A new and extensive analysis of campaign donations from all of Jack Abramoff’s tribal clients, done by a nonpartisan research firm, shows that a great majority of contributions made by those clients went to Republicans. The analysis undercuts the claim that Abramoff directed sums to Democrats at anywhere near the same rate.

The analysis, which was commissioned by The American Prospect and completed on Jan. 25, was done by Dwight L. Morris and Associates, a for-profit firm specializing in campaign finance that has done research for many media outlets.

In the weeks since Abramoff confessed to defrauding tribes and enticing public officials with bribes, the question of whether Abramoff directed donations just to Republicans, or to the GOP and Democrats, has been central to efforts by both parties to distance themselves from the unfolding scandal. President Bush recently addressed the question on Fox News, saying: “It seems to me that he [Abramoff] was an equal money dispenser, that he was giving money to people in both political parties.”

Although Abramoff hasn’t personally given to any Democrats, Republicans, including officials with the GOP campaign to hold on to the Senate, have seized on the donations of his tribal clients as proof that the saga is a bipartisan scandal. And the controversy recently spread to the media when the ombudsman for The Washington Post, Deborah Howell, ignited a firestorm by wrongly asserting that Abramoff had given to both. She eventually amended her assessment, writing that Abramoff “directed his client Indian tribes to make campaign contributions to members of Congress from both parties.”

But the Morris and Associates analysis, which was done exclusively for The Prospect, clearly shows that it’s highly misleading to suggest that the tribes's giving to Dems was in any way comparable to their giving to the GOP. The analysis shows that when Abramoff took on his tribal clients, the majority of them dramatically ratcheted up donations to Republicans. Meanwhile, donations to Democrats from the same clients either dropped, remained largely static or, in two cases, rose by a far smaller percentage than the ones to Republicans did. This pattern suggests that whatever money went to Democrats, rather than having been steered by Abramoff, may have largely been money the tribes would have given anyway.

The analysis includes a detailed look at seven of Abramoff’s tribal clients, and a comparison of their giving with that of approximately 170 other tribes. (Abramoff is often said to have had nine tribal clients. But Morris omitted two of the tribes – the Pueblo of Santa Clara, whose donations were virtually nonexistent, and the Tigua Indian Reservation, because it isn’t listed in Federal lobbying files as having a lobbyist and Abramoff worked on contingency. At any rate Santa Clara’s post-Abramoff donations to the GOP were overwhelmingly higher than to Dems, so including them would have added even more to the GOP side of the ledger.)

The analysis shows:


in total, the donations of Abramoff’s tribal clients to Democrats dropped by nine percent after they hired him, while their donations to Republicans more than doubled, increasing by 135 percent after they signed him up;

five out of seven of Abramoff’s tribal clients vastly favored Republican candidates over Democratic ones;

four of the seven began giving substantially more to Republicans than Democrats after he took them on;

Abramoff’s clients gave well over twice as much to Republicans than Democrats, while tribes not affiliated with Abramoff gave well over twice as much to Democrats than the GOP -- exactly the reverse pattern.
“It’s very hard to see the donations of Abramoff’s clients as a bipartisan greasing of the wheels,” Morris, the firm’s founder and a former investigations editor at the Los Angeles Times, told The Prospect.

Bloomberg News published a similar, more limited analysis last month, which relied on a small amount of data also from Morris’ firm.” But that analysis didn't look at all of Abramoff's tribal clients, and didn't provide a detailed year-by-year analysis of their donations or a detailed comparison to other tribal giving. Since then, some observers, such as blogger Kevin Drum, have argued that a comprehensive look at the donations of all of Abramoff’s tribal clients would help shed light on the scandal.

The Prospect asked Morris to do two things: First, compare the contributions of all of Abramoff’s tribal clients before they’d signed on with Abramoff versus after they’d become his client. And second, compare the contributions of all Abramoff tribal clients with the contributions of all non-Abramoff tribes.

