Victory falls apart - Blame all around on immigration reform

UNION-TRIBUNE EDITORIAL

April 10, 2006

Never underestimate the ability of opportunistic and hopelessly partisan politicians to put their interests before the nation's and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

That's what happened late last week with the immigration reform bill that stalled in the Senate. It amounted to a stunning example of legislative whiplash.

On Thursday evening, it looked like it was a done deal as senators from both parties proudly appeared together at a joint press conference in support of a promising compromise. They assured us all that they had between 60-70 votes for a plan that would provide a path toward legalization for some but not all of the 12 million illegal immigrants currently living in the United States. You knew the idea was promising, if for no other reason than because the extremes on right and left hated it.

But then came Friday morning and the disturbing news that the compromise had fallen apart – not only because hard-line Republicans continued to raise objections over legalizing anyone but also because some Democratic leaders, in their slavish devotion to organized labor (which is opposed to guest workers and legalization), had torpedoed the process by limiting Republican amendments to three, a far cry from the 20 amendments the GOP was seeking.

Democrats said Republicans were trying to water down the bill; Republicans insisted the amendments were reasonable and deserved a hearing.

Who's telling the truth? You decide. One of the changes proposed by Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, and Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., would have barred felons, repeat offenders and those ordered to leave the country from obtaining legal status.

We could have lived with that, and, we'd submit, so could many of the supporters of a compromise that offered some hope of accomplishing something substantial on immigration reform. So it appears that Democrats were spoilers.

Instead, time ran out and senators went off on spring break – heading for some of the best beaches and ski resorts, no doubt. They promised to get back into this issue when they return after Easter.

We'll take them at their word. This doesn't have to be the end of the road. There is still hope. Enjoy the break, folks. When you get back to Washington, you'll be put back to work on fixing a broken immigration system.

We're not naive. We know that it may be easiest to do nothing. No matter what senators do, they're going to face the wrath of some important and vocal groups of voters. But doing nothing on this issue is not an option. Nor does it bear any resemblance at all to something that seems to be in short supply in Washington: leadership.

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me@rescam.org

A black eye for the blogosphere

ELLEN GOODMAN
THE BOSTON GLOBE

April 10, 2006

I am sure that Jill Carroll and her family are too busy inhaling the sweet spring air of freedom to spend time sniffing out the pollution in the blogosphere. Anyone who spent three months imagining the grimmest fate for this young journalist in the hands of terrorists can't get too upset when a little Internet posse goes after her scalp.

Nevertheless, this is not a good moment for the bustling, energetic Wild West of the new Internet media. Remember when a former CBS executive described bloggers as guys in pajamas writing in their living rooms? Well, it seems that many have only one exercise routine: jumping to conclusions.

In the hours between captivity and true freedom, Jill Carroll was seen in one propaganda film describing the mujahideen as “good people fighting an honorable fight” and in another interview saying she was never threatened. An online jeering section bought it hook, line and sinker without waiting to hear that the videos were made under threat. As Alex Jones of Harvard University's Shorenstein Center said, “They were gulled by a clever piece of propaganda and ought to be ashamed of themselves.”

The printouts on my desk describe the 28-year-old journalist, a hostage and victim for 82 terrifying days, as something between Patty Hearst and Baghdad Jane, between a traitor and “Princess Jill.” TBone posted a potshot, calling Carroll “a liar” and the kidnapping “a total scam.” PA Pundits said that “I still just can't get past her being (for the most part) unharmed.” And Debbie Schlussel, called her a “spoiled brat America-hater.”

The blogosphere was not the only source of pollution. Indeed, the oil-spill prize goes to Don Imus' producer, Bernard McGuirk, who described this young reporter as “the kind of woman who would wear one of those suicide vests. ... She may be carrying Habib's baby.” But in the short, volatile and powerful life of the Web log, the Jill Carroll debacle may be a turning point.

Web logs have been around barely a half-dozen years. The Pew Internet & American Life Project estimates that a quarter of Internet users now read blogs and 9 percent write one. Most of the 28 million blogs are online diaries such as those on MySpace. But there is also the feisty political corner of this zone.

