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, February 1, 2006

1.  Our Right to Security – Wall Street Journal Op-ed
The sister of the pilot of American Airlines flight 77 which was crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001 writes that a mere four-and-a-half years after victims were forced to choose between being burned alive and jumping from 90 stories, it is frankly shocking that there is anyone in Washington who would politicize the Patriot Act.

2.  The Health Care Opportunity – Wall Street Journal Editorial
President Bush made health care a big part of his State of the Union address last night, but thankfully we're not talking about another new entitlement like Medicare.  Instead, the President wants to fix defects in the market for health care – an area where he can do a great deal of good at little cost to the Treasury.

3.  Two appeals courts back abortion ruling – Associated Press
Yesterday, two courts declared the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act unconstitutional saying the measure is vague and lacks an exception for cases in which a woman's health is at stake.  The ban covers a procedure in which a fetus is partially removed from the womb and the skull punctured.

4. Voters love Hillary best when she says the least – The Hill, Dick Morris
Hillary has been running as though it is already 2008, hitting Bush every day over everything. But the pace is wearing off the artificial veneer of civility she had managed to paint over her partisan fangs.  Too soon, she is unveiling her true personality.

5.  Activist Cindy Sheehan Arrested at Capitol – Associated Press
Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan, attending as a guest of Rep. Lynn Woolsey, was arrested and removed from the House gallery Tuesday night just before President Bush's State of the Union address.  "I'm proud that Cindy's my guest tonight," Woolsey said in an interview before the speech.

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

FULL ARTICLES BELOW:

1.  Our Right to Security – Wall Street Journal Op-ed
Al Qaeda, not the FBI, is the greater threat to America.

BY DEBRA BURLINGAME
Monday, January 30, 2006

One of the most excruciating images of the September 11 attacks is the sight of a man who was trapped in one of the World Trade Center towers. Stripped of his suit jacket and tie and hanging on to what appears to be his office curtains, he is seen trying to lower himself outside a window to the floor immediately below. Frantically kicking his legs in an effort to find a purchase, he loses his grip, and falls.

That horrific scene and thousands more were the images that awakened a sleeping nation on that long, brutal morning. Instead of overwhelming fear or paralyzing self-doubt, the attacks were met with defiance, unity and a sense of moral purpose. Following the heroic example of ordinary citizens who put their fellow human beings and the public good ahead of themselves, the country's leaders cast aside politics and personal ambition and enacted the USA Patriot Act just 45 days later.

A mere four-and-a-half years after victims were forced to choose between being burned alive and jumping from 90 stories, it is frankly shocking that there is anyone in Washington who would politicize the Patriot Act. It is an insult to those who died to tell the American people that the organization posing the greatest threat to their liberty is not al Qaeda but the FBI. Hearing any member of Congress actually crow about "killing" or "playing chicken" with this critical legislation is as disturbing today as it would have been when Ground Zero was still smoldering. Today we know in far greater detail what not having it cost us.

Critics contend that the Patriot Act was rushed into law in a moment of panic. The truth is, the policies and guidelines it corrected had a long, troubled history and everybody who had to deal with them knew it. The "wall" was a tortuous set of rules promulgated by Justice Department lawyers in 1995 and imagined into law by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court. Conceived as an added protection for civil liberties provisions already built into the statute, it was the wall and its real-world ramifications that hardened the failure-to-share culture between agencies, allowing early information about 9/11 hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi to fall through the cracks. More perversely, even after the significance of these terrorists and their presence in the country was known by the FBI's intelligence division, the wall prevented it from talking to its own criminal division in order to hunt them down.

Furthermore, it was the impenetrable FISA guidelines and fear of provoking the FISA court's wrath if they were transgressed that discouraged risk-averse FBI supervisors from applying for a FISA search warrant in the Zacarias Moussaoui case. The search, finally conducted on the afternoon of 9/11, produced names and phone numbers of people in the thick of the 9/11 plot, so many fertile clues that investigators believe that at least one airplane, if not all four, could have been saved.

