Injustices that fit neatly into U.S. political ideologies will receive much press attention. Many others fall through the cracks, such as the world’s longest-held POWs.

408 Moroccans are still being held by the Polisario Front as a result of a territorial dispute in the Sahara. The remaining POWs have been held in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions since the declaration of a cease- fire in 1991, and are today the longest-held prisoners of war anywhere in the world.

In May, John McCain, along with six other former Morrocan POWS called for the immediate release of the remaining POWs.

“I know all too well that appeals to decency and justice can make a difference in the lives of prisoners,” said McCain. “I have sent a letter to the leadership of the Polisario Front, calling for the immediate release of all prisoners of war, and I hope that my colleagues in the Senate and others will join this call as well.”

The six former prisoners spoke about seeing their fellow prisoners murdered, tortured, forced to perform slave labor and forced to give their own blood to their enemies. The group explained that they had come to America to plea for the active support of the United States in helping to free the 408 Moroccan soldiers who are still facing torture, isolated confinement and regular humiliation.

But the story did not have the political sex appeal of an Abu Graib or Guantanamo Bay and quickly sank below the waves.

Do what you can for these people–take a moment to sign the petition for their immediate release.

ROME (AP) - An Italian judge ordered the arrests of 13 people in the purported CIA abduction of an imam, who then was sent to Egypt, the Milan prosecutor’s office said Friday. An Italian official said earlier the 13 were CIA officers involved in U.S. anti-terrorism efforts.

The 13 are suspected of seizing Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, known as Abu Omar, on the streets of Milan on Feb. 17, 2003, and sending him to Egypt, where he reportedly was tortured, Milan prosecutor Manlio Claudio Minale said in a statement.

An Italian newspaper said all 13 were American agents.

The U.S. Embassy in Rome and the CIA in Washington declined to comment.

The prosecutor’s statement did not name any of the suspects, give their nationalities or mention the CIA by name, but an Italian official familiar with the investigation confirmed newspaper reports Friday that the suspects were working for the CIA. The official requested anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information.

Minale said the suspects remained at large, and Italian authorities would ask the United States and Egypt for assistance in the case.

Prosecutors believe the officers seized Omar as part of the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program, in which terror suspects are transferred to third countries without court approval, according to reports Friday in newspapers Corriere della Sera and Il Giorno.

The statement said Omar was attacked by two people while walking from home to a local mosque and hustled into a white van. He was taken to Aviano, a joint U.S.-Italian base north of Venice; another American air base in Ramstein, Germany; and then Cairo.

Investigators confirmed the abduction through an eyewitness account and other, unidentified witnesses, the statement said.

The statement said Omar was abused by interrogators in Egypt, according to phone calls made by Omar from Egypt to his wife and another unnamed Egyptian citizen in April-May, 2004.

Italian papers have reported that Omar, 42, said in the calls he was tortured with electric shocks.

On Friday, Corriere della Sera cited another Milan-based imam as telling Italian authorities that Omar had been tortured in Egypt after refusing to work in Italy as an informer.

According to the testimony, Omar was hung upside down and subjected to extreme temperatures and loud noise that damaged his hearing, Corriere reported.

Minale said the judge rejected a request for arrest warrants for six more suspects believed to have helped prepare the operation.

Judge Chiara Nobile ordered the arrests after investigators traced the 13 through check-in details at Milan hotels and their use of Italian cell phones during the operation, the reports in Corriere and Il Giorno said.

Il Giorno said the 13 were American agents, and three of them were women.

Minale said a judge also issued a separate arrest warrant for Omar on terrorist charges. In that warrant, Judge Guido Salvini claimed the seizure of Omar represented a violation of Italian sovereignty, according to Italian news agency Apcom.

Omar was believed to have fought alongside jihadists in Afghanistan and Bosnia, and prosecutors were seeking evidence against him before his disappearance, according to a report in La Repubblica newspaper last year, which cited intelligence officials.

The prosecutor’s office said Omar was released by the Egyptians after his interrogation but later was arrested again.

Corriere said Italian police picked up details, including cover names, photos, credit card details, and U.S. addresses that the 13 had given to a number of five-star hotels in Milan around the time of Omar’s alleged abduction.

