Some locales will always be remembered for the tragedies that occurred there, real or imagined. No one who lived through the civil rights movement will think of Birmingham, Alabama without remembering that city as Ground Zero of the southern resistance to civil rights. Locally, I still think of Tawana Brawley whenever someone mentions Wappingers Falls, New York. Kent State University may be a fine college, but I can't imagine anyone not associating that place with the May 4, 1970 killings of four students who were protesting the Vietnam War.

When we think of gun massacres these days we think about some lone nut who shoots up a McDonalds or a high school. But these kind of lone gunman shootings were rare 35 years ago, and it was the government which inflicted random violence against the public.

On May 4, 1970, the National Guard opened fire on students who protested President Nixon's expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia. Sixty seven shots were fired in 13 seconds. The famous photograph of that young woman wailing over a dead body will haunt this country for decades as a symbol of the clash between anti-war protest and an oppressive government that will not listen to reason.

The Kent State killings are back in the news because someone played a tape of the shootings. The tape supposedly records someone yelling "point" right before the Guardsman opened fire on the students.

According to Associated Press:

A static-filled recording of the 1970 Kent State University shooting that killed four students raises questions not only about whether someone called on National Guardsmen to fire, but also who might have given the order.

The tape was released Tuesday by Alan Canfora, 58, one of nine students wounded in the 1970 shootings. He played two versions of the tape — the original and an amplified version — in which he says a Guard officer issues the command, "Right here! Get Set! Point! Fire!"

Background noise on the recording made it difficult to understand as it was played for students and reporters in a campus theater Tuesday. The word "point" is clear, followed by the sound of shots being fired. There is no indication on the tape of who said the word.

These shooting set off a nationwide student strike that is impossible to imagine today. "There was a significant national response to the shootings: hundreds of universities, colleges, high schools, and even middle schools closed throughout the United States due to a student strike of eight million students, and the event further divided the country along political lines." At the time, people thought the country would degenerate into a civil war.

Kent State was not the only place where the government shot and killed anti-war protesters that year. Jackson State University was the site of a lesser known incident only 10 days later. People lament that Jackson State killings are not well-remembered, but at least Kent State remains a part of the national consciousness, thanks to Neil Young, who wrote "Ohio."

Unless you believe that the government was behind 9/11, it's hard to imagine the military shooting American citizens on U.S. soil without provocation. That's progress, in my book. Popular histories of the Vietnam War era conjure up images of hippies and groovy pot smokers. But the reality was quite different. Not every young person during the 1960s and early 1970's was a hippy, and a large segment of the American population supported the Vietnam War and even elected (1968) and re-elected (1972) Richard Nixon. Some conservatives blamed the Kent State students for their deaths, and the soldier-worship that continues to this day was more pronounced back then, when people were more inclined to believe their government and there were few alternative sources of news and analysis to buck conventional wisdom.

But the question remains: how can the American government shoot and kill its own citizens protesting the war? Researchers believe that sociopaths live among us and that 1 in 25 people have sociopathic tendencies. Some of these people wind up in government. Sociopathic tendencies are not limited to Third World dictators or Nazi Germany. Sociopaths can find their way into U.S. government and every social and public institutution, including the military. The surprise is that Kent State-style shootings do not happen more often.

As a masochist, I could not help but watch a few minutes of last night's debate among the Republican Party challengers for the presidency. The irony is that the debate was held at the Ronald Reagan Library in California. This irony was lost on the Republican faithful sitting politely in the auditorium. If any of them got bored during the debate, they could have wandered off to the library. They would have been able to ask a question that I have been asking for years: are they are any books at the Ronald Reagan Library? It would be like finding cookbooks at a McDonald's.

The younger generation may think that things fell off the table when George W. Bush got elected. But actually, George W. takes after Reagan, a subliterate demagogue who got by on the strength of his smile and a teflon personality that allowed him to get away with murder. The candidates last night kept comparing themselves with Ronald Reagan and did not mention George W. more than a few times, but any rational person would avoid these imposters like the plague. Here are two of my favorite Reagan stories which prove two things: first, Reagan was a terrorist who got it on with pathological killers, and second, Reagan was a dunce who behaved like a wind-up robot.

After Reagan died in June 2004, the country took a week off and coronated Reagan as the greatest human being in the history of the world. But some bloggers pointed out that the man was a little bit dumb. Here's the Daily Howler from June 10, 2004, quoting from Lou Cannon's Reagan biography, Role of a Lifetime, on how Reagan answered questions in the Tower Commission investigation into the Reagan Administration's sale of weapons to Iranian terrorists:

CANNON (page 631): [I]t was obvious to [Chief of Staff Donald] Regan and [White House counsel Peter] Wallison that the president was still shaky in his recollections. Wallison drew up what Abshire called an “aide-memoire” to help the president recall what he had told them. At the top Wallison wrote, “On the issue of the TOW [missile] shipment in August, in discussing this matter with me and David Abshire, you said you were surprised to learn that the Israelis had shipped the arms. If that is your recollection, and the question comes up at the Tower Board meeting, you might want to say that you were surprised.”

The question, of course, came up...After a preliminary question about presidents and their NSC staffs, Tower asked Reagan about the discrepancy between his statement and Regan’s on the question of whether he had given prior approval to the Israeli arms shipment. Reagan rose from his chair, walked around the desk and said to Wallison, “Peter, where is that piece of paper you had that you gave me this morning?” Then he picked up the paper and began to read, “If the question comes up at the Tower Board meeting, you might want to say that you were surprised.”

Tower’s jaw went slack. It was, as Abshire put it, “a low moment.” Tower suspected that Reagan was being manipulated by his counsel, and the Tower Board’s chief of staff, Rhett Dawson, asked Wallison for a “copy of the script” when the board departed. But Wallison was even more amazed than the Tower Board by Reagan’s response. “I was horrified, just horrified,” Wallison recalled later.

So Reagan was so dumb that he read out loud coached testimony from his index card and also read out loud the instructions that would highlight the way that he would snow-job the Tower Commission.

Even worse, Reagan loved military dictators who tortured and brutalized Central American peasants in the name of American foreign policy. The following is a damning summary of Reagan's special relationship with a fascist dictator in Guatemala, where the U.S. sponsored a military dictatorship for decades:

Reagan & Guatemala’s Death Files

By Robert Parry

Ronald Reagan's election in November 1980 set off celebrations in the well-to-do communities of Central America.

