J's Cafe Nette

Archive for August 6th, 2007

Fred Thompson’s wife has been the target of hit pieces in various news outlets. Today Fred Thompson spoke out in her defense.

“She has taken a lot of comments that should have been directed toward me,” Thompson told me. When he started looking into running for president, Thompson said, there was a lot to be done and very little time to do it, and his wife played a key role in getting things going. “We started literally from the kitchen table a few months ago,” he said. “While I did the things that I felt like I needed to do — I had a contract with NBC television, I had a contract with ABC radio, I was chairman of the advisory board on international security for the State Department, and a lot of other things — while I was disengaging from that and getting my thoughts together on issues and things of that nature, public comments I knew I would be called on to make, I asked her to do certain things for me. She did what I asked her to do.”

The former senator said his wife’s actions, however they have been interpreted in the press, have been at his behest. “She always looks out for my best interests, and when she sees something that she knows I would not approve of, or is not in my best interest, she voices that concern — in other words, just exactly the way I would want her to. Now, some people don’t like that, especially some people who have their own issue with regard to the campaign, shall we say, and they take advantage of putting out anonymous comments and so forth.”

A few moments later, Thompson addressed reports, like the one in the Post and another in Newsweek, that looked into his wife’s life before meeting Thompson. “I think the problem is that Jeri refuses to go out in public and behave like a candidate’s wife before I’m a candidate,” Thompson said. “The fact that she’s not out there promoting herself seems to greatly concern some people in the media, so they have gone back to old boyfriends, the families of old boyfriends, high-school classmates, basically anything that can be dredged up to fill this void that they perceive has been created.”

Some of the reports, Thompson said, have contained substantial factual errors. “Things that you would think could have been checked fairly readily,” he told me, “but things that are clearly erroneous — like she’s not a lawyer and she’s never been married before. I listened to a news show with an expert commentator about a week ago talking about Jeri, and in a short segment he had four totally erroneous factual errors about her.”

Thompson did not suggest that stories about his wife should be off limits. He understands the ways of politics. But he believes that now is not the right time for Jeri Thompson or the Thompson pre-campaign to address them in detail. “She’s not going to become a public commentator and personality as a candidate’s wife until there’s a candidate,” he said.

So there.

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Here we go again.

Republican Rep. Bob Allen of Merritt Island, whose district includes a large swath of east Orange County, was arrested for soliciting a male undercover police officer for sex in a Titusville park restroom.

Allen was considered to be acting suspicious by police as he entered and exited the men’s room three times, according to a Titusville Police report. Moments later, he approached the plainclothes officer and offered to perform oral sex for $20, police said.

Allen faces second degree misdemeanor charges. A seven-year House veteran, the term-limited Allen had been considered a likely Senate candidate next year. He also had been named a co-chairman last spring of Arizona Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign team in Florida.

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My heart goes out to the miners and their families.

Six miners were trapped in a coal mine Monday by a cave-in so powerful that authorities initially thought it was small earthquake.

The miners were believed to be 1,500 feet below ground, about four miles from the entrance to the mine, which is 140 miles south of Salt Lake City.

University of Utah seismograph stations recorded a seismic waves of 3.9 magnitude early Monday, causing speculation that a minor earthquake had caused the cave-in. Scientists later realized the collapse at the Genwal mine had caused the disturbance.

“There is no evidence that the earthquake triggered the mine collapse,” said Walter Arabasz, director of the seismography stations.

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Mr. President my hat goes off to you if you can accomplish this.

President Bush said Monday that with the right intelligence U.S. and Pakistan governments can take out al-Qaida leaders, and wouldn’t say whether he would consult first with Pakistan before ordering U.S. forces to act on their own.

“With real actionable intelligence, we will get the job done,” Bush said.

He was asked whether he would wait on permission from Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf before committing the U.S. military to move on “actionable intelligence” on the whereabouts of terrorist leaders in Pakistan. He did not answer directly.

Bush was at the presidential retreat at Camp David for two days of meetings with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. The two held talks on a rash of crises confronting Afghanistan: civilian killings, a booming drug trade and the brazen resurgence of the Taliban.

Karzai said that he and Musharraf would discuss how to tackle the problem of lawlessness and extremist hideouts along Pakistan’s border area with his country.

