September 27, 2006

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Don’t get caught flat-footed in front of the press!  Below is a quick rundown of today’s “must reads.” – John T. Doolittle, House Republican Conference Secretary

The Morning Murmur –  Wednesday, September 27, 2006

1. Decision to Declassify - Wall Street Journal Op-ed
In its umpteenth such "leak" story Sunday, the New York Times acknowledged the NIE was the product of 16 intel agencies, and then, based wholly on conversations, shrunk the whole document down to: The Iraq war made terrorism worse. So President Bush deserves some credit in now giving the whole country the opportunity to decide the matter for itself.

2. Warner rejects immigration addition to defense bill - Associated Press
Republican leaders in the House and Senate were blocked Tuesday by Senator Warner in their efforts to add immigration, handgun and Internet gambling measures to a defense bill.

3. A war we have to win - Boston Globe Op-ed
Has US military action in Iraq inflamed the global jihad? Undoubtedly. But just imagine how galvanized it would be by a US retreat. The war on terrorism is going far better now than it did when our eyes were closed.

4. New Campaign Ads Have a Theme: Don't Be Nice - New York Times
Both parties began running aggressive new campaign ads across the country on Tuesday. The result of the dueling media blitz has been what both sides described as the most toxic midterm campaign environment in memory.

5. 9th Circuit: Wrong-Way Court - Human Events
The San Francisco-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has strangely shifting views on freedom of expression. It seems to depend on who expresses what.

If nothing else, this should remind voters that the upcoming elections are as much about the direction of the federal courts as they are about the direction of the Congress.


For previous issues of the Morning Murmur, go to www.GOPsecretary.gov

FULL ARTICLES BELOW:

1. Decision to Declassify - Wall Street Journal Op-ed

September 27, 2006; Page A18

President Bush yesterday released a summary of the National Intelligence Estimate on terror, and we're happy to take credit for the suggestion made in our editorial yesterday, "Declassify the Terrorism NIE." But of course it was hardly rocket science to come to this decision.

In its umpteenth such "leak" story Sunday, the New York Times acknowledged the NIE was the product of 16 intel agencies, and then, based wholly on conversations, shrunk the whole document down to: The Iraq war made terrorism worse. So Mr. Bush deserves some credit in now giving the whole country the opportunity, if it is so inclined, to look at one of these multi-bureaucracy, on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand NIEs.

The one policymaker who appears to have been swept away on the basis of the leak is House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. After Mr. Bush made his announcement, Ms. Pelosi called for the House to go into a "closed" session -- the first since 1983 -- to discuss the NIE. We'll set aside the manifest absurdity of the House going into "secret session" to discuss a classified document being made public. The point of Ms. Pelosi's stunt is to gain traction for the Democratic campaign strategy of telescoping the national-security debate down to her party's proposal to withdraw from Iraq, thereby neutralizing the GOP's advantage when the debate is on the broader war on terror.

We reprint nearby Mr. Bush's remarks on all this at his news conference yesterday because, amid all the flak thrown up by this subject, we think it is a succinct summary of the policy course he has chosen since 9/11. On balance, we have supported that policy, just as we have supported a more robust, pro-active policy against Islamic terror since its emergence more than three decades ago at the Munich Olympics.

We will hold an election in this country in six weeks and a bigger one in 2008. The war on terror -- with or without Iraq -- will be central to those votes. If declassifying this national intelligence estimate helps voters in that decision, so much the better.
 
 
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115931664523575019.html?mod=opinion_main_review_and_outlooks
 

2. Warner rejects immigration addition to defense bill - Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) - Republican leaders in the House and Senate were blocked Tuesday by a senior GOP senator in their efforts to add immigration, handgun and Internet gambling measures to a defense bill.

Sen. John Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, rejected appeals from Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and House Speaker Dennis Hastert to use his bill on military pay raises as a vehicle for their pet measures.

Warner said in a memo to Frist he is "firmly opposed" to including unrelated bills in the defense bill. Two other Republicans also oppose the add-on bills, Warner said.