After four years of Jimmy Carter's human rights nagging, the region's anticommunist hard-liners were thrilled that they had someone in the White House who understood their problems.

The oligarchs and the generals had good reason for the optimism. For years, Reagan had been a staunch defender of right-wing regimes that engaged in bloody counterinsurgency campaigns against leftist enemies.

In the late 1970s, when Carter's human rights coordinator, Pat Derian, criticized the Argentine military for its "dirty war" -- tens of thousands of "disappearances," tortures and murders -- then-political commentator Reagan joshed that she should "walk a mile in the moccasins” of the Argentine generals before criticizing them.

Despite his aw shucks style, Reagan found virtually every anticommunist action justified, no matter how brutal. From his eight years in the White House, there is no historical indication that he was troubled by the bloodbath and even genocide that occurred in Central America during his presidency, while he was shipping hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to the implicated forces.

The death toll was staggering -- an estimated 70,000 or more political killings in El Salvador, possibly 20,000 slain from the contra war in Nicaragua, about 200 political "disappearances" in Honduras and some 100,000 people eliminated during a resurgence of political violence in Guatemala.

The one consistent element in these slaughters was the overarching Cold War rationalization, emanating in large part from Ronald Reagan's White House.

Yet, as the world community moves to punish war crimes in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, no substantive discussion has occurred in the United States about facing up to this horrendous record of the 1980s.

Rather than a debate about Reagan as a potential war criminal, the ailing ex-president is honored as a conservative icon with his name attached to Washington National Airport and with an active legislative push to have his face carved into Mount Rushmore.

When the national news media does briefly acknowledge the barbarities of the 1980s in Central America, it is in the context of one-day stories about the little countries bravely facing up to their violent pasts.

At times, the CIA is fingered abstractly as a bad supporting actor in the violent dramas. But never does the national press lay blame on individual American officials.

The grisly reality of Central America was most recently revisited on Feb. 25 when a Guatemalan truth commission issued a report on the staggering human rights crimes that occurred during a 34-year civil war.

The Historical Clarification Commission, an independent human rights body, estimated that the conflict claimed the lives of some 200,000 people with the most savage bloodletting occurring in the 1980s.

Based on a review of about 20 percent of the dead, the panel blamed the army for 93 percent of the killings and leftist guerrillas for three percent. Four percent were listed as unresolved.

The report documented that in the 1980s, the army committed 626 massacres against Mayan villages. "The massacres that eliminated entire Mayan villages … are neither perfidious allegations nor figments of the imagination, but an authentic chapter in Guatemala's history," the commission concluded.

The army "completely exterminated Mayan communities, destroyed their livestock and crops," the report said. In the north, the report termed the slaughter a "genocide." [WP, Feb. 26, 1999]

Besides carrying out murder and “disappearances,” the army routinely engaged in torture and rape. "The rape of women, during torture or before being murdered, was a common practice" by the military and paramilitary forces, the report found.

The report added that the "government of the United States, through various agencies including the CIA, provided direct and indirect support for some [of these] state operations." The report concluded that the U.S. government also gave money and training to a Guatemalan military that committed "acts of genocide" against the Mayans.

"Believing that the ends justified everything, the military and the state security forces blindly pursued the anticommunist struggle, without respect for any legal principles or the most elemental ethical and religious values, and in this way, completely lost any semblance of human morals," said the commission chairman, Christian Tomuschat, a German jurist.

"Within the framework of the counterinsurgency operations carried out between 1981 and 1983, in certain regions of the country agents of the Guatemalan state committed acts of genocide against groups of the Mayan people,” he added. [NYT, Feb. 26, 1999]

The report did not single out culpable individuals either in Guatemala or the United States. But the American official most directly responsible for renewing U.S. military aid to Guatemala and encouraging its government during the 1980s was President Reagan.

One year ago this week, Neil Young released Living With War, the only rock album devoted to anti-war songs. What made this album so unique was that Neil wrote and recorded the album very quickly and then made it available for free on the Internet. None of this would matter if the songs weren't any good, but much to my shock upon hearing it for the first time last year, I immediately realized that Living With War was nothing if not a great collection of songs.

Living With War works as an album because the songs are excellent. I do not hold out hope that rock's old timers will continue to release great albums. Everyone has a few good songs left in them, but few from the baby-boomer generation are still capable of making great albums. How did Neil Young write and record a great album overnight, especially one with an overriding anti-war theme?

The album was released to great acclaim and the album became a hit. So why didn't other rock superstars follow suit? Although public support for the Iraq war has vanished, it's still an eye-opener when a celebrity comes out against the war. But rock musicians? Rock music was supposed to be rebellious. Maybe they did not want to suffer the fate of the Dixie Chicks, who made an innocuous statement about George W. Bush and got pummelled for it by the country music faithful. We want more of this, but the rock and roll royalty won't go out on a limb any longer. It's not 1967 anymore, and the rock Gods either don't care about the war or they don't want to make waves.

After listening to Living With War on and off for the past year, I nominate "Shock and Awe" as the greatest rock and roll protest song of all time. That distinguishes the song from Bob Dylan's folk classics. Nothing jumps out of the speaker like "Shock and Awe", which attacks the war like nothing I've ever heard. Few songs about the Vietnam War pack the punch of "Shock and Awe," which highlights Young's grungy electric guitar and a trumpet solo to honor the dead. But this song will never be played at a funeral. Change the lyrics and you could play it at a fraternity party.

Living With War also attacks us, who voted for George W. Bush. Well, I sure as hell didn't, but over 50 million people did. "We had a chance to change our mind," Young sings. He carries this theme to "Restless Consumer" which covers how we are amusing ourselves to death. But if any "patriotic" ding-dong attacks Neil Young for anti-American sentiment, play him "Families" and "Flags of Freedom", songs which place sympathy where it belongs, not with the warmongers and the little men who wanted this war but with the soldiers and their families. The title track's not bad, either.

Living With War was supposed to be a dated document by now. That didn't happen because the war is raging on and no one knows how to end it. Soldiers are coming home every day in body bags and the lives of their loved ones have changed forever because George W. Bush wanted a war to call his own and he whipped up support among the American public which still thinks the government tells us the truth whenever it places soldiers in harm's way. There is little we can do when a pathological killer is sitting in the White House but protest and bitch and moan. If you're tired of bitching and moaning, get your hands on Living With War. Buy two copies, in fact.

