Acorn’s Woes Strain Its Ties to Democrats

Last December, in one of his last acts as New York City’s top urban development official — and just days before President Obama nominated him as the federal housing secretary — Shaun Donovan attended a groundbreaking ceremony in the South Bronx.

A complex of 125 apartments had fallen into such disrepair that Bush administration housing officials had foreclosed on the building and transferred it to a group they and Mr. Donovan had come to trust: the New York Acorn Housing Company.

“These renovations will transform this once-troubled property into a remarkable asset,” Mr. Donovan declared in a city news release trumpeting the apartments’ “rescue” by Acorn and its development partners.

Now in Mr. Obama’s cabinet, Mr. Donovan is unwilling to speak publicly about that project or any other work with Acorn, a group with which he at times worked particularly closely during his five years as Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s housing development commissioner but whose missteps have allowed conservatives to cast it as a symbol of liberalism run amok.

Congress is pushing legislation ordering Mr. Donovan to cut off all Acorn-related grants, something he has declined to address. And he is staying clear of the organization’s leaders.

“I can’t get near him,” said Bertha Lewis, the Acorn chief executive, who frequently interacted with Mr. Donovan as Acorn’s New York leader until 2008.

The arc of Mr. Donovan’s relationship with Acorn traces the broader trajectory of its affiliation with the Democratic Party, exhibiting how deeply the group has been enmeshed in urban politics in New York and other large cities and how members of the Obama administration have been put on the defensive over past relationships with the group.

The relationship between Democrats and Acorn has always been as productive as it has been uneasy. In Acorn’s 40-year history, its voter registration drives and policy proposals on behalf of mostly poor and minority constituents have often redounded to the benefit of Democratic politicians and policy makers.

But its hot rhetoric, frequently heavy-handed approach and occasional legal stumbles have just as often proved an alienating liability easily exploited by Republicans.

That is especially the case now, with the presentation of videotapes in which conservative advocates posing as a pimp and a prostitute elicited advice on tax evasion at Acorn-affiliated offices — including one in New York — bringing a new round of recriminations and investigations. Many of Acorn’s onetime Democratic allies, including Mr. Obama, appear to have fled its side.

In publicizing Acorn’s foibles, conservative radio and cable television hosts frequently mention Mr. Obama’s previous interactions with its affiliates in Illinois, including a 1995 ballot-access lawsuit where he represented the group alongside the Justice Department. Mr. Obama’s campaign also hired an Acorn-affiliated get-out-the-vote subsidiary last year.

Yet the Obama administration’s closest contacts with Acorn come by way of New York.

Patrick Gaspard, the White House political director, worked with Acorn in New York to set up the Working Families political party and sat on the party’s board with Ms. Lewis when he was the top strategist for its ally, 1199 S.E.I.U. United Healthcare Workers East. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, in her campaigns for the Senate, and the White House urban policy czar, Adolfo Carrión Jr., formerly the Bronx borough president, ran on the party’s ballot lines.

Perhaps no administration official has had more interaction with Acorn than Mr. Donovan, Mr. Obama’s secretary of housing and urban development.

“We grew to respect him, and he grew to respect us,” Ms. Lewis said in an interview.

Mr. Donovan’s work with Acorn’s New York housing arm, glimpsed through two dozen interviews and a review of city documents, was by most accounts mutually beneficial, and showed a side of the group at variance with depictions of it by opponents as a “criminal enterprise.”

Even Bush administration HUD officials came to view some Acorn divisions as credible, awarding more than $40 million to national affiliates.

But throughout, there were hints of the side of Acorn that has made it politically toxic, “a less tightly run ship” — in the words of one city official — that engendered the same sort of suspicion and resentment dogging it now.

By the time Mr. Donovan joined the Bloomberg administration in 2004, Acorn’s housing wing was a well-established partner with the city in rehabilitating its affordable housing stock.

