Bullets Can’t Stop Beutler From Cracking Wise

Funny thing about being a journalist: your job is to write about people and mayhem and trauma, but let any of those touch you directly, and it becomes a different game. With that caveat, allow me to recount my brief visit today with my colleague, Brian Beutler, whose sign-off is a familiar one on this site, and has come to define the reporting of The Media Consortium’s syndicated reporting project.

I was just about to leave the house this morning to meet with Brian when I got word through a mutual colleague of ours that he had been shot in Washington, D.C., in an aborted mugging.

I found him at Washington Hospital Center, where his good friend, Matt Franklin, sat vigil through the night as Brian underwent major surgery. By the time I got there, Brian was in recovery, and Matt and I were shown to his bedside.

Perhaps foremost among the topics about which Brian writes in his coverage of national security and civil liberties issues is FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the Bush administration’s circumvention of the original 1978 legislation, and subsequent legislative attempts to widen the powers of the executive branch to spy on U.S. citizens. The entity of choice for such spying by the Bush administration has been the National Security Agency.

This morning, Brian and I had planned to go over the story he had just delivered about efforts by Sen. Russell Feingold to stop the latest version of FISA legislation from getting through the Senate. As his editor, I had promised our members that we would deliver the piece today.

When I stepped up to Brian’s hospital bed, he smiled through the clear, plastic mask covering his mouth, and said in a quiet, hoarse voice, “Sorry. I left you high and dry.”

What could I do but laugh?

After some housekeeping conversation about his level of comfort (not great, as you might imagine), he piped up, “I have a theory about the shooting.” He smiled, impishly.

“Oh, yeah?” I said.

“It was the NSA,” he said, with a deadpan look.

(Actually, it was two teenage boys who thought they wanted Brian’s cell phone.)

Matt laughed.

The good word is that Brian is expected to make a full recovery. Please be patient as we await his return to his beat. Nobody covers FISA and the rest of his beat quite like Brian Beutler. I know that his passion for his work will bring him back to the Hill in good time.

–Adele M. Stan

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The Friendship Offensive

Peace activists on Capitol Hill hope to stave off war with Iran through cross-cultural contact between ordinary citizens. Leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus show their support.

As George W. Bush focused his final presidential visit to Europe on Iran’s nuclear program, members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus joined a group of peace activists on Capitol Hill at an event designed to foster dialogue between everyday Iranians and Americans.

On Tuesday afternoon, the activist groups Enough Fear and Campaign for a New American Policy on Iran set up a phone bank outside the Cannon House office building, inviting activists, reporters, and passersby to speak with people in Iran. Leaders of the two groups seek to build lasting person-to-person ties between Iranians and Americans in the hope of building sentiment against a military confrontation between the two nations.

“The main idea is that if more people in this country have friends in Iran the two countries are less likely to go to war,” explained Nick Jehlen, co-founder of Enough Fear. “It’s as simple as that.” The event, called “Time to Talk to Iran,” was Jehlen’s brainchild.

Jehlen invited every member of Congress to attend this week’s event, but only five, all from the House of Representatives, participated: Lynne Woolsey and Barbara Lee, both California Democrats, joined Marcy Kaptur, D-Ohio, and Sheila Jackson-Lee, D-Texas. All are members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which Woolsey and Lee co-chair. Ron Paul, the Republican presidential contender from Texas, crossed the aisle to appear with the congresswomen.

Barbara Lee has long advocated person-to-person contact as the solution to the current stand-off with Iranian leaders over their nuclear program, which President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice contend is a precursor to weapons development. In January, Lee, who also sits on the foreign affairs committee, introduced the Iran Diplomatic Accountability Act of 2008, which, she told the gathering, “directs the president to appoint a high-level envoy empowered to seek to conduct direct, unconditional, bilateral negotiations with Iran for the purpose of easing tensions and normalizing relations between the United States and Iran.” Her legislation has idled in committee for the last six months with 14 cosponsors. Proposals in both houses of Congress intended to block the administration from using force against Iran have similarly stalled.