The political bloggers first flexed their muscle in 2002 when they trumped the MSM – blogspeak for Mainstream Media – by forcing Trent Lott out of the Senate speakership after he toasted the good old segregated days of Strom Thurmond. In 2004, they proved the power of the Internet as a great equalizer when they confronted the house of CBS and Dan Rather over Bush's military records.

Two years later, we have – ready, fire, aim – the Jill Carroll affair. These attacks raise the question of what bloggery is going to be when it grows up. An Internet Op-Ed page? Or a polarized, talk-radio food fight?

As Internet users, we've learned a lot about the good, the bad, the true and the false in cyberspace. If you Google an illness, you get links to a cutting-edge cure for cancer or a Web site for pills made from apricot pits. Dan Gillmor, author of “We the Media,” says that “people are having to learn a new kind of media literacy” and that “quality will end up surfacing.” Maybe so. Maybe not.

If newspapers are the first rough draft of history, a blog is like reading a never-ending draft as it's being written and published, mostly unedited, without standards or correction boxes. Defenders will tell you that blogs are “fact-checked” in the rough and tumble of the marketplace by other bloggers. But don't count on it.

The difference between old media and new, MSM and blog, says Al Tompkins of the Poynter Institute, is the difference between sitting at a restaurant and having your food delivered nicely plated or standing at a buffet nibbling constantly. It's the 24/7 news cycle brought down to the 604,800 seconds-per-week cycle.

In the wake of the Carroll story, a few – far too few – bloggers stopped stocking the buffet long enough to eat their words. But this case provides a juncture for bloggers who want a respected role in the public debate.

It has already provoked something rather rare in the blogosphere: soul searching. Rick Moran, the self-named Right Wing Nut House, asks: “Are we nothing more than a pack of digital yellow journalists writing pixilated scab sheets vying to see who we can lay low next?” Joe Gandelman of The Moderate Voice warns: “You can't fake credibility. You earn it. And today some blogs and blogging in general need to re-earn it.”

For many bloggers, credibility – and decency – should begin with an apology to a survivor named Jill Carroll.

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me@rescam.org

Hey, is that Dan with the GM T-shirt? ;)

Hey, is that Dan with the GM T-shirt? ;)

Not unless it comes with a pair of headphones and a mic.

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me@rescam.org

Hey, is that Dan with the GM T-shirt? ;)

Not unless it comes with a pair of headphones and a mic.

Yeah... but the moustache is right.

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Account frozen...

Eilt, ihr angefochtnen Seelen,
geht aus euren Marterhöhlen,
eilt - Wohin? - nach Golgatha.
Nehmet an des Glaubens Flügel,
flieht - Wohin? - zum Kreuzeshügel,
eure Wohlfahrt blüht allda.

Gesegnete Ostern
Blessed Easter

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Account frozen...

Just to make a legal point here... in the United States, information is classified on the executive authority of the President. The rules governing the classification of information are executive orders, and the President can classify or de-classify any information at his whim. President Carter summarily de-classified the existence of US spy satellites during a press conference.

There is no legal case against the President in this regard, but there are political implications... just because the President cannot-- by definition-- leak classified information, this does not mean that he cannot authorize leaks to the press that "smell" just as bad as the ones he's complaining about. He would have to assume that the press would be unsympathetic to his legally superior position and make it into a "walks like a duck" argument, therefore the leaks were ill-advised.

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No animals were harmed in the making of the above post... much.

Just to make a legal point here... in the United States, information is classified on the executive authority of the President. The rules governing the classification of information are executive orders, and the President can classify or de-classify any information at his whim. President Carter summarily de-classified the existence of US spy satellites during a press conference.

There is no legal case against the President in this regard, but there are political implications... just because the President cannot-- by definition-- leak classified information, this does not mean that he cannot authorize leaks to the press that "smell" just as bad as the ones he's complaining about. He would have to assume that the press would be unsympathetic to his legally superior position and make it into a "walks like a duck" argument, therefore the leaks were ill-advised.

