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THE FEDERALIST(r) DIGEST The Conservative e-Journal of Record * Veritas Vos Liberabit * 18 January 2002 Federalist Edition #02-03 Friday Digest *To support The Federalist, Link to -- http://www.Federalist.com/support.asp *To sponsor an edition of The Federalist, Link to -- http://www.Federalist.com/sponsor.asp *To retrieve today's Digest as HTML printer-friendly text or PDF Link to -- http://www.Federalist.com/current2002.asp *To change your e-mail address or format, see instructions in footer. CONTENTS: The Foundation Federalist Perspective ______----********O********----______ THE FOUNDATION "If 'Thou shalt not covet,' and 'Thou shalt not steal,' were not commandments of Heaven, they must be made inviolable precepts in every society before it can be civilized or made free." --John Adams ______----********O********----______ FEDERALIST PERSPECTIVE Top of the fold... Though our country's war against Jihadistan is still in its early campaign and very dangerous, the Democrats and their Leftmedia sympathizers are eager to return to domestic "politics as usual" for this election year. President George W. Bush has earned high marks from the American people for his conduct as Commander-in-Chief, so the Democrats are very eager to change the subject, and sooner rather than later. On the front in Afghanistan, neutralizing caves, camps and strongholds of terror head Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda continues. And we now know that al Qaeda has a presence in 68 countries, a financial presence the extent of which is illustrated by the anti-terror actions freezing funds of 168 entities, and a deadly potential Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld noted by saying, "We have found a number of things that show an appetite for weapons of mass destruction." Since shortly after 9-11, investigators at the Pentagon have secretly been collecting evidence of "linkage" between Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda organization and other international terror groups, to strengthen the case for including Iraq as a target in the war on terrorism. The study has scanned years of highly classified intelligence reports to find links between groups supported by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and bin Laden's worldwide al Qaeda network. Promising leads involve the likelihood that Iraqi business fronts for the country's intelligence service are linked to bin Laden. We had better turn to confronting Iraqi links to terrorism before it's too late! Speaking of the efforts to roll up terrorism worldwide, such as new movements in concert with our allies in the Philippines, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Wednesday, "The United States is leaning forward, period. ... We are interested in a lot more than al Qaeda.... If you think of the terrorist networks that exist in the world and their relationships with nations that are terrorist nations and nations that have weapons of mass destruction, we simply must, as a country, be attentive to those relationships and be attentive to the risks that are posed by nations that do have weapons of mass destruction programs and relationships with terrorist networks. So we're interested in terrorism quite apart from whether or not there is a direct linkage to September 11th. That -- that is not the litmus test for whether or not the United States of America is interested. .. But if we have to go into 15 more countries, we ought to do it, to deal with the problem of terrorism, so we don't allow [them to] kill tens of thousands more people." In other words, somebody has been asleep at the wheel for the last decade, and we have a lot of ground to cover in a critically short period of time. An example of the remarkable success of our war on Jihadi terror: One American special forces team was credited with killing over 1,300 Taliban and al Qaeda fighters and destroying more than 50 tanks and other heavy weapons pieces. The so-called A-team, code-named Tiger 03, performed such warfront activities as directing American bombers to enemy positions. (A-teams are each composed of up to 18 lightly armed infantrymen and air controllers, which demonstrates we've been getting real bangs for our warrior bucks!) On the home front, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that al Qaeda John Walker Lindh will not face charges of treason, saying, "We may never know why he turned his back on our country and our values, but we cannot ignore that he did. ...Youth is not absolution for treachery, and personal self-discovery is not an excuse to take up arms against your country." So why, inquiring minds want to know, will he not be charged with treason? In the end, perhaps the federal courts are a better forum so that Americans can seek to understand the Leftculture that produced little Johnny. And on the domestic politics war front, Sociocrats and Leftmedia scandal-mongers are salivating over any remote link that might be spun in such a way as to tie Enron's financial collapse to the Bush administration. A sample: "The Enron debacle won't be President Bush's Whitewater. It will be much worse," said CBS Marketwatch.com executive editor, David Callaway. The Left is now tossing their trusty "Heads We Win, Tails Republicans Lose" coin. Either the campaign donations to Mr. Bush influenced the administration to move policy to favor Enron, or paralyzed the administration and prevented necessary actions averting economic damage to the U.S. economy from Enron's unwinding. Very adroit! Even more dubious is the latest line of patter suggesting Enron's troubles could have been avoided had campaign finance laws been enacted. What exactly is the point -- that Enron's donations to both political parties got them so much influence and favoritism that their stock is now at historic highs? The only possible negative fallout for the Bush administration from its meager ties to Enron might come from faulty analogies with Clinton-era scandals. Vice President Dick Cheney's holding back of documents about his consultations with energy executives including Enron's may be compared to Hillary Clinton's withholding of documents from secret meetings of her health care task force. And the American people might be misled by politicos saying all the Bush team's defenses amount only to: "I did not have financial relations with that donor, Enron Corporation." Best, then, for Team Bush to get all this information out as quickly as they can -- as certainly the full story will amount to much less than the slobbering scandal-mongers dream! Quote of the week... "...