The Washington, D.C., event marked the third staging of a “Time To Talk” phone bank. The first took place in Boston in November 2007, and the second in New York in January. “Having congresspeople here [at a ‘Time to Talk’ event] is really an aberration for us,” Jehlen explained. “If we can facilitate dialogue between members of the American and Iranian governments in the future, we’d like to.”

At each event, a bank of four or five old-fashioned red desk phones takes center stage, though the phones are actually fed through hand-held wireless devices. The set-up is designed to resemble the crisis lines that connected officials in Washington with their Moscow counterparts during tense moments in the Cold War. About 50 people — including students and Code Pink activists — braved wilting heat and humidity to participate Tuesday’s event. Many relied on interpreters, young volunteers fluent in both English and Farsi, who joined them on the line.

The conversations tended to be brief, and were often beset by technical problems. But they were substantive, too. Friendly chats quickly developed from exchanges of simple pleasantries (How’s the weather? What do you do?) into earnest discussions about the deteriorating political situation between the two countries.

The organizers put me on the line with Morteza Rassul-Shirazi, a 60-year-old engineer in Tehran who agreed to speak on the record with an American reporter. The connection was poor (the line dropped twice), but Shirazi, along with many of his peers, he said, is concerned that U.S.-Iran hostilities could mushroom into a violent conflict. “We should not talk about war at all,” he told me. “Instead, we should try to show Americans that we are peaceful people.” Rassul-Shirazi and his friends and family in Tehran are understandably nervous. Visiting with European leaders this week, Bush sent mixed signals, focusing his early remarks on rallying European support for sanctions on Iran if it did not agree to stop enriching uranium, leading some to speculated that he was backing off from earlier saber-rattling. Then, before he left the continent, he added, “All options are on the table.”

These latest remarks capped off several weeks of escalating anti-Iran rhetoric from the administration. In a last week’s meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert at the White House, Bush said, “It is very important for the world to take the Iranian threat seriously.” Speaking this week in Europe, Secretary Rice accused the Iranian regime of evading international oversight, saying,”I think that no one is of a mind to allow them to stall very much longer.”

A December National Intelligence Estimate found that the Iranian government suspended its nuclear weapons program in 2003. Iran does, however, continue to pursue a uranium enrichment program, which its leaders contend is for use in peaceful projects, such as energy production.

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Live from Main Street/Minneapolis - Today!
Watch Laura Flanders, Amy Goodman and More, Here

At 3:00 EDT, tune in here for live streaming of The Media Consortium’s debut town-hall program,
Live From Main Street, moderated by GritTV’s Laura Flanders and KFAI/Insight News’s Al McFarlane, and featuring:

· Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now!
· John Nichols, Washington correspondent for The Nation
· Malkia Cyril, director of the Center for Media Justice
· Colleen Rowley, FBI whistleblower/2006 congressional candidate
· Joel Kramer, founder of the Minneapolis Post
· Paul Schmelzer, managing editor of Minnesota Monitor
· Marlina Gonzalez, program director of the Unconvention/Intermedia Arts

…and more of your Twin Cities favorites!

Inspired by the work of everyday activists, Live From Main Street’s premiere
town hall will explore what it takes to get heard in the era of big media
and diminished civil liberties.

Live Webcast by The Uptake

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The Clinton Global Initiative

There’s a pretty fundamental problem with the Clinton Global Initiative from the perspective of junior and mid-level journalists: We weren’t guests.

Oh, sure, we were there, corralled into the Lower Lobby of the Time Square Sheraton that hosted the initiative. We were provided coffee and sandwiches and, for about one hour at a time, twice a day, we were offered a chance to sit on the sidelines of a public panel. But for the rest of the time, we were–for all intents and purposes–confined to a basement allowed only to watch the four ongoing, simultaneous sessions (on global health, climate change, education, and poverty alleviation) via closed-circuit television. We were forbidden from attending those sessions in person and from snooping about like paparazzi to interview the sorts of people we’d never otherwise have access to.
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Ambassador Crocker’s Kooky Economics

The long-anticipated joint congressional testimony of Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker is now history, and the event’s few fireworks have by now been widely documented. Of them, perhaps the most noted was the men’s relative dispositions—one cavalier, the other more so.

