Washed It!

WASHINGTON (AP) — Conservative commentator Glenn Beck and tea party champion Sarah Palin appealed Saturday to a vast, predominantly white crowd on the National Mall to help restore traditional American values and honor Martin Luther King’s message. Civil rights leaders who accused the group of hijacking King’s legacy held their own rally and march.

While Beck billed his event as nonpolitical, conservative activists said their show of strength was a clear sign that they can swing elections because much of the country is angry with what many voters call an out-of-touch Washington.

Palin told the tens of thousands who stretched from the marble steps of the Lincoln Memorial to the grass of the Washington Monument that calls to transform the country weren’t enough. “We must restore America and restore her honor,” said the former Alaska governor, echoing the name of the rally, “Restoring Honor.”

Palin, the GOP vice presidential nominee in 2008 and a potential White House contender in 2012, and Beck repeatedly cited King and made references to the Founding Fathers. Beck put a heavy religious cast on nearly all his remarks, sounding at times like an evangelical preacher.

“Something beyond imagination is happening,” he said. “America today begins to turn back to God.”

Beck exhorted the crowd to “recognize your place to the creator. Realize that he is our king. He is the one who guides and directs our life and protects us.” He asked his audience to pray more. “I ask, not only if you would pray on your knees, but pray on your knees but with your door open for your children to see,” he said.

A group of civil rights activists organized by the Rev. Al Sharpton held a counter rally at a high school, then embarked on a three-mile march to the site of a planned monument honoring King. The site, bordering the Tidal Basin, was not far from the Lincoln Memorial where Beck and the others spoke about two hours earlier.

Sharpton and the several thousand marching with him crossed paths with some of the crowds leaving Beck’s rally. People wearing “Restoring Honor” and tea party T-shirts looked on as Sharpton’s group chanted “reclaim the dream” and “MLK, MLK.” Both sides were generally restrained, although there was some mutual taunting.

One woman from the Beck rally shouted to the Sharpton marchers: “Go to church. Restore America with peace.” Some civil rights marchers chanted “don’t drink the tea” to people leaving Beck’s rally.

Sharpton told his rally it was important to keep King’s dream alive and that despite progress more needs to be done. “Don’t mistake progress for arrival,” he said.

He poked fun at the Beck-organized rally, saying some participants were the same ones who used to call civil rights leaders troublemakers. “The folks who used to criticize us for marching are trying to have a march themselves,” he said. He urged his group to be peaceful and not confrontational. “If people start heckling, smile at them,” Sharpton said.

Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District of Columbia’s delegate to Congress, said she remembers being at King’s march on Washington in 1963. “Glenn Beck’s march will change nothing. But you can’t blame Glenn Beck for his March-on-Washington envy,” she said.

Beck has said he did not intend to choose the King anniversary for his rally but had since decided it was “divine providence.” He portrayed King as an American hero.

Sharpton and other critics have noted that, while Beck has long sprouted anti-government themes, King’s famous march included an appeal to the federal government to do more to protect Americans’ civil rights.

The crowd — organizers had a permit for 300,000 — was a sea of people standing shoulder to shoulder across large expanses of the Mall. The National Park Service stopped doing crowd counts in 1997 after the agency was accused of underestimating numbers for the 1995 Million Man March.

It was not clear how many tea party activists were in the crowd, but the sheer size of the turnout helped demonstrate the size and potential national influence of the movement.

Tea party activism and widespread voter discontent with government already have effected primary elections and could be an important factor in November’s congressional, gubernatorial and state legislative races.

Lisa Horn, 28, an accountant from Houston, said she identifies with the tea party movement, although she said the rally was not about either the tea party or politics. “I think this says that the people are uniting. We know we are not the only ones,” she said. “We feel like we can make a difference.”

Ken Ratliff, 55, of Rochester, N.Y., who served as a Marine in the Vietnam War, said he is moving more in the tea party direction. “There’s got to be a change, man,” he said.

Beck seeks help restoring traditional American values; Sharpton tries to keep King dream alive

If Marine Lance Cpl. Kevin Oratowski was intimidated about briefing three visiting generals as he headed out on another overnight patrol chasing the Taliban, he didn’t show it.

“We’re ready to go,” the 23-year-old from Camp Pendleton said brightly, his enthusiasm seemingly undimmed by the fact that he had spent most of the last 60 days in the heat, danger and uncertainty of Helmand province.

A few hours later, he was dead from a Taliban roadside bomb.

As the three generals watched the next day, Oratowski’s casket was loaded aboard a C-130 to begin its journey home. The cargo plane lumbered down a runway that didn’t exist just a few months ago and lifted heavily into the southern Afghanistan sky.