I disagree. In light of the constant questions about the existance of WMD, it was necessary to "declassify" intelligence about their existence both before the war (Powell's briefing of the UN is one example) and after the war. If one is being accused of going into Iraq without justification, then shouldn't that justification be revealed, assuming the revelation has no security downside? The press has linked the declassification of pre-war intelligence to the Valerie Plame "outing", but these are not related.

I disagree. In light of the constant questions about the existance of WMD, it was necessary to "declassify" intelligence about their existence both before the war (Powell's briefing of the UN is one example) and after the war. If one is being accused of going into Iraq without justification, then shouldn't that justification be revealed, assuming the revelation has no security downside? The press has linked the declassification of pre-war intelligence to the Valerie Plame "outing", but these are not related.

"Should" and "must" are two entirely different things.

In general terms, there are three concerns with revealing classified information.

First, the information itself may be something that you do not want widely known. For example, if the US knew that Dictator X was gravely ill and his nation was hiding the fact, the US might conclude that regional stability would be better served by going along with the nation's cover story.

Second, the fact that the US knows the information may not be widely known, and the US wants to keep it that way. When the US broke Japan's ciphers during World War II, the US did not want Japan to know this.

Third, revealing the information may tip off adversaries about the method used to gain that information. When the US declassified photos of Cuban missile sites, the Soviet Union was able to deduce what sort of aircraft took those pictures and at what altitude... it then created countermeasures to make that sort of surveillance less fruitful in the future.

In the case of Iraq pre-war intelligence, the third concern was the greatest because Iraq was notoriously difficult to penetrate with human intelligence operatives. Since those sources and methods have still not been revealed, it stands to reason that the methods are either based in some other nation(s) or were spying on some other nation(s) in addition to Iraq.

The original prima facie case has never been refuted: why would the President go to war on a justification that he knew would fall apart within days after the invasion? The answer is that he believed the pre-war intel just like every other head of state did at the time. Iraq was acting guilty, which meant that rational officials had to assume the worst (unlike those with a vested interest in keeping Saddam in power, who simply wished for the best).

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No animals were harmed in the making of the above post... much.

In the case of Iraq pre-war intelligence, the third concern was the greatest because Iraq was notoriously difficult to penetrate with human intelligence operatives. Since those sources and methods have still not been revealed, it stands to reason that the methods are either based in some other nation(s) or were spying on some other nation(s) in addition to Iraq.

The original prima facie case has never been refuted: why would the President go to war on a justification that he knew would fall apart within days after the invasion? The answer is that he believed the pre-war intel just like every other head of state did at the time. Iraq was acting guilty, which meant that rational officials had to assume the worst (unlike those with a vested interest in keeping Saddam in power, who simply wished for the best).

I may be wrong, but I think the material that was declassified (the subject of the most recent accusations) was released after the war, so protection of sources would not have been such a concern. And yes, the justification for the war that you and I have both mentioned (and that no one has ever refuted) is valid, but the administration still must feel the unrelenting pressure about pre-war statements that WMD did indeed exist. I know as well as you that WMD were not the sole reason for the war, but the media presents it as such and the White House responded; perhaps it's not the "high road", but I understand it.

Some of the comments in the press are simply inane: e.g. that the president can "leak" information but he complains when someone else does it. Well, it is clear that the president can indeed release classified information, as any president would (and many have) to explain policy decisions. Look at DB's cartoon. But the sentiment ascribed to the president in that cartoon had to do with Valerie Plame, not information about WMD that was released to explain the war. These are two very different things, yet the media has lumped them together in another attempt to discredit the press. (Yet, so many who post here think there is no campaign to smear the president. Misleading political cartoons like this are clear partisan politics.)

I didn't know that Bush could put such a long sentence together! (the first one)
I was even more astonished that he could string 3 sentences together ... !!!
;-)))))))

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Get with the Power of Computing ... USE A MAC, dammit, USE A MAC ! ;-))

No nuclear option - End talk about using these weapons in Iran

UNION-TRIBUNE EDITORIAL

April 11, 2006

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw put it this way: “The idea of a nuclear strike on Iran is completely nuts. I have made clear the British government's position on this time and time again, which is widely shared across Europe.”