Afghanistan has a distrustful relationship with neighboring Pakistan, yet top tribal leaders from both countries are expected to meet this week to try to lessen tensions. Musharraf and Karzai are likely to attend, with Karzai sure to bring up his concern about the flow of foreign fighters into his country from Pakistan.

Bush and Karzai put a positive spin on Afghanistan’s progress since the 2001 defeat of the repressive Taliban, but they stressed that serious problems remain.

“There is still work to be done, don’t get me wrong,” Bush said. “But progress is being made, Mr. President, and we’re proud of you.”

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Mr. President you should learn something from this leakproof campaign.

The women of “Hillaryland” have constructed a carefully managed, always on-message, leakproof campaign. But is this a good thing?

Control the message. This is arguably the first rule of politics. Set the terms of the debate. Stick to your talking points. Minimize leaks. Do not let the opposition define you. Avoid process stories. Win the news cycle. Never let them see you sweat.

In the era of the YouTube election, in which every campaign stumble has the potential to become a “macaca moment,” the pressure on candidates to keep an iron grip on their image is extreme. Quirky, let-it-all-hang-out romps like John McCain’s straight-talking quest for the Republican nomination in 2000 may be charming, but tight-lipped, brutally disciplined efforts like George W. Bush’s 2000 and 2004 runs are the stuff of which legends—and presidents—are made.

Among the 2008 field, no one recognizes this reality more than Hillary Clinton, whose every word, deed, and hairdo of the past fifteen years has sparked bitter national debate. Not coincidentally, she has spent this time assembling a network of advisers who share her views on loyalty and discretion. “Hillaryland,” as the members of this mostly female clique call themselves, is less a campaign entity than an extended sisterhood defined by its devotion to its namesake. Even so, the group’s protective ethos dominates her presidential campaign, where loyalty is demanded, self-promotion frowned upon, and talking out of school, especially to the press, punishable by death. (Just kidding—though staffers point out that the campaign’s Arlington, Virginia, headquarters is in a former INS detention facility that still has cells in the basement.) If any campaign has a shot at Total Message Control in ’08, it is Team Hillary.

But is this a good thing? Hillary is, after all, a candidate with very particular, personality-driven challenges. Unlike Bill Clinton or George W. Bush, she lacks the natural ability to make voters feel as though they have a personal sense of her in a 30-second sound bite. Polls indicate that even people who like Hillary don’t necessarily trust her; she is seen as too cautious, scripted, and opportunistic—in short, too much the slick pol. Dispelling such concerns is no small challenge for a political team dominated by loyalists who for years now have shared, and even enabled, the candidate’s obsession with privacy and control.

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South Carolina must see something that Iowa doesn’t.

Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney holds a clear lead over his GOP rivals in Iowa and New Hampshire. But for some reason, Romney hasn’t been able to connect with S.C. voters — a key primary state in Romney’s bid to gain his party’s nomination.

Romney should be more competitive in the Palmetto State. He has spent more than $1 million for television ads, staff and organization, and get-out-the-vote efforts.

But he has little to show for it.

“I don’t think people are comfortable with him yet,” said former U.S. Rep. Tommy Hartnett of Charleston, a Romney supporter.

Romney remains stuck in fourth or fifth position in statewide polls.

A new survey released this week showed S.C. support for Romney dropped to 7 percent in July from 8 percent in June.

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Now that is a slap in the face.

There’s one vote that Rudy Giuliani definitely can’t count on in his 2008 presidential bid: his own daughter’s. According to the 17-year-old Caroline Giuliani’s Facebook profile, she’s supporting Barack Obama.

On her profile, she designates her political views as “liberal” and—until this morning—proclaimed her membership in the Facebook group “Barack Obama (One Million Strong for Barack).” According to her profile, she withdrew from the Obama group at 6 a.m. Monday, after Slate sent her an inquiry about it.

In what may be an effort to avoid public connection to her famous father, the future Harvard freshman and recent graduate of Trinity School in Manhattan uses a slight variation of her name on the Facebook site. But she didn’t lock her profile, allowing any Facebook user with access to the Harvard or Trinity School networks (more than 42,000 people) to view her detailed profile. (As a Harvard student, I was able to see it.)

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Sue has already gone to visit family in another state, and I’ll be doing the same thing on Monday if my back and stomach cooperate.

That leaves Guss, who will be manning the fort for the most part but has promised to put up conservative or at least neutral posts as well as his regular liberal posts.