Next to the runway, earthmovers pushed mountains of gravel for other construction projects at the base here, projects to expand the “footprint” of the Marines as they settle in for a long battle for Helmand.

A year since the U.S. troop buildup in Afghanistan began with battalions of Marines descending on the Helmand River Valley, optimism about a quick defeat of the insurgents after early small-scale routs has given way to more sober assessments.

As the death toll steadily climbs, the top Marine warns that it could take as long as five years to defeat the Taliban and help the Afghan government establish a credible presence.

The massive assault in February on the Taliban-run town of Marja has not lived up to the U.S. prediction that it would prove a “tipping point” for the province. Two battalions of Marines are still assigned to protect Marja, but Taliban fighters spread messages of terror at night and plant bombs, killing Marines and villagers.

The provincial and national governments provide only a trickle of services. The vaunted “government-in-a-box,” a promise to establish a government in Marja as soon as the fighting stopped, was largely a flop.

“I think Stan McChrystal over-promised in regards to government-in-a-box,” Marine Commandant Gen. James Conway said, referring to the Army general who was then the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan.

Even as President Obama talks of beginning a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan next July, in Helmand, the talk is of “trend lines” and “metrics” rather than a quick knockdown.

In a series of meetings with Marines of all ranks, Conway said he expected Marines — whose numbers have doubled, to 20,000, in Helmand in the last 14 months — to be here until 2014 or 2015. Be prepared for a second or third tour, he said.

“We’re still going to have to convince these people who are fighting us that we are the strongest tribe,” Conway told several hundred Marines just minutes after the C-130 with Oratowski’s casket departed.

Conway and other senior officers say they remain confident of ultimate victory. It is a confidence born of the Marines’ experience in Iraq’s Anbar province, which in 2006 was branded as a lost cause by a Marine intelligence report but within two years was considered an example of the U.S. ability to defeat a ruthless insurgency.

“I’m an inveterate optimist,” Conway said in an interview at the end of his Helmand trip. “I found things better than I would have expected based on [media reports] and on intelligence I’ve been reading.”

The Western military has lately been touting the success of pinpoint special-operations raids targeting midlevel Taliban field commanders, particularly in the south.

NATO’s International Security Assistance Force said this week that coalition and Afghan troops had conducted thousands of raids that it said had fostered “a growing sense of distrust” among the Taliban, heightening the fear of spies in their midst.

The Taliban, of course, paints a much different picture. In a statement this week, spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmadi boasted of expanding influence in Kandahar and Helmand provinces, the insurgency’s spiritual home.

“Helmand is … a great example of the defeat of the enemy,” Ahmadi said in a statement posted on the movement’s website. “An example of this is the Marja operation, in which thousands of [Western] and Afghan soldiers took part. They made it sound as if World War III had started, but now they are ashamed to even mention the name of Marja, due to their disgraceful defeat.”

Marines in Afghanistan prepared for a long haul

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The Commerce Department on Friday downgraded the nation’s economic growth in the second quarter, providing the most important evidence yet that the recovery has stalled.

The anemic annualized growth rate of 1.6% was down from last month’s estimate of 2.4%. The drop was slightly less than many economists had predicted, but the report still put an exclamation point on a week of bad economic news that has raised fears the nation could plunge into another recession.

Responding to those concerns, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said Friday that the central bank was prepared to step in if necessary to help provide additional stimulus to the economy and avoid the type of debilitating deflation that struck Japan in the 1990s.

He outlined three possible options, including expanding its purchases of long-term securities to pump more money into the economy and signaling that the central bank will keep its short-term interest rate near zero for longer than the vague “extended period” it has promised.

“The Federal Reserve is already supporting the economic recovery by maintaining an extraordinarily accommodative monetary policy, using multiple tools,” Bernanke told a major economic gathering in Jackson Hole, Wyo., according to a copy of his remarks released by the Fed.

“Should further action prove necessary, policy options are available to provide additional stimulus. Any deployment of these options requires a careful comparison of benefit and cost.”

In his highly anticipated comments, Bernanke added that despite the “recent slowing” in economic growth, “it is reasonable to expect some pickup in growth in 2011 and in subsequent years.” But the high unemployment – at 9.5% in July – is expected to “decline only slowly,” he said.

“The prospect of high unemployment for a long period of time remains a central concern of policy,” Bernanke said.

The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis said Friday’s downward revision was based on more complete data and “primarily reflected a sharp acceleration in imports and a sharp deceleration in private inventory investment” by businesses. Those drops were partially offset by an increase in residential and nonresidential investment, as well as increases in federal, state and local government spending.

