9:45 a.m.: Convene and begin consideration of the Military Construction Appropriations bill for Fiscal Year 2005.
Posted on 09/07/2004 4:13:07 AM PDT by OXENinFLA
Since "Free Republic is an online gathering place for independent, grass-roots conservatism on the web. We're working to roll back decades of governmental largesse, to root out political fraud and corruption, and to champion causes which further conservatism in America.", I and others think it's a good idea to centralize what the goes on in the Senate (or House).
So if you see something happening on the Senate/House floor and you don't want to start a new thread to ask if anyone else just heard what you heard, you can leave a short note on who said what and about what and I'll try and find it the next day in THE RECORD. Or if you see a thread that pertains to the Senate, House, or pretty much any GOV'T agency please link your thread here.
If you have any suggestions for this thread please feel free to let me know.
Here's a few helpful links.
C-SPAN what a great thing. Where you can watch or listen live to most Government happenings.
C-SPAN 1 carries the HOUSE.
C-SPAN 2 carries the SENATE.
C-SPAN 3 (most places web only) carries a variety of committee meetings live or other past programming.
OR FEDNET has online feed also.
A great thing about our Government is they make it really easy for the public to research what the Politicians are doing and saying (on the floor anyway).
THOMAS where you can see a RECORD of what Congress is doing each day. You can also search/read a verbatim text of what each Congressmen/women or Senator has said on the floor or submitted 'for the record.' [This is where the real juicy stuff can be found.]
Also found at Thomas are Monthly Calendars for the Majority and Minority
Roll Call Votes can be found here.
THE WAR DEPARTMENT (aka The Dept. of Defense)
Switched back over to the senate
Dang .. I missed Rick
Durbin up trashing Goss.....
Did he bring up Kerry's name also?
No, I don't think so....
9:45 a.m.: Convene and begin consideration of the Military Construction Appropriations bill for Fiscal Year 2005.
No votes today or the rest of the week.
Damn they were in late last night.
176: Motion to Table the Corzine amendment #3619: , as modified
Tabled, 48-47
177: Motion to Table the Dayton amendment #3629:
Tabled, 49-45
178: Motioin to Waive the Budget Act with respect to the Clinton amendment #3632:
Not Waived, 43-50
179: Motion to Waive the Budget Act with respect to the Byrd amendment #3649:
Not Waived, 48-47
180: Motion to Table the Kennedy amendment #3626:
Tabled, 49-45
181: Motion to Waive the Budget Act with respect to the Schumer amendment #3656:
Not Waived, 43-51
182: Motion to Waive the Budget Act with respect to the Schumer amendment #3655:
Not Waived, 44-49
183: Motion to Table the Clinton amendment #3631:
Tabled, 54-39
184: Final Passage of H.R.4567, the Homeland Security Appropriations bill, as amended
Passed, 93-0 [NOT voting, Edwards (D-NC) Kerry (D-MA)]
NTS
Post Stearns 1min speech from 9-15-04
Filp over to the house
Lamar Smith too............(r-tx)
Lamar Smith just gave a "Media Bais award" to NBC for putting Kitty Kelly on for three days in a row.....LOL!
That is funny
Hellary is on the Floor
Domenici up asking the dems "Why are y'all up here on the Senate floor teeling us what your canidat is goingto do? Why doesn't he tell the peopel him self"......................This i sgood
LOL .. good for him
I noticed yesterday they were doing that .. heck even Rockefeller kept mentioning Kerry at Porter Goss' hearing
10:00 a.m.: Convene for a pro forma session only.
Pro Forma Session
A daily meeting of the House or Senate during which no votes are held and no legislative business is conducted. The session "in form only" is held for purposes of meeting the 3-day rule in the Constitution. It requires each House to gain the permission of the other for recesses longer than 3 days. When the permission is not forthcoming, or not requested in time, the affected chamber convenes briefly with hardly anyone in attendance [the opening prayer, routine announcements, and sometimes short non-legislative speeches are conducted], and then adjourns.
Hummm ya learn something new everyday......
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(Mr. SMITH of Texas asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
Mr. SMITH of Texas. Mr. Speaker, last week I announced a weekly award for the worst example of a biased liberal media article. The nominees for the first Media Bias Award are:
NBC's ``Today'' show for interviewing Kitty Kelley for 3 consecutive days about her book on the President's family, filled with second-hand sources, rumors, and falsehoods; Newsweek Magazine for this week's cover story on ``The Secret Money War'' in the Presidential campaign. Newsweek neglected to report that the top five outside money groups all have Democratic Party ties and have spent a combined $91 million attacking President Bush; the New York Times for repeatedly hammering Republicans for their get-out-the-vote efforts among church members while never criticizing Democrats for political speeches in churches; The Washington Post for its coverage of the Democratic and Republican conventions. The day after the Democratic convention, The Post ran three positive front-page stories about the Democratic nominee; but the day after the Republican convention, The Post featured two negative and only one positive front-page story on President Bush.