It said investigators also found the prepaid highway passes the 13 used for the journey from Milan to the air base.

The report said investigations showed the 13 ran up $144,984 in hotel bills in Milan, and two couples took holidays in northern Italy after delivering Omar at the Aviano air base.

It would now appear that Bush II is stressing the military through his policies; because of Iraq the number of enlistments is dropping, thus causing troops to stay longer in theater and thus stressing the military even further. It’s now a vicious cycle. One wonders if Bush II is visiting the coffins that are flown back Andrews Air Force Base. It is the decent thing to do, after all.

–Nathan

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/24/AR2005062400149.html
washingtonpost.com
Poll Finds Most Oppose Return to Draft

By WILL LESTER
The Associated Press
Friday, June 24, 2005; 2:58 AM

WASHINGTON — Americans overwhelmingly oppose reinstatement of the military draft and most say they wouldn’t encourage their children to enlist in the service either, an AP-Ipsos poll found.

That resistance underscores the dilemma facing the Bush administration as it struggles to recruit a volunteer military in war time.

The Army is falling short of its recruiting goals this year at a time the country is fighting extended wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Army has repeatedly missed its monthly recruiting goals this year, falling short by 42 percent in April.

And all four branches of military service are having trouble attracting recruits to their reserve forces.

Despite the recruiting problems, seven in 10 Americans say they oppose reinstatement of the draft, and almost half of those polled strongly oppose that step, the AP-Ipsos poll found. About a quarter of the people in this country say they favor reinstating the draft.

“Things have been working well with the all-volunteer army and that’s how it should stay,” said Kathy Fowler, a 44-year-old mother from Chillicothe, Ohio.

More than 1,700 members of the U.S. military have died since the start of the Iraq war and thousands more have been wounded. Gen. John Abizaid, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, told members of Congress on Thursday that the Iraqi insurgency is as active as six months ago and more foreign fighters are flowing in all the time.

The shortfalls in military recruiting have led to speculation that the government might be forced to reinstitute the draft. But Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has ruled it out, saying the all-volunteer force has proved the wisdom of discontinuing the draft in 1973.

“There isn’t a chance in the world that the draft will be brought back,” Rumsfeld told a House hearing Thursday.

New York Congressman Charles Rangel introduced a bill in January 2003 to bring back the draft, and more than a year later he reintroduced it. The legislation went nowhere, which did not surprise the New York Democrat.

Rangel said he initially introduced the draft legislation because he thought people would think twice about going to war in Iraq if their own children might be required to serve. And he objects to the way the military is recruiting troops _ offering cash bonuses to needy young people in poor neighborhoods.

The Army has responded to the recruiting slump by increasing the number of recruiters and offering bigger signup bonuses.

Some feel the military’s recruitment problems will force a return to the draft.

“If we had more manpower in the Middle East we could get this over with,” said James Puma, a retiree from Buffalo, N.Y. “I’m a Republican, I’m with the president. But things in Iraq are not going good at all.”

However, Jeremy Miller, a sales manager from Denver, said the Iraq war is “a situation the president has gotten us into and should be able to get us out of” without bringing back the draft.

More than half of those polled said they would discourage a son who was the right age to serve from enlisting in the military, while two-thirds said they would discourage a daughter from joining.

If a military draft were reinstated, more than half in the poll, 54 percent, said they would oppose women being drafted.

The American public has strongly opposed reinstating the draft for the past couple of decades, according to various polls. And the decreasing support for the war in Iraq suggests that is unlikely to change anytime soon.

“People simply don’t want their kids to be sent off to Iraq to be shot at in a situation in which the value of the war is becoming more and more questionable,” said John Mueller, a political science professor at Ohio State University and author of “War, Presidents and Public Opinion.”

Men were more likely than women to favor reinstating the draft, those over age 50 were more likely to favor it than younger adults. And Republicans were more likely than Democrats to support the idea. But a majority of each of those groups opposed the draft.

“The draft has never been popular and there’s little reason to believe it would be popular now,” public opinion analyst Karlyn Bowman said.

The poll of 1,000 adults was conducted June 20-22 for the AP by Ipsos, an international polling firm, and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

© 2005 The Associated Press

Unusual or not, evidently there is valid reason for concern here….