The conventional wisdom had been to expect kinder depictions of broad progress from the general than from the ambassador. What we saw instead was precisely the opposite. Both men were optimistic—more so than Democrats, moderate Republicans, and many other critics thought reasonable. But it was Crocker, not Petraeus, who painted over his mission’s most pressing concerns.
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Disssecting the Mortgage Mayhem

After watching mortgage market turmoil steal headlines throughout the August congressional recess, House Democrats dove into the growing crisis today, calling for stiffer regulation and listening as an administration official warned that the worst could be yet to come.

For the past two weeks, economists and market analysts have filled news pages and airwaves with a raging debate over the likelihood of a major economic downturn driven by the subprime-mortgage market’s implosion. Some observers argue the blaring headlines about a crisis are overblown. Others fretfully predict a slow, but not catastrophic correction. Still more worry about a full recession. They all agree, though, that a major component of today’s economic landscape is changing, and quickly.
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Reporting from Yearly Kos 2007: Forum Live-Blog

The forum is divided into three segments: domestic policy, foreign policy, and candidate philosophy.

Domestic Policy

Bill Richardson said he would have an explicit Roe vs. Wade “litmus test” for Supreme Court nominees.

Dodd basically agrees.

Hillary Clinton, elaborating on the battle scars for her ‘93-’94 Hillarcare debacle, reiterated her support for universal health care, and suggested that she’s learned a lot about tactics in the intervening 13 years. It would be, she says, her top domestic priority.

Obama would abide by budget deficits to fund important domestic initiatives if those initiatives are in kind investments. Health care and global warming policy fit well in that category.

Edwards: “If you want change… who will be the best candidate to do that?” My guess? John Edwards thinks this person is John Edwards.

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Reporting from Yearly Kos 2007: A Progressive Foreign Policy

The past few years have been host to a fascinating phenomenon: Progressives have come together and settled upon a practically singular foreign policy vision, pasted together from a series of ideas–diplomacy, human rights, cooperation, prudence–that are decidedly non-revolutionary. And yet, despite its conservative-sounding origins, what they’ve come up with is a foreign policy ideal that’s both embarrassingly obvious but also compelling–one rooted in engagement with the world, an interest in the internal realities of other countries and regions, but with a humility about our ability or right to affect them. In short, a progressive realism.

Because of this unity of vision, the progressive foreign policy panel at YearlyKos–though comprised of experts not normally affiliated with the netroots–was one of the most engaging at the conference thus far. Moderator Ken Baer of Democracy, and featured guests Steven Clemons of the New America Foundation and Peter Beinart of The New Republic discussed an array of foreign policy problems–Iraq, military spending, global warming–currently facing the United States. [Disclosure: Clemons is a friend and former colleague of mine.]

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Reporting from Yearly Kos 2007: Howard Dean and the Netroots

Two interesting things happened last night at the Yearly Kos opening plenary. Howard Dean gave a rousing speech, and an organizer announced–to a round of “boos”–that Hillary Clinton will not attend her scheduled “break out session” with attendees after her appearance on Saturday. But that was after Dean’s performance.

It’s interesting to note that Dean now rides high on a popular strategy that, before the 2006 elections, threatened to kick him into irrelevancy.

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Reporting from Yearly Kos 2007: Foley, Macaca, and How the Democrats Almost Lost

It’s at this point conventional wisdom that the Democrats won in 2006 because their stance on the issues of the day were the popular ones: They wanted to stamp out corruption. They ran against the war. They trumpeted minimum wage and health care. They were swept to victory. Which is to say, it’s easy to forget this picture:

Remember that, for every date on the graph, the war was, as it is now, deeply unpopular with the public. The country was suspicious of Republican policies as well as their ethical mores. And yet the spread continued to narrow all the way until October 2006. That’s when the Foley scandal erupted.

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