[There is] a clear, unmistakable threat that al Qaeda could attack the United States again. We must be prepared, we must be alert, we must be vigilant. Al Qaeda-trained terrorists may act on their own, or as part of the terrorist network, but we must assume that they will act." --Attorney General John Ashcroft commenting on new charges issued this week against al Qaeda-trained sneaker-bomber Richard Reid The FBI issued an alert Thursday, based on uncorroborated reports that terrorists may be using U.S. municipal and state Web sites for information on such local energy facilities as water reservoirs, dams, highly-enriched uranium storage sites, and nuclear and gas plants. Emphasizing no specific threats were known, the FBI requested information of any unusual activity around such facilities. On cross-examination... "Lew Eisenberg has made it his life's work to defeat pro-life candidates and drive the pro-life movement out of the Republican Party. It is simply mind-boggling that GOP leaders would consider for the powerful position of finance chairman someone who contributed to Walter Mondale and not Ronald Reagan. Why would an administration that says it wants to promote a 'Culture of Life' change course and promote into a position of enormous political power a man who stands in direct opposition to President Bush's and the party's pro-life platform? ..Mr. Eisenberg has made a career out of financing and working for candidates -- including many liberal pro-abortion Democrats -- who actively oppose the Republican Party's pro-life majority. I know that some favor the big tent approach to the Republican Party, but is the tent so large as to include those who are functionally liberal Democrats? ...How can the President reconcile such disdain for pro-life conservatives with his own stated political aims?" --Family Research Council President Ken Connor on the expected nomination of Eisenberg for RNC finance chairman, which is further expected to enlarge the widening split in the GOP between the party's wealthy establishment elite and the Republican rank-and-file. Open Query... "Are we a better country because we have allowed perhaps 10 million illegal aliens to walk in, demand the benefits of American citizenship, without being American citizens, and then protest the fact they were not being given equality of treatment in being sent back where they came from? Is it a better country -- because it surely is not a safer one, is it?" --Pat Buchanan The BIG lie... "The doubts that many of us had before the nation was attacked about the affordability of those tax cuts have become certainties. Whatever the merits or demerits of last year's tax bill, it was enacted in what now seems a very different and distant time. We must think anew, and act responsibly. ...Future additional tax breaks for the wealthy do not deserve a higher priority than strengthening education, or covering prescription drugs under Medicare, or protecting Social Security, or meeting other urgent national priorities. The spirit of this new time is placing major new demands on our national resources, and those demands must take priority." --Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Stalingrad), Mr. Bush's best buddy on education legislation last week, concluding that terrorist strikes in a recession require tax increase. Memo to Teddy: Under what circumstances, between alcoholic blackouts, would you propose to reduce taxes? News from the Swamp... In the Executive Branch, President Bush is demanding that Senate Leftists who blocked his economic recovery plan as passed by the House last November, take up the plan again. He also released a preview of the 2003 budget -- which boosts spending by a whopping 8%, though most of that expense is in constitutionally mandated areas such as defense/homeland security. As the recession has taken a huge bite out of tax revenues, Mr. Bush has proposed dramatic cuts in many areas of spending in order to hold the deficit at $100 billion. Of course, the Left's predictable class warfare chorus is growing -- as the Sociocrats target those parts of the president's already-passed modest tax reduction plan designated for higher income families. Mr. Bush rebuked his adversaries: "I'm confident that the American people agree with me as well. And if members of the House and the Senate listen to their constituents and listen to those who want to find work, they will understand the wisdom of our ways." Last week, Mr. Bush made excellent recess appointments of Eugene Scalia as Labor Department solicitor and Otto Reich as assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere. (Senate Demo Leader Tom Daschle and his cadre of Sociocrats view both as "controversial" and therefore requiring not the typical simple majority approval but a 60-vote supermajority: Scalia, we guess because of his surname; Reich, because he has been an effective anti-Communist.) Mr. Bush also made a recess appointment last Monday of John Magaw as head of the new Transportation Security Administration. (Only Sen. Arlen Specter had placed a "hold" on Magaw as controversial, as Magaw led the Bureau of Alchohol, Tobacco and Firearms during the agency's attack on the Weaver family at Ruby Ridge, in a failed entrapment scheme in which a sniper bullet ran dangerously close to an infant