Under its leader, Ismene Speliotis, New York Acorn Housing Company Inc. developed an expertise that even officials in the Republican administration of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani — no fan of the group — grew to respect during the 1990s.

“These affordable-housing deals get really complicated, and you need a partner with a certain level of financial sophistication,” said Jerilyn Perine, a commissioner of the Department of Housing Preservation and Development under Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Bloomberg. “Ismene’s one of the best people for that.”

Mr. Donovan included Ms. Speliotis in a group of affordable housing specialists with whom he consulted frequently, current and former city officials said.

They worked closely to keep Starrett City in Brooklyn the nation’s largest federally supported middle-class housing complex when it went up for sale last year.

And she and Ms. Lewis appeared to help Mr. Donovan deliver a coup for Mr. Bloomberg in 2005 when Acorn endorsed a huge Brooklyn development he was supporting in the face of local opposition.

Acorn backed the plan in return for an unusual promise from the developer, Forest City Ratner, to make half of the 4,500 rental apartments that it was proposing — along with a new Nets basketball arena — available to poor and middle-class families at below-market rates.

The city’s agreement to help finance the plan, hammered out among Mr. Donovan, Ms. Speliotis and others, was hailed as a breakthrough for subsidizing a substantial amount of housing for an unusually broad range of middle-class tenants.

Ms. Lewis — a supporter of Mr. Bloomberg’s challenger that election year, Fernando Ferrer — celebrated by exuberantly kissing the mayor at a public ceremony.

The project’s opponents accused Acorn of selling out. (More recently, Forest City Ratner — a development partner with The New York Times on its new Manhattan headquarters — complied with Acorn’s plea for $1.5 million in grants and loans to help it restructure after an internal embezzlement scandal involving Dale Rathke, the brother of its founder, Wade Rathke.)

Friends said it was not the only time when Mr. Donovan felt as if Acorn had forced itself into an outsize role in development negotiations because of political power derived in part through its Working Families Party; the party was affiliated with many officials the developer was wooing.

“One difference with Acorn was their strong political connections to the influential Working Families Party,” said Ingrid Gould Ellen, a professor of public policy at New York University who is friendly with Mr. Donovan and served on the presidential transition team that selected him. “That sometimes helped in creating affordable housing, and sometimes made negotiations more difficult.”

Soon after Mr. Donovan left for Washington, a city-supported nonprofit he helped the mayor and the City Council start to stave off home foreclosures suspended a grant to Acorn’s mortgage counseling center based in Brooklyn because of incomplete record keeping.

It would become the least of the Brooklyn office’s troubles after the conservative filmmakers posing as a pimp and a prostitute — James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles — elicited advice from two of its counselors on how to secure a mortgage for a brothel.

Acorn fired the counselors and is reviewing its supervisory structure; the counselors reported to Acorn Housing’s national branch in Chicago, but fell under the supervision of Ms. Speliotis, in spite of her primary focus on development issues.

With the Brooklyn district attorney’s office investigating, one longtime Acorn ally, the City Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, has suspended all of its Council money.

Some friends, like Councilman Bill de Blasio of Brooklyn, called on Mr. Donovan to speak out. “It’s time for people to say, ‘Wait a minute, Acorn has played a crucial role here,’ ” he said.

Ms. Lewis said she had no such expectations.

By JIM RUTENBERG

NY Times

Doctors Will be 'Drafted' Under Public Option

A respected medical specialist has carefully reviewed the healthcare reform bill in the U.S. House, and he declares that it would amount to a virtual "draft" of doctors into the government's "public option" health insurance program.

Dr. Russell Blaylock, a renowned neurosurgeon, book author and editor of the Blaylock Wellness Report published by Newsmax, also warns that "death panels" could lead to the rationing of medical care to the elderly and a "violation of the Hippocratic Oath."

In an exclusive Newsmax interview, Dr. Blaylock points to other ominous provisions in the bill, HR 3200, which he says would:

• Severely discourage the readmission of patients to a hospital after they have been treated, and punish doctors and hospitals if they do readmit them.
  
