have done.

Wrong as well is the claim that the court engaged in unwarranted judicial activism when it grounded Roe v. Wade in a constitutional right to privacy “broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.” The ruling is not perfect: Justice Blackmun, who served as general counsel to Minnesota’s renowned Mayo Clinic before becoming a judge, may have been better at articulating the harm done by interfering with a doctor’s ability to administer medical treatment than the harm inflicted on the woman. But Roe’s conclusion that a woman’s right to decide whether to become a parent deserves the highest level of constitutional protection required no giant jurisprudential leap. The Roe ruling flowed naturally from a line of previous privacy decisions that protected certain intimate personal decisions from government interference. The most notable of these, the 1965 case, Griswold v. Connecticut, struck down a statute that made it a crime for married couples to use birth control.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who did much to advance the legal rights of women as a lawyer bringing test cases in the 1970’s, suggested in a well-publicized 1993 lecture at New York University Law School that Roe would have been more persuasive had it been grounded on the argument that abortion bans violate the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause. Her point, that the inability of women to control their reproductive destiny prevents them from participating as equals in the nation’s political, social, and economic life, is a sound one, and Justice Blackmun and other pro-choice justices eventually came to embrace it. Upon his retirement in 1994, Justice Blackmun aptly described his much-beloved and much-reviled ruling in Roe as a necessary step toward “the full emancipation of women.” But for the court to have relied on that equality claim way back in 1973 would have meant propelling the court’s equal protection approach to a whole new level. Lawyerly and professorial objections aside, the offense to women’s dignity and privacy inherent in laws prohibiting abortion in the first phases of pregnancy, is something most people, women in particular, seem to get.

Critics of Roe’s reasoning but not its legal outcome - including Justice Ginsburg - have also wondered aloud whether abortion rights would be more secure today if the decision had been less expansive, giving state legislatures more time to liberalize abortion laws on their own. The extent to which courts should defer to elected legislatures on emerging rights issues is an interesting question. But any suggestion that Roe short-circuited a political process that was moving apace to end the criminalization of abortion is wildly inaccurate. As my New York Times colleague Linda Greenhouse recounts in her recent book, “Becoming Justice Blackmun,” when the court took up Roe v. Wade, “(f)our states - New York, Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii - had repealed all criminal penalties for abortions performed by licensed doctors, up to specified points in pregnancy. Thirteen other states had passed ‘reform’ laws, expanding the circumstances under which abortion was permissible. But thirty-three states continued to outlaw nearly all abortions; in many of these states, there was little prospect for change.” Had the Supreme Court waited for the states to act, in other words, we would probably still be waiting.

The New York experience is telling. Three years before Roe v. Wade, in 1970, New York became the second state to legalize abortion, following on the heels of Hawaii, which repealed its criminal abortion law earlier that same year. But even in “liberal” New York, overcoming the heavy opposition, much of it from the Catholic Church, wasn’t easy. The bill that Governor Nelson Rockefeller signed into law cleared the state Assembly by just a single vote. Two years later, after the upstate Republican who cast that decisive vote was defeated for re-election, the Legislature approved a partial repeal of the state’s enlightened new abortion law, which was stopped from going into effect only by a gubernatorial veto. Nationally, whatever momentum there was toward meaningful abortion law reform seemed to quickly peter out. Between 1971 and 1973, the year of Roe v. Wade, not a single additional state moved to repeal its criminal prohibition on abortion early in pregnancy. This was noted by the prominent constitutional scholar, Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School, in his 1990 book, “Abortion: The Clash of Absolutes.” “There is little evidence,” Professor Tribe concluded, “that the United States was on the verge of emerging, in the early 1970’s, from the long shadow of shame that had branded women as blameworthy for extramarital sex and nonprocreative sex and that condemned them for choosing abortion even when the choice was a painful and profoundly reluctant one.”

On a more philosophical level, there are some issues that should not be left in the political arena, to be decided with finality by a majority vote. A woman’s right to decide whether to terminate her pregnancy in the earliest phases is surely one of them. The recognition of basic rights - such as the right to control one’s reproductive choices - should not be a popularity contest.

II. Justice O’Connor’s ‘Undue Burden,’ and the Erosion of Roe

Roe v. Wade established a single national standard making abortion legal, But it also accelerated the abortion wars.

Opponents of Roe turned to Congress, but met with only limited success. Their efforts to get a constitutional amendment declaring that human life begins at conception failed. So did their campaign for a dangerous court-stripping plan, which sought to take away the federal courts’ power to strike down state abortion restrictions. Anti-choice forces did, however, get new prohibitions passed on the use of federal money to pay for abortions, which create severe hardships for poor women to this day.

Anti-abortion groups became even more energetic at the state level. The political and religious right joined forces to push through a succession of state limitations aimed at making it harder for women to obtain an abortion, and serving up test cases they hoped would lead to the overturning of Roe. The court, its membership now changed from the bench that decided Roe, rejected some of these restrictions, but it approved others, on the fictional ground that they did not significantly interfere with the woman’s choice.

These rulings, culminating with the court’s splintered 1989 decision upholding Missouri’s aggressive attempt to restrict abortion in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, fueled concerns that there was no longer a court majority that favored keeping Roe intact. When a closely-divided court issued its much-anticipated 1992 ruling in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, supporters of reproductive freedom breathed a sigh of relief. The decision, co-written by Justice O’Connor, sustained Roe’s core holding that “a State may not prohibit any woman from making the ultimate decision to terminate her pregnancy before viability.”

But buried in the victory were seeds of defeat. The Casey majority sustained Roe’s bottom line, but, alas, not its overall approach.

The Casey decision abandoned Roe’s trimester framework. Instead, it told states they could impose restrictions throughout a pregnancy so long as they do not impose an “undue burden” on women seeking an abortion. In making this change, the 5-to-4 majority significantly watered down the constitutional protection afforded women’s private reproductive decisions.

In practice, the “undue burden” test crafted by Justice O’Connor has invited states to come up with ever more creative schemes to impede the exercise of the abortion right with needless regulation beginning in the earliest weeks of pregnancy, delaying abortions and increasing medical risks for many women, foreclosing abortion choice entirely for others.

In Casey itself, for example, the Supreme Court upheld Pennsylvania’s requirement that a physician must provide a woman with state-scripted information about abortion 24-hours in advance of a non-emergency abortion. To a majority of justices, the rule’s insulting assumption about women’s decision-making and its interference with physicians’ professional judgment sounded benign. But forcing overburdened physicians to provide biased “counseling” drives up abortion costs, turns physicians into propagandists for the state while making them less willing to perform abortions, and, overall, contributes to the isolation and unfair stigmatization of women seeking vital reproductive health care.

By upholding Pennsylvania’s restrictions, the court sent a clear message to anti-abortion forces: if they got abortion restrictions passed at the state level, there was a good chance those restrictions would survive constitutional challenge.

III. Chipping Away at Abortion Rights, State by State

Opponents of abortion took up the Casey court’s invitation. They increased their activity at the state level, accelerating their push for restrictions that would erode abortion rights to varying degrees, but that lawyers could argue did not impose an “undue burden.” The accumulated impact of all these efforts, which show no sign of letting up, is now being felt in many states. For example, in addition to the three decades old federal prohibition that prevents federal Medicaid funding of nearly all abortions for low-income women, 11 states now restrict abortion coverage in insurance plans for public employees. Rules in 4 states limit abortion coverage by private insurance plans to cases in which carrying the pregnancy to term would endanger the woman’s life, although those who can afford it are free to purchase additional coverage for non-emergency abortions. At this point, 43 states have enacted some form of parental involvement law, requiring either parental consent or notice before a minor obtains an abortion. Fully nine of these laws including the New Hampshire parental consent statute that is the subject of a major test case now pending before the Supreme Court have been enjoined by courts, and presently are not being enforced, owing either to their purposeful omission of an adequate exception to protect a minor’s health or because of state constitutional issues.

Some 31 states mandate that women receive “counseling” before an abortion, and 18 of them specify how the slanted, and oft-times inaccurate or misleading information designed to dissuade women from having an abortion is to be delivered. In 23 of the states requiring abortion “counseling”, women are required to wait a specified period of time after the session - most often 24 hours - before getting the procedure. Greatly compounding the hardship these rules create for women, 6 states deter women from exercising their right of choice by requiring that the “counseling” be provided in person instead of by phone or over the Internet, thereby insuring that women must make two clinic visits before having the procedure.

Meanwhile, more than a dozen states are currently enforcing regulatory schemes - so-called TRAP laws - singling out abortion doctors and clinics for overly-stringent regulation. In a scary new initiative, anti-abortion strategists have begun reviving an abusive tactic from the past - deploying health inspectors to abortion clinics to review and copy unredacted medical files containing highly personal details of patients’ histories without any apparent valid regulatory justification.