Let us hope that officials in the Bush administration who are said to be considering a military attack on Iran – including the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons – to slow its suspected nuclear weapons program are listening.

Over the weekend, The New Yorker and The Washington Post reported that the Pentagon had presented the White House with a military plan that did not rule out the nuclear option. Yesterday, President Bush dismissed the reports as “wild speculation.” Indeed, in contingency planning it is common for the Pentagon to include all options, even those with almost no chance of being used.

Our concern is that any discussion at all of the nuclear option is a destabilizing factor in a situation that begs for calm and sober debate.

Iran insists that its nuclear research program is for peaceful purposes, and under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty it has the right to pursue such a program. But because it hid its enrichment program from international inspectors for more than a decade, and because of the irresponsible behavior of Iran's president, most of the world suspects Iran is conducting research for civilian and military purposes.

The U.N. Security Council has given Iran until April 28 to give up its enrichment program, and has threatened sanctions if Iran does not comply. Russia and China, who have vetoes on the council, have said they will not approve sanctions.

That has spurred talk of the military option, which Bush rightly refuses to take off the table. As we have said, a military attack, which should be the international community's last resort, has its own set of risks. For starters, no one knows if a military strike would slow Iran's nuclear program. On the other hand, just about every knowledgeable observer predicts that America's war on terror would be set back after the world's 1.2 billion Muslims watched the United States, perhaps with help from Israel, attack another Muslim nation. Already, anti-Americanism is rampant in the Arab world, even in “friendly” nations. A recent Zogby International poll showed that in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, 85 percent and 89 percent of the populations respectively view the United States unfavorably. Iran also could disrupt the world's oil markets and launch terrorist attacks against the United States and Israel.

But whatever the fallout from a conventional military attack, a nuclear attack – with literal and figurative fallout – would be far worse. America would have crossed a line from which there might never be a return.

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me@rescam.org

Slowing the march to war with Iran

DAVID IGNATIUS
THE WASHINGTON POST

April 12, 2006

The emerging confrontation between the United States and Iran is “the Cuban missile crisis in slow motion,” argues Graham Allison, the Harvard professor who wrote the classic study of President Kennedy's 1962 showdown with the Soviet Union that narrowly averted nuclear war. If anything, that analogy understates the potential risks here.

President Bush tried to calm the war fever Monday, describing stories about military contingency plans for bombing Iran that appeared last weekend in The Washington Post and The New Yorker as “wild speculation.” But those stories did no more than flesh out the strategic options that might be necessary to back up the administration's public pledge, in its National Security Strategy, “to block the threats posed” by Iran and its nuclear program.

The administration insists that it wants diplomacy to do the pre-emption, even as its military planners are studying how to take out Iran's nuclear facilities if diplomacy should fail. Iran, meanwhile, is pursuing its own version of pre-emption, announcing yesterday that it has begun enriching uranium – a crucial first step toward making a bomb. Neither side wants war – who in his right mind would? – but both frame choices in ways that make war increasingly likely.

The impasse was summarized by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker, in a quote attributed to a Pentagon adviser: “The bottom line is that Iran cannot become a nuclear weapons state. The problem is that the Iranians realize that only by becoming a nuclear state can they defend themselves against the U.S.”

Allison argues that Bush's dilemma is similar to the one that confronted Kennedy in 1962. His advisers are telling him that he faces a stark choice – either to acquiesce in the acquisition of nuclear weapons by a dangerous adversary, or go to war to stop that nuclear fait accompli. Hard-liners warned JFK that alternative courses of action would only delay the inevitable day of reckoning, and Bush is probably hearing similar advice now.

Kennedy's genius was to reject the Cuba options proposed by his advisers, hawk and dove alike, and choose his own peculiar outside-the-box strategy. He issued a deadline but privately delayed it; he answered a first, flexible message from Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev but not a second unyielding one; he said he would never take U.S. missiles out of Turkey, as the Soviets were demanding, and then secretly did precisely that.

