Inside Politics

Targeting Rush

“Former right-wing operative David Brock is urging the Pentagon to get Rush Limbaugh off American Forces Radio,” Terence Samuel reports in the Washington Whispers column of U.S. News & World Report.

“Brock, now president of Media Matters for America, a group formed to combat the influence of conservative media outlets, says that the government shouldn’t be sponsoring what Limbaugh is peddling. The popular talk show host, whose radio program is heard at military installations worldwide, has said that what happened at Abu Ghraib was little more than what happens at a fraternity hazing. ‘It is abhorrent that the American taxpayer is paying to broadcast what is in effect pro-torture propaganda to American troops,’ Brock wrote to [Defense Secretary Donald H.]Rumsfeld. No Pentagon response so far.”

Term limits survive

“Reports of the death of term limits are greatly exaggerated,” Patrick Basham writes at National Review Online (www.nationalreview.com).

“On May 15, San Antonio voters provided a vivid demonstration that, contrary to recent national media coverage, term limits are very much alive,” said Mr. Basham, senior fellow at the Center for Representative Government at the Cato Institute and author of “Defining Democracy Down: Explaining the Campaign to Repeal Term Limits.”

“Seventeen thousand local politicians in 2,900 cities, counties, and towns throughout 40 states are now subject to term limits. In 1991, San Antonio voters imposed on their city council members a lifetime limit of two two-year terms in office, the strictest term-limit rule of any major metropolitan area in the nation.”

However, opponents of term limits “never rested in their attempt to roll back the political clock.”

“In 1996, a federal court dismissed a legal challenge and upheld San Antonio’s lifetime term limits on city council members. The conundrum for the political establishment was that the term limitation could only be changed through the ballot box,” Mr. Basham said.

“Three months ago, San Antonio council members voted unanimously to weaken term limits through a referendum. Proposition 1 sought to expand the term limit to three consecutive three-year terms and lift the lifetime ban, thereby enabling council members to run again after sitting out a single term. Mayor Ed Garza admitted that this year’s campaign to relax the limit was simply the first step along the path to completely repealing term limits.”

Although defenders of term limits were outspent by a ratio of 100-to-1, the writer said, San Antonio voters on May 15 “overwhelmingly backed the current term-limit regime.”

Lugar’s view

Compromises necessary to fashion democracy in Iraq will make any post-Saddam Hussein government less than the model of freedom the Bush administration wants for the Middle East, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said yesterday.

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