As the above numbers show, four out of seven tribes -- Saginaw, Chitimacha, Coushatta and Mississippi – saw their contributions to Republicans increase significantly, even vastly, after they became Abramoff’s clients.

At the same time, two of those four tribes -- Saginaw and Chitimacha -- saw their giving to Democrats drop or remain static. The other two -- tribes Coushatta and Mississippi -- did see their giving to Dems rise under Abramoff, but by amounts that were dwarfed by the increases in giving to the GOP.

These patterns strongly suggest that Abramoff’s representation of the tribes manifested itself largely in a dramatic rise in contributions to the GOP. And it also suggests it’s likely that Abramoff had little impact on giving to Democrats.

Nor does it appear likely that Abramoff steered contributions to Dems from the remaining three tribes who didn’t see their giving to the GOP climb. Of those three tribes, one tribe -- Pueblo of Sandia -- saw a negligible shift in donations to both parties. The second -- Agua Caliente -- slashed its contributions to both parties, but even so, the percentage of that tribe’s giving that went to Republicans still rose dramatically. The third -- Cherokee Nation -- simply stopped giving altogether.

The big picture is also compelling. Taken together, Abramoff’s tribal clients gave $868,890 to Dems before hiring him; afterwards, they gave $794,483 -- a decrease of nine percent. By contrast, the tribes’ donations to Republicans went from $786,560 pre-Abramoff to $1,845,975 after he became their lobbyist -- an increase of 135 percent. In other words, when Abramoff entered the picture, contributions to Dems dropped, while donations to Republicans more than doubled.

Adding to the case, the Morris firm also did a year-by-year analysis, from 1991 to the present, of the giving of scores of tribes -- Abramoff’s clients included. The firm’s look at the year-by-year giving of his clients is eye-opening. It shows even more clearly that in some cases clients’ giving to the GOP jumped dramatically just after Abramoff signed them.

Nearly five months after Hurricane Katrina swamped New Orleans, President Bush's lofty promises to rebuild the Gulf Coast have been frustrated by bureaucratic failures and competing priorities, a review of events since the hurricane shows.

While the administration can claim some clear progress, Bush's ringing call from New Orleans's Jackson Square on Sept. 15 to "do what it takes" to make the city rise from the waters has not been matched by action, critics at multiple levels of government say, resulting in a record that is largely incomplete as Bush heads into next week's State of the Union address.

The problems include the slow federal cleanup of debris in Mississippi and Louisiana; a lack of authority for Bush's handpicked recovery coordinator, Donald E. Powell; the shortage and poor quality of housing for evacuees; and federal restrictions on reconstruction money and where coastal communities can rebuild.

With the onset of the hurricane season just four months away, there is no agreement on how to rebuild New Orleans, how to pay for that effort or even who is leading the cross-governmental partnership, according to elected leaders. While there is money to restore the city's flood defenses to protect against another Category 3 hurricane, it remains unclear whether merely reinforcing the levees will be enough to draw residents back.

Below are some of the major promises Bush made in his Jackson Square speech, and how the government has fared:


· Housing. Bush promised to empty shelters quickly, meet the immediate needs of the displaced, register victims, and provide housing aid in the form of rental assistance and trailers.

In Mississippi, 33,378 occupied trailers are meeting 89 percent of the estimated housing needs. But there have been 34,000 repair requests and maintenance complaints, according to Rep. Gene Taylor (D-Miss.).

In Louisiana, trailers have been provided for about 37 percent of the estimated 90,000 displaced families in need of housing. Officials acknowledge production bottlenecks and in-state battles over sites. Trailer costs have swelled from $19,000 to $75,000 apiece.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Small Business Administration are struggling to meet unprecedented demands. FEMA is providing rental assistance to 700,000 families, but about 75,000 people are still in hotels. In some places, there is a shortage of rental housing available for evacuees.

As of Jan. 16, 18,943 applications for rental help had yet to be processed. As of this week, the SBA said that 190,000 of 363,000 applications for disaster loans to homeowners and businesses are still pending.

