The Talk Show American

THE TALK SHOW AMERICAN: 12/19/2004 - 12/26/2004

Friday, December 24, 2004

91 Veterans Ask To Have Their Votes Counted Too

December 23, 2004

By KOMO Staff & News Services


KING COUNTY - A lawyer for the Washington state Republican Party and a group of veterans presented 91 affidavits Thursday to the King County elections director.

The statements say members of the military lost their right to vote when their absentee ballots went uncounted because of signature mis-matches or other problems. Republicans say they should be included.

The three-member county canvassing board is meeting today to consider more than 700 other disputed ballots that the state Supreme Court ruled can now be counted.

A spokeswoman says after the board finishes its work, King County elections officials expect to certify the results by 5 o'clock -- a little later than the previously expected time of 3 o'clock.

Kerry to Enter Ohio Recount Fray

John Kerry is filing papers in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio in support of a recount effort in that state, reports Truthout.


At the center of the Kerry filing are motions to preserve and discover � expeditiously � information regarding the Triad Systems voting machines used in Election 2004.


Sherole Eaton, deputy director of elections for Hocking County, swore an affidavit describing how she witnessed tampering of the electronic voting equipment by a Triad representative.


Kerry lost the Ohio vote by a narrow margin and therefore has the necessary standing to get results from the court. Heretofore the original complainants, the Green and Libertarian parties, have been unsuccessful in their recount efforts � since no recount would deliver Ohio to either party.

According to the Truthout report, the Democratic Party is also quietly putting financial resources into the Ohio recount effort.


The report cited the effectiveness of telephone calls and letters to Kerry to challenge the election.

Wednesday, December 22, 2004

Albania, Poland pledge to keep troops in Iraq





TIRANA, Dec. 21 (Xinhuanet) -- Albania and Poland reconfirmed on Tuesday that their troops will stay in Iraq to help maintain stability in the country.

"We shall continue our contribution to assisting the country ina normal development of elections next year," said Albanian Prime Minister Fatos Nano when he met with his visiting Polish counterpart, Marek Belka.

Both prime ministers hoped that the situation in Iraq would calm down for the elections scheduled for Jan. 30.

"What we are doing in Iraq is not only for the sake of the Iraqi people but for the safety of the whole region and the world,as terrorism is global. Nobody can hide from terrorism and we should persecute terrorism," Belka said.

He hoped that the situation would stabilize in Iraq so that thetroops could "hand over the tasks to the Iraqi army and police we are training." Last week Warsaw said it would cut the number of its troops in Iraq from 2,400 to 1,700 in February.

A strong ally of the United States since the start of the Iraq war, Poland administers a zone south of Baghdad and is leader of amultinational force of 6,000 troops.

Meanwhile, Albania supported the US-led war in Iraq and has a small contingent of 71 troops serving alongside US forces in the town of Mosul.


"I Call the President Imam Bush": A Turning Point in Islamic and World History


By Stephen Schwartz Published 12/22/2004




If one were to rely on the mainstream Western media, one would assume that the situation in Iraq represents nothing more than a disaster and a horrible error by the United States. This media spin, which is more pronounced and strident than any in recent memory, is based on two critical flaws in the way Western media work.



The first is the most obvious and is known to millions: the bias of Western reporters, and nearly all the experts and other sources on which they depend, against the Bush administration's policy of democratization in the Middle East. For such commentators, the failure of the Bush intervention in Iraq was a foregone conclusion. In many cases, including those of Arabist and ethnic Arab academic experts, opposition to democratization is based on breathtakingly prejudicial stereotypes.



Few American intellectuals would ever, in the 1950s, have predicted that the time would come when the very concept of "democracy" would be the object of so much polemical contempt in the democracies themselves. And fewer still would have predicted that Arab adherents, as so many now do, would one day reject altogether the appropriateness of democracy in their countries. When Arab academic and media figures declare that their people are unprepared for democracy, and cannot go beyond limited and culture-bound reforms, one wonders if they realize how arrogant and cruel they sound. In the past, we all seemed to agree that democracy was a universal and benevolent value, for which all peoples, at least outside the palaces, strove.