The Bush administration needs to be engaging in a similar exercise in creative thinking. The military planners will keep looking for targets (as they must, in a confrontation this serious). But Bush's advisers – and most of all, the president himself – must keep searching for ways to escape the inexorable logic that is propelling America and Iran toward war. I take heart from the fact that the counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Philip Zelikow, is an expert on the Cuban missile crisis and co-authored the second edition of Allison's classic, “Essence of Decision.”

What worries me is that the relevant historical analogy may not be the 1962 war that didn't happen, but World War I, which did. The march toward war in 1914 resulted from the tight interlocking of alliances, obligations, perceived threats and strategic miscalculations. The British historian Niall Ferguson argued in his book “The Pity of War” that Britain's decision to enter World War I was a gross error of judgment that cost that nation its empire.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former national security adviser to President Carter, makes a similar argument about Iran. “I think of war with Iran as the ending of America's present role in the world,” he told me this week. “Iraq may have been a preview of that, but it's still redeemable if we get out fast. In a war with Iran, we'll get dragged down for 20 or 30 years. The world will condemn us. We will lose our position in the world.”

Brzezinski urges President Bush to slow down and think carefully about his options – rather than rushing to stop Iran's nuclear program, which by most estimates is five to 10 years, at a minimum, from building a bomb. “Time is on our side,” says Brzezinski. “The mullahs aren't the future of Iran, they're the past.” As America carefully weighs its options, there is every likelihood that the strategic picture will improve.

The Bush administration has demonstrated, in too many ways, that it's better at starting fights than finishing them. It shouldn't make that same mistake again. Threats of war will be more convincing if they come slowly and reluctantly, when it has become clear that truly there is no other choice.

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me@rescam.org

Iran claims progress in uranium enrichment
Leaders vow to press on despite U.N. calls to stop

NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE

April 12, 2006

TEHRAN, Iran – Iran announced yesterday that its nuclear engineers had advanced to a new phase in the enrichment of uranium, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and a series of the country's ruling clerics declared that the nation would now speed ahead, in defiance of a U.N. resolution, to produce the nuclear fuel on an industrial scale.

“Iran has joined the nuclear countries of the world,” Ahmadinejad said during a nationally televised celebration that included video presentations of each step of the nuclear process that he declared Iran had mastered. “The nuclear fuel cycle at the laboratory level has been completed, and uranium with the desired enrichment for nuclear power plants was achieved.”

The White House, which has charged that Iran is secretly attempting to develop fuel for nuclear weapons, at first responded by saying Iran was “moving in the wrong direction.”

Later in the day, it sounded a more ominous tone with the National Security Council announcing that the United States would work with the U.N. Security Council “to deal with the significant threat posed by the regime's efforts to acquire nuclear weapons.”

Outside experts said that while the country appears to have passed a milestone – one it has approached before with smaller-scale enrichment of uranium – the announcement may have been less of an engineering feat than political theater designed to convince the West that the program is unstoppable.

Their declaration comes at a time of intense speculation in Washington that preliminary plans are advancing to take military action against Iran's nuclear sites if diplomacy fails, an idea Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld dismissed yesterday as “fantasy land.”

The director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohammed ElBaradei, is scheduled to arrive in Tehran today to make a another appeal for Iran to halt its enrichment program.

Yesterday's development marks another major setback for the European nations that have pressed for three years to persuade Iran to halt its fuel production program, and for President Bush. On Monday, Bush repeated that his goal was that “we do not want the Iranians to have a nuclear weapon, the capacity to make a nuclear weapon, or the knowledge as to how to make a nuclear weapon.”

For that reason, he has opposed allowing Iran to enrich uranium – even though it signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and has the right to produce fuel for power reactors.

If the Iranian declaration is correct, the enrichment and the rudimentary bomb-making documents that international inspectors have found in Iran suggest Iranians now may have most of the knowledge that Bush has sought to deny them.

At the least, they appear poised to eventually be able to expand enrichment on an industrial scale and, if they were determined to do so, enrich the uranium to levels necessary for an atomic weapon. The quantities that the country has produced appear to be minuscule, and the enrichment level announced yesterday – 3.5 percent – will work for producing power, not warheads.