while killing her mother.) Judicial Benchmarks... In the halls of justice on the right, Constitution defenders specializing in Second Amendment rights are savoring a couple of fine victories. In Ohio, a ban on carrying concealed firearms was struck down as contrary to Ohio's Constitution. "This is one of the greatest victories for the Second Amendment Foundation and the citizens of Ohio. Not since SAF forced the city of Los Angeles to begin issuing concealed carry licenses have we earned such a clear win, and it feels great to strike down a gun control law using the Ohio Constitution," remarked SAF Founder Alan Gottlieb. And the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last week against the city of Philadelphia's suit claiming guns are a "public nuisance," with Judge Morton I. Greenberg writing for the unanimous opinion, "The causal chain is too attenuated to make out a public-nuisance claim." In the halls of injustice on the left, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, usually demonstrating the worst of Leftist legal shenanigans, almost outdid itself, this week affirming lower court rulings that the city of San Francisco did not violate First Amendment rights of religious and family groups, nor did the city exhibit hostility toward religions, by denouncing the "Truth in Love" advertisements as "hateful rhetoric" that incites hate crimes. The ad campaign, containing statements that "God abhors any form of sexual sin," including homosexuality, adultery and extramarital intercourse, and urging those caught in sexual sins to resist and forsake them, was sponsored by organizations including the American Family Association and Family Research Council. AFA lawyer Brian Fahling announced intent to petition for a rehearing: "If that's not hostility toward religion, then it hasn't been invented yet." Dissenting Judge John T. Noonan agreed, saying, "To assert that a group's religious message and religious categorization of conduct are responsible for murder is to attack the group's religion." On the Left... If you think all "race cards" are played with the Left hand, consider how easy they are to trump! Commenting on Left Reverends Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and their race bait games, commentator Armstrong Williams concluded: "Jackson and Sharpton...appeal to the lowest common denominator. The jig goes something like this: Sharpton and Jackson see some opening where they can exploit our racial sensitivity. Then they move in, threatening to replicate with mobs and bad press if their demands aren't met (often their demands include no small amount of financial gain for themselves). Bottom line: They make their living as racketeers, offering to inflame or quell racial tensions at a cost." More in line with the Williams philosophy of black American success is BOND (Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny). Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson is the founder, and he is the antithesis to the Left Reverend Jesse Jackson. On January 21st (MLK holiday), BOND is hosting the "Third Annual National Day of Repudiation of Jesse Jackson" in Los Angeles in front of Jackson's Rainbow/Push (read "SHOVE") offices on Wilshire Boulevard! Memo to Right Thinkers on the Left Coast: Show up and be counted! And in news from the "Clinton Presidue" Files this week, Monica Lewinsky complained to reporters that she dislikes being the butt of crude humor: "The ones that take my last name and equate them to [censored by The Federalist Editor for Standards and Practices] that a lot of people in the world do, is a really cruel thing to do." The butt of crude humor.... The Commissars... This week, the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators decided to do the dirty work of Sociocratic dictators by laying foundations for the necessarily tyrannical national ID card. The AAMVA plan calls for $100 million from Congress to pay for our country's first-ever national ID system, complete with a centralized computer database to keep tabs on all 270 million of us, and biometric identifiers on the cards standardized across all the states. Big Brother wants "Your Papers, Please!" Hey, if these tyrannizers really want a tamper-proof ID system, why not just go with a tattoo on the inner arm! The Nazis found it quite useful! And speaking of transportation and ID's, New DoT air safety rules for so-called "positive bag matching" to check passengers board with their luggage or requiring all baggage to be inspected for explosives go into effect this weekend. Actually, this is one of a few air travel security measures that make sense. But as previously noted by The Federalist, posting National Guard troops in terminals, preventing anyone from parking near terminals and federalizing concourse inspectors are fine examples of mindless bureaucratic overreaction. None of this would have prevented the September 11th attack on our nation. Of course, all central government programs, once implemented, take great political will to undo. Not only is the treasury dolling out dollars to somebody's political constituents, but the political risk of reducing security measures is very high. The next incident of air piracy would undoubtedly be blamed on some common sense representative of the people who declared that nail clippers were not deadly weapons -- and you know if a common sense representative is unseated, a Sociocrat will take that seat! Regarding your IRS overpayment... Did you know that your tax dollars pay for a couple of supposed "safe sex" programs called the "Great Sex Workshop" and "Booty Call"? We didn't think so! Now, some reason returns, as in an initial inquiry, Inspector General Janet Rehnquist has discovered that these programs, instead of serving their intended purpose of AIDS prevention, may be inappropriate and potentially obscene as well as promoting sexual promiscuity. "Where's the data that all the billions we spent over the last 10 years has slowed or