Federal stimulus and other spending was a big boost from April through June, with expenditures and investment up 9.1% in the second quarter, compared with an increase of 1.8% in the first quarter of the year, the report said. But the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reported this week that the effect of last year’s $814-billion stimulus legislation would gradually diminish in the second half of the year.

The widening trade deficit was a major drag on the recovery in the second quarter. Real exports of goods and services increased 9.1% in the second quarter, compared with an 11.4% increase in the first quarter. Imports soared 32.4% in the second quarter after rising 11.2% in the first.

The government routinely revises its reports on domestic economic output, also known as Gross Domestic Product.

Friday’s revision comes after an advance estimate of second-quarter GDP that was released July 30. The average revision is about 0.5%.

Economists had projected second-quarter GDP could fall to 1.3% or lower. Still, Friday’s report was discouraging because growth below 2% reflects a very weak recovery. The economy had grown at a 3.7% rate in the first quarter and 5% in the final three months of last year.

The downward revision follows horrible housing reports that hit Tuesday.

Thursday brought some more potentially discouraging news on home foreclosures and unemployment. Investors demonstrated their concern, dropping the blue-chip Dow Jones industrial average 74 points to close below 10,000 Thursday for the first time since early July.

The Dow was up slight in early trading Friday. Consumer sentiment in August remained largely unchanged, according to survey results released Friday by Thompson Reuters and the University of Michigan. Only one in four households expected their finances to improve in the year ahead, the survey found.

The downward revision of second-quarter economic activity came as other forecasts projected slow growth.

Last month, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke declared that the economic outlook was “unusually uncertain.” Concerned about the pace of recovery, the Fed this month decided to start buying U.S. Treasury bonds again to keep down longer-term interest rates.

The central bank this year had begun pulling back its extraordinary support for the financial system, but jumped back into the bond market this month because Fed policymakers said the recovery “appeared more modest in the near term than had been anticipated.”

Bernanke is set to address the economic situation later Friday morning in a speech at the Fed’s annual Economic Policy Symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyo., a high-level gathering of central bankers, finance ministers, academics and industry executives from around the world. It will be his first public comments since the Fed announced its plan to resume purchases of Treasury bonds.

But with the Fed’s benchmark short-term interest rate near zero, its policy options are limited. The Fed’s most recent economic forecast, in late June, called for economic growth of 3% to 3.5% this year, slower than the 4% growth in the last half of 2009.

Bernanke said Friday that the central bank could decide to expand its purchases of long-term securities, signaling low interest rates will last much longer, or lower the interest rate the Fed pays to commercial banks for their reserves, which would encourage them to lend the money.

He said there was not a significant risk of the economy “falling into deflation” – a harmful cycle of lower prices that damages growth. But he said the Fed was prepared to act in such a case to “strongly resist deviations from price stability in the downward direction.”

jim.puzzanghera@latimes.com
Downward revision of GDP growth a strong signal of stalled recovery

Democratic gubernatorial nominee Jerry Brown argued Thursday that his experience makes him the only candidate who can right California, and he slashed at Republican rival Meg Whitman by calling her a neophyte who has run an ugly and inaccurate campaign against him.

“Everything I’ve done in my life has prepared me for this moment in time, to do what I can to protect the state I love,” said Brown, the former two-term governor and current attorney general, standing in front of a vat of sulfuric acid after touring New Leaf Biofuel in San Diego.

“I’m confident at the end of the day, though it’s going to be a close race, people are going to vote for change, they’re going to vote for integrity, and they’re going to reject the negativity and the carpet-bombing of deceptive commercials we’ve been facing these last two months.”

More than 100 miles north, at a rivet manufacturer in the City of Industry, Whitman argued that the state would be ill-served if it elected a career politician who “has not delivered” in the past. Faced with a query from a worker about whether she could be any more effective than another political novice, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Whitman said the business skills she developed as EBay’s chief executive would ease her path in Sacramento.

Schwarzenegger “did a number of good things … but he had not run and managed and led large organizations” as she has, Whitman told an audience gathered on the factory floor of Allfast Fastening Systems. The next governor, she said, “has to be very tough-minded.”

“We cannot afford a third term of Jerry Brown,” Whitman said. “And I am going to give Jerry Brown the toughest fight he has had in his 40-year political career.”

The events marked a rare moment in the general election campaign so far — one in which the two gubernatorial candidates were actually campaigning at the same time.

Although Whitman has kept a brisk pace traveling around the state, airing ads and reaching out to voters since she won the GOP primary in June, Brown, who lacks his rival’s deep pockets, has spent much of his time raising money while juggling his duties as the state’s attorney general.