Jerry Falwell dies at age 73. The people who claim the moral high ground most often are those who have no moral scruples at all. The following summary is from the Carpetbagger Report:

March 1980: Falwell tells an Anchorage rally about a conversation with President Carter at the White House. Commenting on a January breakfast meeting, Falwell claimed to have asked Carter why he had “practicing homosexuals” on the senior staff at the White House. According to Falwell, Carter replied, “Well, I am president of all the American people, and I believe I should represent everyone.” When others who attended the White House event insisted that the exchange never happened, Falwell responded that his account “was not intended to be a verbatim report,” but rather an “honest portrayal” of Carter’s position.

August 1980: After Southern Baptist Convention President Bailey Smith tells a Dallas Religious Right gathering that “God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew,” Falwell gives a similar view. “I do not believe,” he told reporters, “that God answers the prayer of any unredeemed Gentile or Jew.” After a meeting with an American Jewish Committee rabbi, he changed course, telling an interviewer on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that “God hears the prayers of all persons…. God hears everything.”

July 1984: Falwell is forced to pay gay activist Jerry Sloan $5,000 after losing a court battle. During a TV debate in Sacramento, Falwell denied calling the gay-oriented Metropolitan Community Churches “brute beasts” and “a vile and Satanic system” that will “one day be utterly annihilated and there will be a celebration in heaven.” When Sloan insisted he had a tape, Falwell promised $5,000 if he could produce it. Sloan did so, Falwell refused to pay and Sloan successfully sued. Falwell appealed, with his attorney charging that the Jewish judge in the case was prejudiced. He lost again and was forced to pay an additional $2,875 in sanctions and court fees.

October 1987: The Federal Election Commission fines Falwell for transferring $6.7 million in funds intended for his ministry to political committees.

February 1988: The U.S. Supreme Court strikes down a $200,000 jury award to Falwell for “emotional distress” he suffered because of a Hustler magazine parody. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, usually a Falwell favorite, wrote the unanimous opinion in Hustler v. Falwell, ruling that the First Amendment protects free speech.

February 1993: The Internal Revenue Service determines that funds from Falwell’s Old Time Gospel Hour program were illegally funneled to a political action committee. The IRS forced Falwell to pay $50,000 and retroactively revoked the Old Time Gospel Hour’s tax-exempt status for 1986-87.

March 1993: Despite his promise to Jewish groups to stop referring to America as a “Christian nation,” Falwell gives a sermon saying, “We must never allow our children to forget that this is a Christian nation. We must take back what is rightfully ours.”

1994-1995: Falwell is criticized for using his “Old Time Gospel Hour” to hawk a scurrilous video called “The Clinton Chronicles” that makes a number of unsubstantiated charges against President Bill Clinton — among them that he is a drug addict and that he arranged the murders of political enemies in Arkansas. Despite claims he had no ties to the project, evidence surfaced that Falwell helped bankroll the venture with $200,000 paid to a group called Citizens for Honest Government (CHG). CHG’s Pat Matrisciana later admitted that Falwell and he staged an infomercial interview promoting the video in which a silhouetted reporter said his life was in danger for investigating Clinton. (Matrisciana himself posed as the reporter.) “That was Jerry’s idea to do that,” Matrisciana recalled. “He thought that would be dramatic.”

November 1997: Falwell accepts $3.5 million from a front group representing controversial Korean evangelist Sun Myung Moon to ease Liberty University’s financial woes.

April 1998: Confronted on national television with a controversial quote from America Can Be Saved!, a published collection of his sermons, Falwell denies having written the book or had anything to do with it. In the 1979 work, Falwell wrote, “I hope to live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won’t have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be!” Despite Falwell’s denial, Sword of the Lord Publishing, which produced the book, confirms that Falwell wrote it.

January 1999: Falwell tells a pastors’ conference in Kingsport, Tenn., that the Antichrist prophesied in the Bible is alive today and “of course he’ll be Jewish.”

February 1999: Falwell becomes the object of nationwide ridicule after his National Liberty Journal newspaper issues a “parents alert” warning that Tinky Winky, a character on the popular PBS children’s show “Teletubbies,” might be gay.

September 2001: Falwell blames Americans for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. “The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the Pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.’”

November 2005: Falwell spearheads campaign to resist “war on Christmas.”

February 2007: Falwell describes global warming as a conspiracy orchestrated by Satan, liberals, and The Weather Channel.

Say what you will about the man and his life, but he leaves behind a colorful background.

Aren't you tired of Rudy Guiliani riding September 11 to the White House? Rudy's claim to fame that day was being in the Mayor's office when the planes attacked. He gave some speeches on television that day and told everyone to calm down and that things would be all right. I guess from the standpoint of a child watching his father tell the family that the storm has passed that Rudy's performance that day was responsible, but many firefighters think Rudy screwed up so badly during the Ground Zero cleanup that they's like to slap him around.

The media is starting to ask questions about Rudy's performance before and after September 11. For a good account of pre-September 11 screw-ups which reflected near total disregard for terrorism, read Wayne Barrett's recent book "Grand Illusion."

For good summary of what Rudy did wrong after September 11, read this long article from the New York Times this week about the health risks suffered by firefighters and others who handled the cleanup. Riding September 11 to the White House is bad enough, but when you placed everyone at risk of permanent health damage, that's another can of wax entirely. If you want to save time, read the last two paragraphs of the story, below.

May 14, 2007 Ground Zero Illnesses Clouding Giuliani’s Legacy

By ANTHONY DePALMA

Anyone who watched Rudolph W. Giuliani preside over ground zero in the days after 9/11 glimpsed elements of his strength: decisiveness, determination, self-confidence.

Those qualities were also on display over the months he directed the cleanup of the collapsed World Trade Center. But today, with evidence that thousands of people who worked at ground zero have become sick, many regard Mr. Giuliani’s triumph of leadership as having come with a human cost.

An examination of Mr. Giuliani’s handling of the extraordinary recovery operation during his last months in office shows that he seized control and largely limited the influence of experienced federal agencies. In doing that, according to some experts and many of those who worked in the trade center’s ruins, Mr. Giuliani might have allowed his sense of purpose to trump caution in the rush to prove that his city was not crippled by the attack.

Administration documents and thousands of pages of legal testimony filed in a lawsuit against New York City, along with more than two dozen interviews with people involved in the events of the last four months of Mr. Giuliani’s administration, show that while the city had a safety plan for workers, it never meaningfully enforced federal requirements that those at the site wear respirators.