Hastert had insisted on adding to the defense bill a measure the House passed last week that would make it easier to detain and deport illegal immigrants who are members of violent criminal street gangs.

"Cracking down on gangs might be divisive in San Francisco, but it's not in the rest of America," Hastert said in a reference to House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, who represents the city by the bay. "It's my hope the Senate will live up to its word so that we can send this measure to the president for his signature."

The speaker also wanted to use the defense bill as a vehicle for a House measure allowing judges to carry handguns and bolstering courthouse security in response to the murder of a Chicago federal judge's husband and mother last year.

Warner balked at both, saying he wanted to keep the defense bill bipartisan at a time when U.S. troops are at war. Warner said that he, along with Democrats and at least two other Republicans, would not sign off on it or any other "out-of-scope" bills that were added.

"There are not even sufficient signatures to affect a partisan Republican" defense bill, he said.

Senate Democrats, including Minority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., support tightening court security. But the House-passed version allowing judges to carry concealed weapons cooled their support for the measure. Democrats also oppose aspects of the immigration bill, which has drawn fire from immigration rights groups.

Hastert said Tuesday he has offered to drop the provision allowing judges to carry a concealed weapon.

Frist, eyeing a 2008 presidential bid, has been pushing for the Internet gambling crackdown. Among other things, the provision would ban the use of credit cards, checks and other forms of payment to settle online wagers.

Other immigration measures passed by the House this month also have stalled as senators refused to add them to the Homeland Security spending bill.

A bill providing prison sentences for those who build or finance tunnels across U.S. borders was included in the spending bill.

A House bill proposing a 700-mile fence remained mired in Senate wrangling over a separate bill addressing U.S. treatment of wartime detainees.

House and Senate negotiators agreed late Tuesday to devote $1.2 billion to fences and other barriers along the U.S.-Mexico border. However, only $250 million of it can be used until the Homeland Security Department details to Congress how the other $950 million would be spent.

The Senate had approved $1.8 billion for 370 miles of fence and 500 miles of vehicle barriers.

"Some would say that, 'Well the fencing will probably take two years to complete anyway and we can come back next year' but ... promises of appropriations in the future often don't materialize," complained Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala.

Associated Press writers Anne Plummer Flaherty and Nancy Zuckerbrod in Washington contributed to this report.


http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-09-26-warner-defense-additions_x.htm

3. A war we have to win - Boston Globe Op-ed

By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist | September 27, 2006

THE CONSENSUS in the intelligence community is that the war in Iraq has worsened the threat from radical Islamic violence and hurt US efforts to combat terrorism. So, at any rate, say The New York Times (``Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terrorism Threat") and The Washington Post (``Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Hurting US Terror Fight"), which reported on the most recent National Intelligence Estimate in front-page stories on Sunday. But is it true?

The full estimate, which was completed in April, is a classified document. I haven't seen it. And neither, it would seem, have the Times and Post reporters who characterized its contents. The papers' headlines are unequivocal, but the stories themselves don't actually quote the intelligence estimate. They merely pass along the spin -- and advance the anti-Bush agenda -- of the anonymous sources who chose this moment to leak secret intelligence for partisan purposes.

Has the Iraq war undermined efforts to defeat the jihadis? Maybe, but the Times and Post stories don't come close to making that case. They claim that new terrorists are being enlisted at a growing rate and that America's presence in Iraq has become a major terrorist recruitment tool. That hardly adds up to a weakened war against Al Qaeda and its accomplices. D-Day and the battle of Midway triggered some of the most ferocious fighting of World War II and resulted in tens of thousands of additional Allied casualties. But would anyone say that they undermined the drive to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan?

After 9/11, the United States went to war against Islamic totalitarianism; since 2003 that war has focused most dramatically on Iraq. It stands to reason that Iraq is therefore the focal point in the jihadis' war against the West. President Bush has made that point repeatedly, quoting Osama bin Laden's declaration that the war in Iraq is ``the most serious issue today for the whole world " and will end in ``victory and glory or misery and humiliation." Has US military action in Iraq inflamed the global jihad? Undoubtedly. But just imagine how galvanized it would be by a US retreat.