Mr. Speaker, the winner of the first Media Bias Award is NBC for its decision to feature Bush critic Kitty Kelley on the Today show 3 days in a row. This is the Media Bias Award to NBC.
That's just funny...........
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(Mr. STEARNS asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
Mr. STEARNS. Mr. Speaker, last night the House voted to strip language in the Treasury bill that would have made a small step towards restoring some sense of sanity to our national immigration policy. Even
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And now we are allowing these matricula consular cards which are issued as a form of identification in Mexico. We are allowing this form of ID even though the FBI reports that there is no centralized database for issuing these cards, there are no uniform standards for its issuance, and in some cases all an applicant has to do is simply say, I am who I am. The FBI determined that these are not adequate standards and that they are fraught with fraud. I wholeheartedly agree.
Mr. Speaker, I am disappointed that we are allowing these ID cards to be used. I am deeply concerned that their use places our national security at risk.
LEGITIMACY OF NEWS STORIES -- (Senate - September 15, 2004)
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Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, if I might reminisce for a moment as a predicate for what I am about to say. I go back to a time in my career when I was the center of considerable national press attention. The occasion was the 1970s. The issue was Watergate. I will not bother to describe why I was there; I will just tell my colleagues of a phone call I received one night just before the ``Evening News with Walter Cronkite'' came on CBS.
A reporter called me to say that Dan Rather was going to be speaking about me that night, and he read to me the piece that had been written for Dan Rather to give on the evening news. Frankly, it terrified me because if it had been delivered in just the way it was read to me on the phone, it would have destroyed my business, destroyed my career, made it impossible for me to continue to represent the various clients I had in my public relations and consulting firm.
I said that to the reporter. I said: This is terrible, it is not true, and you will destroy my career. We had a brief conversation about the details of what it is he had in his report, and he said, well, I see your point, I will do the best I can, and hung up at about 10 minutes before the news broadcast was to begin.
As anyone can understand, I watched the news with great interest that night, and Walter Cronkite began by saying: Tonight, Dan Rather has important new information about the Watergate scandal that he will be bringing us from Washington. It was about 20 minutes after the hour when he got around to Rather, and Dan Rather then gave a report, mentioned me by name but said the things that I had said to the reporter, along with some of the things he had already prepared. It was not a pleasant experience for me, but it was nowhere near what it sounded as if it would be some half hour before.
Within 10 minutes after the news broadcast ended, the phone rang again at my home, and it was Dan Rather. I thanked him for paying attention to the points I was trying to make, and he said: Well, you had a strong advocate, referring to the reporter who had been talking to me. Then he said: I have been in this town long enough to know the difference between a legitimate news story that has somehow come out and a situation that is being laid on me for the purpose of getting the information forward.
He said: Mr. Bennett, this was not a legitimate news story. This is something that was laid on me by someone who obviously wishes you ill. Who do you think your enemies might be in this situation?
We then had that discussion. That is neither here nor there, but obviously I always will remember that time. We do remember the times in our lives when trauma comes upon us. I remembered it fondly, with respect for Dan Rather and his willingness to listen to something other than the preconception that had been handed to him, and for his journalistic instinct to tell him that this just might not be a legitimate story, this just might be something that someone was feeding to him for a purpose and a hidden agenda.
We now know about the great controversy that has surrounded the documents that have come forward with respect to President Bush's service in the Texas National Guard. I regret, from my personal experience, to find that this newsman whom I have respected all these years is in the center of this particular controversy. It would seem to me that this time, Dan Rather's instinct has failed him. The instinct that told him some 30 years ago, again in his words, that ``something was being laid on him'' deserted him this time. It is very clear that documents were forged, they were laid on him, and this time he bit.
I do not join in the chorus that is arising on talk radio and elsewhere that he must somehow be driven from the air. I don't think he deserves that. But I do think this is a cautionary tale and we need to spend a little time talking about it because it represents a new phenomenon in the information age where someone has used information-age technology to forge documents and then insert those forged documents and the false information they contain into the political debate at a time that is crucial.
This is the first indication I know of where we have seen that sort of thing,
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I believe I am something of an expert on forgery. In this same period of time, back in the 1970s, I worked for Howard Hughes. I was working for the Hughes organization when we had two of the most significant forgery attempts of the last century. The first one was the autobiography of Howard Hughes. The second one was the will of Howard Hughes.
We now know, looking back, that the autobiography of Howard Hughes was written by a man named Clifford Irving, who had never met Howard Hughes, never spoke to him, never had any contact with him at all. But, perhaps a parallel to today's situation, two very respected and prestigious national organizations bought the Clifford Irving forgery, paying $1 million to Clifford Irving for that manuscript. McGraw-Hill Publishing Company was going to publish the book, and Time-Life, the publishers of Time and Life magazines, now part of Time Warner, was going to publish excerpts from the book.