The early evidence suggests that these sort of barriers have done just what their drafters intended - impeded women from getting abortions. For example, in a 2001 challenge to an Indiana law requiring medical personnel to deliver state-mandated information on abortion “in the presence” of pregnant women at least 18 hours before an abortion, the federal trial judge found the law effectively blocked approximately 10 to 13 percent of Indiana women who wanted abortions from obtaining them. A 1997 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association cited by the judge reported on the impact of a Mississippi law that required pregnant women make at least two clinic visits before obtaining an abortion. It found that the total rate of abortion for residents of Mississippi, the nation’s poorest state, decreased by approximately 16 percent in the first year after the law took effect. Because of the delays it created, the proportion of Mississippi abortions that occurred second trimester increased by about 40 percent. A 2-to-1 ruling by a federal appeals panel subsequently reversed the trial court’s rejection of the in-person counseling requirement, but without persuasively countering the factual reality of its “undue burden.”

IV. The Scary Mississippi Model

For people residing in blue states, with pro-choice legislative majorities, the threat posed by anti-abortion forces may seem remote. But in states where abortion rights enjoy less political support, women’s right to control their reproductive choices are only what the courts say they are. Even with Roe still the law of the land, the situations in these states is not good. Consider the bleak terrain for women confronting an unwanted pregnancy today in Mississippi, the subject of “The Last Abortion Clinic,” a valuable documentary by Raney Aronson-Rath that aired recently on P.B.S.

By piling restriction upon restriction, Mississippi has all but outlawed abortion in the state. Today, Mississippi currently has just one functioning abortion clinic, down from six just a decade ago. Even that clinic’s survival is now in jeopardy.

Making matters worse, many of Mississippi’s anti-abortion extremists also oppose birth control. Their activism is inflicting a cruel double-whammy on impoverished women who are denied access both to abortion services and to the contraceptives they need to avoid become pregnant in the first place - a situation hardly unique to Mississippi, unfortunately.

Meanwhile, other states are seeking to follow Mississippi’s legislative lead. And bad as things are in Mississippi, some parts of the country have gone even further to promote a “culture of life” that pays no heed to the negative impact for women’s health and lives when reproductive choice is severely encumbered or denied. According to a 2004 ranking of the states by a leading anti-abortion legal advocacy group, Americans United for Life, three states are ahead of Mississippi when it comes to implementing abortion restrictions and a range of other anti-abortion measures.

V. The Future of the Constitutional Right

There has been a lot of discussion already about whether Judge Alito would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade - a goal he explicitly embraced in a memo he wrote 20 years ago and there will be no doubt be more when his confirmation hearings begin in January. His position on Roe is important. But replacing Justice O’Connor with an anti-Roe justice should still leave at least five votes in support of letting Roe stand. The more urgent concern raised by Judge Alito’s nomination is that he could join with other conservatives on the court to continue to poke holes in the right to abortion, further weakening Roe without formally discarding it.

Opponents of abortion rights have become adept at passing laws that are progressively narrowing the right to abortion in America. On Nov. 23, the Indiana Supreme Court upheld in its entirety the state’s waiting-period law that will, like others around the country, make it incrementally more difficult for many women to exercise their reproductive rights.

The effort to eliminate abortion rights by regulation and restriction has already progressed too far, and there are cases heading toward the court’s docket that will give Justice O’Connor’s replacement plenty of opportunity to make things substantially worse. What the court needs is a Justice who will prevent abortion rights from eroding any further. Judge Alito’s record contains strong hints he is not that person - including his vote as a federal appellate judge that a provision requiring an adult woman to notify her husband before obtaining an abortion posed no problem under the court’s “undue burden” standard.

When senators question Judge Alito, they should try to determine whether he would vote to uphold Roe v. Wade, but that should only be the beginning of their inquiry about his abortion views. Even if he votes to keep Roe, he will have plenty of opportunity to erode women’s ability to control their reproductive destiny, one decision at a time.

It’s regrettable that the country is facing yet another confirmation proceeding dominated by the issue of abortion. The time and energy both sides spend brawling over abortion rights would be much better spent working on an effective common agenda to reduce unwanted pregnancies. But the primary fault here lies not with abortion rights supporters, but with the vocal and tenacious minority on the other side who still refuse to bow to the legitimacy of Roe’s wise compromise, and who believe their personal moral opposition to abortion gives them a mandate to try to shut down abortion access locally and pack the Supreme Court with anti-abortion justices in order to deny that option to others.

Attempting to turn back the clock to the days of dangerous back alley abortions, and deny women the reproductive freedom essential to their full participation in the nation’s civic life is a moral issue, too. Not to mention an undue burden.

The Autumn of the Patriarchy by Maureen Dowd

November 30, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist

The Autumn of the Patriarchy
By MAUREEN DOWD

In the vice president’s new, more fortified bunker, inside his old undisclosed secure location within the larger bunker that used to be called the West Wing of the White House, Dick Cheney was muttering and sputtering.

He wasn’t talking to the pictures on the wall, as Nixon did when he finally cracked. Vice doesn’t trust those portraits anyway. The walls have ears. He was talking to the only reliable man in a city of dimwits, cowards, traitors and fools: himself.

He hurled a sheaf of news reports with such force it knocked over the picture of Ahmad Chalabi that he keeps next to the picture of Churchill. Winston Chalabi, he likes to call him.

Vice is fed up with all the whining and carping - and that’s just inside the White House. The only negativity in Washington is supposed to be his own. He’s the only one allowed to scowl and grumble and conspire.

The impertinent Tom DeFrank reported in New York’s Daily News that embattled White House aides felt “President Bush must take the reins personally” to save his presidency.

Let him try, Cheney said with a sneer. Things are nowhere near dire enough for that. Even if Junior somehow managed to grab the reins to his presidency, Vice holds Junior’s reins. So he just needs to get all these sniveling, poll-driven wimps and losers back on board with the master plan.

Things had been going so smoothly. The global torture franchise was up and running. Halliburton contracts were flowing. Tax cuts were sailing through. Oil companies were raking it in. Alaska drilling was thrillingly close. The courts were defending his executive privilege on energy policy, and people were still buying all that smoke about Saddam’s being responsible for 9/11, and that drivel about how we’re fighting them there so we don’t have to fight them here. Everything was groovy.

But not anymore. Cheney could not believe that Karl had made him go out and call that loudmouth Jack Murtha a patriot. He was sure the Pentagon generals had put the congressman up to calling for a withdrawal from Iraq. Is the military brass getting in touch with its pacifist side? In Wyoming, Vice shoots doves.

How dare Murtha suggest that Cheney dodged and dodged and dodged and dodged and dodged the draft? Murtha thinks he knows about war just because he served in one and was a marine for 37 years? Vice started his own war. Now that’s a credential!

It always goes this way with the cut-and-run crowd. First they start nitpicking the war, complaining about little things like the lack of armor for the troops. Then they complain that there aren’t enough troops. Well, that would just require more armor that we don’t have. Then they kvetch about using incendiary weapons in a city like Falluja. Vice likes the smell of white phosphorus in the morning.

What really enrages him is all the Republicans in the Senate making noises about timetables. Before you know it, it’s going to be helicopters on the rooftop at the Baghdad embassy.

Just because Junior’s approval ratings are in the 30’s, people around here are going all wobbly. Vice was 10 points lower and he wasn’t worried. Numbers are for sissies.

Why do Harry Reid and his Democratic turncoats think they can call the White House on the carpet? Do they think Vice would fear to lie about lying about the rationale for going to war? A real liar never stops lying.

He didn’t want to have to tell the rest of the senators to go do to themselves what he had told Patrick Leahy to go do to himself.

Now all these idiots are getting caught, even Scooter. DeLay’s on the ropes and the Dukester is a total embarrassment, spending bribes on antique commodes and a Rolls-Royce. Vice should never have let an amateur get involved with defense contracts.

Republican moderates are running scared in the House, worried about re-election. Even senators seem to have forgotten which side their bread is oiled on. Ted Stevens let oil company executives get caught lying about the energy task force meeting, while Vice can’t even get a little thing like torture chambers through the Senate. What’s so wrong with a little torture?

And now John Warner wants Junior to use fireside chats to explain his plan for Iraq. When did everybody get the un-American idea that the president is answerable to America?

Vice is fed up with the whining of squirrelly surrogates like Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence Wilkerson on behalf of peaceniks like George Senior and Colin Powell. If Poppy’s upset about his kid’s mentor, he should be man enough to come slug it out.

Poppy isn’t getting Junior back, Vice vowed, muttering: “He’s my son. It’s my war. It’s my country.”

(And the bad news is: this man is our vice president.)

Va. Gov. Grants Clemency for Condemned Man

What’s to Be Done About Darfur? Plenty

November 29, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist

What’s to Be Done About Darfur? Plenty
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
In 1915, Woodrow Wilson turned a blind eye to the Armenian genocide. In the 1940’s, Franklin Roosevelt refused to bomb the rail lines leading to Auschwitz. In 1994, Bill Clinton turned away from the slaughter in Rwanda. And in 2005, President Bush is acquiescing in the first genocide of the 21st century, in Darfur.