Cleanup. The president vowed "to get the work done quickly . . . honestly and wisely," but a key first step -- cleanup -- has not gone smoothly.

Thirty million cubic yards of debris remain uncollected -- enough to build a five-sided column more than 50 stories tall over the Pentagon -- provoking environmental concerns, fears of runaway spending abuses and a spirit-sapping despair. Layers of subcontractors have caused debris removal costs to quadruple from $8 per cubic yard to $32 per cubic yard, said Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), who visited the region on Jan. 17 as part of a Senate delegation.

Rebuilding. On the broader question of rebuilding, Bush promised "a close partnership" with state and local leaders, with the federal government playing a secondary role. But the U.S. government is the key player because it provides money, determines access to flood insurance, and takes primary responsibility for infrastructure and cleanup.

Reimbursement. Bush said the government would reimburse states for the costs of taking in evacuees and cities for emergency costs. But Mississippi and Louisiana officials say their needs are greater and will continue for years.

Whether or not we can regard Sept. 11 as history, I would like to raise two historical questions about the terrorist attacks of that horrific day. My goal is not to offer definitive answers but rather to invite a serious debate about whether Sept. 11 deserves the historical significance it has achieved.

My first question: where does Sept. 11 rank in the grand sweep of American history as a threat to national security? By my calculations it does not make the top tier of the list, which requires the threat to pose a serious challenge to the survival of the American republic.

Here is my version of the top tier: the War for Independence, where defeat meant no United States of America; the War of 1812, when the national capital was burned to the ground; the Civil War, which threatened the survival of the Union; World War II, which represented a totalitarian threat to democracy and capitalism; the cold war, most specifically the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, which made nuclear annihilation a distinct possibility.

Sept. 11 does not rise to that level of threat because, while it places lives and lifestyles at risk, it does not threaten the survival of the American republic, even though the terrorists would like us to believe so.

My second question is this: What does history tell us about our earlier responses to traumatic events?

My list of precedents for the Patriot Act and government wiretapping of American citizens would include the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798, which allowed the federal government to close newspapers and deport foreigners during the "quasi-war" with France; the denial of habeas corpus during the Civil War, which permitted the pre-emptive arrest of suspected Southern sympathizers; the Red Scare of 1919, which emboldened the attorney general to round up leftist critics in the wake of the Russian Revolution; the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, which was justified on the grounds that their ancestry made them potential threats to national security; the McCarthy scare of the early 1950's, which used cold war anxieties to pursue a witch hunt against putative Communists in government, universities and the film industry.

In retrospect, none of these domestic responses to perceived national security threats looks justifiable. Every history textbook I know describes them as lamentable, excessive, even embarrassing. Some very distinguished American presidents, including John Adams, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, succumbed to quite genuine and widespread popular fears. No historian or biographer has argued that these were their finest hours.

What Patrick Henry once called "the lamp of experience" needs to be brought into the shadowy space in which we have all been living since Sept. 11. My tentative conclusion is that the light it sheds exposes the ghosts and goblins of our traumatized imaginations. It is completely understandable that those who lost loved ones on that date will carry emotional scars for the remainder of their lives. But it defies reason and experience to make Sept. 11 the defining influence on our foreign and domestic policy. History suggests that we have faced greater challenges and triumphed, and that overreaction is a greater danger than complacency.

A newly declassified document gives a fascinating glimpse into the US military's plans for "information operations" - from psychological operations, to attacks on hostile computer networks.

The document says information is "critical to military success"

Bloggers beware.

As the world turns networked, the Pentagon is calculating the military opportunities that computer networks, wireless technologies and the modern media offer.

From influencing public opinion through new media to designing "computer network attack" weapons, the US military is learning to fight an electronic war.

The declassified document is called "Information Operations Roadmap". It was obtained by the National Security Archive at George Washington University using the Freedom of Information Act.