There won’t be much political news for a month anyway, since Congress has gone on its undeserved vacation. At least they won’t be passing any laws, stupid or otherwise, so we should be grateful.

I will have my trusty laptop with me, but the home where I’m going to be staying doesn’t have high speed internet service available, so I envision myself going to a coffee shop or something to do a couple of posts a day. I remember seeing a sign saying free wireless internet service on one of the restaurants that wouldn’t normally be one of my stops, but it will be now.

Big Mo, if you do another Presidents series post, please email it to me and I’ll post it as soon as I can. It sometimes takes me two hours to post it with all the photos in it, but I’ll get it posted as soon as possible.

With that I bid you a happy week and ask you to keep visiting us.

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If you’re looking for a story that isn’t about corruption or pork here is one to warm your heart.

Sitting on a stool in the center of a TV studio stuffed with anchor desks, fake brick walls and wires hanging from the ceiling, the Rev. Peter Panagore closed his eyes and meditated.

For several minutes he sat there, his head bowed, as a technician prepared the TelePrompTer and camera monitors flickered.

“I was getting my act together,” Panagore said later.

Such is life at the head of Maine’s only media ministry: the First Radio Parish Church of America. “A lot of the stuff I do happens inside my head,” he said of his quiet moments, which include plenty of prayer and quiet thought around his East Boothbay home.

Though the ministry is known by Mainers for its contemplative “Daily Devotions” – a fixture on TV for more than five decades on WCSH-TV in Portland and WLBZ-TV in Bangor – Panagore’s voice is becoming even better known.

Since taking over four years ago, he has aimed to broaden the ministry’s place among increasingly varied media.

“We’ve always been at the cutting edge,” he said.

In part, that’s a reference to the age of the church, which began in 1923 on radio and moved to TV in 1954.

“We are the oldest, continuously running, non-sectarian broadcast in the country,” Panagore said. “As far as we know, we are unique.” When the church went online in 1995, it was ahead of the curve, he said.

These days, Panagore creates those morning TV spots, radio programs and online mailings.

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I don’t know what to say. Read it and decide for yourself.

Fatah officials in Ramallah claimed over the weekend that Professor Sana al-Sayegh, who teaches at Palestine University in Gaza City, was kidnapped by Hamas militiamen who forced her to convert to Islam against her will.

The officials said the president of the university, Dr. Zaher Khail, had assisted Hamas in kidnapping the professor.

They added that senior officials in the office of Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh played a major role in forcing her to convert to Islam.

“She was forced to convert to Islam against her will,” the Fatah officials said. “She was kidnapped and held for two weeks during which time she was not allowed to contact her family.” Sayegh is the dean of the Science and Technology Faculty at Palestine University. She has represented the university at numerous conferences around the world over the past few years and is considered one of the most prominent experts in her field.

According to the Fatah officials, she went missing in late June. When her family’s attempts to find her failed, they sought the help of Haniyeh’s office.

Two weeks later the family was summoned to a meeting with some of Haniyeh’s aides, who were accompanied by the professor.

At the meeting, which was held at the home of Hamas official Rafik Makki, the family was told that the professor had converted to Islam and married a Muslim man.

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This is an editorial by MARY ANASTASIA O’GRADY of the Wall Street Journal.
She has an interesting view.

Congressional Democrats out to quash the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement argue that the terror-torn South American country doesn’t adequately protect human rights and thus doesn’t deserve FTA status. In the Democrats’ book, the way to make Colombia more just is to deny it the chance to deepen its commercial relations with the U.S.

This is curious thinking, and all the more so coming from a party that also argues that the U.S. ought to lift its trade embargo on the Cuban dictatorship as a way to help the Cuban people. Given Cuba’s dismal track record on human rights and the hard work Colombia has done over the past six years to defend human life, it is hard to square that circle.

Americas columnist Mary O’Grady discusses opposition to a free-trade agreement with Colombia.
Classical liberals might argue that open trade with all countries is an individual right. Human-rights advocates might counter that doing business with a dictatorship props up the tyrant. Isolationists may want to cut everyone off. But it is hard to understand just what rational belief system could support expanding commercial exchanges with a dictator while denying deeper trade relations to a democracy, especially one that has shed so much blood for America’s war on drugs.

Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy is one of many in the Democratic Party who seem conflicted on this subject. Mr. Leahy says he hasn’t decided how he will vote on the U.S.-Colombia FTA. But just last month, in a letter published in this newspaper, he accused me of viewing “the assassinations of hundreds of trade unionists” in Colombia as “irrelevant” because I am in favor of boosting trade as a way to consolidate democratic capitalism and increase economic opportunities for all Colombians. I’m still trying to figure out the connection.

Funny enough, Mr. Leahy, like many of his colleagues — including New York Rep. Charles Rangel in the House — has no such qualms about trade with the despotic regime in Havana. The senator has said that the U.S. should seek engagement with Cuba by “lifting the embargo” and increasing “contact between Americans and Cubans — in other words, we should be tearing down the barriers between our countries not building them ever higher.”

The Cuba Mr. Leahy wants to get closer to isn’t simply accused of failing to prosecute human-rights violators, as is the case of Colombia. It is a human-rights violator. It is regrettable that the senator apparently believes that the murder of thousands of Cubans, the torture and imprisonment of tens of thousands of others, the exile of millions and the denial of all human rights, including the right to organize unions, is irrelevant.

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When President Clinton was contemplating running for president he was a member of the moderate Democrat Leadership Council and that’s what put him ahead of the pack. He ran as a moderate and not as a liberal. Or at least not as liberal as he turned out to be.

Now the candidates are shunning the DLC in favor of the Kos Convention.

From Greg Pierce’s Inside Politics column in the Washington Times is this quote:

“There’s no obvious way to measure such a thing, but as a matter of intuition, you’d have to say that the most hated people in America today are sensible Democrats,” Tod Lindberg writes in the Weekly Standard.

“The hard-core partisans of the Democratic left have never had a bigger megaphone than they now have on the Internet, and while they are united in the view that George W. Bush is public enemy No. 1, with Alberto Gonzales and Karl Rove alternating in the No. 2 slot, what really pumps up the volume is any sign of deviationism on their own side,” Mr. Lindberg said.

“When Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution travel to Iraq and report on the New York Times op-ed page that conditions there are improving, they aren’t doing so in order to give aid and comfort to the Bush administration, but because as a defense expert and regional expert respectively, that’s what they are seeing. Nevertheless, they were flayed alive by angry left-wing bloggers, who challenged everything from their qualifications to their competence to their honesty to their eyesight.

“The policy and political headquarters for sensible Democrats has long been the Democratic Leadership Council, which was founded in response to Walter Mondale’s massive defeat running as an orthodox liberal against Ronald Reagan in 1984. …

“The DLC had its annual ‘National Conversation’ late last month in Nashville, and the headline was who didn’t show: namely, any of the candidates vying for the Democratic presidential nomination. Why not? Maybe because, as Noam Scheiber put it in another New York Times op-ed, the DLC is now ‘radioactive’ for the Democratic mainstream and especially its netroots agitators.”

Just as the far right nut roots are trying to take over the Republican Party, the far left nut roots are taking over the Democratic Party, and neither party is well-served by either group.

I wonder if Nixon’s “Silent Majority” still exists and will show both groups who really decides the elections come November ‘08.

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It’s all about politics and it’s always been about politics. It doesn’t matter who is in power. When are the Democrats and the Republicans going to do something for the people who put them in power? Probably never. At least that’s my opinion.

As House Democrats prepare for a floor fight over government-subsidized children’s health insurance, they are spotlighting the role of freshman Jason Altmire.

The career hospital association executive has been working behind the scenes with his leadership on legislation that would expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). When the bill (HR 3162) goes to the floor Wednesday, the newcomer has secured floor time to help make a case for its passage.

Altmire, who upset three-term incumbent Melissa A. Hart, R-Pa., is one of the freshmen that Democratic leaders have identified as rising stars among the 42 who helped the party gain control of the House last fall.

House leaders are offering the freshmen unusual opportunities to quickly burnish their legislative credentials: allowing them to serve on important committees, headline news conferences, offer popular amendments on the floor and meet weekly with Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

Just days into the 110th Congress, Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer, D-Md., baptized the Democratic freshmen as “majority makers.” To stay in the majority, he and other leaders are doing all they can to ensure that the ones who only narrowly won their seats will survive their first re-election challenges in 2008.