This much we do know: There has been no successful terrorist attack on the United States in the years since 9/11, whereas the years leading up to 9/11 saw one act of terrorism after another, including the bombing of the World Trade Center, the destruction of the US embassies in Africa, and the attack on the USS Cole. The Bush administration must be doing something right -- something the Clinton administration, on whose watch bin Laden and Al Qaeda launched and escalated their terror war, failed to do.

Could 9/11 have been prevented? That in essence was what Chris Wallace asked former President Bill Clinton during his Fox News interview on Sunday: ``Why didn't you do more to put bin Laden and Al Qaeda out of business when you were president? . . . Why didn't you . . . connect the dots and put them out of business?"

From the ferocity of Clinton's response, you would have thought he'd been accused of using a 22-year-old White House intern for sex. Purple-faced with rage, he blasted Wallace for doing a ``nice little conservative hit job on me." He fumed that he had ``worked hard to try and kill" bin Laden and that ``all the right-wingers" who criticize him for doing too little ``spent the whole time I was president saying, `Why is he so obsessed with bin Laden?' "

But Wallace's question was no ``hit job." No one ever accused Clinton of being too obsessed with bin Laden. On the contrary: The eight years of his presidency, like the first eight months of Bush's, were marked at the top by a tragic inattention to Al Qaeda. The 9/11 Commission Report records the exasperated reaction of a State Department counterterrorism officer to Clinton's refusal to retaliate for the bombing of the Cole: ``Does Al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon to get their attention?"

Unfortunately, the answer was yes. Only after 9/11 did the United States muster the will to begin fighting the jihadis in earnest.

Was Iraq the best place to fight them? There are passionate views on both sides of that question, and history will have the final say. What we know for sure today is that we are at war against a deadly enemy, one we must defeat or be defeated by. The war on terrorism is going far better now than it did when our eyes were closed.

Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/09/27/a_war_we_have_to_win/

4. New Campaign Ads Have a Theme: Don't Be Nice - New York Times
 

By ADAM NAGOURNEY

WASHINGTON, Sept. 26 - Republicans and Democrats began showing at least 30 new campaign advertisements in contested House and Senate districts across the country on Tuesday. Of those, three were positive.

For Republicans, it was the leading edge of a wave of negative advertisements against Democratic candidates, the product of more than a year of research into the personal and professional backgrounds of Democratic challengers.

"What do we really know about Angie Paccione?" an announcer asks about a Democratic challenger in Colorado. "Angie Paccione had 10 legal claims against her for bad debts and campaign violations. A court even ordered her wages garnished."

For Democrats, it was part of a barrage intended to tie Republican incumbents to an unpopular Congress, criticize their voting records, portray them as captives to special interests and highlight embarrassing moments from their business histories.

In Tennessee, Democrats attacked Bob Corker, a Republican candidate for Senate, saying his construction company had hired illegal immigrants "while he looked the other way."

The result of the dueling accusations has been what both sides described on Tuesday as the most toxic midterm campaign environment in memory. It is a jarring blend of shadowy images, breathless announcers, jagged music and a dizzying array of statistics, counterstatistics and vote citations - all intended to present the members of Congress and their challengers in the worst possible light. Democratic and Republican strategists said they expected over 90 percent of the advertisements to be broadcast by Nov. 7 to be negative.

At the national level, the two parties are battling over issues like national security and the war in Iraq. But Congressional races play out on local airwaves, and the flood of commercials amounts to a parallel campaign, one that is often about the characters of individual challengers and obscure votes cast by incumbents. Frequently lost in the back-and-forth are the protests of candidates who say the negative advertisements are full of deliberate distortions and exaggerations.

While Democrats have largely concentrated their efforts on the political records of Republicans, the Republicans have zeroed in more on candidates' personal backgrounds.

Representative Thomas M. Reynolds of New York, the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, said his investigators had been looking into prospective Democratic challengers since the summer of 2005.

"These candidates have been out there doing other things - they have never seen anything like this before," Mr. Reynolds said of the Democratic challengers.