Mr. Bush is paralyzed for the same reasons as his predecessors. There is no great public outcry, there are no neat solutions, we already have our hands full, and it all seems rather distant and hopeless.

But Darfur is not hopeless. Here’s what we should do.

First, we must pony up for the African Union security force. The single most disgraceful action the U.S. has taken was Congress’s decision, with the complicity of the Bush administration, to cut out all $50 million in the current budget to help pay for the African peacekeepers in Darfur. Shame on Representative Jim Kolbe of Arizona - and the White House - for facilitating genocide.

Mr. Bush needs to find $50 million fast and get it to the peacekeepers.

Second, the U.S. needs to push for an expanded security force in Darfur. The African Union force is a good start, but it lacks sufficient troops and weaponry. The most practical solution is to “blue hat” the force, making it a U.N. peacekeeping force built around the African Union core. It needs more resources and a more robust mandate, plus contributions from NATO or at least from major countries like Canada, Germany and Japan.

Third, we should impose a no-fly zone. The U.S. should warn Sudan that if it bombs civilians, then afterward we will destroy the airplanes involved.

Fourth, the House should pass the Darfur Peace and Accountability Act. This legislation, which would apply targeted sanctions and pressure Sudan to stop the killing, passed the Senate unanimously but now faces an uphill struggle in the House.

Fifth, Mr. Bush should use the bully pulpit. He should talk about Darfur in his speeches and invite survivors to the Oval Office. He should wear a green “Save Darfur” bracelet - or how about getting a Darfur lawn sign for the White House? (Both are available, along with ideas for action, from www.savedarfur.org.) He can call Hosni Mubarak and other Arab and African leaders and ask them to visit Darfur. He can call on China to stop underwriting this genocide.

Sixth, President Bush and Kofi Annan should jointly appoint a special envoy to negotiate with tribal sheiks. Colin Powell or James Baker III would be ideal in working with the sheiks and other parties to hammer out a peace deal. The envoy would choose a Sudanese chief of staff like Dr. Mudawi Ibrahim Adam, a leading Sudanese human rights activist who has been pushing just such a plan with the help of Human Rights First.

So far, peace negotiations have failed because they center on two groups that are partly composed of recalcitrant thugs: the government and the increasingly splintered rebels. But Darfur has a traditional system of conflict resolution based on tribal sheiks, and it’s crucial to bring those sheiks into the process.

Ordinary readers can push for all these moves. Before he died, Senator Paul Simon said that if only 100 people in each Congressional district had demanded a stop to the Rwandan genocide, that effort would have generated a determination to stop it. But Americans didn’t write such letters to their members of Congress then, and they’re not writing them now.

Finding the right policy tools to confront genocide is an excruciating challenge, but it’s not the biggest problem. The hardest thing to find is the political will.

For all my criticisms of Mr. Bush, he has sent tons of humanitarian aid, and his deputy secretary of state, Robert Zoellick, has traveled to Darfur four times this year. But far more needs to be done.

As Simon Deng, a Sudanese activist living in the U.S., puts it: “Tell me why we have Milosevic and Saddam Hussein on trial for their crimes, but we do nothing in Sudan. Why not just let all the war criminals go. … When it comes to black people being slaughtered, do we look the other way?”

Put aside for a moment the question of whether Mr. Bush misled the nation on W.M.D. in Iraq. It’s just as important to ask whether he was truthful when he declared in his second inaugural address, “All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors.”

Mr. Bush, so far that has been a ringing falsehood - but, please, make it true.

In Niceville U.S.A., Tone on Iraq Changes

In Niceville U.S.A., Tone on Iraq Changes
By JOHN VINOCUR
International Herald Tribune

Things have a way of slopping together in the all-talk, Christian contemporary, news/talk, country/oldie, adult contemporary, true gospel AM airwaves propagating above the K-Mart parking lot on Route 20.

A $59 offer from a “star registry” to get an asteroid officially named after you in time for Christmas segues into the claim that since nobody would take a broken foot to a dentist, smart folks hire Keith Vanover, the Florida Panhandle’s specialist DUI/DWI lawyer, to handle their drunk-driving citations.

Where Okaloosa and Walton counties align, deep in a part of America where George W. Bush has been held in reverence by more than 70 percent of the voting population, the background audio can get easily turned into a hyper-caricature of how a redneck, conservative world is supposed to sound: commercials for Abner’s chicken restaurant and rant-level commentary going after the liberals.

In fact, next to K-Mart there’s an Italian deli called Joey Tomato’s with terrific sandwiches and a photo of Jacob Javits, the old New York (liberal Republican) senator, on the wall.

And last weekend, a voice from the car radio was saying, stop arguing about how we got in there, George Bush needs a better plan on Iraq right now. A steadying hand moved to the knob to hold the wobbling signal. I got this much:

Americans should ask themselves what would have happened if we had pulled out of Germany after killing Hitler, the voice said. We didn’t then, and we can’t quit Iraq now either. The thing is, it went on, the president has to explain how we win. So people understand.

To the Panhandle’s ears, here was a new kind of admonition from inside the conservative reservation, representing a real change in tone. If much of official Washington appears to be finally engaging in a deep debate on the American military presence in Iraq, that’s a development. But it’s the unmistakable on-air legitimization here of real concern about Iraq that may convince the president he has a problem in his rock-hard constituencies.

A little more than a year ago, Niceville, its cheery Welcome Wagon of a name, its air force base, its colony of retired colonels, and its locals’ strong ties to the Christian right wing, all made the town an early campaign stop for Bush on his way to re-election.

The mood on Iraq was such then that Jim Anders, the Republican Party chairman in neighboring Walton County, proclaimed that Neville Chamberlain would have been a Democrat.

Okaloosa and Walton went, as expected, on the high side of 70 percent for Bush. When hurricanes, although not Katrina, whacked the Panhandle’s coast on the Gulf of Mexico, even Democrats said federal and state aid seemed adequate. Unemployment here for 2005 was running at about 3 percent last month. And Susan MacManus, who watches the region’s politics from the University of South Florida, said the local congressional seats seemed locks for the GOP in 2006.

All the same, Jim Anders, having breakfast at the Doughnut Hole over near the beach in Destin, seems a different guy these days. Sure, he said at first, there was uncertainty about Iraq, and look how Lincoln, that Republican, had a hard time during the Civil War.

But just suppose, Anders was asked, you got a call from Dubya and he wanted to know what his support was like down here. What do you say?

“I support you.”

Full stop. Pause. Anders moved the conversation to what he felt was some wavering in the economy, a sense of diminished vibrancy, something less entrepreneurial making the rounds. O.K.

But when the question came back to Iraq a second time, Anders leapt over both a strategy for the present and the idea of winning. His response was not a cave-in, but an attempt at a phrase that would skirt the president’s here-and-now misery.

He said, “I think Bush is sincerely working hard to get us out of Iraq, and I think he will.”

Ray Padgett seems a different man too now. A retired Coca-Cola executive, he moved back to the pineywoods near DeFuniak Springs and became Walton County Democratic chairman before the 2004 elections. With a real homeboy’s sense of redneck sensibilities, and experience in the great world beyond, he thought he could make a political dent.

Padgett resigned last month. He said he had become frustrated not being able to speak his mind. In the context of Washington’s party-linked partisan political debate on Iraq, he said, that means being able to say out loud how he backs Representative John Murtha’s call for an immediate withdrawal of American forces.

Padgett explained he was appalled to see how most Democrats in Congress gave lip service to Murtha’s status as an elder, but fled from real support of his position.

But what about the local section of Bush’s kamikaze constituency, Padgett’s friends from way back, all Republicans, how do they feel now about the president’s handling of Iraq?

“We’ve got a group I call the Old Farts Club,” Padgett said. “We get together regularly. What’s changing is what’s not said. They’re not proselytizing like they used to.”

Back to Niceville, driving through Panhandle air-time taking time off from the moment’s new touch of reflectiveness on Iraq: voices talking instead about proposed boycotts, one of San Francisco because of an army recruiter being refused access to a city school, another against department store chains that reject the word Christmas in their advertising.

At Joey Tomato’s, an air force colonel who retired in July, and promised an hour of his opinions on Iraq and Bush in a straight trade for anonymity, said “the perception here is we are not solving the problem.”

Like Anders and Padgett, I had spoken to him a year ago about people made nervous by George Bush. Then the colonel described America as being full of guys who think Bush’s being judgmental and decisive is terrible “when it’s being judgmental and decisive that will save us.”

Now, the colonel said, “I fault him strategically. You’ve got to take the battle to the roots.”

That meant to Syria, or even Iran in order to win in Iraq.

The former military man said, “Bush needs to be more vocal, to stand at his own bully pulpit and say exactly what he’s doing. That’s his shortcoming right now.”

In the heart of the Panhandle, where there are often Great Certainties and a craving for no-ifs-or-buts, I heard confusion about that lack of direction for two days. Among the president’s faithful, that could be called slippage on once-consecrated ground.