“We’ve had a lot of help in a very coordinated way from the leadership in . . . focusing both on the broad agenda and also on the needs of our particular districts,” said Paul W. Hodes, D-N.H., who was chosen to head the freshmen class during its early weeks on Capitol Hill.

“If we identify an opportunity that we know aligns with an area of interest, then of course we present it to them,” said a House leadership aide.

Military veterans Patrick J. Murphy of Pennsylvania and Tim Walz of Minnesota have been standard-bearers on Iraq policy. In February and again in March, Pelosi shared the stage with the two freshmen during news conferences highlighting Democratic victories.

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I guess some things will never change.

The House Defense Appropriations bill for Fiscal Year 2008 allocates the Department of Defense $459.6 billion, $3.5 billion less than the president’s request but nearly $40 billion more than last year’s appropriations. The bill does not provide the $141 million requested by the White House for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, which is slated to appear in an emergency supplemental in September.

The committee disclosed 1,337 earmarks worth $3 billion. This year is the first in which earmarks were disclosed under new House rules mandating that representatives identify their earmarks in letters to the committee certifying they have no financial interest in the project. The report accompanying the bill contained a chart listing projects and sponsors, but not the amounts of the earmark: TCS searched the report and added the value of the earmarks to our accompanying database. TCS will soon release an updated version of the earmark database listing undisclosed earmarks, earmark beneficiaries and scanned images of the letters, which are not available on the committee’s web site.

The lion’s share of the earmarks can be found in the research, development, test and evaluation (RDTE) budget account. The largest of these include $21.8 million for “electronic combat and counterterrorism training” by FATS Inc. of Georgia, sponsored by Jack Kingston (R-GA), and $19 million for an “affordable weapons system,” sponsored by Duncan Hunter (R-CA). Hunter also added $1.5 million to the drug interdiction account for a southwest border fence—much less than the $8 million he requested in the defense authorization bill for the same project. The committee disclosed 26 intelligence-related earmarks, though the cost was not revealed in the bill’s report. These included the National Drug Intelligence Center, a project long supported by appropriations chairman John Murtha which Senator Tom Coburn recently sought to eliminate in an amendment to the Senate Defense Authorization bill. Murtha disclosed $150.5 million worth of earmarks, while Defense Subcommittee Ranking Member C.W. Bill Young (R-FL) piled on $117 million in earmarks.

Pork

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I don’t usually write anything in e-mails that I’m going to be ashamed of. This is an issue that rubs people in different ways. I personally don’t care if they read my e-mails or listen in on my phone calls.

President Bush signed into law on Sunday legislation that broadly expanded the government’s authority to eavesdrop on the international telephone calls and e-mail messages of American citizens without warrants.

Congressional aides and others familiar with the details of the law said that its impact went far beyond the small fixes that administration officials had said were needed to gather information about foreign terrorists. They said seemingly subtle changes in legislative language would sharply alter the legal limits on the government’s ability to monitor millions of phone calls and e-mail messages going in and out of the United States.

They also said that the new law for the first time provided a legal framework for much of the surveillance without warrants that was being conducted in secret by the National Security Agency and outside the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the 1978 law that is supposed to regulate the way the government can listen to the private communications of American citizens.

“This more or less legalizes the N.S.A. program,” said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies in Washington, who has studied the new legislation.

Previously, the government needed search warrants approved by a special intelligence court to eavesdrop on telephone conversations, e-mail messages and other electronic communications between individuals inside the United States and people overseas, if the government conducted the surveillance inside the United States.

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This story pretty much speaks for itself.

U.S., Iranian and Iraqi officials held the first meeting in Baghdad on Monday of a sub-committee intended to improve cooperation on Iraqi security among the three countries, officials said.

“It’s the sub-committee they’ve been talking about for some time now. They’re meeting today at the expert level. It’s hosted and organised by the Iraqis,” U.S. embassy spokesman Philip Reeker said.

The U.S. delegation was headed by Marcie Ries, minister-councilor for political-military affairs at the U.S. embassy, Reeker said.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini said Tehran’s delegation was being led by the deputy head of its mission, Amir Abdollahian.

Setting up the security sub-committee was one of the main achievements of a July 24 meeting in Baghdad between the U.S. and Iranian ambassadors in Iraq.

Washington accuses Tehran of fomenting instability in Iraq, supporting militias and providing weapons, such as armor-penetrating bombs, used to kill U.S. troops.