Officials in the Pentagon wrote it in 2003. The Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, signed it.

The "roadmap" calls for a far-reaching overhaul of the military's ability to conduct information operations and electronic warfare. And, in some detail, it makes recommendations for how the US armed forces should think about this new, virtual warfare.

The document says that information is "critical to military success". Computer and telecommunications networks are of vital operational importance.

Propaganda

The operations described in the document include a surprising range of military activities: public affairs officers who brief journalists, psychological operations troops who try to manipulate the thoughts and beliefs of an enemy, computer network attack specialists who seek to destroy enemy networks.

All these are engaged in information operations.

Perhaps the most startling aspect of the roadmap is its acknowledgement that information put out as part of the military's psychological operations, or Psyops, is finding its way onto the computer and television screens of ordinary Americans.

"Information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and Psyops, is increasingly consumed by our domestic audience," it reads.

"Psyops messages will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public," it goes on.

When it describes plans for electronic warfare, or EW, the document takes on an extraordinary tone.

It seems to see the internet as being equivalent to an enemy weapons system.

"Strategy should be based on the premise that the Department [of Defense] will 'fight the net' as it would an enemy weapons system," it reads.

The slogan "fight the net" appears several times throughout the roadmap.

And, in a grand finale, the document recommends that the United States should seek the ability to "provide maximum control of the entire electromagnetic spectrum".

US forces should be able to "disrupt or destroy the full spectrum of globally emerging communications systems, sensors, and weapons systems dependent on the electromagnetic spectrum".

Consider that for a moment.

The US military seeks the capability to knock out every telephone, every networked computer, every radar system on the planet.

Are these plans the pipe dreams of self-aggrandising bureaucrats? Or are they real?

The fact that the "Information Operations Roadmap" is approved by the Secretary of Defense suggests that these plans are taken very seriously indeed in the Pentagon.

And that the scale and grandeur of the digital revolution is matched only by the US military's ambitions for it.

The ACLU of Georgia released copies of government files on Wednesday that illustrate the extent to which the FBI, the DeKalb County Division of Homeland Security and other government agencies have gone to compile information on Georgians suspected of being threats simply for expressing controversial opinions.

Two documents relating to anti-war and anti-government protests, and a vegan rally, prove the agencies have been "spying" on Georgia residents unconstitutionally, the ACLU said. (Related: ACLU Complaint -- PDF file)

For example, more than two dozen government surveillance photographs show 22-year-old Caitlin Childs of Atlanta, a strict vegetarian, and other vegans picketing against meat eating, in December 2003. They staged their protest outside a HoneyBaked Ham store on Buford Highway in DeKalb County.

An undercover DeKalb County Homeland Security detective was assigned to conduct surveillance of the protest and the protestors, and take the photographs. The detective arrested Childs and another protester after he saw Childs approach him and write down, on a piece of paper, the license plate number of his unmarked government car.

"They told me if I didn't give over the piece of paper I would go to jail and I refused and I went to jail, and the piece of paper was taken away from me at the jail and the officer who transferred me said that was why I was arrested," Childs said on Wednesday.

The government file lists anti-war protesters in Atlanta as threats, the ACLU said. The ACLU of Georgia accuses the Bush administration of labeling those who disagree with its policy as disloyal Americans.

• Open Letter to theWashington Post arose from ombudsperson Deborah Howell's drawing equivalences between these legal contributions from the tribes which Abramoff, it turns out, BILKED OUT OF MONEY, and illegal direct contributions from Republicans by Abramoff himself.


• Open Letter to Chris Matthews is a response to Chris Matthews, who is getting nuttier by the day, claiming that Americans who are concerned about the Iraq War sound like Osama Bin Laden. Matthews has been a treasure trove of Bush Blowjobbery over the last few weeks, which makes me wonder if perhaps someone has photos of Mr. Matthews doing unspeakable things with either an underage girl, and underage boy, a mule, or JimmyJeffGannonGuckert. First we had the "Democrats = Osama" meme. Then he appeared on Don Imus show making sniggering jokes about Brokeback Mountain. Then he jumped on the "Abramoff gave to Democrats too" bandwagon. And now he's claiming that Latinos ought to be natural Republicans since they're so hard-working. Matthews is the gift that keeps on giving, and you can do your part to get him to get honest or get off the air here.