–Nathan

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/22/AR2005062201988.html?nav=most_emailed
washingtonpost.com
Pharmaceuticals in Waterways Raise Concern
Effect on Wildlife, Humans Questioned

By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 23, 2005; A03

Academics, state officials and environmental advocates are starting to question whether massive amounts of discarded pharmaceuticals, which are often flushed down the drain, pose a threat to the nation’s aquatic life and possibly to people.

In waterways from the Potomac to the Brazos River in Texas, researchers have found fish laden with estrogen and antidepressants, and many show evidence of major neurological or physiological changes.

No one has seen evidence of effects on human health, but a number are asking publicly why the federal government is not taking a more aggressive approach to what they see as a looming problem.

In October 2002, Maine’s Department of Environmental Protection asked federal scientists to analyze water samples to determine to what extent prescription drugs had seeped into the state’s waterways. Worried that discarded birth-control pills, antidepressants and other drugs could affect the state’s fishing industry and public health, the department’s Ann Pistell hoped the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s Northeast office could give her a speedy answer.

It was 2 1/2 years before she received a partial report identifying drugs in the water without a detailed explanation — it came in the past week — and she said she is still waiting for a full breakdown.

“We’re sort of baffled and frustrated by the lack of a sample analysis,” said Pistell, an environmental specialist. “We see this as an emerging issue. The more we find out, the more concerned we are.”

Some state officials have started organizing. Raoul Clarke, an environmental administrator in Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection, has worked with colleagues to establish a listserv where state and local officials can exchange information with concerned activists.

“There are many unanswered questions, but these things are showing up, and people are taking notice,” Clarke said.

EPA officials say they are still gauging the seriousness of the threat. Technological advances in testing make it possible to detect very low levels of hormones and chemical compounds in waterways, they say, and it is unclear whether such levels harm animals and people.

Hal Zenick, who monitors health issues in the EPA’s Office of Research and Development, said several agencies are working to determine whether such contaminants “lead to exposures, and do these exposures have implications for health effects.”

Others, including drug manufacturers and sewage treatment operators, say that while they are monitoring the contaminants, their threat has been overstated.

Thomas White, an environmental consultant for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), said industry studies indicate there are “no appreciable human health risks” and no “appreciable impacts on the aquatic environment” linked to drugs in the water.

In recent months, however, scientists have issued a series of findings suggesting that discarded drugs, which pass through municipal wastewater systems and into rivers, lakes and streams, could affect the environment. In 2002, a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) study found these kinds of contaminants in 80 percent of the 139 streams it sampled in 30 states. Other researchers suspect that hormones and medicines in the water may be responsible for effects on wildlife that include feminizing male fish and making others sluggish or uninterested in eating.

Rebecca D. Klaper, an ecological genomics scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, recently exposed fathead minnows to a popular anti-cholesterol drug at a level that was only slightly higher than what now occurs in area streams. She had to stop the week-long experiment after 24 hours because the fish were struggling to survive.

“They were sitting at the bottom of the tank, barely moving and barely breathing,” Klaper said in an interview. “We’re concerned [these pharmaceuticals] are not only having an effect on aquatic organisms, but on human populations as well.”

Timothy S. Gross, a USGS toxicologist, has spent several years studying how fish are faring downstream from Las Vegas. He examined three species — carp, largemouth bass and the endangered razorback sucker — and detected “a very large and marked decrease in sperm quality and quantity” in all three populations.

There are enough carp and bass to withstand such effects, Gross said, but the razorback sucker may not recover. “When you have a species already on the brink, this may push them over the brink,” he said.

Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), who has secured $2.5 million over the past decade to fund the Geological Survey’s water quality studies in the Las Vegas Valley, said the government needs “to do a comprehensive national study to determine how these contaminants might affect our health, our water supplies and our environment. I think it would be irresponsible not to provide funding on this issue. It is a wise, and necessary, investment in our future.”

But several rank-and-file EPA employees said senior agency officials have expressed little interest in the subject. Hilary Snook, an EPA research scientist who has been analyzing pharmaceutical levels in about 45 water samples from Maine, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Vermont, said he has yet to receive funding from headquarters for the project. As a result, he said, his office lacks the money to complete the study quickly.