At the same time, the administration warned companies working on the pile that they would face penalties or be fired if work slowed. And according to public hearing transcripts and unpublished administration records, officials also on some occasions gave flawed public representations of the nature of the health threat, even as they privately worried about exposure to lawsuits by sickened workers.

“The city ran a generally slipshod, haphazard, uncoordinated, unfocused response to environmental concerns,” said David Newman, an industrial hygienist with the New York Committee on Occupational Safety and Health, a labor group.

City officials and a range of medical experts are now convinced that the dust and toxic materials in the air around the site were a menace. More than 2,000 New York City firefighters have been treated for serious respiratory problems. Seventy percent of nearly 10,000 recovery workers screened at Mount Sinai Medical Center have trouble breathing. City officials estimate that health care costs related to the air at ground zero have already run into the hundreds of millions of dollars, and no one knows whether other illnesses, like cancers, will emerge.

The question of who, if anyone, is to blame for not adequately protecting the workers could finally be decided in United States District Court in Manhattan, where thousands of firefighters, police officers and other recovery workers are suing the city for negligence.

City officials have always maintained that they acted in good faith to protect everyone at the site but that many workers chose not to wear available safety equipment, for a variety of reasons.

Mr. Giuliani has said very little publicly about how his leadership might have influenced the behavior of the men and women who worked at ground zero. Mr. Giuliani, whose image as a 9/11 hero has been a focus of his run for president, declined to be interviewed for this article. His representatives did not respond to specific questions about the pace of the cleanup, the hazards at the site and Mr. Giuliani’s reticence about the workers’ illnesses.

Moreover, many of the people who ran agencies for Mr. Giuliani or who handled responsibility for the health issues after he left office would not comment, citing the pending litigation.

In the past, Mr. Giuliani has said that quickly reopening the financial district was essential for healing New York and the nation. The cost of Wall Street’s going dark was enormous, and Mr. Giuliani has said he was forced to balance competing interests as he confronted a never-imagined emergency, and he acknowledged that he and others made mistakes.

A Mayor in Control

From the beginning, there was no doubt that Mr. Giuliani and his team ruled the hellish disaster site. Officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Army Corps of Engineers and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, all with extensive disaster response experience, arrived almost immediately, only to be placed on the sideline. One Army Corps official said Mr. Giuliani acted like a “benevolent dictator.”

Despite the presence of those federal experts, Mr. Giuliani assigned the ground zero cleanup to a largely unknown city agency, the Department of Design and Construction. Kenneth Holden, the department’s commissioner until January 2004, said in a deposition in the federal lawsuit against the city that he initially expected FEMA or the Army Corps to try to take over the cleanup operation. Mr. Giuliani never let them.

In this environment, the mayor’s take-charge attitude produced two clear results, according to records and interviews. One, work moved quickly. Although the cleanup was expected to last 30 months, the pit was cleared by June 2002, nine months after the attack.

And second, the city ultimately became responsible for thousands of workers and volunteers while, critics say, its health and safety standards went lacking.

“I would describe it as a conspiracy of purpose,” said Suzanne Mattei, director of the New York office of the Sierra Club, which has been critical of how the cleanup was handled. “It wasn’t people running around saying, ‘Don’t do this safely.’ But there was a unified attempt to do everything as fast as possible, to get everything up and running as fast as possible. Anything in the way of that just tended to be ignored.”

Records show that the city was aware of the danger in the ground zero dust from the start. In a federal court deposition, Kelly R. McKinney, associate commissioner at the city’s health department in 2001, said the agency issued an advisory on the night of Sept. 11 stating that asbestos in the air made the site hazardous and that everyone should wear masks.

Many workers refused. No one wanted to be slowed down while there was still a chance of rescuing people. Later on, workers said that the available respirators were cumbersome and made it difficult for them to talk.

Violations of federal safety rules abounded, and no one strictly enforced them. OSHA did not play an active role during the rescue phase, which is usually the case in emergency operations. But the agency remained in a strictly advisory position long after there was any hope of finding any survivors and at the point when, in other circumstances, it would have enforced safety requirements.

Agency officials said that enforcing rules and issuing fines would have delayed the cleanup, and contractors could have passed along the cost of the fines to the city.

With the city in charge, municipal employees were given video cameras to record recovery workers who were not wearing respirators. Violations were reported at daily safety meetings.

An official who was then with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, who asked not to be quoted by name because he was not authorized to speak for the agency, said the focus in safety discussions was always on preventing accidents, not protecting workers from the toxic dust.

Remarkably, not one fatal accident occurred on the pile. But the city’s inspectors found that by late October, only 29 percent of ground zero workers were wearing the sophisticated respirators that were required by OSHA. Even Mr. Giuliani sometimes showed up without one.

The city’s handling of safety issues has been criticized by doctors, unions and occupational safety experts. Mr. Giuliani’s oversight of the operation was condemned in a 2006 book, “Grand Illusion,” by Wayne Barrett, a longtime critic of the former mayor, and Dan Collins. Mr. Barrett said in an interview that when it came to safety, Mr. Giuliani “said all the right things, but did all the wrong things.”

In their defense against the negligence lawsuit, city officials have maintained that they cooperated with federal officials to develop an effective safety plan. On Nov. 20, well into the cleanup, contractors and city agencies agreed to follow safety rules, and OSHA agreed not to fine them if violations occurred.

The agency ended up distributing more than 130,000 respirators. Workers’ unions tried to get members to wear them, but usage remained spotty without strict enforcement of the rules.

“What they were doing on paper wasn’t what they were doing in practice,” said Paul J. Napoli, one of the lawyers representing the more than 8,000 workers who have sued the city for negligence. He said that the construction companies were billing the city for their time and materials, and “safety slows things down.”

The four large construction companies that had been hired to clear debris worked around the clock. But that was not fast enough for the city, especially after the rescue operation formally ended on Sept. 29. One reason for the push may have been concern that unnecessary delays would have added to the cost of the cleanup.

Two days after the rescue efforts ended and the full-scale recovery and cleanup began, Michael Burton, executive deputy commissioner of the Design and Construction Department, warned one of the companies in a letter that the city would fire individual workers or companies “if the highest level of efficiency is not maintained.”

Danger in the Air

Much has been said and written about Christie Whitman, then the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, and her statement a week after the towers fell that the air in New York was safe. But even then, the air above the debris pile was known to be more dangerous than the air in the rest of Lower Manhattan.

In those first days after 9/11, Mr. Giuliani made it clear that workers needed to wear masks at ground zero because it was more contaminated than elsewhere. But as time went on, and workers failed to heed the warnings, the record indicates that his administration sometimes said otherwise.