Dishonest, Reprehensible, Corrupt … by Frank Rich

November 27, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist

Dishonest, Reprehensible, Corrupt …
By FRANK RICH

GEORGE W. BUSH is so desperate for allies that his hapless Asian tour took him to Ulan Bator, a first for an American president, so he could mingle with the yaks and give personal thanks for Mongolia’s contribution of some 160 soldiers to “the coalition of the willing.” Dick Cheney, whose honest-and-ethical poll number hit 29 percent in Newsweek’s latest survey, is so radioactive that he vanished into his bunker for weeks at a time during the storms Katrina and Scootergate.

The whole world can see that both men are on the run. Just how much so became clear in the brace of nasty broadsides each delivered this month about Iraq. Neither man engaged the national debate ignited by John Murtha about how our troops might be best redeployed in a recalibrated battle against Islamic radicalism. Neither offered a plan for “victory.” Instead, both impugned their critics’ patriotism and retreated into the past to defend the origins of the war. In a seasonally appropriate impersonation of the misanthropic Mr. Potter from “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the vice president went so far as to label critics of the administration’s prewar smoke screen both “dishonest and reprehensible” and “corrupt and shameless.” He sounded but one epithet away from a defibrillator.

The Washington line has it that the motivation for the Bush-Cheney rage is the need to push back against opponents who have bloodied the White House in the polls. But, Mr. Murtha notwithstanding, the Democrats are too feeble to merit that strong a response. There is more going on here than politics.

Much more: each day brings slam-dunk evidence that the doomsday threats marshaled by the administration to sell the war weren’t, in Cheney-speak, just dishonest and reprehensible but also corrupt and shameless. The more the president and vice president tell us that their mistakes were merely innocent byproducts of the same bad intelligence seen by everyone else in the world, the more we learn that this was not so. The web of half-truths and falsehoods used to sell the war did not happen by accident; it was woven by design and then foisted on the public by a P.R. operation built expressly for that purpose in the White House. The real point of the Bush-Cheney verbal fisticuffs this month, like the earlier campaign to take down Joseph Wilson, is less to smite Democrats than to cover up wrongdoing in the executive branch between 9/11 and shock and awe.

The cover-up is failing, however. No matter how much the president and vice president raise their decibel levels, the truth keeps roaring out. A nearly 7,000-word investigation in last Sunday’s Los Angeles Times found that Mr. Bush and his aides had “issued increasingly dire warnings” about Iraq’s mobile biological weapons labs long after U.S. intelligence authorities were told by Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service that the principal source for these warnings, an Iraqi defector in German custody code-named Curveball, “never claimed to produce germ weapons and never saw anyone else do so.” The five senior German intelligence officials who spoke to The Times said they were aghast that such long-discredited misinformation from a suspected fabricator turned up in Colin Powell’s presentation to the United Nations and in the president’s 2003 State of the Union address (where it shared billing with the equally bogus 16 words about Saddam’s fictitious African uranium).

Right after the L.A. Times scoop, Murray Waas filled in another piece of the prewar propaganda puzzle. He reported in the nonpartisan National Journal that 10 days after 9/11, “President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda.”

The information was delivered in the President’s Daily Brief, a C.I.A. assessment also given to the vice president and other top administration officials. Nonetheless Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney repeatedly pounded in an implicit (and at times specific) link between Saddam and Al Qaeda until Americans even started to believe that the 9/11 attacks had been carried out by Iraqis. More damning still, Mr. Waas finds that the “few credible reports” of Iraq-Al Qaeda contacts actually involved efforts by Saddam to monitor or infiltrate Islamic terrorist groups, which he regarded as adversaries of his secular regime. Thus Saddam’s antipathy to Islamic radicals was the same in 2001 as it had been in 1983, when Donald Rumsfeld, then a Reagan administration emissary, embraced the dictator as a secular fascist ally in the American struggle against the theocratic fascist rulers in Iran.

What these revelations also tell us is that Mr. Bush was wrong when he said in his Veterans Day speech that more than 100 Congressional Democrats who voted for the Iraqi war resolution “had access to the same intelligence” he did. They didn’t have access to the President’s Daily Brief that Mr. Waas uncovered. They didn’t have access to the information that German intelligence officials spoke about to The Los Angeles Times. Nor did they have access to material from a Defense Intelligence Agency report, released by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan this month, which as early as February 2002 demolished the reliability of another major source that the administration had persistently used for its false claims about Iraqi-Al Qaeda collaboration.

The more we learn about the road to Iraq, the more we realize that it’s a losing game to ask what lies the White House told along the way. A simpler question might be: What was not a lie? The situation recalls Mary McCarthy’s explanation to Dick Cavett about why she thought Lillian Hellman was a dishonest writer: “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’ “

If Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney believe they were truthful in the run-up to the war, it’s easy for them to make their case. Instead of falsely claiming that they’ve been exonerated by two commissions that looked into prewar intelligence - neither of which addressed possible White House misuse and mischaracterization of that intelligence - they should just release the rest of the President’s Daily Briefs and other prewar documents that are now trickling out. Instead, incriminatingly enough, they are fighting the release of any such information, including unclassified documents found in post-invasion Iraq requested from the Pentagon by the pro-war, neocon Weekly Standard. As Scott Shane reported in The New York Times last month, Vietnam documents are now off limits, too: the National Security Agency won’t make public a 2001 historical report on how American officials distorted intelligence in 1964 about the Gulf of Tonkin incident for fear it might “prompt uncomfortable comparisons” between the games White Houses played then and now to gin up wars.

SOONER or later - probably sooner, given the accelerating pace of recent revelations - this embarrassing information will leak out anyway. But the administration’s deliberate efforts to suppress or ignore intelligence that contradicted its Iraq crusade are only part of the prewar story. There were other shadowy stations on the disinformation assembly line. Among them were the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, a two-man Pentagon operation specifically created to cherry-pick intelligence for Mr. Cheney’s apocalyptic Iraqi scenarios, and the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), in which Karl Rove, Karen Hughes and the Cheney hands Lewis Libby and Mary Matalin, among others, plotted to mainline this propaganda into the veins of the press and public. These murky aspects of the narrative - like the role played by a private P.R. contractor, the Rendon Group, examined by James Bamford in the current Rolling Stone - have yet to be recounted in full.

No debate about the past, of course, can undo the mess that the administration made in Iraq. But the past remains important because it is a road map to both the present and the future. Leaders who dissembled then are still doing so. Indeed, they do so even in the same speeches in which they vehemently deny having misled us then - witness Mr. Bush’s false claims about what prewar intelligence was seen by Congress and Mr. Cheney’s effort last Monday to again conflate the terrorists of 9/11 with those “making a stand in Iraq.” (Maj. Gen. Douglas Lute, director of operations for Centcom, says the Iraqi insurgency is 90 percent homegrown.) These days Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney routinely exaggerate the readiness of Iraqi troops, much as they once inflated Saddam’s W.M.D.’s.

“We’re not going to sit by and let them rewrite history,” the vice president said of his critics. “We’re going to continue throwing their own words back at them.” But according to a Harris poll released by The Wall Street Journal last Wednesday, 64 percent of Americans now believe that the Bush administration “generally misleads the American public on current issues to achieve its own ends.” That’s why it’s Mr. Cheney’s and the president’s own words that are being thrown back now - not to rewrite history but to reveal it for the first time to an angry country that has learned the hard way that it can no longer afford to be without the truth.

Age of Anxiety by Paul Krugman

ovember 28, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist

Age of Anxiety
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Many eulogies were published following the recent death of Peter Drucker, the great management theorist. I was surprised, however, that few of these eulogies mentioned his book “The Age of Discontinuity,” a prophetic work that speaks directly to today’s business headlines and economic anxieties.

Mr. Drucker wrote “The Age of Discontinuity” in the late 1960’s, a time when most people assumed that the big corporations of the day, companies like General Motors and U.S. Steel, would dominate the economy for the foreseeable future. He argued that this assumption was all wrong.

It was true, he acknowledged, that the dominant industries and corporations of 1968 were pretty much the same as the dominant industries and corporations of 1945, and for that matter of decades earlier. “The economic growth of the last twenty years,” he wrote, “has been very fast. But it has been carried largely by industries that were already ‘big business’ before World War I. … Every one of the great nineteenth-century innovations gave birth, almost overnight, to a major new industry and to new big businesses. These are still the major industries and big businesses of today.”

But all of that, said Mr. Drucker, was about to change. New technologies would usher in an era of “turbulence” like that of the half-century before World War I, and the dominance of the major industries and big businesses of 1968 would soon come to an end.

He was right. Consider, for example, what happened to America’s steel industry. In the 1960’s, steel production was virtually synonymous with economic might, as it had been for almost a century. But although the U.S. economy as a whole created lots of wealth and tens of millions of jobs between 1968 and 2000, employment in the U.S. steel industry fell 60 percent.

And as industries went, so did corporations. Many of the corporate giants of the 1960’s, companies whose pre-eminence seemed permanent, have fallen on hard times, their places in the business hierarchy taken by new players. General Motors is only the most famous example.