Tehran denies the charge and blames Iraq’s unrelenting sectarian violence on the 2003 U.S.-led invasion to topple Saddam Hussein.

The talks between the United States and Iran, which have not had diplomatic relations for almost 30 years, had their first round in May and are seen as groundbreaking.

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I guess Romney is going to need more than just, I hate Hillary to get some conservative votes.
Go to the link below and watch the video. It’s very interesting.

Mitt Romney engaged in a heated discussion about his Mormon faith with a prominent Des Moines talk show host off the air on Thursday morning. The contentious back-and-forth between Romney and WHO’s Jan Mickelson began on the air (video link courtesy Breitbart.tv) when the former governor appeared on the popular program that has become a regular stop for GOP presidential hopefuls. But the conversation spilled over to a commercial break and went on after the program ended, where a visibly annoyed Romney spoke in much greater detail about his church’s doctrines than he is comfortable doing so in public.

The footage was captured by the station’s in-studio camera and posted on its website. But Romney, who is careful to portray a sunny and upbeat public image, clearly did not know he was being recorded. The candidate reveals a private side that is at turns cutting, combative and sarcastic, but most of all agitated at being forced to defend what he and his church stand for.

Perhaps knowing that the video was bound to get out, Romney’s campaign sought to frame the story by posting it on its YouTube site and sending it to a friendly blogger, Dean Barnett of TownHall. Under the header “Mitt takes the gloves off,” Barnett posted it last night, describing his preferred candidate as “firm, decisive, authoritative.” Asked why they would highlight the testy exchange in which the candidate touches on his church’s official stance on abortion, extramarital sex, alcohol consumption and even where the second coming of Christ will take place, Romney spokesman Matt Rhoades said they did so “because it was posted and we reviewed and thought the governor handled the situation very well.”

During the show, Mickelson, a staunch conservative, pressed Romney on his abortion views and then pointed out that LDS doctrine discourages the practice. Romney, as he always does, was quick to steer the conversation away from what his church stands for. But Mickelson kept at it when the program went to break.

“I think you’re making a big mistake when you distance yourself from your faith,” Mickelson observed. “I’m not distancing myself from my faith,” Romney forcefully responded. “I’m proud of my faith. There’s nothing I distance myself from.”

Video

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Booed by the far left? That should tell you something. They backed a loser in 04 and their backing a loser now.

Any debate Hillary Clinton doesn’t lose, she wins. And she didn’t lose the debate at the YearlyKos Convention here Saturday.

Throughout the campaign year, Clinton has led all national polls, and almost always with double-digit leads. And even though there is a long way to go, her success supports the notion — which her campaign pushes hard behind the scenes — that she is the inevitable nominee of the Democratic Party and the one with the greatest chance of winning in 2008.

Anything that does not put a chink in that image, anything that does not throw her off her game or derail her progress just adds to the notion that nobody is going to beat her (video courtesy of Breitbart.tv).

The YearlyKos convention — the brainchild of the popular blogger Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, the author of the Daily Kos blog — was attended by about 1,500 liberal activists. But that did not make it a Clinton crowd.

In July, Clinton came in third in the Daily Kos poll, with only 9 percent (John Edwards came in first, with 36 percent, and Barack Obama was second, with 27 percent), and she is often attacked in the blogosphere for her initial support for the war in Iraq.

So she expected boos when she spoke here. But that happened only twice.

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This is an editorial in the Washington Post by John McQuaid. I think this guy has hit the nail on the head.

Even as rescue workers searched for more victims of Wednesday’s deadly collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis, inspectors were dispatched to eyeball thousands of bridges nationwide, looking for other potential disasters — of which there are, apparently, many. In a 2005 report, the Federal Highway Administration rated more than 75,000 U.S. bridges, about an eighth of the total, as “structurally deficient.”

While we’ll learn more about the specific causes of the collapse in coming weeks, it has been clear for a while that our aging national infrastructure network — bridges, roads, dams, levees — isn’t standing up well to intensifying levels of stress.

But the bridge disaster also reflects a broader and more troubling problem. The United States seems to have become the superpower that can’t tie its own shoelaces. America is a nation of vast ingenuity and technological capabilities. Its bridges shouldn’t fall down.