• Last, but by no means least, we have Open Letter to Tim Russert. L'il Tim is an even bigger tool than Matthews. Up to his eyeballs in the Plame outing case, he nevertheless continued to ask guests on Press the Meat leading questions designed to minimize the importance of that particular scandal. Russert finally became a target when he decided that All Black People Are Alike by asking Barack Obama to comment on the remarks of Harry Belafonte, a private citizen, that George Bush is the world's worst terrorist. Russert is going to be an awfully big whale to bring down, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try.

A majority of Americans said the presidency of George W. Bush has been a failure and that they would be more likely to vote for congressional candidates who oppose him, according to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll.

Fifty-two percent of adults said Bush's administration since 2001 has been a failure, down from 55 percent in October. Fifty- eight percent described his second term as a failure. At the same point in former President Bill Clinton's presidency, 70 percent of those surveyed by Gallup said they considered it a success and 20 percent a failure.

In a poll conducted in January of 2002, after Bush was president for one year, 83 percent of those surveyed said his presidency was a success.

In the new poll, conducted Jan. 20-22, fifty-one percent of those surveyed said they would be more likely to vote for congressional candidates who do not support Bush's policies.

The percentage of Americans who called Bush ``honest and trustworthy'' fell 7 percentage points in the last year to 49 percent, the poll found.

The new poll also found that 62 percent of Americans said they are ``dissatisfied'' with ``the way things are going'' in the U.S., unchanged from a December survey. The percentage of ``dissatisfied'' Americans reached its peak in October of 2005 when 68 percent of those surveyed agreed.

The survey interviewed 1,006 U.S. adults and has a margin of error of 4.5 percentage points. For the questions about whether Bush's presidency is a success, about 500 U.S. adults were surveyed and the margin for error is plus or minus 5 percentage points.

The direction in which America needs to go is obvious: toward energy independence. If Mr. Bush steps up to that challenge, this speech could be a new beginning for his presidency. If he doesn't, you can stick a fork in this administration. It will be done — because it will have abdicated leadership on the biggest issue of our day. Here's the speech I'll be listening for:

[snip]

I am here to tell you that if we don't move away from our dependence on oil and shift to renewable fuels, it will change our way of life for the worse — and soon — much, much more than communism ever could have. Making this transition is the calling of our era.

Why? First, we are in a war with a violent strain of Middle East Islam that is indirectly financed by our consumption of oil. Second, with millions of Indians and Chinese buying cars and homes as they join the great global middle class, we must quickly move away from burning fossil fuels or we're going to create enough global warming to melt the North Pole. Because of that, green cars, homes, offices, appliances, designs and renewable energies will be the biggest growth industry of the 21st century. If we don't dominate that industry, China, India, Japan or Europe surely will.

But to lead, we must impose the highest energy-efficiency standards on our own automakers and other industries so we force them to be the most innovative. I want to inspire girls and boys across America to study math, science and engineering to help our nation achieve green energy independence. President Kennedy said, Let's put a man on the Moon. I say, Let's make oil obsolete.

ARLINGTON, Va.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 24, 2006--KBR announced today that the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) component has awarded KBR an Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contingency contract to support ICE facilities in the event of an emergency. KBR is the engineering and construction subsidiary of Halliburton (NYSE:HAL).

With a maximum total value of $385 million over a five-year term, consisting of a one-year based period and four one-year options, the competitively awarded contract will be executed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Fort Worth District. KBR held the previous ICE contract from 2000 through 2005.