“I don’t think there’s much political will at all” to tackle the issue, Snook said. “We should at least look at it. We shouldn’t be burying our heads in the sand.”

State and local officials are growing increasingly impatient. David Galvin, who manages the hazardous waste program in King County, Wash., is coming under pressure from county residents to collect unused pharmaceuticals from hospitals as well as from elderly residents’ homes. He is working with the nonprofit Product Stewardship Institute in Boston to start a national dialogue between drug manufacturers and government agencies on how to minimize the environmental impact of discarded medicines.

“Otherwise, we at the local level are going to be stuck with figuring out how to deal with it and having to pay for it,” Galvin said. “I’d rather that not happen.”

Maine officials hope to establish a program that would encourage consumers to mail back unused drugs to be incinerated, and they want drug manufacturers to pay for it. But in February, according to a letter obtained by the Natural Resources News Service, PhRMA wrote that it was “opposed to the recommendation that manufacturers solely fund this approach.”

Pistell and others would like to start taking back medicines, but, she said, “the state is not in a position to pay for it.”

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

ARRRRGH!!! The Detroit Pistons lost to the San Antonio Spurs!

–Nathan

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/23/AR2005062302279.html

Here, George Will offers his opinion about yesterday’s U.S. Supreme Court decision.

–Nathan

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/23/AR2005062301420.html?sub=AR
washingtonpost.com
Damaging ‘Deference’

By George F. Will
Post
Friday, June 24, 2005; A31

The country is bracing for a bruising battle over filling a Supreme Court vacancy, a battle in which conservatives will praise “judicial restraint” and “deference” to popularly elected branches of government and liberals will praise judicial activism in defense of individual rights. But consider what the court did yesterday.

Most conservatives hoped that, in the most important case the court was to decide this term, judicial activism would put a leash on popularly elected local governments and would pull courts more deeply into American governance to protect the rights of individuals. Yesterday conservatives were disappointed.

The case came from New London, Conn., where the city government, like all governments, wants more revenue and has empowered a private entity, New London Development Corp., to exercise the awesome power of eminent domain. It has done so to condemn an unblighted working-class neighborhood in order to give the space to private developers whose condominiums, luxury hotel and private offices would pay more taxes than do the owners of the condemned homes and businesses.

The question answered yesterday was: Can government profit by seizing the property of people of modest means and giving it to wealthy people who can pay more taxes than can be extracted from the original owners? The court answered yes.

The Fifth Amendment says, among other things, “nor shall private property be taken for public use , without just compensation” (emphasis added). All state constitutions echo the Constitution’s Framers by stipulating that takings must be for “public use.” The Framers, who weighed their words, clearly intended the adjective “public” to circumscribe government’s power: Government should take private property only to create things — roads, bridges, parks, public buildings — directly owned or primarily used by the general public.

Fighting eviction from homes one of them had lived in all her life, the New London owners appealed to Connecticut’s Supreme Court, which ruled 4 to 3 against them. Yesterday they lost again. The U.S. Supreme Court issued a 5 to 4 ruling that drains the phrase “public use” of its clearly intended function of denying to government an untrammeled power to dispossess individuals of their most precious property: their homes and businesses.

During oral arguments in February, Justice Antonin Scalia distilled the essence of New London’s brazen claim: “You can take from A and give to B if B pays more taxes?” Yesterday the court said that the modifier “public” in the phrase “public use” does not modify government power at all. That is the logic of the opinion written by Justice John Paul Stevens and joined by justices Anthony Kennedy, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer.

In a tart dissent, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, joined by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Justice Clarence Thomas and Scalia, noted that the consequences of this decision “will not be random.” She says it is “likely” — a considerable understatement — that the beneficiaries of the decision will be people “with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms.”

Those on the receiving end of the life-shattering power that the court has validated will almost always be individuals of modest means. So this liberal decision — it augments government power to aggrandize itself by bulldozing individuals’ interests — favors muscular economic battalions at the expense of society’s little platoons, such as homeowners and the neighborhoods they comprise.

