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Democrats in Texas

EL PASO, Texas -- - Tony Sanchez, Democratic candidate for governor of Texas, made an effective speech at the state convention here. Some of you may not recognize this as a "STOP THE PRESSES!" moment, but that's because life has not forced you to listen to his previous efforts. Entire audiences have been stunned into immobility by the awesome mediocrity of Early Sanchez Oratory. Congratulations to the voice coach, the drama coach, the speechwriters and the candidate -- it's clear they've all been working hard.

It was a peppy crowd of Democrats whooping it up in Sun City -- evidence that they think have a shot at the statewide offices this year. The D's appear to be way more revved up than the R's were in Dallas a week earlier, though sometimes it's hard to compare the parties -- since R's, on the whole, spend more time at prayer breakfasts, while the D's drink more beer. The D's Irish-American Caucus met daily when the bar opened.

The D's were quick to jump on Sen. Phil Gramm's bad line about how diversity on the Dem ticket is "trying to divide us by race." So the

Terry Lynn's Fire?

If you believe what the Forest Service interrogators say, Terry Lynn Barton started the big fire in Colorado's Pike National Forest by burning a letter from her estranged husband. Maybe so, and possibly the jury will be forgiving when they hear more details of Ms. Barton's married life. But a jury might well be equally forgiving if it turns out Terry Lynn started the fire by setting fire to her pay stub.

After 18 years of dedicated service, Terry Lynn Barton's monthly pay was $1,485, which tots up to $17,820 a year. Try raising two kids on that in the greater metropolitan area of Denver. She's being described in the press as "a Forest Service technician," which is FS-speak for all-purpose manual laborers who clean up campgrounds, trail maintenance and kindred grunt work.

Forget the Edward Abbeys, Jack Kerouacs and Gary Snyders of the forest fire watches, turning out literature while communing with nature and scanning the ridge lines for telltale plumes. The Forest Service, part of the USDA, has long been notorious for exploiting its bottom-rung workers

A Creeping Indifference and a Silent Hollowing Out

American journalism has devoted massive attention to reporting on business in recent years. Overall news outlets are enthralled with efforts in our society to maximize corporate profits and personal wealth. Top executives and shrewd investors are good bets to emerge as media heroes, unless or until they appear to be headed for prison. Insatiable avarice -- always pushing for more, more, more -- is unlikely to cause bad press. In fact, journalists are apt to cite enthusiasm for boosting "net worth" as evidence of sturdy character.

Half a century ago, sociologist C. Wright Mills warned of "a creeping indifference and a silent hollowing out." In the United States, he observed, "money is the one unambiguous criterion of success," and behind the obvious fact that people "want money" lurked the more unsettling reality that "their very standards are pecuniary." A few years later, author Vance Packard asked a key question: "By encouraging people constantly to pursue the emblems of success, and by causing them to equate possessions with status, what are we doing to their emotions and their sense of values?"

Three Decades Later, Watergate Is A Cautionary Tale

Thirty years have passed since Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein began to cover the Watergate story. The investigative journalism that they did back then still stands out as exceptional. Unfortunately.

For a long time after the arrests of five burglars at the Democratic National Committee's executive offices in the early morning of June 17, 1972, the conventional media wisdom was to accept the White House depiction of a minor crime without any political significance. During that summer and fall, few journalists devoted much time to probing the Watergate incident as President Nixon cruised to a landslide re-election victory in November.

"At the time of Watergate, there were some 2,000 full-time reporters in Washington, working for major news organizations," Bernstein later pointed out. "In the first six months after the break-in ... 14 of those reporters were assigned by their news organizations to cover the Watergate story on a full-time basis, and of these 14, half-a-dozen on what you might call an investigative basis."

Speaking at Harvard's Institute of Politics in 1989, Bernstein

Speak the vocabulary of consumer protection

AUSTIN, Texas -- In the Most Chilling Quote category, consider this gem from Mitchell Daniels, director of the office of Management and Budget, concerning the administration's ongoing campaign to deregulate everything in sight: "We must learn to speak the vocabulary of consumer protection."

Oooo, Grandma, what big teeth you have! The Wall Street Journal did an admiring profile this week of the "regulatory czar," John D. Graham, who works for Mitchell. Graham, you may recall, was the subject of a peppy confirmation fight on account of he founded Harvard's Center for Risk Analysis. The center is heavily funded by business and industry groups and by individual businesses. You will be amazed to learn that the center often criticizes regulations disliked by the very people who give it money! Graham once claimed that government regulations kill 60,000 Americans a year, a figure that turned out to be ... evanescent.