So what? Meet the new boss, same as the old boss: why does it matter if the list of leading corporations turns over every couple of decades, as long as the total number of jobs continues to grow?

The answer is the reason Mr. Drucker’s old book is so relevant to today’s headlines: corporations can’t provide their workers with economic security if the companies’ own future is highly insecure.

American workers at big companies used to think they had made a deal. They would be loyal to their employers, and the companies in turn would be loyal to them, guaranteeing job security, health care and a dignified retirement.

Such deals were, in a real sense, the basis of America’s postwar social order. We like to think of ourselves as rugged individualists, not like those coddled Europeans with their oversized welfare states. But as Jacob Hacker of Yale points out in his book “The Divided Welfare State,” if you add in corporate spending on health care and pensions - spending that is both regulated by the government and subsidized by tax breaks - we actually have a welfare state that’s about as large relative to our economy as those of other advanced countries.

The resulting system is imperfect: those who don’t work for companies with good benefits are, in effect, second-class citizens. Still, the system more or less worked for several decades after World War II.

Now, however, deals are being broken and the system is failing. Remember, Delphi was once part of General Motors, and its workers thought they were totally secure.

What went wrong? An important part of the answer is that America’s semi-privatized welfare state worked in the first place only because we had a stable corporate order. And that stability - along with any semblance of economic security for many workers - is now gone.

Regular readers of this column know what I think we should do: instead of trying to provide economic security through the back door, via tax breaks designed to encourage corporations to provide health care and pensions, we should provide it through the front door, starting with national health insurance. You may disagree. But one thing is clear: Mr. Drucker’s age of discontinuity is also an age of anxiety, in which workers can no longer count on loyalty from their employers.

Cut Our Losses by Bob Herbert

November 28, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist

Cut Our Losses
By BOB HERBERT

Washington — Jack Murtha is as tough as they come, but he’s seen enough of the misguided, mismanaged, mission impossible war in Iraq to know that it’s not sustainable, not worth the continued killing and butchering and psychological maiming of thousands of American G.I.’s.

“I mean, this was a war done on the cheap and we’re paying a heavy price for it,” he said in an interview just before Thanksgiving.

Mr. Murtha is the Pennsylvania congressman, former marine and traditional war hawk whose call for a quick withdrawal of American troops from Iraq has intensified the national debate over the war. He makes weekly visits to wounded troops in military hospitals, and when he talks about their suffering it sometimes seems as if his own heart is breaking.

“These kids are magnificent,” he said. “They’ve done their duty.”

He talked about the former Notre Dame basketball player Danielle Green, a left-handed guard (”heck of a player”) who lost her left hand in a rocket attack in Baghdad. And he recalled a young marine who was trying to defuse a bomb when it exploded. “It blinded him and took his hands off,” said Mr. Murtha. “It killed the guy behind him.”

In Congressman Murtha’s view, the troops who have displayed so much valor and made so many sacrifices in Iraq deserved better from their leadership here at home. “We went in with insufficient forces,” he said. “We had people in the wrong [specialties], people driving trucks who couldn’t back trucks up. We had security forces without radios. I found 40,000 troops without body armor.”

He has no faith in President Bush’s repeated calls to stay the course. “The number of incidents have gone from 150 a week to 772 a couple of weeks ago,” he said. As additional U.S. forces have been deployed, casualty rates have increased, not decreased. And his many conversations with G.I.’s have convinced him that American fighting men and women don’t have much confidence in their Iraqi allies.

“They don’t trust them - that’s all there is to it,” said Mr. Murtha. The disparagement of Iraqi security forces by American troops was so widespread that Mr. Murtha was surprised when one soldier “started talking about how good they are, how much they’ve improved, and so forth.”

It was a miscommunication. The congressman soon realized that the soldier was talking about how much the insurgents had improved; how they had become more sophisticated, and thus “more deadly.”

Mr. Murtha, 73, is a Democrat who has maintained good ties over the years with Republicans and has extraordinary contacts within the Defense Department and the military. He’s a decorated Vietnam War veteran (Bronze Star, two Purple Hearts) who retired as a colonel in the Marine Corps Reserves after 37 years of service.

He said he’s convinced that there is nothing more the military can accomplish in Iraq. It’s the presence of the American troops themselves, inevitably seen by the Iraqis as occupiers, that continues to fuel the insurgency.

“Our military captured Saddam Hussein and captured or killed his closest associates,” he said. “But the war continues to intensify.”

When he went public with his proposal to pull American troops out of Iraq (he would establish a “quick reaction” force elsewhere in the region, perhaps in Kuwait), he said:

“Our military and their families are stretched thin. Many say that the Army is broken. Some of our troops are on their third deployment. Recruitment is down, even as our military has lowered its standards. Defense budgets are being cut. Personnel costs are skyrocketing, particularly in health care.”

Equipment shortages at premier military bases in the U.S., including Fort Hood in Texas and Fort Bragg in North Carolina, are so severe, Mr. Murtha told me, “that the troops don’t have the equipment they need to train on.”

We need to cut our losses in Iraq. The folly of the Bush crowd and its apologists is now plain for all to see. Congressman Murtha is right, the war is not sustainable. Even Republicans in Congress are starting to bail out on this impossible mission. They’re worried - not about the welfare of the troops, but about their chances in the 2006 elections.

To continue sending people to their deaths under these circumstances is worse than pointless, worse than irresponsible. It’s a crime of the most grievous kind.

Bad for the Country by PAUL KRUGMAN

November 25, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist

Bad for the Country
By PAUL KRUGMAN

“What was good for our country,” a former president of General Motors once declared, “was good for General Motors, and vice versa.” G.M., which has been losing billions, has announced that it will eliminate 30,000 jobs. Is what’s bad for General Motors bad for America?

In this case, yes.

Most commentary about G.M.’s troubles is resigned: pundits may regret the decline of a once-dominant company, but they don’t think anything can or should be done about it. And commentary from some conservatives has an unmistakable tone of satisfaction, a sense that uppity workers who joined a union and made demands are getting what they deserve.

We shouldn’t be so complacent. I won’t defend the many bad decisions of G.M.’s management, or every demand made by the United Automobile Workers. But job losses at General Motors are part of the broader weakness of U.S. manufacturing, especially the part of U.S. manufacturing that offers workers decent wages and benefits. And some of that weakness reflects two big distortions in our economy: a dysfunctional health care system and an unsustainable trade deficit.

According to A. T. Kearney, last year General Motors spent $1,500 per vehicle on health care. By contrast, Toyota spent only $201 per vehicle in North America, and $97 in Japan. If the United States had national health insurance, G.M. would be in much better shape than it is.

Wouldn’t taxpayer-financed health insurance amount to a subsidy to the auto industry? Not really. Because most Americans believe that their fellow citizens are entitled to health care, and because our political system acts, however imperfectly, on that belief, tying health insurance to employment distorts the economy: it systematically discourages the creation of good jobs, the type of jobs that come with good benefits. And somebody ends up paying for health care anyway.

In fact, many of the health care expenses G.M. will save by slashing employment will simply be pushed off onto taxpayers. Some former G.M. families will end up receiving Medicaid. Others will receive uncompensated care - for example, at emergency rooms - which ends up being paid for either by taxpayers or by those with insurance.

Moreover, G.M.’s health care costs are so high in part because of the inefficiency of America’s fragmented health care system. We spend far more per person on medical care than countries with national health insurance, while getting worse results.

About the trade deficit: These days the United States imports far more than it exports. Last year the trade deficit exceeded $600 billion. The flip side of the trade deficit is a reorientation of our economy away from industries that export or compete with imports, especially manufacturing, to industries that are insulated from foreign competition, such as housing. Since 2000, we’ve lost about three million jobs in manufacturing, while membership in the National Association of Realtors has risen 50 percent.

The trade deficit isn’t sustainable. We can run huge deficits for the time being, because foreigners - in particular, foreign governments - are willing to lend us huge sums. But one of these days the easy credit will come to an end, and the United States will have to start paying its way in the world economy.

To do that, we’ll have to reorient our economy back toward producing things we can export or use to replace imports. And that will mean pulling a lot of workers back into manufacturing. So the rapid downsizing of manufacturing since 2000 - of which G.M.’s job cuts are a symptom - amounts to dismantling a sector we’ll just have to rebuild a few years from now.

I don’t want to attribute all of G.M.’s problems to our distorted economy. One of the plants G.M. plans to close is in Canada, which has national health insurance and ran a trade surplus last year. But the distortions in our economy clearly make G.M.’s problems worse.

Dealing with our trade deficit is a tricky issue I’ll have to address another time. But G.M.’s woes are yet another reminder of the urgent need to fix our health care system. It’s long past time to move to a national system that would reduce cost, diminish the burden on employers who try to do the right thing and relieve working American families from the fear of lost coverage. Fixing health care would be good for General Motors, and good for the country.

Um, About That Dirty Bomb?

November 23, 2005
Editorial
Um, About That Dirty Bomb?