In 2002, FISA's appellate level Court of Review examined the entire statutory scheme for issuing warrants in national security investigations and declared the "wall" a nonsensical piece of legal overkill, based neither on express statutory language nor reasonable interpretation of the FISA statute. The lower court's attempt to micromanage the execution of national security warrants was deemed an assertion of authority which neither Congress or the Constitution granted it. In other words, those lawyers and judges who created, implemented and so assiduously enforced the FISA guidelines were wrong and the American people paid dearly for it.

Despite this history, some members of Congress contend that this process-heavy court is agile enough to rule on quickly needed National Security Agency (NSA) electronic surveillance warrants. This is a dubious claim. Getting a FISA warrant requires a multistep review involving several lawyers at different offices within the Department of Justice. It can take days, weeks, even months if there is a legal dispute between the principals. "Emergency" 72-hour intercepts require sign-offs by NSA lawyers and pre-approval by the attorney general before surveillance can be initiated. Clearly, this is not conducive to what Gen. Michael Hayden, principal deputy director of national intelligence, calls "hot pursuit" of al Qaeda conversations.

The Senate will soon convene hearings on renewal of the Patriot Act and the NSA terrorist surveillance program. A minority of senators want to gamble with American lives and "fix" national security laws, which they can't show are broken. They seek to eliminate or weaken anti-terrorism measures which take into account that the Cold War and its slow-moving, analog world of landlines and stationary targets is gone. The threat we face today is a completely new paradigm of global terrorist networks operating in a high-velocity digital age using the Web and fiber-optic technology. After four-and-a-half years without another terrorist attack, these senators think we're safe enough to cave in to the same civil liberties lobby that supported that deadly FISA wall in the first place. What if they, like those lawyers and judges, are simply wrong?

Meanwhile, the media, mouthing phrases like "Article II authority," "separation of powers" and "right to privacy," are presenting the issues as if politics have nothing to do with what is driving the subject matter and its coverage. They want us to forget four years of relentless "connect-the-dots" reporting about the missed chances that "could have prevented 9/11." They have discounted the relevance of references to the two 9/11 hijackers who lived in San Diego. But not too long ago, the media itself reported that phone records revealed that five or six of the hijackers made extensive calls overseas.

NBC News aired an "exclusive" story in 2004 that dramatically recounted how al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar, the San Diego terrorists who would later hijack American Airlines flight 77 and fly it into the Pentagon, received more than a dozen calls from an al Qaeda "switchboard" inside Yemen where al-Mihdhar's brother-in-law lived. The house received calls from Osama Bin Laden and relayed them to operatives around the world. Senior correspondent Lisa Myers told the shocking story of how, "The NSA had the actual phone number in the United States that the switchboard was calling, but didn't deploy that equipment, fearing it would be accused of domestic spying." Back then, the NBC script didn't describe it as "spying on Americans." Instead, it was called one of the "missed opportunities that could have saved 3,000 lives."

Another example of opportunistic coverage concerns the Patriot Act's "library provision." News reports have given plenty of ink and airtime to the ACLU's unsupported claims that the government has abused this important records provision. But how many Americans know that several of the hijackers repeatedly accessed computers at public libraries in New Jersey and Florida, using personal Internet accounts to carry out the conspiracy? Al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi logged on four times at a college library in New Jersey where they purchased airline tickets for AA 77 and later confirmed their reservations on Aug. 30. In light of this, it is ridiculous to suggest that the Justice Department has the time, resources or interest in "investigating the reading habits of law abiding citizens."