  
• Require medical practitioners to document their dealings to the extent that they won't have enough time to adequately treat their patients.
  
  
• Jeopardize the confidentiality of patients' medical records, including psychiatric reports.
  

Read Full Story

NewsMax.com

Republicans fail to stop Gitmo transfers into US

WASHINGTON (AP) - Handing President Barack Obama a partial victory in his effort to close the Guantanamo Bay prison, House Democrats on Thursday repelled a Republican effort to block transfer of any of the detainees to the U.S. Instead, by a 224-193 vote, the House stood by a Democratic plan to allow suspected enemy combatants held at the controversial facility in Cuba to be shipped to U.S. soil—but only to be prosecuted for their suspected crimes.



The Guantanamo restrictions were attached by House-Senate negotiators on a $42.8 billion homeland security appropriations bill. The measure subsequently passed by a 307-114 vote.

President Barack Obama has ordered the facility closed in January but has yet to offer a plan to meet his deadline.

Democratic leaders had to push hard to win the vote because many Democrats two weeks ago had cast a nonbinding but politically safe vote against any Guantanamo detainee transfers. But several Democrats from swing districts said they saw little political risk on Thursday's vote.

"It's a non-issue. Inside the (Washington) Beltway stuff," said first-term Rep. Dan Maffei, D-N.Y. "People care about jobs, the economy, health care."

"I haven't had one person ask me about Guantanamo," said Rep. Baron Hill, D-Ind. He added that he does "not in the least" fear it as an issue in next year's elections.

Permitting Guantanamo prisoners to be transferred to U.S. soil to stand trial had been a bipartisan compromise earlier. It mostly tracks current restrictions put in place in June and is similar to a version backed by Republicans earlier in the year. In fact, Republicans such as top Appropriations panel Rep. Jerry Lewis of California helped fashion the compromise.

But in the absence of a plan from the administration for closing the facility, Lewis has toughened his talk, calling the administration's plan misguided and potentially dangerous.

"Terrorists should not be treated like common criminals in federal court," Lewis said. "These detainees are enemies of the state, and should be treated as such by being held and brought to justice right where they are—in Guantanamo Bay."

Read Full Story From AP
Breitbart.com
Photo from AP, former Gitmo detainees chilling with some ice cream.

Bush Preemptive Strike Doctrine Under Review, May Be Discarded

Oct. 15 (Bloomberg) -- The Pentagon is reviewing the Bush administration’s doctrine of preemptive military strikes with an eye to modifying or possibly ending it.

The international environment is “more complex” than when President George W. Bush announced the policy in 2002, Kathleen Hicks, the Defense Department’s deputy undersecretary for strategy, said in an interview. “We’d really like to update our use-of-force doctrine to start to take account for that.”

The Sept. 11 terrorist strikes prompted Bush to alter U.S. policy by stressing the option of preemptive military action against groups or countries that threaten the U.S. Critics said that breached international norms and set a dangerous precedent for other nations to adopt a similar policy.

The doctrine is being reassessed as part of the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review of strategy, force structure and weapons programs. Hicks is overseeing the review.

“We are looking very explicitly at use of force and use of forces,” she said. “We are looking at how to articulate the use of the U.S. military instrument -- how we use military force to achieve national objectives.”

President Barack Obama was elected last year on a platform that included promises to undo many Bush policies. He pledged to extract U.S. forces from Iraq, close the terror detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and give greater U.S. support to the UN.

Norway’s Nobel committee, in awarding Obama the Peace Prize last week, cited a “new climate” in world politics and the restoration of “multilateral diplomacy.” The prize also was widely seen as a repudiation of Bush’s policies.

Report to Congress

Congress requires the administration to report its national security strategy annually, and it requires the Pentagon to reassess its policies and war-fighting doctrine every four years.

The Obama administration will state its security doctrine for the first time as part of the Pentagon’s review, which will be given to Congress in February along with the fiscal 2011 budget.