Even after the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health found that workers were “unnecessarily exposed” to health hazards, officials played down the danger.

Robert Adams, director of environmental health and safety services at the Design and Construction Department, told the City Council’s environmental committee in early November that even unprotected ground zero workers would not experience long-term health risks. In an interview last week, Mr. Adams, now working for a consulting firm in Princeton, N.J., said that he still believed that based on the information available at the time, the right decisions were made.

Whatever they were saying publicly about the safety of the air, Mr. Giuliani and his staff were privately worried. A memo to Deputy Mayor Robert M. Harding from his assistant in early October said that the city faced as many as 10,000 liability claims connected to 9/11, “including toxic tort cases that might arise in the next few decades.”

The warning did not lead to a crackdown on workers without respirators. Rather, a month later, Mr. Giuliani wrote to members of the city’s Congressional delegation urging passage of a bill that capped the city’s liability at $350 million. And two years after Mr. Giuliani left office, FEMA appropriated $1 billion for a special insurance company to defend the city against 9/11 lawsuits.

Some experts and critics have suggested that the only way the respirator rules could have been enforced after rescue operations ended would have been to temporarily shut down the site and lay down the law: No respirator, no work. And they say the only person who could have done so was Mr. Giuliani.

“They should have backed off on the night shift, when a very limited amount of work could be done,” said Charles Blaich, who was in charge of safety for the Fire Department at the time of the attack.

Mr. Blaich, who is now retired, said he considers Mr. Giuliani’s unwillingness to enforce respirator rules a failure of judgment, not a mistake, because no one had ever faced such a crisis.

“ ‘Mistake’ indicates there was a known procedure that wasn’t followed,” he said. “There just was not that much logistics in place to support another course of action.”

Help for the Sick

Millions of Americans saw television news reports of Mr. Giuliani attending firefighters’ funerals. They heard him call those who died heroes.

But they have not heard him say much about the medical problems of ground zero workers. Although he pushed Congress to protect the city from lawsuits, he has generally stood on the sidelines as New York’s delegation tried to get the federal government to pay for the treatment that sick workers need.

“I don’t think I ever saw the mayor at a 9/11 hearing on health,” said Representative Jerrold Nadler, a Democrat whose district includes parts of Brooklyn and Manhattan. Mr. Nadler, who was one of the first to criticize the city’s handling of ground zero, said it never occurred to him or to other Democrats in Congress to ask for Mr. Giuliani’s help to influence the Republican White House.

John T. Odermatt, who was Mr. Giuliani’s deputy at the city’s Office of Emergency Management, said that Mr. Giuliani had to make many decisions every day during the crisis, but the priority always was “clearly more about people than getting the site open.”

Mr. Odermatt, now speaking on behalf of Mr. Giuliani’s presidential campaign, said he did not know whether the former mayor had ever lobbied Congress on behalf of sick workers, and the campaign did not provide any information about Mr. Giuliani’s working to secure federal funds for treatment of ground zero responders. Many of those people are now sick, and they are angry.

Lee Clarke, director of health and safety for District Council 37, the city’s largest public employees’ union, said Mr. Giuliani used “very, very poor judgment” in rushing to reopen the financial district without watching out for the workers who cheered him at ground zero.

Ms. Clarke said that if those workers found themselves in a meeting with Mr. Giuliani today, “a number of them would be standing up, wanting a piece of Rudy.”

"Bedside manner" is a phrase that refers to how the doctor treats you when you're in the hospital and he stops by to see how you're doing. A doctor with good bedside manner sits down and answers all of your questions so that you don't need a medical dictionary to understand what he's staying. Bad bedside manner is when the doctor only comes into your hospital room to look for cigarettes.

The best stories about bad bedside manner involve political figures who take advantage of the sick guy when he's hitting the morphine pump and hallucinating. Recently, a former Bush administration official gave public testimony about this kind of bedside manner in the context of the administration's wiretapping program, which came under fire because the New York Times discovered that it authorized wiretapping of U.S. citizens without a warrant.

The media was not alone in objecting to the wiretapping program. Some lawyers working for the Bush administration felt the same way. One of those lawyers was James Comey, who held the prestigious job of chief Federal prosecutor in New York City. When he was designated Acting Attorney General once John Ashcroft was out of commission due to gall bladder surgery, he said "No" when asked to reauthorize the wiretapping program. Technically, when Ashcroft was in the hospital, Comey was Attorney General. The problem was that Comey thought the wiretapping program was against the law, and he would not re-authorize it.

What happened next will interest anyone who thinks the Bush administration is staffed with nutjobs and other like-minded people. The whole story is here, but here are some excerpts if you are reading this while driving.

On the night of March 10, 2004, as Attorney General John D. Ashcroft lay ill in an intensive-care unit, his deputy, James B. Comey, received an urgent call.

White House Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales and President Bush's chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., were on their way to the hospital to persuade Ashcroft to reauthorize Bush's domestic surveillance program, which the Justice Department had just determined was illegal.

In vivid testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday, Comey said he alerted FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and raced, sirens blaring, to join Ashcroft in his hospital room, arriving minutes before Gonzales and Card. Ashcroft, summoning the strength to lift his head and speak, refused to sign the papers they had brought. Gonzales and Card, who had never acknowledged Comey's presence in the room, turned and left.

The sickbed visit was the start of a dramatic showdown between the White House and the Justice Department in early 2004 that, according to Comey, was resolved only when Bush overruled Gonzales and Card. But that was not before Ashcroft, Comey, Mueller and their aides prepared a mass resignation, Comey said. The domestic spying by the National Security Agency continued for several weeks without Justice approval, he said.

Comey testified that he drove his car as fast as he could to the hospital when he learned that Alberto Gonzalez (White House Counsel) and Andrew Card (Chief of Staff) were on their way to get Ashcroft to sign the re-authorization. This was Comey's call, not Ashcroft's, because Comey was filling in for Ashcroft who was lying in agony in his hospital bed.

The crisis in March 2004 stemmed from a review of the program by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, which raised "concerns as to our ability to certify its legality," according to Comey's testimony. Ashcroft was briefed on the findings on March 4 and agreed that changes needed to be made, Comey said.

That afternoon, Ashcroft was rushed to George Washington University Hospital with a severe case of gallstone pancreatitis; on March 9, his gallbladder was removed. The standoff between Justice and White House officials came the next night, after Comey had refused to certify the surveillance program on the eve of its 45-day reauthorization deadline, he testified.