stemmed the spread of this disease? Just because somebody wants the money -- and claims it's for a good purpose -- does not mean we should necessarily keep giving it to them year in and year out," commented Rep. Dave Weldon (R-Florida), also a physician, who supports a comprehensive review of AIDS prevention grants, such as the $698,000 Stop AIDS received from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. >From the department of military readiness... Combat air patrols in the skies over the U.S., known as Operation Noble Eagle, soon may be scaled back, after 13,000 flights since 9-11 costing about $325 million. The underlying concern is maintaining readiness for future missions with limited resources being rapidly depleted. In other words, somebody has been asleep at the wheel for the last decade.... >From the department of military correctness... The Virginia Military Institute has an excellent idea our armed services might want to consider -- VMI cadets who find themselves expectant parents are expected to leave the Corps of Cadets. And, of course, we can expect legal challenges to this eminently reasonable policy, despite the fact it applies consistently to both expectant fathers and expectant mothers. But remind us again, what exactly was the point of sewing up maternity BDU's? >From the states... Out Left Coast way, in Corona, Nick Bouse ran afoul of his homeowners association for displaying a 5' by 8' flag outside then inside his window. The association informed Bouse the flag is an "inappropriate window covering," and barred him from showing it; he must either strike his colors or place blinds in front of the flag to hide it from passersby. The "Dumb and Dumber" Department... The ACLU is back this week, with more "helpfulness" in fighting terrorist attacks, Thursday filing suit in Los Angeles federal court against the new requirement that airport screeners be U.S. citizens. An estimated 20 percent of the nation's 28,000 screeners are not citizens, and the new law would hit hardest at San Francisco airport, where about 80 percent of its 800 screeners are not citizens, and at Los Angeles International Airport, with about 40 percent of its 1,000 screeners non-citizens. Amazingly, the ACLU attorneys kept straight faces while arguing the citizenship requirement would damage air security. Court Jesters... There are omissions and then there are omissions.... A three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals (them again!) held that marijuana intoxication is not automatically a legal impairment for driving in Idaho -- because the relevant DUI law failed to list marijuana as a narcotic. So long as their driving is not erratic and they pass field sobriety tests, pot-smoking drivers can toddle on down the road. Culture comment... Some notable folks have been caught in lies and misrepresentations recently -- historians like Stephen Ambrose, Pulitzer Prize-winners like Joseph Ellis, and, of course, Notre Dame's George O'Leary. Of these various deceptions, friend of The Federalist Lynne Cheney concludes, "[Academics] leaped beyond the common sense observation that people's descriptions of reality differ to the conclusion that there is no independent reality and thus no basis for making judgments about truth or falsity. [Truth claims are in reality] the constructs of dominant groups -- the creations of the powerful." Certainly, the most stunning such example occurred when, steeped in these mental acrobatics, a sitting president of the most powerful nation in the world swore under oath that the truth of his answer depended on what the meaning of "is" is.... Faith Matters... President Bush's Council on Bioethics held its first meeting Thursday, beginning the arduous task of formulating policy on such politically contentious -- and really ultimately faith-based -- issues as euthanasia and human cloning, including possible distinctions between embryonic human cloning for research and "therapeutic" ends and human cloning for reproduction. Panel staff noted, "There is a need both for sobriety and for a full hearing of all arguments in this debate, and it is in this spirit of open inquiry that the council shall do its work. But there is also the need for responsible judgments and policies, and for recognition of the fact that these are inescapably moral matters, to be decided on not by scientists or techno-entrepreneurs acting alone but by all of us conversing and deliberating in the public square." On the frontiers of science... About those possible further terrorist attacks, the FBI and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will soon evaluate the federal stockpile of drugs to combat chemical and bioweapons. And not a minute too soon.... Existing stores contain anthrax and radiation treatments and smallpox vaccines, but are lacking drugs to deal with hemorrhagic fevers like Ebola and may require new antidotes for botulism and cyanide. Around the world... Out Kashmir way, Indians and Pakistanis continued cross-border hostilities. Secretary of State Colin Powell visited Afghanistan, then India and Pakistan to gauge cross-border tensions around the contested region, and Indian Defense Minister George Fernandes was at the Pentagon, where Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld discussed the likelihood of "relaxation of that tension" with Pakistan. Indeed, contrary to expectations of nuclear freezeniks, India and Pakistan both being nuclear powers has not been incitatory but rather sobering in their conflict. And last... If you thought some jokes about al Qaeda and Taliban escapades were too far-fetched to be true, this week Pakistani officials captured five suspected members of bin Laden's terror network attempting escape -- disguised as women in burqas! (We trust our readers are clever enough to make up your own joke here.) -- PUBLIUS -- *COPYRIGHT NOTICE** In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. 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