Almost three and a half years ago, the Bush administration announced that it had arrested a Chicago-born man named Jose Padilla while he was entering the United States to explode a “dirty bomb” and blow up apartment buildings. The attorney general, John Ashcroft, said Mr. Padilla was a Qaeda-trained terrorist so dangerous that he was being tossed into a Navy brig and the key was being thrown away.

The administration hotly defended its right to hold Mr. Padilla without legal process because he was declared an unlawful enemy combatant, one of the new powers that President Bush granted himself after 9/11. The administration fought the case up to the Supreme Court. Mr. Padilla’s plot was thwarted, the Justice Department claimed, only because of the government’s ability to hold suspected terrorists in secretive prisons where they were sweated, to put it mildly, for information. The “dirty bomb” plot supposedly was divulged by a top Qaeda member who had been interrogated 100 times at one such location.

Never mind. As of yesterday, Mr. Padilla stopped being an unlawful combatant, and the new attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, refused even to talk about that issue. Mr. Padilla is not going to be charged with planning to explode bombs, dirty or otherwise, in the United States. Just in time for the administration to prod Congress on extending the Patriot Act and to avoid having to argue the case before the Supreme Court, Mr. Padilla was charged with aiding terrorists in other countries and will be turned over to civilian authorities.

Mr. Padilla was added late in the game, and in a minor role, to a continuing case against four other men. He faces serious charges that carry a possible life sentence, but they do nothing to clear up the enormous legal questions created by this case, nor do they have the remotest connection with the original accusations.

The Padilla case was supposed to be an example of why the administration needs to suspend prisoners’ rights when it comes to the war on terror. It turned out to be the opposite. If Mr. Padilla was seriously planning a “dirty bomb” attack, he can never be held accountable for it in court because the illegal conditions under which he has been held will make it impossible to do that. If he was only an inept fellow traveler in the terrorist community, he is excellent proof that the government is fallible and needs the normal checks of the judicial system. And, of course, if he is innocent, he was the victim of a terrible injustice.

The same is true of the hundreds of other men held at Guantánamo Bay and in the C.I.A.’s secret prisons. This is hardly what Americans have had in mind hearing Mr. Bush’s constant assurances since Sept. 11, 2001, that he will bring terrorists to justice.

George Bush’s Third Term By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

November 23, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
George Bush’s Third Term
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
President George W. Bush has just entered his third term. That’s right. He’s a three-term president. His first term was from 2001 to 2004, and it was dominated by 9/11, which Mr. Bush skillfully used to take a hard-right Republican agenda on taxes and war with Iraq, which was going nowhere on 9/10, and drive it into a 9/12 world.

His second term was very brief. It lasted from his re-election in November 2004 until Election Day 2005. This was an utterly wasted term. It was dominated by an attempt to privatize Social Security, which the country rejected, political scandals involving I. Lewis Libby Jr., Tom DeLay and Bill Frist, a ham-fisted response to Katrina and a mishandling of the Iraq war to such a degree that many Democrats and Republicans have begun to vote “no confidence” in the Bush-Cheney war performance. If ours were a parliamentary system, Mr. Bush would have had to resign by now.

So now begins Mr. Bush’s third term. What will he do with it? The last time Mr. Bush hit rock bottom - then from too much drinking - he found God and turned his life around. Now that he has hit rock bottom again - this time from drinking in too much Karl Rove - the question is whether he can find America and turn his presidency around.

When I watch Mr. Bush these days, though, he looks to me like a man who wishes that we had a 28th amendment to the Constitution - called “Can I Go Now?” He looks like someone who would prefer to pack up and go back to his Texas ranch. It’s not just that he doesn’t seem to be having any fun. It’s that he seems to be totally out of ideas relevant to the nation’s future.

Since there is no such clause, Mr. Bush has two choices. One is to continue governing as though he’s still running against John McCain in South Carolina. That means pushing a hard-right strategy based on dividing the country to get the 50.1 percent he needs to push through more tax cuts, while ignoring our real problems: the deficit, health care, energy, climate change and Iraq. More slash-and-burn politics like that will be a disaster.

Indeed, at a time when a decent outcome in Iraq is still possible and we are at the most important political moment in Baghdad - the first national election based on an Iraqi-written constitution - it was appalling to watch Mr. Bush and Dick Cheney using their bully pulpits to act like two Rove attack dogs, accusing Democrats of being less than patriotic on Iraq.

For two men who have fought this war without deploying enough troops, always putting politics before policy, without any plans for the morning after and never punishing any member of their team for rank incompetence to then accuse others of lacking seriousness on Iraq is disgusting. Yes, we need to stay the course for now in Iraq, but we can’t stay the course alone or divided. That’s the point.

We are about to produce the most legitimate government ever in the Arab world, and the Bush-Cheney team - instead of acknowledging its errors on W.M.D., seeking forgiveness and urging the country to unite behind the important effort to defeat the jihadist madness in Iraq - does what? It starts slinging mud at Democrats on Iraq. Sure, some Democrats goaded them with reckless remarks - but they are not in power. Where are the adults? We can’t afford this nonsense, while also ignoring our energy crisis, the deficit, health care, climate change and Social Security.

“We are entering the era of hard choices for the United States - an era in which we can’t always count on three Asian countries writing us checks to compensate for our failure to prepare for a hurricane or properly conduct a war,” said David Rothkopf, author of “Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power.”

“If President Bush doesn’t rise to this challenge, our children and grandchildren will look at the burden he has placed on their shoulders and see this moment as the hinge between the American Century and the Chinese Century. George W. Bush may well be seen as the president who, by refusing to address these urgent questions when they needed to be addressed, invited America’s decline.”

Truly, I hope Mr. Bush rises to the challenge. We do not have three years to waste. To do that, though, Mr. Bush would need to become a very different third-term president, with a much more centrist agenda and style. If he does, he still has time to be a bridge to the future. If he doesn’t, the resources he will have squandered and the size of the problems he will have ignored will put him in the running for one of our worst presidents ever.

John F. Kennedy Quotes

Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.

Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength for our nation.

Liberty without learning is always in peril; learning without liberty is always in vain.

The American, by nature, is optimistic. He is experimental, an inventor and a builder who builds best when called upon to build greatly.

The ancient Greek definition of happiness was the full use of your powers along lines of excellence.

The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.

There are risks and costs to a program of action. But they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.

We stand for freedom. That is our conviction for ourselves; that is our only commitment to others.

When we got into office, the thing that surprised me the most was that things were as bad as we’d been saying they were.

The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the Nation’s greatness, but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable, especially when that questioning is disinterested, for they determine whether we use power or power uses us. (Amherst College, Oct 26, 1963)

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. (In a speech at the White House, 1962)

And so, my fellow americans: ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man. (Inaugural address, January 20, 1961)

If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. (Inaugural address, January 20, 1961)

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth. (October 26, 1963)

For in the final analysis, our most basic common link, is that we all inhabit this small planet, we all breathe the same air, we all cherish our children’s futures, and we are all mortal. (Speech at The American University, Washington, D.C., June 10, 1963)

Our problems are man-made, therefore they may be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. (Speech at The American University, Washington, D.C., June 10, 1963)

The ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all. (Speech at Vanderbilt University, May 18, 1963)

Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.
(Speech prepared for delivery in Dallas the day of his assassination, November 22, 1963)

Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind. (Speech to UN General Assembly, Sept. 25, 1961)

White people! Don’t just cast a vote; sell it

Georgia State Rep. Sue Burmeister, an Augusta Republican and author of the state’s controversial voter ID law, told investigators for the Justice Department that the law isn’t a threat since black voters in her area vote only if they’re paid to vote anyway.

Ladies and gentlemen, that’s racism, pure and ugly

[thx to GIG]

Sudan’s Department of Gang Rape by Nicholas D. Kristof

November 22, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
Sudan’s Department of Gang Rape
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Kalma Camp, Sudan

When the Arab men in military uniforms caught Noura Moussa and raped her the other day, they took the trouble to explain themselves.

“We cannot let black people live in this land,” she remembers them telling her, and they used racial epithets against blacks, called her a slave, and added: “We can kill any members of African tribes.”

Ms. Noura is one of thousands of women and girls to be gang-raped in Darfur, as part of what appears to be a deliberate Sudanese government policy to break the spirit of several African tribes through mass rape.

This policy is shrewd as well as brutal, for the exceptional stigma of rape here often silences victims even as it terrorizes the entire population and forces people to flee.

Ms. Noura, 22, expected to be married soon, and the neighbors said she probably would have received a bride price of 30 cows. These days, they say, she will be lucky to find any husband at all - and will not get a single cow.

This is the first genocide of the 21st century, and we are collectively letting the Sudanese government get away with it. Sudan’s leaders appear to have made a calculated decision that some African tribes in the Darfur region are more of a headache than the international protests that result when it depopulates large areas of those tribes. In effect, it is our acquiescence that allows the rapes and murders to continue.