About 8 p.m. on March 10, Comey said that his security detail was driving him home when he received an urgent call from Ashcroft's chief of staff, David Ayres, who had just received an anxious call from Ashcroft's wife, Janet. The White House -- possibly the president -- had called, and Card and Gonzales were on their way.

Furious, Comey said he ordered his security detail to turn the car toward the hospital, careening down Constitution Avenue. Comey said he raced up the stairs of the hospital with his staff, beating Card and Gonzales to Ashcroft's room.

"I was concerned that, given how ill I knew the attorney general was, that there might be an effort to ask him to overrule me when he was in no condition to do that," Comey said, saying that Ashcroft "seemed pretty bad off."

Comey said he was angry because "I thought I just witnessed an effort to take advantage of a very sick man, who did not have the powers of the attorney general because they had been transferred to me."

When they all got to the hospital room, Gonzalez and Card and Comey were standing around Ashcroft's bed. According to the Washington Post which summarized Comey's testimony, "Gonzales [was] holding an envelope that contained the executive order for the program. Comey said that, after listening to their entreaties, Ashcroft rebuffed the White House aides. 'He lifted his head off the pillow and in very strong terms expressed his view of the matter, rich in both substance and fact, which stunned me,' Comey said. Then, he said, Ashcroft added: 'But that doesn't matter, because I'm not the attorney general. There is the attorney general,' and pointed at Comey, who was appointed acting attorney general when Ashcroft fell ill."

In the end, this all didn't matter. Bush signed the Executive Order re-authorizing the wiretapping program despite objections from his lawyers as to its legality. Comey quit the next day.

The guy who tried to take advantage of a sick man in the hospital was Alberto Gonzalez. Today he's the Attorney General!

The Democratic Party has once again given George W. Bush whatever he wants to continue the Iraq War. No one has the guts to say Enough. Bush gets what he wants, and the military gets what it wants, too. The only angry voice in the mainstream media speaking out is Keith Olbermann, once against devoting a Special Comment to the mess in Washington and Iraq. You tell 'em, Keith. Click here for the video.

Transcript:

This is, in fact, a comment about… betrayal.

Few men or women elected in our history-whether executive or legislative, state or national-have been sent into office with a mandate more obvious, nor instructions more clear: Get us out of Iraq.

Yet after six months of preparation and execution-half a year gathering the strands of public support; translating into action, the collective will of the nearly 70 percent of Americans who reject this War of Lies, the Democrats have managed only this:

* The Democratic leadership has surrendered to a president-if not the worst president, then easily the most selfish, in our history-who happily blackmails his own people, and uses his own military personnel as hostages to his asinine demand, that the Democrats "give the troops their money";

* The Democratic leadership has agreed to finance the deaths of Americans in a war that has only reduced the security of Americans;

* The Democratic leadership has given Mr. Bush all that he wanted, with the only caveat being, not merely meaningless symbolism about benchmarks for the Iraqi government, but optional meaningless symbolism about benchmarks for the Iraqi government.

* The Democratic leadership has, in sum, claimed a compromise with the Administration, in which the only things truly compromised, are the trust of the voters, the ethics of the Democrats, and the lives of our brave, and doomed, friends, and family, in Iraq.

You, the men and women elected with the simplest of directions-Stop The War-have traded your strength, your bargaining position, and the uniform support of those who elected you… for a handful of magic beans.

You may trot out every political cliché from the soft-soap, inside-the-beltway dictionary of boilerplate sound bites, about how this is the "beginning of the end" of Mr. Bush's "carte blanche" in Iraq, about how this is a "first step."
Well, Senator Reid, the only end at its beginning… is our collective hope that you and your colleagues would do what is right, what is essential, what you were each elected and re-elected to do.

Because this "first step"… is a step right off a cliff.

And this President!

How shameful it would be to watch an adult hold his breath, and threaten to continue to do so, until he turned blue.

But how horrifying it is to watch a President hold his breath and threaten to continue to do so, until innocent and patriotic Americans in harm's way, are bled white.

You lead this country, sir?

You claim to defend it?

And yet when faced with the prospect of someone calling you on your stubbornness–your stubbornness which has cost 3,431 Americans their lives and thousands more their limbs–you, Mr. Bush, imply that if the Democrats don't give you the money and give it to you entirely on your terms, the troops in Iraq will be stranded, or forced to serve longer, or have to throw bullets at the enemy with their bare hands.

How transcendentally, how historically, pathetic.

Any other president from any other moment in the panorama of our history would have, at the outset of this tawdry game of political chicken, declared that no matter what the other political side did, he would insure personally-first, last and always-that the troops would not suffer.

A President, Mr. Bush, uses the carte blanche he has already, not to manipulate an overlap of arriving and departing brigades into a ‘second surge,' but to say in unequivocal terms that if it takes every last dime of the monies already allocated, if it takes reneging on government contracts with Halliburton, he will make sure the troops are safe-even if the only safety to be found, is in getting them the hell out of there.

Well, any true President would have done that, sir.

You instead, used our troops as political pawns, then blamed the Democrats when you did so.

Not that these Democrats, who had this country's support and sympathy up until 48 hours ago, have not since earned all the blame they can carry home.

"We seem to be very near the bleak choice between war and shame," Winston Churchill wrote to Lord Moyne in the days after the British signed the Munich accords with Germany in 1938. "My feeling is that we shall choose shame, and then have war thrown in, a little later…"

That's what this is for the Democrats, isn't it?

Their "Neville Chamberlain moment" before the Second World War. All that's missing is the landing at the airport, with the blinkered leader waving a piece of paper which he naively thought would guarantee "peace in our time," but which his opponent would ignore with deceit.

The Democrats have merely streamlined the process.

Their piece of paper already says Mr. Bush can ignore it, with impugnity.

And where are the Democratic presidential hopefuls this evening? See they not, that to which the Senate and House leadership has blinded itself?

Judging these candidates based on how they voted on the original Iraq authorization, or waiting for apologies for those votes, is ancient history now.

The Democratic nomination is likely to be decided… tomorrow.

The talk of practical politics, the buying into of the President's dishonest construction "fund-the-troops-or-they-will-be-in-jeopardy," the promise of tougher action in September, is falling not on deaf ears, but rather falling on Americans who already told you what to do, and now perceive your ears as closed to practical politics.