International inspectors are stationed at the main facility at Natanz, and presumably will be able to confirm or knock down Iranian claims in coming days, assuming they have access to centrifuges.

Centrifuges are devices in which rotors spin very rapidly to enrich a toxic gas in uranium's rare component, uranium 235, which then can be used to fuel nuclear reactors or atom bombs. The 164 centrifuges Iran said it has strung together in a “cascade” are enough to test the technology, but it would take years to produce uranium for even one weapon with such a small number. Still, it is a milestone.

Despite claims yesterday of an enrichment breakthrough, Iran in the past seven years repeatedly has used centrifuges and lasers to enrich uranium, according to reports by the nuclear agency. But the amounts apparently have been small and the setups experimental.

Ahmadinejad reiterated that Iran's nuclear program was being developed for industrial and power purposes alone, and said his country “does not get its strength from nuclear arsenals.”

He did his best to turn the development to political advantage.

“I declare at this historic moment, with the blessings of God almighty and the efforts of our scientists, that we have mastered the nuclear fuel cycle on a laboratory scale and our young scientists have produced enriched uranium required for nuclear plants on Sunday,” said Ahmadinejad as his comments were followed by chants of “God is Great.”

The speech was bracketed by recitations from the Koran, and Ahmadinejad spoke before a mural of doves in flight.

“Access to the nuclear fuel cycle is a national demand and our people have repeatedly stressed that they want to have it,” he said.

Before he spoke, a small parade of men in traditional costumes danced as a thin silver box said to contain the first enriched uranium was carried to the stage. The announcer said that the box would be preserved at a museum.

State-run television repeatedly showed footage of scientists in white uniforms working in what seemed to be a nuclear facility.

Ahmadinejad was careful to position Iran as operating within the existing rules, saying his country's nuclear activities have been “under complete, unprecedented” supervision by the atomic energy agency. He did not mention that he has restricted the access of those inspectors to some sites in recent months, and that inspectors have yet to receive explanations about documents found in Iran, or an explanation of what the country bought in the mid-1990s from Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani nuclear engineer who helped start Iran's program.

Ahmadinejad said Iran would continue to allow inspectors to watch its progress.

“Today we are interested to operate under IAEA supervision what has been achieved,” he said. “And what is going to be achieved in the future is within the framework of the rights of the nation.”

David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a private research group in Washington, said that the announcement had been expected, but that the quantities were probably small.

“They need to learn a lot more to produce it in significant quantities and they need to build a lot more centrifuges,” Albright said.

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me@rescam.org

Blame the Democrats for immigration reform failure

RUBEN NAVARRETTE JR.
THE UNION-TRIBUNE

April 12, 2006

Who killed immigration reform? The autopsy shows it was Senate Democrats.

It's tempting to put a pox on both parties. But it wouldn't be fair. Republicans were tireless in search of comprehensive, and bipartisan, reform. Sen. John McCain of Arizona joined with Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., to draft the guest-worker legislation, and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter made that legislation central to what his committee sent to the full Senate. Sens. Lindsay Graham of South Carolina and Sam Brownback of Kansas were vocal in their support. Sens. Mel Martinez of Florida and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska offered a helpful compromise. And Republican Majority Leader Bill Frist showed leadership by reaching out to the other side.

Too bad you can't say the same for Democratic leader Harry Reid, who was the villain in this drama.

Hector Flores, president of the League of United Latin-American Citizens, told me that he tried to impress upon Reid's office that it was important to get immigration reform done.

“Apparently, it fell on deaf ears,” Flores said.

Reid claims it was GOP hard-liners who killed reform by running roughshod over Frist.

Baloney. The hard-liners had – by all accounts – no more than 30 votes, including those of conservative Democrats. On the other side, you had – according to McCain – as many as 70 votes.

A deal was at hand that would have offered legal status to some illegal immigrants. It would have made the GOP seem more Latino-friendly, but it would also have infuriated organized labor, which opposes something that was in the mix: guest workers.