Bush outlined his doctrine of preemptive strike in a speech at West Point in June 2002. He elevated it to a formal strategy that September. For the first time in a doctrine, the U.S. expressed the right to attack a threat that was gathering, not just imminent.

The doctrine was issued as the U.S. was working to build global support for military action against Iraq to enforce United Nations resolutions requiring Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to allow unfettered inspections for suspected chemical, biological and nuclear arms and to destroy any such weapons of mass destruction.

‘Will Not Hesitate’

The doctrine says the U.S. “will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self-defense by acting preemptively.

“In an age where enemies of civilization openly and actively seek the world’s most destructive technologies, the United States cannot remain idle while dangers gather,” the doctrine says.

Some defense policy analysts say the doctrine should be amended or minimized.

“That doctrine was always at odds with international law and norms,” said James Lindsay, director of studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. The doctrine is now “dead” after the invasion of Iraq, when the U.S. in March 2003 launched a “preventive war” to eradicate “the threat of weapons of mass destruction that did not exist,” he said.

‘New Strategy’

James Mann, an author in residence at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, said the doctrine “was presented as not just the ‘right’” to strike “before you are about to be attacked, but as an entirely new strategy for dealing with the world.”

“I don’t think the Obama people believe preemption should be defined in this incredibly broad sense -- and I think they feel -- with some reason -- the broad definition really lost American support in the rest of the world,” said Mann, author of “Rise of the Vulcans,” a 2004 history of Bush’s war cabinet.

Michael O’Hanlon, a defense analyst at the non-partisan Brookings Institution in Washington, said “the clear challenge for this administration is to find a balance between retaining the right, in extremis, to preempt, while avoiding association with the Bush administration.”

“The only solution is to try to downplay this option and say it will be reserved for the most extreme cases and even then pursued only with as much international backing and legitimacy as possible,” O’Hanlon said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Tony Capaccio at acapaccio@bloomberg.net.

Bloomberg

Missile Defense Shield: Deal or no Deal?

The trading off of a missile defense system for what appears to be our own safety would seem to be a classic move for a Nobel peace prizewinner. The question remains however, did he indeed “trade something” with Russia for removing the shield?

There have been many different ideas and theories floating about the Obama administration and the “deal” that would do one of two things, either ensure that Russia looks the other way when Israel inevitably attacks Iran, or Russia will support harsh sanctions against Iran when it is raised at the U.N. Either deal (especially the first one) would seem to be worth the removal of a missile defense shield.

As we know a missile from Iran would take 33 minutes to get the U.S. so ideally our own protection with a mulit-facetted approach to missile destruction, Obama’s new plan, seems secure.

This theory leaves our allies out to dry, but we know that peace in some appeasers minds means surrender, unless of course we got something in return. Israel is not likely to sit by and watch the fireworks show in 4-5 months when the first missiles that will carry nukes becomes operational. They are not in favor of a blockade or U.N. sanctions when Iran is so close and preaches Israel’s destruction on almost a daily basis. Israel will go in and take them out likely before they become operational.

Recently the Obama administration is rethinking and possibly shifting it’s policy on the missile shield, this coming after Vladimir Putin warns about intimidating Iran.

This either signifies a doctrinal shift in thought on missile defense, or Russia did not hold up their end of the bargain, and wants to see how much they can get from our new Nobel peace prizewinner since Moscow has come out and said they are not happy with the new system either.

Russia having influence on our defense system is somewhat troubling, and I can’t help but think that Obama tried to make a back channel deal with Russia, and was laughed at for his inexperience. Appeasement makes the aggressor more aggressive.

~Ohio Citizen

Sluggish Results Seen in U.S. Math Scores

Scores on the most important nationwide math test increased only marginally for eighth graders and not at all for fourth graders, continuing a six-year trend of sluggish results that suggest the nation will not come close to bringing all children to proficiency by 2014, a central goal of the Bush-era federal education law, No Child Left Behind.