We now have the ability to put remote control cameras on the surface of Mars. Why should we allow enemies to annihilate us simply because we lack the clarity or resolve to strike a reasonable balance between a healthy skepticism of government power and the need to take proactive measures to protect ourselves from such threats? The mantra of civil-liberties hard-liners is to "question authority"--even when it is coming to our rescue--then blame that same authority when, hamstrung by civil liberties laws, it fails to save us. The old laws that would prevent FBI agents from stopping the next al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi were built on the bedrock of a 35-year history of dark, defeating mistrust. More Americans should not die because the peace-at-any-cost fringe and antigovernment paranoids still fighting the ghost of Nixon hate George Bush more than they fear al Qaeda. Ask the American people what they want. They will say that they want the commander in chief to use all reasonable means to catch the people who are trying to rain terror on our cities. Those who cite the soaring principle of individual liberty do not appear to appreciate that our enemies are not seeking to destroy individuals, but whole populations.

Three weeks before 9/11, an FBI agent with the bin Laden case squad in New York learned that al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi were in this country. He pleaded with the national security gatekeepers in Washington to launch a nationwide manhunt and was summarily told to stand down. When the FISA Court of Review tore down the wall in 2002, it included in its ruling the agent's Aug. 29, 2001, email to FBI headquarters: "Whatever has happened to this--someday someone will die--and wall or not--the public will not understand why we were not more effective and throwing every resource we had at certain problems. Let's hope the National Security Law Unit will stand behind their decisions then, especially since the biggest threat to us now, [bin Laden], is getting the most 'protection.'"

The public has listened to years of stinging revelations detailing how the government tied its own hands in stopping the devastating attacks of September 11. It is an irresponsible violation of the public trust for members of Congress to weaken the Patriot Act or jeopardize the NSA terrorist surveillance program because of the same illusory theories that cost us so dearly before, or worse, for rank partisan advantage. If they do, and our country sustains yet another catastrophic attack that these antiterrorism tools could have prevented, the phrase "connect the dots" will resonate again--but this time it will refer to the trail of innocent American blood which leads directly to the Senate floor.

Ms. Burlingame, a former attorney, is the sister of Charles F. "Chic" Burlingame III, the pilot of American Airlines flight 77, which was crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110007891

2.  The Health Care Opportunity – Wall Street Journal Editorial

February 1, 2006; Page A14

President Bush made health care a big part of his State of the Union address last night, which is rare for a Republican. Thankfully we're not talking about another new entitlement like the Medicare drug benefit, which is being implemented this year to far less fanfare than the GOP had hoped.

Instead, the President wants to fix defects in the market for health care. This is an area where he can do a great deal of good at little cost to the Treasury. And it's high time. The inefficiencies of the current system are a drag on wage growth that's being felt now even by the United Auto Workers union. And health care costs may partly explain why many Americans don't feel as good as they might about the current economic expansion.

Longer term, it's also increasingly obvious that the U.S. is approaching a tipping point where the reforms needed to preserve an innovative, market-based health system may become politically impossible. That's because almost half of our health-care dollars are already spent by government. Do nothing and the inevitable growth of Medicare alone will lead us far down the path toward government-rationed health care a la Europe or Canada.

Even the half of our national health-care spending that remains a "private" responsibility bears little resemblance to an efficient market. That's because the vast majority of Americans with private insurance get it from their employers, a relic of World War II when companies adapted to wage and price controls by offering insurance as a benefit to attract the best employees.

A tax exemption for employer health spending was later codified and will be worth about $126 billion this year. This enormous subsidy has created a system of overgenerous employer-provided plans that give individuals little incentive to pay attention to costs. It's also unfair to people who aren't lucky enough to get insurance from their employers, and therefore must pay for it with after-tax dollars.

So the first principle of reform must be to equalize the tax treatment of individually purchased and employer-provided insurance. Health Savings Accounts, which were part of the 2003 Medicare bill, are already a step in the right direction, since they mate a high-deductible insurance policy with a tax-free savings account to help pay pre-deductible expenses. Mr. Bush is usefully going further by asking for the premiums on the HSA insurance policy to be tax-free as well.