The second serious defect in the methodology of Western media, when dealing with Iraq, is their lack of knowledge about Islam. Reporters seem to continue to base their dispatches on off-the-street quotes and Iraqi official handouts. Much more homework needs to be done, especially considering that American lives have been sacrificed for the future of Iraq. Western reporters seldom study Islam or seek out authoritative representatives of the Islamic leaderships; and when, almost as if by accident, they encounter such figures, they seem never to know what questions to ask them.



Terrorism continues in Iraq and monopolizes headlines. But there is much more to be said about the situation in that country, and it has to do with much more than the restoration of public services and infrastructure. Perhaps the biggest story left unreported in the West is the extraordinary exuberance about the Iraqi election, set for January 30, among Iraqi Shias.



I know about this because I spend a great deal of time talking to Iraqi Shia religious leaders, some of whom commute back and forth between Iraq and the U.S. The effervescence among them must be experienced to be believed. One prominent Shia in the U.S. told me, "I call the president Imam Bush." (In Shia Islam, the imams are the chief religious guides throughout the history of the sect.) "He is a believer in God, he is just, and I believe he will keep his promise to hold a fair election on January 30," my interlocutor said. "He liberated Kerbala and Najaf [the Shia holy cities]. He has done more for Shias than anybody else in history."



Shias comprise at least 65 percent of the Iraqi population. It is clear that the January 30 election will produce a Shia-majority government. The Iraqi Shias have produced a unity ticket for the elections under the direction of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the leading Iraqi Shia cleric. Sistani has severely condemned any Shia who might obstruct the election. Sistani and his colleagues have managed to silence the disruptive Moqtada ul-Sadr in the interest of orderly elections.



Still, even if they can anticipate a Shia sweep in Iraq, Westerners generally seem unable to grasp the full meaning, for the Islamic world, of such a fact. Unequivocal Arab Shia control over their holy sites will represent a major, new historical chapter. Notwithstanding superficial Western reportage and alarmist propaganda by Arab Sunnis, Arab Shias do not obey the commands of Iranian Shias. Iraqi Shias never accepted Khomeini's conception of clerical governance, which had no basis in Islamic doctrine, and was actually a heresy. There is no serious evidence that, if a Shia majority is brought to power in Iraq, a Khomeinist regime would be established.



In addition, the Khomeinist scheme has been discredited in Iran itself, and that country's majority is trying to find a way out of it. Yet it is amazing to see Western media and politicians, as well as some Arab politicians and rulers, proclaiming the "menace" of Shia rule in Iraq. Naturally, the former Sunni elite who misruled Iraq with the support of Saddam, and Saudi-backed Wahhabi jihadists who hate Shias even more than they do Jews and Christians, seek to disrupt the electoral process in Iraq. But Westerners have no justification to back away from the commitment to elections in Iraq, merely on the basis of Sunni complaints or threats. Some Western experts warn that the triumph of the Shias would bring about a civil war in Iraq; but what other than a civil war is presently going on? Sunni terrorists wreak havoc and devastating bloodshed wherever they can. If anything, a definitive Shia victory would be a powerful incentive for Sunnis to cease their terrorism.



The wider regional and global ripples of a Shia government in Iraq are likely to be as significant as the transfer of power itself. A nonclerical Shia regime in Baghdad, governing Kerbala and Najaf, would powerfully encourage completion of democratization in Iran. Its success would also draw Lebanese Shias away from the extremist clerical leadership of Hezbollah. A stable post-Ba'athist regime in Iraq could provide a significant model for Syrians as they work their way out of the Bashir Assad dictatorship. Above all, however, a Shia regime in Iraq will provide a stunning exemplar of Arab-Islamic pluralism, that is, an alternative to the model of Sunni monolithism found in Saudi Arabia, and which the Saudis have sought to export throughout the global community of Sunni Islam.