The solution isn’t to send American troops. But a starting point is to convey American outrage - loudly and insistently - and demonstrate that Darfur is an American priority.

Ms. Noura’s saga began when the Sudanese Army and janjaweed militia burned down her village a year ago and killed her father. She and her family fled here to Kalma, but she is the eldest child and needed money to support her younger brothers and sisters.

So she ventured out of Kalma to cut grass in the nearby fields to sell. That was when the men raped and beat her, leaving her unable to walk home.

Rape leads to particular injuries in Darfur because many girls, as part of female circumcision rites, have their vaginas sewn shut with a wild thorn. The resulting physical trauma from rape%2

US rapper Snoop Dogg inspires protesters at death row prison

Rapper Snoop Dogg (R) and his wife Shante Broadus, pictured 02 November 2005. Snoop Dogg joined an anti-execution protest at the gates of a California prison and called on celebrity governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to spare the life a condemned killer.(AFP/Getty Images/File/Kevin Winter) Learn more about Tookie Williams

Time to Leave By PAUL KRUGMAN

November 21, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
Time to Leave
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Not long ago wise heads offered some advice to those of us who had argued since 2003 that the Iraq war was sold on false pretenses: give it up. The 2004 election, they said, showed that we would never convince the American people. They suggested that we stop talking about how we got into Iraq and focus instead on what to do next.

It turns out that the wise heads were wrong. A solid majority of Americans now believe that we were misled into war. And it is only now, when the public has realized the truth about the past, that serious discussions about where we are and where we’re going are able to get a hearing.

Representative John Murtha’s speech calling for a quick departure from Iraq was full of passion, but it was also serious and specific in a way rarely seen on the other side of the debate. President Bush and his apologists speak in vague generalities about staying the course and finishing the job. But Mr. Murtha spoke of mounting casualties and lagging recruiting, the rising frequency of insurgent attacks, stagnant oil production and lack of clean water.

Mr. Murtha - a much-decorated veteran who cares deeply about America’s fighting men and women - argued that our presence in Iraq is making things worse, not better. Meanwhile, the war is destroying the military he loves. And that’s why he wants us out as soon as possible.

I’d add that the war is also destroying America’s moral authority. When Mr. Bush speaks of human rights, the world thinks of Abu Ghraib. (In his speech, Mr. Murtha pointed out the obvious: torture at Abu Ghraib helped fuel the insurgency.) When administration officials talk of spreading freedom, the world thinks about the reality that much of Iraq is now ruled by theocrats and their militias.

Some administration officials accused Mr. Murtha of undermining the troops and giving comfort to the enemy. But that sort of thing no longer works, now that the administration has lost the public’s trust.

Instead, defenders of our current policy have had to make a substantive argument: we can’t leave Iraq now, because a civil war will break out after we’re gone. One is tempted to say that they should have thought about that possibility back when they were cheerleading us into this war. But the real question is this: When, exactly, would be a good time to leave Iraq?

The fact is that we’re not going to stay in Iraq until we achieve victory, whatever that means in this context. At most, we’ll stay until the American military can take no more.

Mr. Bush never asked the nation for the sacrifices - higher taxes, a bigger military and, possibly, a revived draft - that might have made a long-term commitment to Iraq possible. Instead, the war has been fought on borrowed money and borrowed time. And time is running out. With some military units on their third tour of duty in Iraq, the superb volunteer army that Mr. Bush inherited is in increasing danger of facing a collapse in quality and morale similar to the collapse of the officer corps in the early 1970’s.

So the question isn’t whether things will be ugly after American forces leave Iraq. They probably will. The question, instead, is whether it makes sense to keep the war going for another year or two, which is all the time we realistically have.

Pessimists think that Iraq will fall into chaos whenever we leave. If so, we’re better off leaving sooner rather than later. As a Marine officer quoted by James Fallows in the current Atlantic Monthly puts it, “We can lose in Iraq and destroy our Army, or we can just lose.”

And there’s a good case to be made that our departure will actually improve matters. As Mr. Murtha pointed out in his speech, the insurgency derives much of its support from the perception that it’s resisting a foreign occupier. Once we’re gone, the odds are that Iraqis, who don’t have a tradition of religious extremism, will turn on fanatical foreigners like Zarqawi.

The only way to justify staying in Iraq is to make the case that stretching the U.S. army to its breaking point will buy time for something good to happen. I don’t think you can make that case convincingly. So Mr. Murtha is right: it’s time to leave.

Ali Honored at Opening of Hometown Center

Muhammad Ali hugged former President Bill Clinton last night as Ali’s wife, Lonnie, looked on during the gala celebration for the Ali Center. (Ed Reinke/Associated Press)

One War Lost, Another to Go By FRANK RICH

November 20, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
One War Lost, Another to Go
By FRANK RICH

IF anyone needs further proof that we are racing for the exits in Iraq, just follow the bouncing ball that is Rick Santorum. A Republican leader in the Senate and a true-blue (or red) Iraq hawk, he has long slobbered over President Bush, much as Ed McMahon did over Johnny Carson. But when Mr. Bush went to Mr. Santorum’s home state of Pennsylvania to give his Veterans Day speech smearing the war’s critics as unpatriotic, the senator was M.I.A.

Mr. Santorum preferred to honor a previous engagement more than 100 miles away. There he told reporters for the first time that “maybe some blame” for the war’s “less than optimal” progress belonged to the White House. This change of heart had nothing to do with looming revelations of how the new Iraqi “democracy” had instituted Saddam-style torture chambers. Or with the spiraling investigations into the whereabouts of nearly $9 billion in unaccounted-for taxpayers’ money from the American occupation authority. Or with the latest spike in casualties. Mr. Santorum was instead contemplating his own incipient political obituary written the day before: a poll showing him 16 points down in his re-election race. No sooner did he stiff Mr. Bush in Pennsylvania than he did so again in Washington, voting with a 79-to-19 majority on a Senate resolution begging for an Iraq exit strategy. He was joined by all but one (Jon Kyl) of the 13 other Republican senators running for re-election next year. They desperately want to be able to tell their constituents that they were against the war after they were for it.

They know the voters have decided the war is over, no matter what symbolic resolutions are passed or defeated in Congress nor how many Republicans try to Swift-boat Representative John Murtha, the marine hero who wants the troops out. A USA Today/CNN/Gallup survey last week found that the percentage (52) of Americans who want to get out of Iraq fast, in 12 months or less, is even larger than the percentage (48) that favored a quick withdrawal from Vietnam when that war’s casualty toll neared 54,000 in the apocalyptic year of 1970. The Ohio State political scientist John Mueller, writing in Foreign Affairs, found that “if history is any indication, there is little the Bush administration can do to reverse this decline.” He observed that Mr. Bush was trying to channel L. B. J. by making “countless speeches explaining what the effort in Iraq is about, urging patience and asserting that progress is being made. But as was also evident during Woodrow Wilson’s campaign to sell the League of Nations to the American public, the efficacy of the bully pulpit is much overrated.”

Mr. Bush may disdain timetables for our pullout, but, hello, there already is one, set by the Santorums of his own party: the expiration date for a sizable American presence in Iraq is Election Day 2006. As Mr. Mueller says, the decline in support for the war won’t reverse itself. The public knows progress is not being made, no matter how many times it is told that Iraqis will soon stand up so we can stand down.

On the same day the Senate passed the resolution rebuking Mr. Bush on the war, Martha Raddatz of ABC News reported that “only about 700 Iraqi troops” could operate independently of the U.S. military, 27,000 more could take a lead role in combat “only with strong support” from our forces and the rest of the 200,000-odd trainees suffered from a variety of problems, from equipment shortages to an inability “to wake up when told” or follow orders.

But while the war is lost both as a political matter at home and a practical matter in Iraq, the exit strategy being haggled over in Washington will hardly mark the end of our woes. Few Americans will cry over the collapse of the administration’s vainglorious mission to make Iraq a model of neocon nation-building. But, as some may dimly recall, there is another war going on as well - against Osama bin Laden and company.

One hideous consequence of the White House’s Big Lie - fusing the war of choice in Iraq with the war of necessity that began on 9/11 - is that the public, having rejected one, automatically rejects the other. That’s already happening. The percentage of Americans who now regard fighting terrorism as a top national priority is either in the single or low double digits in every poll. Thus the tragic bottom line of the Bush catastrophe: the administration has at once increased the ranks of jihadists by turning Iraq into a new training ground and recruitment magnet while at the same time exhausting America’s will and resources to confront that expanded threat.

We have arrived at “the worst of all possible worlds,” in the words of Daniel Benjamin, Richard Clarke’s former counterterrorism colleague, with whom I talked last week. No one speaks more eloquently to this point than Mr. Benjamin and Steven Simon, his fellow National Security Council alum. They saw the Qaeda threat coming before most others did in the 1990’s, and their riveting new book, “The Next Attack,” is the best argued and most thoroughly reported account of why, in their opening words, “we are losing” the war against the bin Laden progeny now.