Those who seek the Democratic nomination need to-for their own political futures and, with a thousand times more solemnity and importance, for the individual futures of our troops-denounce this betrayal, vote against it, and, if need be, unseat Majority Leader Reid and Speaker Pelosi if they continue down this path of guilty, fatal acquiescence to the tragically misguided will of a monomaniacal president.

For, ultimately, at this hour, the entire government has failed us.

* Mr. Reid, Mr. Hoyer, and the other Democrats… have failed us. They negotiated away that which they did not own, but had only been entrusted by us to protect: our collective will as the citizens of this country, that this brazen War of Lies be ended as rapidly and safely as possible.

* Mr. Bush and his government… have failed us. They have behaved venomously and without dignity-of course.
That is all at which Mr. Bush is gifted.

We are the ones providing any element of surprise or shock here.

With the exception of Senator Dodd and Senator Edwards, the Democratic presidential candidates have (so far at least) failed us.

They must now speak, and make plain how they view what has been given away to Mr. Bush, and what is yet to be given away tomorrow, and in the thousand tomorrows to come.

Because for the next fourteen months, the Democratic nominating process–indeed the whole of our political discourse until further notice–has, with the stroke of a cursed pen, become about one thing, and one thing alone.
The electorate figured this out, six months ago.

The President and the Republicans have not-doubtless will not.

The Democrats will figure it out, during the Memorial Day recess, when they go home and many of those who elected them will politely suggest they stay there-and permanently.

Because, on the subject of Iraq the people have been ahead of the media….

Ahead of the government…

Ahead of the politicians…

For the last year, or two years, or maybe three.

Our politics… is now about the answer to one briefly-worded question.

Mr. Bush has failed.

Mr. Warner has failed.

Mr. Reid has failed.

So. Who among us will stop this war-this War of Lies? To he or she, fall the figurative keys to the nation.

To all the others-presidents and majority leaders and candidates and rank-and-file Congressmen and Senators of either party-there is only blame… for this shameful, and bi-partisan, betrayal.

Taking on West Point is like taking on a mountain. West Point is the most prestiguous military installation in the country. Located about 50 miles north of New York City on the Hudson River, it is certainly the premier institution in Orange County. As a high-visibility military institution, it's not just a training ground but a college campus and cultural center. It attracts well known government officials who use graduation ceremonies to articulate policy. It also attracts anti-war protesters when people like Vice President Cheney address graduating cadets.

Over the last few weeks I have (without charge) handled an emergency lawsuit on behalf of anti-war protesters who want to protest Cheney's graduation address, scheduled for today (May 25). Everyone knows that when presidential administrations speak at West Point, they use it as a bully pulpit to promote their war policies. George W. Bush unveiled the pre-emptive war doctrine at West Point graduation in 2002. God knows what the attack dog in the Vice President's office will say today. Thanks to some recent court rulings, Cheney will say whatever he wants without any opposition.

In the past, anti-war protesters marched outside of West Point, in the neighboring village. There was never any violence or disorder. This time around, because Cheney was speaking at commencement, they wanted to march inside West Point, around a large field about three quarters of a mile from the football stadium where Cheney will tell future military officers that the Iraq War is central to our existance as a democracy and that the war critics are full of shit and hate America. Of course, he won't put it quite that way, but there's no telling what this ideologue will say in order to rally the troops.

You know that the protesters would have been on their best behavior if they got to march on West Point property. But West Point told the war protesters that they can't march there, so we filed the lawsuit on May 15, 2007. The judge decided not to take West Point at its word that the march would interfere with security so he scheduled a trial on the issue for May 17, 2007. We were optimistic -- rarely do the courts actually agree to hear evidence on an issue like this. Courts usually just throw out lawsuits challenging military speech policies on the theory that protests at military installations threaten soldier loyalty, security, morale, etc.

In the end, the trial judge agreed wholeheartedly with West Point's theory that the march on graduation day would strain West Point security, and the court actually speculated that anti-war marchers create special security concerns even though West Point invites over 20,000 people to watch graduation in the football stadium, in close proximity to Dick Cheney. But the judge left open the possibility that West Point might have to allow a protest march on some other day with fewer security concerns. While the military gets the benefit of the doubt in censoring speech, the judge reasoned, that doesn't mean West Point can always deny permission to march out of hand.

A few days later I was in the Court of Appeals, asking the panel of three judges to reverse the trial court and allow the march to proceed inside West Point. Most lawsuits don't move this fast; cases get argued on appeal maybe a year after they are filed. But this was an emergency case and time was of the essence. Within 2 minutes of the oral argument, it was clear we would lose the appeal. The judges said flat-out that you can't have any protests at West Point and that the marchers have no wiggle room in claiming the protest was carefully planned in advance and would only last about an hour, far from Cheney and the graduates who probably would not even know the protest was taking place. Yesterday, two days after I argued the appeal, the Court of Appeals rushed out a decision upholding West Point's right to deny protesters the right to enter the property.

What does it all mean? It means that the people that I represented in court had the guts to take on West Point at a time when Cheney can no longer be allowed to spew his propaganda in support of a war disaster that has no end in sight and is killing American soldiers every day. It also means that while our society claims to support free speech and the right to protest, we really only give those values lip service. You can do whatever you want in the public square, but bring your message to the policymakers (like graduation, where policies are sometimes articulated for the first time) on hallowed ground like West Point and you are better off talking to a mayonnaise jar.

Here is the news article reporting on our loss at the Court of Appeals. My fatalist quotation in the article was this: "No other institution in our society enjoys the deference that the military establishment enjoys," [Bergstein] said. "There are things you can't do in our society, and protesting at a military institution is one of them. It's a shame because they invite Cheney and he can say whatever he wants."

Protesting Cheney at West Point would not have stopped the war, but it damn sure would have reminded everyone that more Americans than ever before oppose this war which continues to kill Americans and Iraqis and deplete the national treasury, not to mention increase the risk of another terror attack on U.S. soil.

It's hard to keep up with the continuous revelations about pre-war negligence and recklessness. Today's story is the classified report that predicted the Iraq War would have precisely the negative consequences that unfolded. Check out this bombshell, courtesy of ThinkProgress.org:

The U.S. intelligence community’s pre-war clairvoyance is notable. While there was originally no link between al Qaeda and Iraq, they accurately predicted how a U.S. invasion would ignite Islamic sentiment against the U.S., allowing terrorists networks like al Qaeda to resurge elsewhere and disrupt regional stability. Some highlights of the report:

“A stable democratic government in postwar Iraq would be a long, difficult, and probably turbulent challenge.”