"We haven't even begun to unload this freight train," Mr. Reynolds said.

Democrats are learning just how deeply the Republicans have been digging. John Yarmuth, a Kentucky Democrat who is running for a House seat, has spent much of the past few days trying to explain editorials unearthed by Republican researchers and spotlighted in new advertisements. Mr. Yarmuth wrote the editorials for his student newspapers, and in them he advocated the legalization of marijuana, among other things.

Across the airwaves, Democratic challengers are being attacked for having defaulted on student loans, declaring bankruptcy, skipping out on tax bills, and being a lobbyist, a trial lawyer or, even worse, a liberal.

Steve Kagan, a doctor and Democrat running for Congress in Wisconsin, is being attacked for having sued patients who did not pay their bills. "Why not just tell the truth, Dr. Millionaire?" said an advertisement shown Tuesday.

Heath Shuler, the former Washington Redskins quarterback running for Congress as a Democrat in North Carolina, is being attacked in advertisements for owning a business that was late in paying $69,000 in back taxes.

Democrats are equally aggressive in their advertisements, going after Republicans on votes, ties to campaign contributors and, in the case of challengers, their own personal foibles. In one Democratic advertisement, the disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff is shown in shadows wearing a hat as an announcer notes that he made contributions to Representative J. D. Hayworth, Republican of Arizona.

Democrats are even attacking Republicans on what should be their signature issue, taxes, most recently in an upstate New York race between State Senator Raymond A. Meier, a Republican, and Michael A. Arcuri, a Democrat, to fill an open Republican seat. "Raymond Meier raised taxes in Oneida County," the announcer says. "Meier raised taxes in Albany. What do you think he'll do" in Washington?

Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said that relatively inexperienced candidates might be vulnerable, but that Republicans had even worse problems this year, with a record of votes that he said had provided a steady stream of damaging information for Democratic campaigns.

"Let me tell you: candidates with lesser name identification are vulnerable to being defined," Mr. Emanuel said. "But candidates who are associated with an institution are also vulnerable. There are two sides to this sword."

While some public officials have criticized negative advertisements as destructive and blamed them for discouraging voter turnout, other analysts say they have come, if only by default, to play an important role. At a time of diminishing local news coverage of House and Senate races, they are one of the few ways in which voters learn about the candidates and their positions.

"Negative ads are more likely to talk about policy than positive ads," said Joel Rivlin, deputy director of the Wisconsin Advertising Project, which monitors political advertising. "How else do you find out about the flaws of a candidate besides a negative ad?"

Incumbent Republicans and, to a lesser extent, Democrats are being attacked on their voting records and positions taken on issues large and small.

With dollar figures scrolling across the screen, Democrats belittled Republicans for taking money from oil companies, suggesting that was a reason for high gasoline prices. "Drake voted for billions in tax breaks for the oil and gas industry," said a Democratic advertisement aimed at Representative Thelma Drake, Republican of Virginia. "She gets her way, big oil and gas get theirs."

In a blizzard of conflicting advertisements, Republicans and Democrats in all regions of the country are accusing one another of supporting amnesty for illegal immigrants or providing government benefits to them.

Bruce Braley, a Democratic candidate for a House seat in Iowa, attacked his opponent, Mike Whalen, on Social Security. "He actually backed George Bush's half-baked plan to privatize Social Security," an advertisement said. Mr. Whalen accused Mr. Braley, in his own advertisement, of wanting to pull out of Iraq and thus "risk the safety of our troops to advance his extreme liberal agenda."

Mr. Emanuel said he had warned his candidates about this part of the campaign, though he made a practice of waiting until after they had signed on to run. "I tell them: 'I'm glad you're running. Now get ready. This is a tough business. This is the hellfire you are going to go through,' " he said.

Mr. Reynolds has long believed that it would be this kind of information about Democratic challengers and not voter opinion on, say, President Bush or the war in Iraq that would determine whether Republicans held Congress this year. By way of example, he pointed to the case of Mr. Shuler.

"When he was a quarterback, it didn't matter that he wasn't paying $69,000 in taxes," Mr. Reynolds said. "When you run for Congress, it matters."