Equally important is creating a national market for individual insurance. Right now employers large enough to "self insure" can do so mostly as they see fit. But individuals and small businesses who want to buy insurance are at the mercy of state regulators where they live or operate. In overregulated states like New York and New Jersey, residents can pay 10 times as much for insurance as they would in neighboring states, and might not even be able to buy the high-deductible insurance necessary for an HSA. Individually purchased insurance also isn't portable across state lines, contributing needless anxiety to normal life decisions like moving or switching jobs.

The Founders put the Commerce Clause in the Constitution precisely so Congress could act against internal restraints on trade such as today's 50-state insurance market. We hope Mr. Bush endorses and fights for the bill from Representative John Shadegg of Arizona that would let individuals buy insurance from vendors in any state, no matter where they live.

The overall goal here is to move from the inefficiency and insecurity of the employer-dependent system to one where all workers have portable, individually owned insurance. A good analogy is portable 401k retirement plans, which are more appropriate to the mobile nature of the modern economy than traditional pensions. They are also more secure, as the increasing number of defined-benefit pension plans in default (United Airlines) amply demonstrates.

Achieving this won't be easy, especially given the ideological stake that so many politicians have in a government-run system. They like the leverage of determining payment rates to hospitals and doctors, not to mention being able to take credit with voters for providing more benefits. But there is no free lunch in health care, any more than there is in any other part of the U.S. economy.

Health care is either going to be allocated by prices or by government, which in the latter case means price controls and waiting lines. Though it represents one-sixth of the U.S. economy, health care is the one industry in which the purchasers actually have no idea what anything costs. An individual market for health insurance would allow more freedom of choice while making consumers more cost conscious.

Market-based health-care reform could be a big political winner for Mr. Bush and the GOP. Americans have shown themselves averse to rationing via brute force, both in their rejection of HillaryCare and in the backlash against HMOs. And while the opponents have skillfully played on fears, consumer-driven plans -- which let individuals "ration" care for themselves -- have proven popular when they've been offered. Just last week the insurance industry announced that enrollment in HSAs had tripled in 10 months to three million people.

That's a small part of the entire market, but an important start. Policy inertia on health care will inevitably lead to more government and Canadian or British-style waiting lists. But there's still a chance to change course. Republicans in Congress should join Mr. Bush in seizing it.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113876384919361791.html

3.  Two appeals courts back abortion ruling – Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Two courts declared the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act unconstitutional Tuesday, saying the measure is vague and lacks an exception for cases in which a woman's health is at stake.

The first ruling came from a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Hours later, President Bush signed the abortion ban in 2003, but it was not enforced because of legal challenges in several states.

The ban covers a procedure generally performed in the second trimester, in which a fetus is partially removed from the womb and the skull punctured.

A federal judge in Nebraska also has ruled the ban unconstitutional. The Nebraska ruling was upheld in July by the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and has been appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-01-31-abortion-law_x.htm

4.  Voters love Hillary best when she says the least – The Hill, Dick Morris

Throughout Hillary Clinton’s political career, she has done much better when she has shut up.

After the “tea and cookies” comment in the 1992 campaign, she lapsed into relative silence and let her husband win the election. But when she took center stage trying to reform healthcare, she screwed it up.

There followed three years of relative silence during which she confined her impact to the feature pages of the papers, writing a book about education, journeying to China for a human-rights conference and taking well-photographed trips abroad.

During her Senate race, her best days were those of the “listening tour,” in which she let others tell her what were the problems of her newly adopted state of New York and she just listened and nodded her head. In the Senate, it was her absence of partisanship, rancor and ideology that won her plaudits from both sides of the aisle. The sounds, once again, of silence.

Her high marks in the Senate come not from activity but from civility and inactivity. She has captured the essence of what Gilbert and Sullivan identified as the secret of the House of Lords’ success: “They did nothing particular and did it very well.” And then, throughout the campaign of 2004, Hillary stepped aside and let Sen. John Kerry carry the ball, even accepting a minor speaking role at the national convention.

But toward the end of last year, she emerged with both guns blazing, attacking President Bush on Hurricane Katrina, race, poverty, tax cuts, homeland security, the Patriot Act, judicial nominations and, pardon the chutzpah, ethics! Even as her husband basked in the aura of the Bushes, senior and junior, Hillary was out there giving the president hell.