"We are especially gratified to be awarded this contract because it builds on our extremely strong track record in the arena of emergency operations support," said Bruce Stanski, executive vice president, KBR Government and Infrastructure. "We look forward to continuing the good work we have been doing to support our customer whenever and wherever we are needed."

The contract, which is effective immediately, provides for establishing temporary detention and processing capabilities to augment existing ICE Detention and Removal Operations (DRO) Program facilities in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs. The contingency support contract provides for planning and, if required, initiation of specific engineering, construction and logistics support tasks to establish, operate and maintain one or more expansion facilities.

The contract may also provide migrant detention support to other U.S. Government organizations in the event of an immigration emergency, as well as the development of a plan to react to a national emergency, such as a natural disaster. In the event of a natural disaster, the contractor could be tasked with providing housing for ICE personnel performing law enforcement functions in support of relief efforts.

ICE is one of three agencies that make up the Border and Transportation Security (BTS) Directorate of the DHS. The mission of the BTS Directorate is to secure the nation's air, land and sea borders. ICE, the largest investigative arm of the DHS, is responsible for identifying and shutting down vulnerabilities in the nation's border, economic, transportation and infrastructure security.

In his press conference today, President Bush suggested that the existence of photographs of himself and Jack Abramoff are no big deal and generally pooh-poohed the press's focus on the story. But our reporting suggests that the White House is actively involved in covering up and possibly destroying photographic evidence of the two men together.

Earlier this month, we were alerted to the existence of a series Abramoff photos at the website of Reflections Photography, a studio that does photo shoots for many Republican political events and sells copies to the individuals who attended the events and other members of the public through an online photo database. Reflections was an official photographer for Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign events and for the 2005 inauguration.

One of those photos was of Abramoff and Ralph Reed at a party for the launch of Reed's Century Strategies DC office in 2003. We contacted Reflections Photography and purchased the rights to publish that photograph and did so on January 11th.

Things weren't so simple with the late 2003 photograph of Jack Abramoff and President Bush.

When we went to the page for the photograph of President Bush and Abramoff, the page in question had disappeared from the site. Indeed, in the sequence of photographs from the event in question, each had a unique identification number in perfect consecutive order. All were there on the site, in sequence, with the exception of the one that was apparently that of President Bush and Abramoff.

I called back Reflections Photography and spoke to the woman who had earlier sold us the licensing rights to the other image. I told her there was another photograph we wanted to purchase the rights to publish but that it appeared no longer to be on their website.

She told me that sometimes pictures going back as far as 2003 had not been transferred over to the online catalog.

I told her that as far as we knew the photograph had been available on the site until quite recently. Then I asked if the photograph in question were available in their offline archives and whether I could purchase it that way.

She said that it was and that the CD in question was available for purchase.

I asked her if it would be possible for her to pull the CD. Then I could describe the photograph with the identification number in question to her to verify that it was the same picture.

The woman, who was helpful and friendly throughout, said she could and asked me to wait a few minutes while she retrieved the CD in question.

After a few minutes, she returned and proceeded to pull up the photo in question on the CD. Then, to her audible surprise, she told me the "photo was deleted" from the CD.

[snip]

But early this afternoon, I decided to take one more go at Reflections. I talked to company president Joanne Amos. We went back and forth over various questions about whether photographs at the site were available to the public and why some had been removed. When she, at length, asked me who it was in the picture with the president. I told her we believed it was Jack Abramoff.

Amos very straightforwardly told me that the photographs had been removed and that they had been removed because they showed Abramoff and the president in the same picture. The photos were, she told me, "not relevant."

When I asked her who had instructed her to remove the photos, she told me she was the president of the company. She did it. It was "her business decision" to remove the photographs. She told me she had done so within the last month.

So, here we have it that the president of Reflections admits that she removed photos of Abramoff and the president from their online database. If what her employee told me on the 11th is accurate the photos were also deleted from the CDs they keep on file in their own archives. So the scrub seems to have been pretty thorough.

Did the White House send out the word to deep-six those Bush-Abramoff pics?