Mr. Reynolds burst out laughing when asked why he was not using more positive advertisements. "If they moved things to the extent that negative ads move things, there would be more of them," he said.
 

5. 9th Circuit: Wrong-Way Court - Human Events

by Terence P. Jeffrey
Posted Sep 27, 2006

The San Francisco-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has strangely shifting views on freedom of expression. It seems to depend on who expresses what.

In 1999, for example, the court declared "virtual" child pornography a "right." "The 1st Amendment," it said, "prohibits Congress from enacting a statute that makes criminal the generation of fictitious children engaged in imaginary but explicit sexual conduct."

Last October, however, the court took a far more cramped view of free speech. The murder conviction of Mathew Musladin must be thrown out, it ruled, because the victim's family sat in the front row of the trial, wearing buttons depicting nothing more than the victim's photograph.

This mute expression, the judges ruled, may have prejudiced the jury and thus violated Musladin's right to a fair trial. In October, the Supreme Court will hear an appeal.

One wonders how the 9th Circuit might have ruled had the victim's family worn "virtual" child pornography instead of a photo of their slain loved one?

Musladin never denied shooting the dead man--twice. He claimed it was self-defense, but the jury didn't buy it.

The circumstances are described in a brief that California Attorney General Bill Lockyer submitted to the Supreme Court.

Musladin and his wife, Pamela, were separated. She was living with her mother, brother, Tom Studer (her new fiancé), and Garrick, her 3-year-old son by Musladin. On May 13, 1994, Musladin had a scheduled visit with his son. That day, the local district attorney's office contacted him about not paying child support. He went to his wife's house with a pistol in his car, got his son, put him in the car, too, and began arguing with his wife.

"Either you sign full custody of Garrick over to me right now or I will blow both of your f------ heads off," he told her, according to the attorney general's brief. Then he shoved her to the ground.

Studer and her brother, Michael Albaugh, came to her assistance.

Musladin grabbed his gun and shot Studer in the back of the shoulder. When Studer tried to crawl under a truck in the garage, Musladin pursued him there and fired again. This time the bullet ricocheted into Studer's skull, killing him.

Musladin claimed Studer was carrying a gun and Albaugh a machete and that he fired to defend himself. The prosecutor presented testimony that Studer and Albaugh were unarmed.

The jury convicted Musladin of murder and he was sentenced to 32 years to life.

The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, designed to limit frivolous appeals in federal courts, governs Musladin's case. A federal court, it says, may not overturn a state court decision unless it "was contrary to, or involved an unreasonable application of, clearly established federal law, as determined by the Supreme Court of the United States."

The problem for Musladin is that the Supreme Court has never "clearly established" or even hinted that something worn by courtroom spectators could deny a defendant a fair trial. Accordingly, the state appeals court let Musladin's conviction stand. A federal district court declined to over rule the state court, and Musladin's appeal arrived in the 9th Circuit.

Judge Stephen Reinhardt, a Carter appointee, wrote that court's opinion overturning Musladin's conviction. This is the same Judge Reinhardt who has voted over the years for 9th Circuit opinions that claimed doctor-assisted suicide was a constitutional right and--in another take on freedom of expression-that it is unconstitutional for children to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools.

Lacking a Supreme Court precedent to back up his decision that the Studers' buttons made Musladin's conviction unconstitutional, Reinhardt ignored the letter of the law and used a 1990 opinion by the 9th Circuit itself as his justification. That opinion threw out a rape conviction because a few women had attended the trial in question wearing buttons that said, "Women Against Rape."

In a recent story on the Musladin case, the Los Angeles Times reported that the high court reviewed 18 cases from the 9th Circuit last year and reversed 15. But it was only four years ago that the court voted 6-3 to uphold the 9th's Circuit's ruling that the 1st Amendment protected "virtual" child porn.

That opinion was written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Reagan appointee.

If nothing else, the Musladin case should remind voters that the upcoming Senate elections are as much about the direction of the federal courts as they are about the direction of the Congress.



http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=17233