The reactionary wing of the Saudi royal family may have a great deal to lose from successful elections in Iraq. To emphasize, Wahhabism, the official religion in the Saudi kingdom, preaches violence against Shias, and a Shia-led Iraq with a system of popular sovereignty would be an enormous humiliation to the Wahhabis. But more important, as the American architects of the Iraqi experiment have understood, Iraq has immense resources in terms of education and entrepreneurship, aside from the economic cushion of its oil.



President Bush is quite correct when he states that the terrorists hate Americans for who we are, not for what we do. The Wahhabi clerics in Saudi Arabia, who encourage al-Qaida and other terrorists, including Zarqawi in Iraq, repudiate the very concept of voting, parliamentarism, and democracy. Shias do not reject these principles. A prosperous Shia-led electoral regime in Iraq, on its long northern border, could be the ultimate nightmare for the Saudi hardliners, particularly since the oil industry in the kingdom is centered in the Saudi Eastern Province, which has a Shia majority -- and Shias have suffered a near-genocidal discrimination at Wahhabi hands. Saudi Arabia has always dealt with Shia dissidence by labeling it as a product of Iran. But if Shia dissidents in the Saudi kingdom are inspired by Iraq they will gain immense credibility.



Finally, the worldwide effect of transitions to democracy, in countries typically considered impossibly distant from one another, cannot be belied. Looking at the last quarter of the 20th century, we observe a process that began in Spain in 1975, with the death of dictator Francisco Franco. The Spanish business class and political elite carried out a peaceful process of democratization. Spain was only the first such instance. Although Iran and Nicaragua later saw major convulsions in their societies, and brutal wars broke out in Yugoslavia and Africa, many more countries entered on the road of peaceful democratization, including, finally, Nicaragua and some of the ex-Yugoslav states. The number of countries that settled a change in their political affairs peacefully came to far outnumber those with recourse to armed conflict: they include the Philippines, all the rest of the former Baltic and East European Communist states (although Russia, as always, remains a problem), Taiwan, South Korea, Chile, Mexico, Indonesia, Turkey.



Many of these countries have a legacy of rule by ideological parties acting as a foundation for the state, typically with the backing of the military. This was the experience of Taiwan with the Guomindang, Mexico under the so-called Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), and Turkey ruled by the Republican People's Party. Saddam's Ba'athism was merely a variation of this 20th century model, as was the Soviet Communism that is finally disappearing, one hopes, from Ukraine.



There should be no reason to doubt the universality of democracy, or the contagious nature of elections in Iraq, and, for that matter, in Ukraine. As Iraq's ballot boxes may trump the viciousness of its terrorists, the Palestinians may also join the new wave of democratization. Ukrainians vote, Palestinians vote, Iraqis vote, and a new phase in world history begins. This is the true meaning of globalization, especially in the age of the internet and satellite television.



Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia is much less a form of Islam than an ideology employed to keep the royal family in power, and if the removal of the ideological state may be effected peacefully in Kyiv, why not in Riyadh? Saudi subjects could leap ahead of their Iraqi neighbors, for I cannot imagine that if Ukraine succeeds in a bloodless democratization, Saudi subjects will not be inspired to ask why they, too, cannot follow the road of the Orange Revolution, rather than that of the black-bannered jihad, and voting boxes protected by American lives, in Iraq. And that will mean a decisive blow to terrorist jihadism throughout the world

Department of Justice: Second Amendment Is Individual Right

Jeff Johnson, CNSNews.com
Tuesday, Dec. 21, 2004
The U.S. Department of Justice has declared that the Second Amendment explicitly recognizes the right of individual Americans to own and carry firearms. Gun rights advocates call the statement a "good first step" but cautioned that it is not the end of the gun control debate.