“Al Qa’ida probably would see an opportunity to accelerate its operational tempo and increase terrorist attacks during and after a U.S.-Iraq war.”

“Rogue ex-regime elements could forge an alliance with existing terrorist organizations or act independently to wage guerilla warfare against the new government or Coalition forces.”

“A US-led defeat and occupation of Arab Iraq would boost proponents of political Islam and would result in ‘calls for the people of the region to unite and build up defenses against the West.’”

“Funds for terrorist groups probably would increase as a result of Muslim outrage over US action.”

But like several other reports, the Bush administration dismissed these predictions. “The committee also found that the warnings predicting what would happen after the U.S.-led invasion were circulated widely in government, including to the Defense Department and the Office of the Vice President.”

A news reporter asked Bush yesterday why the American public should deem him credible on the war. Bush answered, "I'm credible because I read the intelligence." Click here for the video.

That's bullshit. Bush does not read any of the intelligence. Cheney does. Cheney knew in pushing for war that it would increase, not decrease terror, and that "Al Qa’ida probably would see an opportunity to accelerate its operational tempo and increase terrorist attacks during and after a U.S.-Iraq war." But who cared? The administration wanted war so badly nobody cared about the consequences.

What I told the Associated Press is true. The military gets whatever it wants. It gets billions and billions of dollars to fight a war that never should have started and no one knows how to end. It gets a fresh supply of young American soldiers who can die tomorrow from a roadside bomb, and then it gets more young Americans to die, and when they die, even more Americans are sent to Iraq. It gets to promote its war policies without significant opposition. The war critics will be attacked as un-patriotic and un-American. But what's really un-American is the national policy -- recognized by the courts -- that makes it impossible to protest a horrific war policy at the country's premier military installation and institution.

The "America: love it or leave it" crowd loves Fox News, which bills itself as America's news channel. Rational news consumers know that Fox is a Republican conduit. How bad is it? Imagine sitting at the Fox News conference table as the editors talk about the news of the day:

EDITOR 1: OK, what are we leading with tonight? Ten more U.S. soldiers dead today from a roadside bomb. Ya wanna go with that?

EDITOR 2: Well, Anna Nicole Smith's former boyfriend turned up today. He said that Anna was over-prescribed prescription drugs. We also have some new footage of Anna Nicole in a bikini.

EDITOR 1: OK, screw the war, we're going with Anna Nicole Smith tonight.

This conversation must have gone down at Fox News. According to a new study, Fox devoted more airtime to the Anna Nicole Smith soap opera than the Iraq War which is giving Memorial Day new meaning and placing this country at greater risk of another terror attack. Of the three major cable news networks, Fox covered the Iraq War the least and Anna Nicole the most. Fox, by the way, is obsessed with the theory that most American media is too liberal and does not support the troops.

Four years ago, a few months after the Iraq War started, a survey established that Fox News viewers were less informed about current events than other news consumers. The study also drew a connection between this misinformation and support for the war. We have to bury our children because a substantial portion of the American public does not know what's going on. This same segment of the population is most vocal in support of President Bush and the war. Just tune into Fox News or right wing talk radio for the evidence.

In 1985, Neil Postman wrote a book called "Amusing Ourselves to Death." His point was that television's obsession with celebrity and trivia was destroying our national discourse on current events. Twenty-two years ago, there was no Internet and only one cable news outlet, CNN. Today the national discourse is getting much worse. This country was not at war in 1985, though the country did elect a clown in the form of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and gave him another four years in 1984. Today, we have taken many steps backwards, handing the presidency to a man both intellectually and temperamentally unsuited for the position.

The media does not speak to us; it speaks and yells at us. Most of the news on television is crap, devoid of context or any meaning.The presidential campaigns have devolved into name-calling and propaganda as the candidates appeal to the lowest common denominator. I have no doubt that if the media took its job seriously over the last seven years this country would not be in Iraq and Bush would have been removed from office by now. Today, more people know about Bill Clinton's Monica than George W. Bush's Monica. Bill's Monica nearly ruined his marriage. George's Monica nearly destroyed the Justice Department. Bill's Monica got him impeached. George's Monica gets a free pass.

Can one man make all the difference? He can if he sits on the Supreme Court. People who only casually follow the Supreme Court don't realize how many important decisions are decided by a 5-4 vote. That fifth vote is the tie-breaker on cases involving the First Amendment, presidential power and civil rights. It happened again this week in a decision that made it more difficult for workers to sue their employers for pay discrimination.

In the Ledbetter case, a female employee sued her employer because men were being paid more money. Under the civil rights laws in Ledbetter's state, she had to file her complaint of discrimination in 180 days. She didn't. Instead, she filed it after it became clear that she was the victim of discrimination. In some cases, like sexual harassment, the worker can technically violate the 180 day rule if the "hostile work environment" looks more and more like sexual harassment after 180 days.

The Supreme Court said that pay discrimination is not like sexual harassment because, like cases involving the failure to promote or wrongful termination, the worker knows right away that she is being discriminated against. Except that pay discrimination is more subtle than termination or failure to promote. Employees don't even know what their co-workers are making, and the pattern of pay discrimination takes time. It's not as obvious as being termined.

The Supreme Court rejected the argument that pay discrimination is too subtle to hold the worker to the 180 day limit. So the worker in that case is out of luck. This 5-4 decision was handed down courtesy of the Bush administration, which replaced the more pragmatic Sandra Day O'Connor with the more rigid Samuel Alito. O'Connor liked parsing through the nuances in the law, but hard-liners like Alito will take it down another road. That road means that employees have to jump the gun if they suspect discrimination at work, rather than wait it out to see if the discrimination is real.

Love may be fleeting, but Supreme Court decisions are forever. One President can appoint enough people to the Court to make a real difference in how the law is interpreted. A 5-4 decision may seem razor thin, but a concrete interpretation of the law means the ruling is binding on the courts no differently than a 9-0 decision. The employment discrimination laws are supposed to be broadly interpreted, but the Bush Supreme Court is heading in the opposite direction. In the past, when the Supreme Court issued a crampted interpretation of the employment discrimination laws, Congress amended the law and overruled the Supreme Court decision. Will that happen this time around? Doubtful. The Bush administration filed legal arguments with the Supreme Court in this case in opposition to the plaintiff's claim. Bush will never sign a law that favors plaintiffs in civil rights cases. Something to think about for the next presidential election.