After the Senate Judiciary Committee put out a guest-worker bill, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney issued a statement saying: “Guest-workers programs are a bad idea and harm all workers.”

That did it. Senate Democrats sided with labor and sold out Latinos. The deal came undone because Reid refused to allow the legislation to go through the amendment process. Republicans had come up with as many as 400 amendments but whittled the list to 20. Reid agreed to proceed with debate on just three.

It was a masterstroke by Democrats. Labor is happy. And while Latinos are angry, there's always the chance that Democrats can fool them into channeling that anger toward Republicans.

Remarkably, it's working. At a protest in Washington Monday, one Latina held up a sign that read: “The GOP is losing my Latino vote.” At another protest in Dallas, someone handed out registration leaflets urging demonstrators to vote Democratic.

Some Latino leaders don't think it'll be that easy. Cecilia Munoz, vice president of the National Council of La Raza, told me: “I don't believe that it's wise for Democrats to come to our community and ask for votes by saying: 'Hey, we kept an immigration bill from going forward.' ... People understand when they're being used.”

Even so, it looks like Reid and the Democrats orchestrated the perfect deception. Trouble is, they left fingerprints.

The Washington Post said in an editorial: “Democrats – whether their motive was partisan advantage or legitimate fear of a bad bill emerging from conference with the House – are the ones who refused, in the end, to proceed with debate on amendments, which is, after all, how legislation gets made.”

Frank Sharry, the executive director of the liberal National Immigration Forum, said in a statement: “We cannot escape the conclusion that the Democratic Senate leadership was more interested in keeping the immigration issue alive in the run-up to midterms than in enacting immigration reform legislation.”

And Sen. Kennedy told The Associated Press: “Politics got ahead of policy on this.” He then refused, according to the article, to defend Reid's performance. The story noted that, “Outside the Senate, several Democratic strategists concluded that the best politics was to allow the bill to die.”

The moral: Marches and Mexican flags don't equal power. Labor uses millions of dollars in political contributions to take care of Democrats, and so Democrats take care of labor.

After the bill died, Democrats rubbed salt in the wound by insisting that Latinos had no choice but to stay on the liberal hacienda. Susan Estrich, who served as campaign manager for Michael Dukakis in 1988, told Fox News that Republicans had blown their chance to win Latino votes and predicted that Latino support would help Democrats win both houses of Congress.

You see, in a twist on the famous words of one of their icons, Democrats no longer ask what they can do for Latinos, only what Latinos can do for them.

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me@rescam.org

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Account frozen...

Experts say Iran can't make good on claims
Nuclear abilities lacking, Western analysts assert

By William J. Broad Nazila Fathi and Joel Brinkley
NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE

April 13, 2006

Western nuclear experts said yesterday that Tehran lacked the skills, materials and equipment to make good on its immediate nuclear threats, even as a senior Iranian official said Iran would defy international pressure and rapidly expand its ability to enrich uranium.

Mohammad Saeedi, the deputy head of Iran's atomic energy organization, said yesterday that Iran would push to put 54,000 centrifuges on line. On Tuesday, Iran reported that 164 centrifuges had been successfully used to enrich uranium to levels that could fuel a nuclear reactor.

Still, nuclear analysts said yesterday that the claims did little or nothing to alter current estimates of when Tehran might be able to make a single nuclear weapon, which some analysts have estimated could be as late as 2015 or even 2020.

Iran's announcement brought criticism from several Western nations and to a lesser degree from Russia and China. The Bush administration took the opportunity to press for “strong steps” against Iran, hoping to use the country's clear statement of defiance to persuade reluctant countries such as Russia and China to support tough international penalties. But Russian officials said they had not changed their opposition to such penalties.

Nuclear analysts said Iran's boast that it had enriched uranium using 164 centrifuges meant that it had now moved one small but significant step beyond what it had been ready to do nearly three years ago, when it agreed to suspend enrichment while negotiating the fate of its nuclear program.

“They're hyping it,” said David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington, a private group that monitors the Iranian nuclear program. “There's still a lot they have to do.”