The "Memorandum Opinion for the Attorney General" released on the Internet last week is titled "Whether the Second Amendment Secures an Individual Right." The 103-page report, with 437 footnotes, concluded that "the Second Amendment secures a personal right of individuals, not a collective right that may only be invoked by a State or a quasi-collective right restricted to those persons who serve in organized militia units."
That conclusion is based, according to the authors, "on the Amendment's text, as commonly understood at the time of its adoption and interpreted in light of other provisions of the Constitution and the Amendment's historical antecedents."

The Aug. 24 memorandum stated that it did not consider the "substance" of the individual right to own and carry firearms or the legitimacy of government attempts to limit the right. The document also declared that the authors were not calling into question the constitutionality of any particular limitations on owning, carrying or using firearms.

Joe Waldron, executive of Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA), told Cybercast News Service that the memorandum was "a good start, a good first step."

"What this does," Waldron explained, "is it puts the federal government - the U.S. Justice Department, which is the nation's chief law enforcement agency - on record as recognizing that the Second Amendment, without question, is intended to apply to individuals and not to collective organizations such as the National Guard or any kind of lesser militia."

The memo does not protect individuals from being prosecuted under gun laws, Waldron acknowledged, but he said it did require a fundamental change in how the government approaches those cases.

Civil Rights

"It changes the courts' view of the issue, and it applies a stricter standard of scrutiny as to whether or not a given law does infringe on an individual's constitutional rights," Waldron said. "They have to look at it from a civil rights perspective now instead of just [whether] the individual violated a given law."

Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence did not return calls seeking comment on the Justice Department's determination, but the organization has spoken out against the "individual rights" interpretation of the Second Amendment frequently in the past, including in an amicus brief filed in federal court in 1999.

Gun Grabbers: Second Amendment 'Depleted'

"The fact that militia members are no longer required to supply their own arms when reporting for service has depleted the Second Amendment of most of its vitality," Brady Center stated. "And, in fact, the Second Amendment remains relevant today because the rights it protects are held by the National Guard."

Dennis Henigan, director of Brady Center's Legal Action Project, also spoke against the "individual rights" interpretation of the Second Amendment at James Madison University in 2002.

"Both the language and history of the Second Amendment show that its subject matter was not individual rights," Henigan said, "but rather the distribution of military power in society between the states and the federal government."

The Justice Department rejected Brady Center's argument.


'A Right of Individuals'


"A 'right of the people' is ordinarily and most naturally a right of individuals, not of a State and not merely of those serving the State as militiamen. The phrase 'keep arms' at the time of the Founding usually indicated the private ownership and retention of arms by individuals as individuals, not the stockpiling of arms by a government or its soldiers, and the phrase certainly had that meaning when used in connection with a 'right of the people,'" the Justice Department's report stated.

"Moreover, the Second Amendment appears in the Bill of Rights amid amendments securing numerous individual rights, a placement that makes it likely that the right of the people to keep and bear arms likewise belongs to individuals," the document continued.

Waldron expects the opinion to be introduced in support of the individual rights of gun owners in several cases working their way through the federal courts. His hope is that one of those cases will reach the Supreme Court.

"Is this the end, is this the Omega? Absolutely not," Waldron said. "The Omega will come when the Supreme Court begins to overturn selected gun control laws based on the fact that they do infringe upon the individual right protected in the Constitution."

Sunday, December 19, 2004

Rumsfeld's Questioner Wrong About Unit's Armor

The reporter who managed to get a National Guardsman serving in Iraq to question Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld about why his unit's vehicles lacked sufficient armor coached the soldier using false information.

In fact, by the time Chattanooga Times Free Press reporter Edward Lee Pitts rehearsed Spc. Thomas "Jerry" Wilson on what to say to Rumsfeld, the Pentagon had already up-armored 97 percent of the vehicles in Thomas' 278th Regimental Combat Team, senior members of the Army's combat systems development and acquisition team said Thursday. Further undermining the premise of Pitts' question, orders to up-armor the last 20 of the 278th's 830 vehicles were already in the pipeline when he engineered the bogus inquiry.