And it’s not just bridges. Has there ever been a period in our history when so many American plans and projects have, literally or figuratively, collapsed? In both grand and humble endeavors, the United States can no longer be relied upon to succeed or even muddle through. We can’t remake the Middle East. We can’t protect one of our own cities from a natural disaster or, it seems, rebuild after one. We can’t rescue our citizens when they’re on TV begging for help. We can’t even give our wounded veterans decent medical care.

We’re supposed to be an optimistic, problem-solving nation, the country that tamed a vast wilderness, won World War II and the Cold War, put men on the moon, built the Panama Canal and the Hoover Dam. But somehow, can-do America has become a joke, an oxymoron. We’ve become the can’t-do nation, slipping on every banana peel on the global stage. Of course, we’ve had our share of failure in the modern era — the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Vietnam War, the Iranian hostage crisis, two space shuttle disasters — but the sheer scale of our current predicament is something different.

Even Americans’ usually boundless self-confidence has taken a hit. In 2002, a Pew poll showed that 74 percent of respondents agreed with this statement: “As Americans, we can always find a way to solve our problems and get what we want.” Five years later, the number has fallen 16 percentage points, to 58 percent. Annual polls taken by the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion have found public confidence in the government’s ability to respond to terrorist attacks, natural disasters and health crises such as avian flu dropping steadily over the same time fram

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Years ago I was in need of having my gallbladder removed. My surgeon said he could do it the old fashioned way with a large incision or I could wait for his partner to come back from learning the new laproscopic technique.

My answer was I didn’t want to be the first patient to have this technique used. As it turned out I had a gallstone in my bile duct at the time of the surgery and a large incision would have been necessary even if I had agreed to the laproscopic method.

A couple of years ago I was suffering with a bad case of psoriasis on the bottoms of my feet.

The dermatologist I saw (who had no personality) suggested I take a drug that was an injectible and had many side effects. I took the literature home with me and read it.

When I read all the potential side effects I decided against this therapy since it could cause cancer and death. Diabetics and people suffering from depression should not take the drug.

My doctor had my history, knew I was a diabetic and suffered from depression, but he still thought I should take the drug.

It turned out he was getting paid by the drug manufacturer to give lectures to other dermatologists about how wonderful this drug was, and when I reminded him of my other medical conditions his response was, “So?”

I quickly changed dermatologists and went with more conventional therapy and today my feet are fairly clear.

I tell you all this because I have just finished reading this tragic story of a 36 year old woman with arthritis, who was talked into taking an experimental drug she knew wouldn’t help her, and probably caused her death although the autopsy results are not yet back.

Her rheumatologist was being paid by the drug company to push this drug experiment on his patients. That is a dead giveaway, just as my dermatologist giving lectures about the benefits of the drug he wanted me to take.

Today there is a husband and a five year old child without a wife and mother and there is no explanation for it other than the fact the drug she had was made from viruses and may have gotten into her immune system and shut her down with internal bleeding and killing her liver.

If my life were in danger anyway I guess I’d grasp at any straw, but not for arthritis or psoriasis or gallbladder surgery.

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A sad story that speaks for itself.

One Woman’s Experience in Gene Therapy Trial Highlights Weaknesses in the Patient Safety Net
Robb Mohr sat by his wife’s hospital bed two weeks ago, trying to take it all in. His wife, Jolee Mohr, was breathing with the help of a ventilator in a Chicago intensive care unit — her body bloated from internal bleeding, her liver failing — and no one could figure out what was wrong with her.

Robb Mohr had his suspicions. Jolee, 36, had been feeling fine just a few weeks earlier, save for occasional stiffness from her arthritis. Her decline had begun the day after her right knee was injected with an experimental drug made of genetically engineered viruses. Doctors at the hospital shared his concern.

Jolee Mohr died from massive bleeding and organ failure July 24, leaving behind a 5-year-old daughter and a host of questions about why she was recruited into a gene therapy experiment whose chief goal was to test the safety of a novel arthritis treatment that had virtually no chance of helping her.

No one knows yet whether the treatment was to blame. Of the dozens of other volunteers who got the injections, only Mohr suffered anything more than short-lived side effects, said officials at Targeted Genetics Corp., the Seattle company that makes the product. The Food and Drug Administration and the company are investigating.

But a close look at the events leading to Mohr’s death reveals failures in the safety net that is supposed to protect people from the risks of medical experimentation — and in particular, the risks of gene therapy, which for 17 years has struggled in vain to live up to its optimistic name.

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