Thirty-nine percent of fourth graders and 34 percent of eighth graders scored at or above the proficient level on the test, administered this spring.

“The trend is flat; it’s a plateau. Scores are not going anywhere, at least nowhere important,” said Chester E. Finn, Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a research organization in Washington. “That means that eight years after enactment of No Child Left Behind, the problems it set out to solve are not being solved, and now we’re five years from the deadline and we’re still far, far from the goal.”

The test, known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, was given to 329,000 fourth- and eighth-grade students. Results in reading are to be released next year, officials said.

“This is the first time in 19 years that fourth-grade math scores are flat,” said Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. “We’ve got to get better faster.”

The latest scores were especially disappointing because score gaps between white and minority students did not diminish at all since the last time the math test was administered, in 2007. On average, the nation’s fourth graders scored 240 on a 500-point scale, just as they did in 2007. White fourth graders, on average, scored 248, Hispanics scored 227 and blacks scored 222.

Eighth graders, on average, scored 283 on the same scale, up from 281 in 2007. White eighth graders, on average, scored 293, while Hispanics scored 266 and black eighth graders scored 261.

The gap of 32 points separating average black and white eighth graders represents about three years’ worth of math learning.

The No Child Left Behind law, which President George W. Bush signed in 2001, raised the importance of the National Assessment, requiring the Department of Education to increase the frequency of its administration in math and reading to once every two years, to help Americans monitor progress toward the goals of universal proficiency and the elimination of the achievement gap.

The federal law’s enactment followed a decade dominated by a standards and accountability movement that brought deep changes to public schools across the nation. Educators and policy makers, in nearly every state, often led by governors, including Mr. Bush when he was the Texas governor, laid out standards as to what students were expected to know in each grade and subject, and required schools to use those standards to guide instruction.

Nearly every state established standardized testing regimes during the 1990s, intended to measure whether students were meeting the standards, with the intent of holding schools accountable for student achievement.

The No Child Left Behind law, proposed by President Bush and passed by bipartisan majorities in Congress in his first year in office, sought to build on the standards and accountability movement with many new federal rules, including a requirement that states administer reading and math tests to every student every year in all elementary and middle schools, and once in students’ high school careers.

It also required that schools publish test scores not just as averages, but broken down by students’ race, sex and other groups, a rule that most educators agree has focused nationwide attention on narrowing achievement gaps.

The law also for the first time made it a national goal to bring every student to proficiency in those subjects by 2014.

With the latest test results, it is possible to trace student achievement growth over the years before the law’s passage, when states were dominant in education policy, and over the years since, when the federal law has become a powerful force in classrooms.

They show that scores grew faster during the seven years before the federal law’s enactment. During those years, average fourth-grade math scores grew by 11 points, to 235 in 2003 from 224 in 1996, and eighth-grade scores grew by eight points, to 278 in 2003 from 270 in 1996. In the six years since the law took effect, fourth-grade scores have risen by five points, to 240 from 235. Eighth-grade scores have risen by an equal amount, to 283 from 278.

“If we look at the gains between 1996 and 2003, which is the era preceding the No Child law, when states were enacting accountability and standards, the gains were larger than during the No Child era that began in 2003 and has run to 2009,” said Mark Schneider, who from 2005 to 2008 was commissioner of the arm of the Department of Education that oversees the National Assessment. “Either the standards movement has played out, or the No Child law failed to build on its momentum. Whatever momentum we had, however, is gone.”

William Schmidt, an education professor at Michigan State University, also called the results disappointing.

“We’re just inching upwards, and we’ve only got about a third of our students proficient,” Professor Schmidt said.

The large variation in average scores by state, he said, should be a focus of national analysis. In Massachusetts, for instance, where educators have sharply raised math scores in recent years by carefully reworking standards and instruction, 57 percent of fourth graders scored at or above proficient on the latest test. That compares with Mississippi, where only 16 percent of students scored at proficient.