Dissenting separately, Thomas noted the common-law origins and clearly restrictive purpose of the Framers’ “public use” requirement. And responding to the majority’s dictum that the court should not “second-guess” the New London city government’s “considered judgment” about what constitutes seizing property for “public use,” he said: A court owes “no deference” to a legislature’s or city government’s self-interested reinterpretation of the phrase “public use,” a notably explicit clause of the Bill of Rights, any more than a court owes deference to a legislature’s determination of what constitutes a “reasonable” search of a home.

Liberalism triumphed yesterday. Government became radically unlimited in seizing the very kinds of private property that should guarantee individuals a sphere of autonomy against government.

Conservatives should be reminded to be careful what they wish for. Their often-reflexive rhetoric praises “judicial restraint” and deference to — it sometimes seems — almost unleashable powers of the elected branches of governments. However, in the debate about the proper role of the judiciary in American democracy, conservatives who dogmatically preach a populist creed of deference to majoritarianism will thereby abandon, or at least radically restrict, the judiciary’s indispensable role in limiting government.

georgewill@washpost.com

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

The moderates on the U.S. Supreme Court gave governments the power to use eminent domain for any purpose. It was the conservatives on the bench that voted against this expansion of powers.

–Nathan

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/23/AR2005062300783.html
washingtonpost.com
Supreme Court Expands Government’s Right to Seize Homes

By William Branigin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 23, 2005; 3:02 PM

The Supreme Court today effectively expanded the right of local governments to seize private property under eminent domain, ruling that people’s homes and businesses — even those not considered blighted — can be taken against their will for private development if the seizure serves a broadly defined “public use.”

In a 5-4 decision, the court upheld the ability of New London, Conn., to seize people’s homes to make way for an office, residential and retail complex supporting a new $300 million research facility of the Pfizer pharmaceutical company. The city had argued that the project served a public use within the meaning of the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution because it would increase tax revenues, create jobs and improve the local economy.

A group of homeowners in New London’s Fort Trumbull area had fought the city’s attempt to impose eminent domain, arguing that their property could be seized only to serve a clear public use such as building roads or schools or to eliminate blight. The homeowners, some of whom had lived in their house for decades, also argued that the public would benefit from the proposed project only if it turned out to be successful, making the “public use” requirement subject to the eventual performance of the private business venture.

The Fifth Amendment also requires “just compensation” for the owners, but that was not an issue in the case decided today because the homeowners did not want to give up their property at any price.

Writing for the majority, Justice John Paul Stevens said the case turned on the question of whether New London’s development plan served a “public purpose.” He added, “Without exception, our cases have defined that concept broadly, reflecting our longstanding policy of deference to legislative judgments in this field.”

The majority endorsed the view that local governments are better placed than federal courts to decide whether development projects serve a public purpose and will benefit the community, justifying the acquisition of land through eminent domain. In his opinion, Stevens wrote that “for more than a century,” the high court has favored “affording legislatures broad latitude in determining what public needs justify the use of the takings power.”

New London officials “were not confronted with the need to remove blight in the Fort Trumbull area, but their determination that the area was sufficiently distressed to justify a program of economic rejuvenation is entitled to our deference,” Stevens wrote. “The City has carefully formulated an economic development plan that it believes will provide appreciable benefits to the community, including–but by no means limited to–new jobs and increased tax revenue.”

Stevens added that “because that plan unquestionably serves a public purpose, the takings challenged here satisfy the public use requirement of the Fifth Amendment.”

He was joined in that view by justices Anthony Kennedy, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer.

Dissenting were justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, as well as Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist.

In a strongly worded dissenting opinion, O’Connor wrote that the majority’s decision overturns a long-held principle that eminent domain cannot be used simply to transfer property from one private owner to another.

“Today the Court abandons this long-held, basic limitation on government power,” she wrote. “Under the banner of economic development, all private property is now vulnerable to being taken and transferred to another private owner, so long as it might be upgraded — i.e., given to an owner who will use it in a way that the legislature deems more beneficial to the public — in the process.”

The effect of the decision, O’Connor said, “is to wash out any distinction between private and public use of property — and thereby effectively to delete the words “for public use” from the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment.”