Scott McClellan won't answer our questions. But this mystery would not be difficult to solve by a press outlet with sufficient juice to get a question answered by Scott McClellan. Has the White House or anyone working at the White House's behest instructed Reflections Photography to destroy or remove from its archives photographs of President Bush and Jack Abramoff?

President Bush defended anew his program of warrantless surveillance Thursday, saying “there’s no doubt in my mind it is legal.” He suggested that he might resist congressional efforts to change it.

“The program’s legal, it’s designed to protect civil liberties, and it’s necessary,” Bush told a White House news conference.

[snip]

“It’s so sensitive that if information gets out about how the program works, it will help the enemy,” Bush said. “Why tell the enemy what we’re doing?”

“We’ll listen to ideas. If the attempt to write law is likely to expose the nature of the program, I’ll resist it,” the president said.

Last year, the liberal economist Stephen Rose posted an essay on the Emerging Democratic Majority Web site in which he observed, "It is an occupational hazard of those with big hearts to overestimate the share of the population that is economically distressed." Rose concluded that only 19 percent of males and 27 percent of females are poor or working poor — a percentage that is "probably much smaller than most progressive commentators would estimate."

Furthermore, he wrote, the percentage of Americans with reasonably well-paying corporate jobs has expanded over the past few decades: "Contrary to what some on the left might think, the share of bad jobs fell significantly as more workers with postsecondary education moved into an expanding set of managerial and professional jobs."

Based on a new analysis of the data, we have found that Americans are indeed working longer than they once did, if not quite as much as Schor would have us believe. But, more importantly, we have also found that many Americans are both overworked and underemployed. Because of growing job instability, workers face a "feast and famine" cycle: They work as much as they can when work is available to compensate for short workweeks, temporary layoffs, or permanent job loss that may follow. What's more, while American families as a whole are putting in more time, that work isn't producing significant increases in living standards. For the typical two-breadwinner household, having both parents work longer hours may not mean an extra trip to Disney World or nicer clothes for school; more likely, it means keeping up car payments or just covering the costs of food and housing.

But over the past year the Democratic polling firm of Greenberg, Quinlan, Rosner has noted that voters don't separate values issues from economic issues. They use values issues as stand-ins and figure the candidates they associate with traditional morality are also the ones with sensible economic policies.

In the current issue of The American Prospect, Garance Franke-Ruta also notes the interplay between values and economic issues. "Traditional values have become aspirational," she writes. "Lower-income individuals simply live in a much more disrupted society, with higher divorce rates, more single moms, more abortions, and more interpersonal and interfamily strife, than do the middle- and upper-middle-class people they want to be like."

With these sentiments, Democrats seem to be moving away from materialistic determinism. In past decades, Democratic political campaigns have been based primarily on appeals to economic interests. But especially in the information age, social values and cultural capital shape a person's economic destiny more than the other way around.

If you are a middle-class woman, you have more to fear from divorce than from outsourcing. If you have a daughter, you're right to worry more about her having a child before marriage than about her being a victim of globalization. This country's prosperity is threatened more by homes where no one reads to children than it is by big pharmaceutical companies.

Conservatives, especially evangelicals, have had free rein to offer their own recipe for social renewal: churches that restrain male selfishness, decency standards that check hedonism, social norms that discourage childbearing outside wedlock.

Middle-class Americans feel social anxiety more acutely than economic anxiety because they understand that values matter most. Democrats are beginning to understand this, too.

In light of Gen. Hayden's new claim yesterday that the reason the Bush Administration decided to eavesdrop outside of FISA is because the "probable cause" standard for obtaining a FISA warrant was too onerous (and prevented them from obtaining warrants they needed to eavesdrop), there is a fact which I have not seen discussed anywhere but which now appears extremely significant, at least to me.