Anthony Cordesman and Khalid al-Rodhan of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington called the new Iranian claims “little more than vacuous political posturing” meant to promote Iranian nationalism and a global sense of atomic inevitability.

The nuclear experts said Iran's claim that it would mass-produce 54,000 centrifuges echoed boasts that it made years ago. Even so, they noted, the Islamic state still lacked the parts and materials to make droves of the machines that spin uranium into fuel rich enough for use in nuclear reactors or weapons.

It took Tehran 21 years of planning and seven years of sporadic experiments, mostly in secret, to reach its current ability to link just 164 spinning centrifuges in what nuclear experts call a cascade. Now, the analysts said, Tehran has to achieve not only consistent results around the clock for many months and years but even higher degrees of precision and mass production.

Yesterday, Saeedi said the Islamic state was moving rapidly toward its atomic goals. “We will expand uranium enrichment to industrial scale at Natanz,” he was quoted as saying by the ISNA student news agency in a reference to Iran's main enrichment facility.

Saeedi said Iran would start operating the first of 3,000 centrifuges at Natanz by late this year, with further expansion to 54,000 centrifuges. “We have no problem in doing that,” he told ISNA. “We just need to increase our production lines.”

The news from Iran, which holds 10 percent of the world's oil reserves, has made oil markets nervous and contributed to a spike in oil prices to nearly $70 a barrel Tuesday. Oil futures on the New York Mercantile Exchange closed at $68.62 a barrel yesterday, just $2 short of the record set after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast.

Since the beginning of the year, the diplomatic crisis has prompted fears that Iran might be tempted to restrict its oil sales, provoking a price spike that would cause economic havoc around the world. Iranian officials have repeatedly said that they might use their country's “oil weapon” in a confrontation with the West.

But, as is often the case in Iranian politics, such statements were just as rapidly offset by more reassuring comments from the Oil Ministry that Iran would not use its oil exports as a bargaining chip with the West.

Many traders fear that any international penalties against Iran might hurt Iran's oil industry, slow investments, or remove sorely needed barrels from oil-hungry markets.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said yesterday that the U.N. Security Council must consider “strong steps” to induce Iran to change course.

The United States is urging members of the Security Council to approve new travel and financial restrictions on Iran's leaders.

Such penalties could hurt Russia, which has close trade ties with Iran.

The Russian stance against penalties highlighted the obstacles still facing Washington in its effort to force a halt to Iran's nuclear program.

A senior aide to Russian President Vladimir Putin said yesterday that any effort to employ broad penalties against Tehran would backfire because “Iran's current president will use them for his benefit, and he will use them to consolidate public opinion around him.”

While a Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman called Iran's push to expand uranium enrichment “a step in the wrong direction,” Foreign Minister Sergy Lavrov later inveighed against any possible military action against Iran. He also advised against a rush to judgment, saying Iran had “never stated that it is striving to possess nuclear weapons.”

In Iran on Tuesday, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced in an elaborate ceremony that Iranian scientists had successfully enriched uranium to 3.5 percent – a level of purity that, if enough could be made, might fuel a nuclear reactor. While Iran hailed the step as a first, the nuclear experts said Tehran had in fact been doing periodic enrichment experiments with centrifuges for seven years, since 1999.

While Iran has sharply raised its nuclear claims in the past two days, nuclear analysts said that it appeared to be roughly where it was expected to be on the road to learning how to enrich uranium on an industrial scale, and still had years of hard work ahead of it to attain its highly ambitious goals.

Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security said he was not surprised that the Iranians had got a group of 164 centrifuges up and running and had begun to introduce uranium gas into them for enrichment.

U.S. intelligence agencies estimate that Tehran is five to 10 years away from having enough material to make a single nuclear weapon.

Several nations criticized Iran's recent announcements as needlessly provocative.

British Foreign Minister Jack Straw said they were “deeply unhelpful,” and his German counterpart, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, said that Iran was “going in precisely the wrong direction.”

Wang Guamgya, China's ambassador to the United Nations, said, “For China, we are concerned about the events and the way things are developing.” But he added, “In spite of this, I believe diplomatic efforts are still under way.”

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