The ruling has broad potential implications nationwide, giving cities wider authority to condemn homes and businesses to make way for more lucrative developments.

According to the Institute for Justice, a Washington-based property rights group that represented the Fort Trumbull homeowners, local governments have used or threatened to use eminent domain to transfer property to private parties in more than 10,000 instances between 1998 and 2002.

Over the years, the power of local governments to take private property through eminent domain has gradually grown. Although that authority historically had been used to acquire land needed for roads, bridges or other infrastructure fitting the “public use” requirement, the Supreme Court in 1954 broadened the definition of the term to allow local governments to condemn slums or other blighted areas for the purpose of redevelopment.

The court’s ruling today upheld the Connecticut Supreme Court, which had ruled 4-3 that New London’s property condemnations were constitutional.

The case had been brought by nine holdout owners of 15 homes in the Fort Trumbull area, which sits on a peninsula jutting into the Thames River and includes a total of about 115 privately owned properties.

Among the holdouts was Susette Kelo, who moved into Fort Trumbull in 1997 and made major improvements to her house, which she prized for its water view. Another petitioner was Wilhelmina Dery, who was born in her Fort Trumbull house in 1918 and has lived in it with her husband for the past 60 years. In fact, the home, originally purchased by her grandmother, has been in her family for more than a century.

Although the area is described as a working-class neighborhood, the majority opinion written by Stevens noted that “there is no allegation that any of these properties is blighted or otherwise in poor condition; rather, they were condemned only because they happen to be located in the development area.”

New London adopted its redevelopment plan in January 2000, two years after Pfizer announced plans to build a new research facility nearby. The plan called for a waterfront hotel and conference center surrounded by restaurants and stores, marinas for recreational and commercial use, 80 new residences in an urban neighborhood, office space for research and development, parking lots and other retail services. The site also includes an existing state park and space reserved for a new U.S. Coast Guard Museum.

During oral arguments before the court, it emerged that the land parcels at issue were earmarked for office space and “support” for the park or marina, possibly meaning a parking lot.

In this column, Terry M. Neal wonders about the motivations of U.S. Senators that refuse to apologize for past racist behavior of the U.S. Senate.

–Nathan

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/23/AR2005062300465.html?sub=AR
washingtonpost.com
Symbolic Lynching Resolution Forced Concrete Political Choice

By Terry M. Neal
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Thursday, June 23, 2005; 8:12 AM

There’s not much these days that the two parties in Washington can rally around, as evidenced by the increasingly shrill tone here. You might think that one thing on which everyone in both parties could agree would be a resolution apologizing for the Senate’s failure, over many decades, to make it a federal crime for racists to hunt black people like animals and hang them from trees.

When the Senate passed just such a resolution last week, 21 senators had not signed on as co-sponsors. Three of those 21 were Democrats, who added their names the next day. Seven Republicans also signed on after the vote, leaving 11 Senators — all Republicans — who have yet to sign on as co-sponsors. Because Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) opted for a voice vote instead of a roll call vote, and the resolution passed with only a few senators actually in the chamber. For supporters of the resolution, led by Sens. George Allen (R-Va.) and Mary Landrieu (D-La.), that elevated the importance of having all 100 members of the Senate sign on as co-sponsors, because it would officially put the support of each member into the record.

Left-leaning columnists, pundits and bloggers have taken the story and run with it. They’ve all noted that the missing Republican names underscore, at a minimum, the GOP’s lack of respect for African Americans.

“Who the hell, in this day and age, is against a resolution condemning LYNCHING!” blogs Rising Hegemon. Meanwhile, AMERICAblog is running its “Latest list of Republican pro-lynching Senators.”

This has been a hot topic on black radio and other media outlets around the country as well.

On Thursday, Georgia state Rep. Tyrone Brooks (D), president of the Georgia Association of Black Elected Officials, told me: “It’s sad. It’s a reminder that we’re still in an era when there are some in the body politic who still want to play to the racist elements who still live in our country, particularly the South, the Sons of the Confederacy and that sort of thing. These senators are the new Dixiecrats. Years ago, it used to be the southern Democrats [who were the problem]. But today it’s the Republicans. . . . It’s a reminder that we still have a long way to go.”