In June, 2002, Republican Sen. Michael DeWine of Ohio introduced legislation (S. 2659) which would have eliminated the exact barrier to FISA which Gen. Hayden yesterday said is what necessitated the Administration bypassing FISA. Specifically, DeWine's legislation proposed:

to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 to modify the standard of proof for issuance of orders regarding non-United States persons from probable cause to reasonable suspicion. . . .

In other words, DeWine's bill, had it become law, would have eliminated the "probable cause" barrier (at least for non-U.S. persons) which the Administration is now pointing to as the reason why it had to circumvent FISA.

During that time, the Administration was asked to advise Congress as to its position on this proposed amendment to loosen the standard for obtaining FISA warrants, and in response, they submitted a Statement from James A. Baker, the Justice Department lawyer who oversees that DoJ's Office of Intelligence Policy and Review, which is the group that "prepares and presents all applications for electronic surveillance and physical search under the Act to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA Court or Court)." If anyone would be familiar with problems in obtaining FISA warrants, it would be Baker.

And yet, look at what Baker said in his Statement. He began by effusively praising the Patriot Act on the ground that the 72-hour window provided by the Patriot Act had given the Administration the speed and flexibility it needed in order to engage in eavesdropping:

The reforms in those measures (the PATRIOT Act) have affected every single application made by the Department for electronic surveillance or physical search of suspected terrorists and have enabled the government to become quicker, more flexible, and more focused in going "up" on those suspected terrorists in the United States.

One simple but important change that Congress made was to lengthen the time period for us to bring to court applications in support of Attorney General-authorized emergency FISAs. This modification has allowed us to make full and effective use of FISA's pre-existing emergency provisions to ensure that the government acts swiftly to respond to terrorist threats. Again, we are grateful for the tools Congress provided us last fall for the fight against terrorism. Thank you.

And then, regarding DeWine's specific proposal to lower the evidentiary standard required for a FISA warrant, Baker said that:

The Department of Justice has been studying Sen. DeWine's proposed legislation. Because the proposed change raises both significant legal and practical issues, the Administration at this time is not prepared to support it.

So, in June, 2002, the Administration refused to support elimination of the very barrier ("probable cause") which Gen. Hayden claimed yesterday necessitated the circumvention of FISA. In doing so, the Administration identified two independent reasons for opposing this amendment. One reason was that the Justice Department was not aware of any problems which the Administration was having in getting the warrants it needed under FISA:

The practical concern involves an assessment of whether the current "probable cause" standard has hamstrung our ability to use FISA surveillance to protect our nation. We have been aggressive in seeking FISA warrants and, thanks to Congress's passage of the USA PATRIOT Act, we have been able to use our expanded FISA tools more effectively to combat terrorist activities. It may not be the case that the probable cause standard has caused any difficulties in our ability to seek the FISA warrants we require, and we will need to engage in a significant review to determine the effect a change in the standard would have on our ongoing operations. If the current standard has not posed an obstacle, then there may be little to gain from the lower standard and, as I previously stated, perhaps much to lose.

So as of June, 2002 -- many months after the FISA bypass program was ordered -- the DoJ official who was responsible for overseeing the FISA warrant program was not aware (at least when he submitted this Statement) of any difficulties in obtaining warrants under the FISA "probable cause" standard, and for that reason, the Administration would not even support DeWine's amendment. If - as the Administration is now claiming - they had such significant difficulties obtaining the warrants they wanted for eavesdropping that they had to go outside of FISA, surely Baker - who was in charge of obtaining those warrants - would have been aware of them. And, if the Administration was really having the problems under FISA, they would have supported DeWine's Amendment. But they didn't.

The second concern the Administration expressed with DeWine's amendment was that it was quite possibly unconstitutional:

The Department's Office of Legal Counsel is analyzing relevant Supreme Court precedent to determine whether a "reasonable suspicion" standard for electronic surveillance and physical searches would, in the FISA context, pass constitutional muster. The issue is not clear cut, and the review process must be thorough because of what is at stake, namely, our ability to conduct investigations that are vital to protectin