I won't go into the details of that, but I do remember very clearly when the leading investigative reporter for Life magazine came into my office to discuss the Howard Hughes autobiography, and I said to him there is no way in the world that Howard Hughes has ever met Clifford Irving. That is absolute, provable, irrefutable. Clifford Irving and Howard Hughes had never, ever met each other.
The reporter said to me: That may be true. Irving is probably lying about how he got the manuscript, but the manuscript itself is genuine. The evidence is overwhelming.
I said: What evidence?
He said: The handwriting experts. The handwriting experts have looked at the handwriting on the note that Clifford Irving put forward--supposedly written by Howard Hughes--validating the manuscript, and he said the handwriting experts are unanimous, Howard Hughes
wrote that note.
Now we know, of course, Howard Hughes did not write that note. Clifford Irving wrote that note.
In the course of his trial, one of the prosecutors said to Clifford Irving: Is it really possible that you were the man who wrote that note? Is it really possible that you had the skills of forgery so that you could write something that would fool the best experts in the country on handwriting analysis?
Clifford Irving took a legal pad, wrote out a letter from Howard Hughes to this particular prosecutor, signed it ``Howard Hughes,'' and handed it over to him. The prosecutor had it framed and it is hanging on his wall.
One of the major lessons I learned from that experience is that the experts can be wrong. The experts can be fooled. A good forger who concentrates in the right area can, in fact, come up with forgeries that can get by some forensic experts.
I don't think that is the case with the forgeries with respect to President Bush's Texas National Guard service. I think the forgeries are fairly clumsy and the expert that CBS has quoted validated only the signature and not the document as a whole.
But the thing I have learned from dealing with the Hughes forgeries, the fake autobiography and the fake will, is that one must look at a forgery not only for the forensic side of it but also for the content and ask this fundamental question whenever something magically appears: Why did this appear at this particular time?
If, indeed, Howard Hughes was planning to write an autobiography, why did it appear just after there was a major shakeup in the Hughes organization and there was a tremendous amount of publicity about Howard Hughes' reclusiveness? Isn't that coincidence a little bit too close?
The will that would have left hundreds of millions of dollars to a service station attendant in the state of Utah, why did that appear just as the press was reporting that Howard Hughes had died without signing a will? What caused this to come forward at just that moment? Isn't that content suspicious? Doesn't that suggest that somebody has an agenda that is not just a coincidence?
The third area of forgery with which I am familiar says exactly the same thing. I had friends with whom I went to college who were killed by the forger-murderer Mark Hoffman. Mark Hoffman earned his living over decades forging documents that had relationship to the Mormon Church.
Looking back on it, now that Hoffman is in jail, we should have recognized, once again, the great coincidence that these documents would come forward at just the right time. There would be scholars who would be speculating as to whether the founder of the church had any connection with folk magic, and suddenly, at just the right time, documents saying that he did have connections with folk magic began to appear. We now know they were forged. They came from Mark Hoffman. They were created out of whole cloth.
But they seemed logical because of the context in which they came.
The application of that to these documents relating to President Bush is obvious.
Why, if these documents have been sitting in the records of the Texas National Guard for all of these years, did they suddenly come forward with exactly the right amount of validation of the accusations that are being made by President Bush's opponents at just the right time in the campaign when the Kerry campaign seemed to need a little boost?
That alone, once again, in historic context, says be on your guard. That alone should have alerted Dan Rather's journalistic instincts that this is not really a legitimate leak. This is something somebody is laying on him for the purpose of their own agenda.
The rest of the press has gone in after all of the forensic evidence.
I looked at it with great interest because of my background in forgery. I agreed that the memos that are purported to be true do not fit with the memos that are written in the Texas National Guard. I agree that the typeface is suspect. I agree there can be no explanation other than forgery for the fact that someone sat down at a modern computer and recreated the memo exactly. You cannot do that with memos that are typed on typewriters. You have to go back to the original typewriter to recreate a memo and have it match exactly.
I agree with all of the forensic evidence, and I agree that there is absolutely no question that this is a forgery.
But instead of wallowing in the delight of having caught the Boston Globe or CBS in their gullibility, having caught them in the mistake of having bought this whole thing, let us ask the more fundamental question: Who did it? Who is concerned with the campaign to such a degree that they are willing to falsify documents and peddle them to national media organizations?
I have heard three explanations. There are people who have speculated on this. Frankly, the speculation in its own way can add to the poison of this situation.
The first speculation I heard was that it was done by supporters of President and Senator Clinton. As they put it, the Clinton supporters want to make sure Kerry didn't win so that the 2008 nomination would be open to Senator Clinton, and they are the ones who forged the documents and then put them forward in a way that they knew would be embarrassing to the Kerry campaign.