Gone has been the giggling, friendly demeanor, the toss of the head, the interview intimacy. Instead, she began pounding the podium, ratcheting up the rhetoric, appealing to the partisan base she has to capture to win the nomination.

The reason for her escalating rhetoric is obvious: She needs to be pro-war to cultivate a sufficiently tough image to run for president (commander in chief) but still must turn on the hard-core ideologues who dominate her party primaries. To do so, she has to be extremely partisan on everything else to compensate for her shortcomings in not opposing the war.

But the consequences are all too obvious in her poll numbers. According to the most recent Gallup poll, 52 percent of Americans say they would never vote for Hillary and her popularity comes in a distinct second among possible female candidates to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. The more vocal she gets, the more her ratings drop.
Bill Clinton — the man whom Bush recently described as his “brother” — is capable of a wide range of rhetorical styles and does not need harshness to convey passion. A raise of his eyebrow often suffices. A nod of his head. A properly constructed glance. But the woman who, by deduction, is apparently the president’s sister-in-law is not as capable. Indeed, she has two rhetorical styles: coy and strident. Off and on. Soft and loud. 

And lately she has been running as though it is 2008 already, hitting Bush every day over everything. But the pace is wearing off the artificial veneer of civility she had managed to paint over her partisan fangs and leaving her image back in the dog days of Healthcare Hillary. Too soon, she is unveiling her true personality. She is getting overexposed. 

Of course, she’s got a tough problem. To accept a lower profile in a time of war and political heat would be to let others pass her by. She has mousetrapped herself into backing the war policy her party detests and must be visibly out there on all other issues to compensate.

But the more she raises the political pressure, the more she grates on America like nails on a blackboard. And we have three more years of this to look forward to.

Morris, a former political adviser to Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and President Bill Clinton, is the author of Condi vs. Hillary: The Next Great Presidential Race.

http://www.thehill.com/thehill/export/TheHill/Comment/DickMorris/020106.html

5.  Activist Cindy Sheehan Arrested at Capitol – Associated Press

By LAURIE KELLMAN

WASHINGTON - Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a fallen soldier in Iraq who reinvigorated the anti-war movement, was arrested and removed from the House gallery Tuesday night just before President Bush's State of the Union address, a police spokeswoman said.

Sheehan, who was invited to attend the speech by Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D- Calif., was charged with demonstrating in the Capitol building, said Capitol Police Sgt. Kimberly Schneider. The charge was later changed to unlawful conduct, Schneider said. Both charges are misdemeanors.

Sheehan was taken in handcuffs from the Capitol to police headquarters a few blocks away. Her case was processed as Bush spoke.

Schneider said Sheehan had worn a T-shirt with an anti-war slogan to the speech and covered it up until she took her seat. Police warned her that such displays were not allowed, but she did not respond, the spokeswoman said.

Police handcuffed Sheehan and removed her from the gallery before Bush arrived. Sheehan was to be released on her own recognizance, Schneider said.

"I'm proud that Cindy's my guest tonight," Woolsey said in an interview before the speech. "She has made a difference in the debate to bring our troops home from Iraq."
Woolsey offered Sheehan a ticket to the speech _ Gallery 5, seat 7, row A _ earlier Tuesday while Sheehan was attending an "alternative state of the union" press conference by CODEPINK, a group pushing for an end to the Iraq war.

Sheehan, wrapped in a bright pink scarf against the cold, protested outside the White House with a handful of others before heading to the Capitol Tuesday evening. There were no cameras around, but the small band faced the executive mansion and repeatedly shouted, "You're evicted! Get out of our house!"

Sheehan was arrested in September with about 300 other anti-war activists in front of the White House after a weekend of protests against the war in Iraq. In August, she spent 26 days camped near Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, where he was spending a working vacation.

http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/02/01/D8FG6GQG2.html

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