“How can we as a nation allow such disparity?” Professor Schmidt asked.

by Sam Dillon

NyTimes

What happened to global warming?

By Paul Hudson 

Climate correspondent, BBC News

This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.


But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.
And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

So what on Earth is going on?
Climate change sceptics, who passionately and consistently argue that man's influence on our climate is overstated, say they saw it coming.

They argue that there are natural cycles, over which we have no control, that dictate how warm the planet is. But what is the evidence for this?

During the last few decades of the 20th Century, our planet did warm quickly.

Sceptics argue that the warming we observed was down to the energy from the Sun increasing. After all 98% of the Earth's warmth comes from the Sun.

But research conducted two years ago, and published by the Royal Society, seemed to rule out solar influences.

The scientists' main approach was simple: to look at solar output and cosmic ray intensity over the last 30-40 years, and compare those trends with the graph for global average surface temperature.

And the results were clear. "Warming in the last 20 to 40 years can't have been caused by solar activity," said Dr Piers Forster from Leeds University, a leading contributor to this year's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

But one solar scientist Piers Corbyn from Weatheraction, a company specialising in long range weather forecasting, disagrees.

He claims that solar charged particles impact us far more than is currently accepted, so much so he says that they are almost entirely responsible for what happens to global temperatures.

He is so excited by what he has discovered that he plans to tell the international scientific community at a conference in London at the end of the month.

If proved correct, this could revolutionise the whole subject.

Ocean cycles
What is really interesting at the moment is what is happening to our oceans. They are the Earth's great heat stores.

“ In the last few years [the Pacific Ocean] has been losing its warmth and has recently started to cool down ”

According to research conducted by Professor Don Easterbrook from Western Washington University last November, the oceans and global temperatures are correlated.

The oceans, he says, have a cycle in which they warm and cool cyclically. The most important one is the Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO).

For much of the 1980s and 1990s, it was in a positive cycle, that means warmer than average. And observations have revealed that global temperatures were warm too.

But in the last few years it has been losing its warmth and has recently started to cool down.
These cycles in the past have lasted for nearly 30 years.

So could global temperatures follow? The global cooling from 1945 to 1977 coincided with one of these cold Pacific cycles.

Professor Easterbrook says: "The PDO cool mode has replaced the warm mode in the Pacific Ocean, virtually assuring us of about 30 years of global cooling."

So what does it all mean? Climate change sceptics argue that this is evidence that they have been right all along.

They say there are so many other natural causes for warming and cooling, that even if man is warming the planet, it is a small part compared with nature.

But those scientists who are equally passionate about man's influence on global warming argue that their science is solid.

The UK Met Office's Hadley Centre, responsible for future climate predictions, says it incorporates solar variation and ocean cycles into its climate models, and that they are nothing new.

In fact, the centre says they are just two of the whole host of known factors that influence global temperatures - all of which are accounted for by its models.

In addition, say Met Office scientists, temperatures have never increased in a straight line, and there will always be periods of slower warming, or even temporary cooling.

What is crucial, they say, is the long-term trend in global temperatures. And that, according to the Met office data, is clearly up.

To confuse the issue even further, last month Mojib Latif, a member of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) says that we may indeed be in a period of cooling worldwide temperatures that could last another 10-20 years.

Professor Latif is based at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University in Germany and is one of the world's top climate modellers.

But he makes it clear that he has not become a sceptic; he believes that this cooling will be temporary, before the overwhelming force of man-made global warming reasserts itself.

So what can we expect in the next few years?
Both sides have very different forecasts. The Met Office says that warming is set to resume quickly and strongly.

It predicts that from 2010 to 2015 at least half the years will be hotter than the current hottest year on record (1998).

Sceptics disagree. They insist it is unlikely that temperatures will reach the dizzy heights of 1998 until 2030 at the earliest. It is possible, they say, that because of ocean and solar cycles a period of global cooling is more likely.

One thing is for sure. It seems the debate about what is causing global warming is far from over. Indeed some would say it is hotting up.

BBC