According to the Maryville, Tenn., Daily Times - a rival to Pitts' paper - Army Maj. Gen. Stephen Speakes and Army Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Sorenson said during last week's Pentagon briefing that routine pre-deployment preparations before proceeding to Iraq included adding protective armor plates to the last 20 vehicles of the Tennessee-based 278th Regimental Combat Team's 830 vehicles.

"When the question was asked, 20 vehicles remained to be up-armored at that point," Gen. Speakes said, in comments completely ignored by the major media.

"We completed those 20 vehicles in the next day," he said. "In other words, we completed all the armoring within 24 hours of the time the question was asked," Gen. Speakes added.

The eye-opening revelations by Gen. Speakes and Gen. Sorenson first gained national exposure on FreeRepublic.com late Friday.

In a Dec. 8 exchange during a question-and-answer session in Kuwait, Spc. Wilson asked Rumsfeld, "Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles?"

Unaware that Wilson's questioned was based on false information, the Defense Secretary replied, in part: "You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have."

Pitts later admitted that the idea to question Rumsfeld about the unit's armor was his, and that he thoroughly coached the National Guardsman on what to say.

President Bush Named Time's Person of 2004

NewsMax Wires
Monday, Dec. 20, 2004
NEW YORK -- After winning re-election and "reshaping the rules of politics to fit his 10-gallon-hat leadership style," President George Bush for the second time was chosen as Time magazine's Person of the Year.

The magazine's editors tapped Bush "for sharpening the debate until the choices bled, for reframing reality to match his design, for gambling his fortunes -- and ours -- on his faith in the power of leadership." Time's 2004 Person of the Year package, on newsstands Monday, includes an Oval Office interview with Bush, an interview with his father, former President George H. W. Bush, and a profile of Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove.
In an interview with the magazine, Bush attributed his victory over Democratic candidate John Kerry to his foreign policy and the wars he began in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"The election was about the use of American influence," Bush said.

After a grueling campaign, Bush remains a polarizing figure in America and around the world, and that's part of the reason he earned the magazine's honor, said Managing Editor Jim Kelly.

"Many, many Americans deeply wish he had not won," Kelly said in a telephone interview. "And yet he did."

In the Time article, Bush said he relishes that some people dislike him.

"I think the natural instinct for most people in the political world is that they want people to like them," Bush said. "On the other hand, I think sometimes I take kind of a delight in who the critics are."


Six Other Presidents


Bush joins six other presidents who have twice won the magazine's top honor: Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower (first as a general), Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. Franklin Roosevelt holds the record with three nods from the editors.

Kelly said Bush has changed dramatically since he was named Person of the Year in 2000 after the Supreme Court awarded him the presidency.

"He is not the same man," Kelly said. "He's a much more resolute man. He is personally as charming as ever but I think the kind of face he's shown to the American public is one of much, much greater determination."

The magazine gives the honor to the person who had the greatest impact, good or bad, over the year.

Asked on ABC's "This Week" how Bush reacted when he learned of Time's decision, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card said the president was "not worried about what pundits might be saying."

Card praised Bush as a "great liberator" for the people of Afghanistan and Iraq and lauded Bush's tax cuts, education and Medicare reform packages and plans to remake Social Security.

"So I think he's got the right ingredients to be recognized as the Person of the Year," Card said.

Kelly said other candidates included Michael Moore and Mel Gibson, "because in different ways their movies tapped in to deep cultural streams," and political strategist Rove, who is widely credited with engineering Bush's win. Kelly said choosing Rove alone would have taken away from the credit he said Bush deserves.

This is the first time an individual has won the award since 2001, when then-New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani was celebrated for his response to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

The American soldier earned the honor last year; in 2002, the magazine tapped Coleen Rowley, the FBI agent who wrote a critical memo on FBI intelligence failures, and Cynthia Cooper and Sherron Watkins, who blew the whistle on scandals at Enron and Worldcom.