Graham said in a recent speech: "There is no grandiose plot to roll back safeguards. This administration is pursuing an agenda of smarter regulation." Ah, smarter regulation; well, that's different. The Journal

Texas state Republican convention

DALLAS -- The world will little note nor long remember what was said at the Republican state convention last weekend. Nevertheless, the shindig had its moments. (I first saw the Lincoln quote applied to some political event in the Boston Globe a while back, but I can no longer remember who wrote it.)

A supremely nostalgic moment occurred during the convention's recognition of Sen. Phil Gramm for Lifetime Achievement. Gramm responded graciously, as befits a retiring pol making his final appearance, thanking all and sundry, giving us his fondest memories of public service: "I had the honor to be a storm trooper in the Reagan Revolution," he declared. But then, he couldn't help himself. The old pit bull dropped the statesman pose and went for the Democrats' jugular. He started in politics as an attack dog and finished that way, too -- in its way, a glorious moment.

Unfortunately, the attack was a trifle off. Gramm appeared to be in a state of high indignation because two Democratic contenders for the gubernatorial nomination had held a debate in Spanish. "Anybody who

Guinea Pigs in Freedom's Cause

No one with even a passing knowledge about the history of chemical and biological warfare in the United States should be in the least surprised about recent disclosures regarding the testing of nerve gas upon unsuspecting members of the U.S. military back in the 1960s. (If you're looking for these historical data, best not look under the file marked "war on terror.") In the late 1970s, the CIA made the mistake of responding to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by the Scientologists by contemptuously sending them a railroad car of shredded documents.

The Scientologists patiently pieced enough of the millions of scraps of paper together to figure out that in 1951, the U.S. Army had secretly contaminated the Norfolk Naval Supply Center in Virginia with infectious bacteria. One type of bacterium was chosen because blacks were believed to be more susceptible than whites.

The towns of Savannah, Ga., and Avon Park, Fla., were targets of repeated army bio-weapons experiments in 1956 and 1957. Army Chemical and Biological Warfare (CBW) researchers released millions of mosquitoes on the

Nuclear Weapons and Media Fog


"Even one military move by either of these nuclear-armed neighbors," USA Today's front page reported in big type, "could set off an unstoppable chain reaction that could lead to the holocaust the world has feared since the atomic bomb was developed." The June 10 edition of Newsweek includes a George Will column with a chilling present-day reference to the Cuban Missile Crisis: "The world may be closer to a nuclear war than it was at any time during the Cold War -- even October 1962."

Yet when it comes to nuclear weapons, the mainstream American press has scant emotional range or professional zeal to scrutinize the progression of atomic perils. From the start of the nuclear era, each

Cheney-Halliburton connection

AUSTIN, Texas -- The Securities and Exchange Commission is now investigating Halliburton -- the company formerly run by Vice President Dick Cheney -- for accounting irregularities. What took so long?

Dick Cheney's record at Halliburton is one of the most under-covered stories of the past three years. When you consider all the time and ink spent on Whitewater, the neglect of the Cheney-Halliburton story is unfathomable.

The proximate cause of the SEC investigation is an "aggressive accounting practice" at Halliburton approved by the accounting firm Arthur Andersen -- a little matter of counting revenue that had not yet been received, $100 million worth. The New York Times reports two former executives of Dresser Industries, which merged with Halliburton in 1998, say Halliburton used the accounting sham to cover up its losses. Dresser may have thought it got a bad deal in that merger because of that $100 million "anticipation" on the credit line, but the deal turned out to be much more sour for Halliburton.

Cheney bought himself a former Dresser subsidiary facing 292,000

Connect the dots

AUSTIN, Texas -- It's time to connect the dots. If you think the government is having a connection problem on the national security side, you should take a look at the starburst of dots on the economic side for a really stunning scandal. When you start to connect the dots on the business side, you will notice that we're being stolen blind.

One of the best interviews I've read in a long time is in the current issue of The Texas Observer with Bill Black, a name that will bring back fond memories for those who followed the S&L scandals closely.

Black is now an assistant professor of public affairs at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. He is a lawyer, an economist and former litigation director of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board -- which is to say, the man who went after the S&L crooks. After he left government, he got a Ph.D. in criminology. His greatest claim to fame is that Charles Keating, that noted thief, once wrote a memo to his top lobbyist that said: "Highest priority -- Get Black. GOOD GRIEF -- If you can't get (Jim) Wright and Congress to get Black -- kill him dead -- you ought to retire."

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