Tara Wall, an RNC official responsible for minority outreach, accused Democrats of exploiting a non-issue for political gain.

“What I can say is that absolutely we absolutely don’t condone lynching,” she said. “We support what’s been passed unanimously. Now we need to take the opportunity to move ahead and look forward. We need to focus on the next generation of civil rights by closing the wealth gap, enabling more African Americans to own their own homes, [and have better] health care reform and retirement security.”

Fight From the Right

If only left-wingers were up in arms, there would be little issue.

I called a senior Republican official in Washington and was initially given the party line: The bill passed unanimously by voice vote. There was no opposition. Any senator who opposed it could have moved to take it off the unanimous consent calendar.

Then this person called back, insisting on anonymity, to say, “Yes, in reality, this sort of thing does make it difficult for us. There is some frustration, yes.”

Whatever reasons some senators had for not signing the resolution, this official asked rhetorically, was it really worth the frustration. It’s just a non-controversial resolution, after all.

At least one longtime black Republican activist, who thinks all Republicans should have signed on, is not afraid to put his name on the record.

Harold Doley Jr., who became the first African American to own a seat on the New York Stock Exchange 32 years ago, fired off an angry e-mail to the RNC this week. He told me that Frist personally called him on Wednesday to assure him that support for the resolution was unanimous and that the party was committed to diversity.

“I would have liked it if all of these senators had sponsored the bill,” said Doley, from New York, where he runs Doley Securities, one of the nation’s oldest black-owned investment banks. “But that’s not the case, and I understand it’s not the case for various reasons.”

Doley said he was already upset that after meeting with House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Majority Leader Tom DeLay a few years ago about increasing black personnel in key RNC and congressional staff positions, little has been done in that regard, even after he personally forwarded top Republican officials dozens of potential candidates at their requests.

“My party needs to be reaching out to the African American community as America becomes browner and blacker,” said Doley, who considers himself a moderate. “The party needs to build constituencies. Some of the right-wingers have told me, ‘Well if I’m not happy I should change my party.’ No, I’m not going to change parties. I’m going to change my party from within to try to expand its base.”

Power of Symbols

Symbolic politics is the most powerful. Symbolic politics is about messaging. It’s about code words. It’s how a politician sends subtle cues about priorities and whose interests he or she is there to protect.

Symbolic politics is Ronald Reagan launching his presidential re-election campaign by extolling the virtues of states rights in Philadelphia, Miss., where Ku Klux Klan leader Edgar Ray Killen killed three civil rights workers in 1964.

Symbolic politics is the “white hands” ad that former senator Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) ran against African American opponent Harvey Gantt in 1990. Symbolic politics is George W. Bush going to speak at Bob Jones University in the 2000 presidential election campaign.

From those symbolic events, black people ask, if you can’t respect my history how can you protect my interest in Washington?

Frist has said repeatedly that none of his colleagues asked him to schedule a roll call vote. But in news reports, aides to Landrieu and Allen contradicted him.

I called the offices of several of the senators who have not signed on as co-sponsors to give them an opportunity to explain their positions. According to the Congressional Record, these were the members who did not originally co-sign the legislation:

Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.)

Robert Bennett (R-Utah)

Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.)

Thad Cochran (R-Miss.)

Kent Conrad (D-N.D.)

John Cornyn (R-Texas)

Michael Crapo (R-Idaho)

Michael Enzi (R-Wyo.)

Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa)

Judd Gregg (R-N.H.)

Orrin Hatch (R-Utah)

Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.)

Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.)

Trent Lott (R-Miss.)

Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska)

Jack Reed (D-R.I.)

Richard Shelby (R-Ala.)

Gordon Smith (R-Ore.)

John Sununu (R-N.H.)

Craig Thomas (R-Wyo.)

George Voinovich (R-Ohio)

The three Democrats and seven Republicans — Crapo, Grassley, Hatch, Murkowski, Voinovich, Hutchinson and Smith — signed on after the resolution was passed.

I was particularly eager to chat with someone from Cochran’s office. Cochran told reporters earlier this week that he didn’t feel he could apologize “for something I did not do.”