The second speculation is that Karl Rove did it; that the Republicans are the ones who did this; that this is a Republican dirty trick; that they are so anxious to destroy Kerry they are willing to forge documents and foist them onto an unsuspecting CBS and Boston Globe.
The third explanation, to me, is the only one that makes any sense, which is that there is an overzealous Kerry supporter, or, if you will, a Bush hater who is really stupid. This was a really dumb thing for someone who supports Senator Kerry to have done.
I cannot believe it was done by anyone in the Kerry campaign because they are smarter than that. But very often in politics we have the experience called up from my father when someone was trying to help him in the campaign: I can take care of my enemies, may the Good Lord save me from my friends.
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But someone who wanted Bush to lose and Kerry to win said if the documents to support the charge on the National Guard issue aren't there, I will see that they are there. I will do it anonymously. This will be my contribution to the campaign.
It is a really stupid thing to do. But I believe that is the explanation of where this came from.
Stupidity trumps Machiavelli almost every time when you are looking for an explanation.
However, I think everyone ought to focus on finding out who did it. Until we do find out who did it, we will continue to poison the atmosphere with the
suggestion that maybe the Clintons did it, maybe Karl Rove did it, or the Republicans played a dirty trick. We know there are other forces at work.
We owe it to clear the atmosphere by finding out who it is that forged these documents.
Back to my own history, we cleared the atmosphere with respect to Howard Hughes when we found out and made public the fact that the H.R. Hughes to whom the million-dollar payment was made by McGraw Hill was, in fact, Clifford Irving's wife. She opened a Swiss bank and told them her name was Helga R. Hughes, and asked McGraw Hill to please make the checks out to H.R. Hughes. And then Clifford Irving's wife deposited them into her account. Naturally, the signature card that endorsed the check H.R. Hughes matched the signature card in the bank because Clifford Irving wrote them. Once we knew that, then the air was cleared.
The air was cleared with respect to the Howard Hughes will and who wrote the will. When Melvin Dumar, the service station attendant who would have inherited $100 million from Howard Hughes, exclaimed he knew nothing about it, yet was surprised when he came forward and was confronted in court by the fact that his thumbprint was on the will inside a sealed envelope when the will was found. Again, the air was cleared, and there was no more mystery as to where this came from.
The air was cleared with Mark Hoffman and all of the documents that he forged when the murders occurred and we found out that he was trying to cover up his forgery by killing people who were in a position to expose him.
The air needs to be cleared here. We should not just stop at snickering at newspapers and television stations that seem to have been taken in. We should go deeper than that and find out who actually did it. Then we can lay to rest the conspiracy theory that says it came from all of these other places.
I end as I began by saying, over the years, I have always had a warm spot in my heart and a great sense of respect for Dan Rather because of the way he treated a story in which I was a principal some 30 years ago. I know he is a journalist with the highest professional standards. I extend to him my regrets at this time that his journalistic instincts failed him, and he didn't realize this was one that was being laid on him in the hope that he would be taken in. I hope he will recover from this. I know at some point he will recognize that he was taken in and step forward and make that acknowledgment clear.
With that, I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Tennessee.
Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I have enjoyed listening to my friend from Utah. He always speaks eloquently and brings a different insight than most of us can to issues. It is a remarkable saga which he recounts. It also makes me think that here we are, 6 weeks before a Presidential election, which all parties are describing as one of the most important in our history, when we are at war and we have significant issues of health care, immigration--we could make a list a mile long--and jobs, can we keep our jobs in the competitive marketplace, and the dominant issue of the moment is the media covering the media about something that might or probably didn't happen 30 years ago.
My hope is that we recognize that Senator Kerry served, President Bush served, and they both supported the war in Iraq. It is now at the forefront of American consciousness. And the question before us in the Presidential race is which one of these men is the best prepared to be Commander in Chief to lead us into the future?
My hope is the media coverage would be more on those issues, more on the future. I don't want to hear too much more about what happened 30 years ago.
The distinguished occupant of the chair was heroic in his service 30 years ago. We admire that. But he spent most of his time looking toward the future, as I do mine, and I think the American people do. We are not elected to CBS president of the United States.
It is my hope that whatever the circumstances, if they made a mistake, admit it--we politicians have learned the hard way that is the best thing to do--and get on with it. Talk about 30 years from now, instead of the media covering the media about what happened 30 years ago or what might not have happened 30 years ago.
Earlier, the Senator from Louisiana, Ms. Landrieu, came to the Chamber and talked primarily about the devastating hurricane in New Orleans. Having lived in New Orleans a year, at the time of another great hurricane in 1965, I know how difficult that is going to be for New Orleans, Mobile, and that part of the world. Our hearts and support are with the people of the gulf coast. We are thinking about them and their families and hope they are safe.
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