“The Next Attack” is prescient to a scary degree. “If bin Laden is the Robin Hood of jihad,” the authors write, then Abu Musab al-Zarqawi “has been its Horatio Alger, and Iraq his field of dreams.” The proof arrived spectacularly this month with the Zarqawi-engineered suicide bombings of three hotels in Amman. That attack, Mr. Benjamin wrote in Slate, “could soon be remembered as the day that the spillover of violence from Iraq became a major affliction for the Middle East.” But not remembered in America. Thanks to the confusion sown by the Bush administration, the implications for us in this attack, like those in London and Madrid, are quickly forgotten, if they were noticed in the first place. What happened in Amman is just another numbing bit of bad news that we mentally delete along with all the other disasters we now label “Iraq.”

Only since his speech about “Islamo-fascism” in early October has Mr. Bush started trying to make distinctions between the “evildoers” of Saddam’s regime and the Islamic radicals who did and do directly threaten us. But even if anyone was still listening to this president, it would be too little and too late. The only hope for getting Americans to focus on the war we can’t escape is to clear the decks by telling the truth about the war of choice in Iraq: that it is making us less safe, not more, and that we have to learn from its mistakes and calculate the damage it has caused as we reboot and move on.

Mr. Bush is incapable of such candor. In the speech Mr. Santorum skipped on Veterans Day, the president lashed out at his critics for trying “to rewrite the history” of how the war began. Then he rewrote the history of the war, both then and now. He boasted of America’s “broad and coordinated homeland defense” even as the members of the bipartisan 9/11 commission were preparing to chastise the administration’s inadequate efforts to prevent actual nuclear W.M.D.’s, as opposed to Saddam’s fictional ones, from finding their way to terrorists. Mr. Bush preened about how “we’re standing with dissidents and exiles against oppressive regimes” even as we were hearing new reports of how we outsource detainees to such regimes to be tortured.

And once again he bragged about the growing readiness of Iraqi troops, citing “nearly 90 Iraqi army battalions fighting the terrorists alongside our forces.” But as James Fallows confirms in his exhaustive report on “Why Iraq Has No Army” in the current issue of The Atlantic Monthly, America would have to commit to remaining in Iraq for many years to “bring an Iraqi army to maturity.” If we’re not going to do that, Mr. Fallows concludes, America’s only alternative is to “face the stark fact that it has no orderly way out of Iraq, and prepare accordingly.”

THAT’S the alternative that has already been chosen, brought on not just by the public’s irreversible rejection of the war, but also by the depleted state of our own broken military forces; they are falling short of recruitment goals across the board by as much as two-thirds, the Government Accountability Office reported last week. We must prepare accordingly for what’s to come. To do so we need leaders, whatever the political party, who can look beyond our nonorderly withdrawal from Iraq next year to the mess that will remain once we’re on our way out. Whether it’s countering the havoc inflicted on American interests internationally by Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo or overhauling and redeploying our military, intelligence and homeland security operations to confront the enemy we actually face, there’s an enormous job to be done.

The arguments about how we got into Mr. Bush’s war and exactly how we’ll get out are also important. But the damage from this fiasco will be even greater if those debates obscure the urgency of the other war we are losing, one that will be with us long after we’ve left the quagmire in Iraq.

Activists Seek Marker for Till’s Church

In a small, nondescript church, the mutilated body of 14-year-old Emmett Till was put on display in an open casket because his mother wanted the nation to see what racism looked like.

In the beginning of a change the patriot is a scar…

In the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him for then it costs nothing to be a patriot. ~Mark Twain

Every great historic change has been based on nonc…

Every great historic change has been based on nonconformity, has been bought either with the blood or with the reputation of nonconformists. ~Ben Shahn

In all history, there is no instance of a country …

In all history, there is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare. Only one who knows the disastrous effects of a long war can realize the supreme importance of rapidity in bringing it to a close. ~Sun Tzu - The Art of War

A Private Obsession by PAUL KRUGMAN

November 18, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
A Private Obsession
By PAUL KRUGMAN
“Lots of things in life are complicated.” So declared Michael Leavitt, the secretary of health and human services, in response to the mass confusion as registration for the new Medicare drug benefit began. But the complexity of the program - which has reduced some retirees to tears as they try to make what may be life-or-death decisions - is far greater than necessary.

One reason the drug benefit is so confusing is that older Americans can’t simply sign up with Medicare as they can for other benefits. They must, instead, choose from a baffling array of plans offered by private middlemen. Why?

Here’s a parallel. Earlier this year Senator Rick Santorum introduced a bill that would have forced the National Weather Service to limit the weather information directly available to the public. Although he didn’t say so explicitly, he wanted the service to funnel that information through private forecasters instead.

Mr. Santorum’s bill didn’t go anywhere. But it was a classic attempt to force gratuitous privatization: involving private corporations in the delivery of public services even when those corporations have no useful role to play.

The Medicare drug benefit is an example of gratuitous privatization on a grand scale.

Here’s some background: the elderly have long been offered a choice between standard Medicare, in which the government pays medical bills directly, and plans in which the government pays a middleman, like an H.M.O., to deliver health care. The theory was that the private sector would find innovative ways to lower costs while providing better care.

The theory was wrong. A number of studies have found that managed-care plans, which have much higher administrative costs than government-managed Medicare, end up costing the system money, not saving it.

But privatization, once promoted as a way to save money, has become a goal in itself. The 2003 bill that established the prescription drug benefit also locked in large subsidies for managed care.

And on drug coverage, the 2003 bill went even further: rather than merely subsidizing private plans, it made them mandatory. To receive the drug benefit, one must sign up with a plan offered by a private company. As people are discovering, the result is a deeply confusing system because the competing private plans differ in ways that are very hard to assess.

The peculiar structure of the drug benefit, with its huge gap in coverage - the famous “doughnut hole” I wrote about last week - adds to the confusion. Many better-off retirees have relied on Medigap policies to cover gaps in traditional Medicare, including prescription drugs. But that straightforward approach, which would make it relatively easy to compare drug plans, can’t be used to fill the doughnut hole because Medigap policies are no longer allowed to cover drugs.

The only way to get some coverage in the gap is as part of a package in which you pay extra - a lot extra - to one of the private drug plans delivering the basic benefit. And because this coverage is bundled with other aspects of the plans, it’s very difficult to figure out which plans offer the best deal.

But confusion isn’t the only, or even the main, reason why the privatization of drug benefits is bad for America. The real problem is that we’ll end up spending too much and getting too little.

Everything we know about health economics indicates that private drug plans will have much higher administrative costs than would have been incurred if Medicare had administered the benefit directly.

It’s also clear that the private plans will spend large sums on marketing rather than on medicine. I have nothing against Don Shula, the former head coach of the Miami Dolphins, who is promoting a drug plan offered by Humana. But do we really want people choosing drug plans based on which one hires the most persuasive celebrity?

Last but not least, competing private drug plans will have less clout in negotiating lower drug prices than Medicare as a whole would have. And the law explicitly forbids Medicare from intervening to help the private plans negotiate better deals.

Last week I explained that the Medicare drug bill was devised by people who don’t believe in a positive role for government. An insistence on gratuitous privatization is a byproduct of the same ideology. And the result of that ideology is a piece of legislation so bad it’s almost surreal.

Dubya Asks

“Do you have blacks too?”

– Speaking to an astonished Fernando Cardoss, President of Brazil

(Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, Condoleeza Rice jumped in to rescue President Cardoso from the embarrassment of having to answer that mind bogglingly stupid question. She informed Bush that Brazil has more blacks than any country outside of Africa. In the interest, no doubt, of national security, the White House press corps dutifully did not report the incident. However, it was reported by foreign media - to which Americans wanting to know what their government is doing, have to turn.)

The New Rules on Going Broke in America

Nicholas Kulish, an editorial board member, writes on business issues.

There was a long line of people wrapped around the corner of New York’s hundred-year-old granite Custom House at the foot of Broadway one Friday last month. Most of the people in it had little more than cheap black convenience-store umbrellas to protect them from a torrential downpour. But they had good reason to wait for hours in the driving rain. The following Monday, October 17, a much-disputed new federal bankruptcy law took effect.

Similar scenes played out across the country. People living on the economic brink rushed to declare themselves insolvent under the old law, rather than become guinea pigs of the new regime. A surge in filings in the run-up to the deadline was expected, but the sheer quantity that gray Friday dwarfed most expectations.

The new law makes it much harder for people in financial distress to make the “fresh start” that has long been the promise of American bankruptcy law. It requires most people who earn more than the median income in their state to pay off their debts on a five-year repayment plan. Poorer filers can still avail themselves of Chapter 7’s debt-erasing provisions, but they face an array of new hurdles, including mandatory credit counseling, greater paperwork requirements, and rising lawyers’ fees.

America has always been ambivalent about bankruptcy. It has been stigmatized as a refusal to make good on one’s obligations. But at the same time, the laws governing bankruptcy have been credited with contributing to the flexibility of the American economic system, and has been a key ingredient in its success over the last century.

News stories about the new law have largely focus