“I don’t feel that I should apologize for the passage or the failure to pass any legislation by the U.S. Senate,” Cochran told the Clarion Ledger of Jackson, Miss. “But I deplore and regret that lynchings occurred and that those committing them were not punished.”

As the newspaper pointed out, Cochran had previously co-sponsored measures “apologizing for the U.S. government’s mistreatment of American Indians and Japanese Americans” — neither of which he was directly responsible for.

Cochran’s spokeswoman, Jenny Manley said the difference was that Native American and Japanese American apologies “were resolutions on behalf of all America,” while the anti-lynching apology dealt specifically with past Senate actions, which Cochran felt had nothing to do with him.

I talked to several Republican Senate officials. They told me that their senators merely didn’t feel the need to co-sponsor every piece of legislation that came down the pike. Enzi spokesman Coy Knobel said Enzi “in general doesn’t co-sponsor bills that don’t give specific legislative action or direction to a specific agency.”

Cornyn spokesman Don Stewart said, “at this point, it’s after the fact.” The senator absolutely supports the resolution, though. Stewart said liberal groups and bloggers are going overboard, trying to “make it a political tool. And that’s disrespectful to the families” of people who had been the victims of lynching.

Alexander’s office sent this statement from the senator, which said he did not co-sponsor the resolution because he is pushing a different measure “condemning lynching, celebrating the accomplishments of African Americans and recommitting the Senate to improving health, education and job opportunities for African Americans and all Americans.”

Bennett’s office pointed out that although he did not sign on as a co-sponsor, he did sign an oversized copy of the resolution that will be preserved in a traveling photography exhibit about lynching. Crapo, Grassley and Shelby also signed that copy, or expressed their support to Landrieu’s office.

The Choice

Really, what reasonable person thinks any of the senators who didn’t sign the lynching apology bill actually endorses that morbid practice?

The better question is, by declining to sign on to the resolution, did they practice symbolic politics, just as those who signed it also practiced symbolic politics? The senators who failed to sign the measure prior to its passage — with the exception of Voinovich — were either from southern states or states with relatively small African American populations. Only the senators themselves know their true motivations.

The lynching resolution wasn’t the kind of policy legislation that cuts taxes or increases funding to a particular project. It was a symbol that different voters interpret differently, and every senator made a choice about which voters he or she wanted to risk alienating with a symbolic message that — as Howard Dean and Sen. Richard Durbin have learned — is easy for political enemies to exploit.

Staff writer Sehrish Shaban contributed to this report.

© 2005 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive

Steve Gilliard nails it with this one:

This will be brief.

We need to be honest here: Iraq is not worth one more dead American.

People on the right and left want some deus ex machina to save Iraq, but we have., collectively, come to a simple conclusion:

Iraq is not worth dying for. Not for the warmongers on the right or the liberal hawks on the left.

It’s bad the soldiers are trapped there, but we have made it their problem, No one is willingly going to join them, and 5,000 have deserted so far.

When you ask liberal hawks to enlist, they are offended by the question.

When you ask conservatives to enlist, they are offended by the question.

And America’s parents are NOT sending their kids to die in Iraq if they can, at all, help it. No one blows up IED’s at Wal Mart.

We have a volunteer army with fewer and fewer volunteers, and people reenlisting only to save their friends. There is a time limit to their ability to be in combat. They cannot serve forever. They will have to be replaced. And fewer and fewer are willing to replace them,

What I want people to do is be honest.

If you will not serve in Iraq, and no one you know will serve, stop expecting someone else to do what you will not.

Therefore, it is time to stop calling for more troops, or the US to make Iraq safe. We cannot do this and even Americans are refusing to join the fight. It is time to look at your actions and realize, that despite your ideals, you oppose continuing this war. In practical terms, you have decided that this war is not worth your life or anyone you know. And million of Americans have joined you in this decision.

So, with this fact evident, it is time to call for US troops to withdraw from Iraq. Not save it, not add more boots on the ground. You have already voted by your actions. It is time that you match it with your words.

This column didn’t make the front page, or even the third page. It was buried on page six. Check it out. It’s about Tom DeLay’s pal Jack Abramoff. Oops! It’s late and I’ve gotta go….

–Nathan

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/22/AR2005062202100.html