Organized labor has propped up his campaign with television ads over the summer, but until Wednesday it had been nearly a month since the candidate held a campaign event. Brown has said he was biding his time and would spend $25 million to $30 million in the fall, when voters would be paying attention.

“There are two things that are unprecedented in American political history,” he said Thursday. “One, the $100 million plus that Whitman has paid on her campaign, most of it from her own pocketbook, and two, the virtually no effect it’s had. This is basically a tie race.”

Brown, who picked up the endorsement of Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America on Thursday, appeared to be gearing up for the start of the general election battle. He headlined a rally in front of 800 people in Santa Rosa on Wednesday night, followed by the Thursday morning tour and news conference.

Those events offered Brown the chance to respond to several attacks Whitman has launched against him in recent weeks, including questions about his recent use of a state plane after he bragged about eliminating such luxuries during his prior time as governor. Brown dismissed a query as a “Whitman-fed” question.

“I fly it so little, really, compared to commercial flights,” he told reporters in Santa Rosa. “By the way, sometimes funerals are very important to go to, for fallen officers.”

Whitman’s newest television ad, unveiled Thursday, charged Brown with hypocrisy for touting his frugality even though he used a state plane 10 times since he assumed the attorney general post in 2007. The ad says that Brown used a Beechcraft King Air turboprop for trips to a conference at the La Costa Resort and Spa and a reception in Pebble Beach. “It’s your money — not his,” the announcer says.

Whitman, who received the endorsement of the National Federation of Independent Business on Thursday, was fending off her own attacks from the state’s nurses‘ union and the Courage Campaign, which used the anniversary of women’s suffrage vote to protest the candidate and her spotty voting record at a Sacramento rally.

More than 1,000 people gathered on the west steps of the Capitol, ostensibly to honor the 90th anniversary of suffrage. Labor leaders, led by the California Nurses Assn., hammered Whitman for her poor voting record and painted her as a corporate elitist who plans to cut 40,000 state jobs, slash pension benefits and curtail the political influence of unions.

“She may not have voted,” said Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the nurses’ union, “but we will.”

Whitman countered that the protest appeared to be driven by “union bosses trying to distract from the fact that I will go to Sacramento and I will change Sacramento.” But she once again apologized for her past voting record: “I have said I should have been more engaged and I was not. But I am all in now.”

seema.mehta@latimes.com

maeve.reston@latimes.com

Times staff writer Michael Mishak contributed to this report from Sacramento.
Brown and Whitman spar in sync

Construction on the long-stalled Grand Avenue hotel, condo and shopping complex may be delayed at least another two years because developers have been unable to secure financing.

The $3-billion Frank Gehry-designed Grand Avenue complex was supposed to be the centerpiece of an elaborate effort to rebuild the blocks stretching from the Walt Disney Concert Hall to City Hall. But while backers of downtown development cheer Eli Broad’s recent decision to build his new art museum on Grand Avenue and a new 16-acre park nearby, the latest delay is a reminder that the fate of the broader reimagining of the Civic Center area is still uncertain.

The project developer, Related Cos., said this week that it plans to request a two-year extension of its current February 2011 deadline to begin construction.

If the new deal is approved by city and county officials, groundbreaking would not have to start until 2013 — six years after work was first slated to begin. Bill Witte, the president of the developer’s California division, said Related may request yet another extension if the economy hasn’t improved by 2013.

“There is no chance of financing a significant project in the near term,” Witte said. “In fact, I’m not sure there’s much of a chance of financing even an insignificant project in the near term.”

Proposed in the early 2000s during the zenith of downtown’s building boom, the project’s plans call for a boutique hotel, thousands of luxury condos and acres of retail space for upscale restaurants, shops and art galleries. A 40- to 50-story Gehry-designed glass tower was to mark the spot as a cultural hub for tourists, shoppers and a new breed of wealthy downtown denizens.

Now it’s likely that Broad’s museum and the planned park — which was conceived as part of the overall development — will open before construction on Gehry’s tower begins.

The project remains popular with downtown boosters, but some concede that the plans may need to be tweaked to take into account the economic downturn.

Eric Richardson, the publisher of blogdowntown.com, praised the Grand Avenue project for “the attention that the idea brought to downtown revitalization.” But he said some residents feel that what the area really needs is more grocery stores, pharmacies and other basic amenities.

“We’ve been very slow to pull in the retail that kind of completes the picture of life downtown,” he said. “Some people are asking, ‘Does downtown really need a mega project at this point?’”

Grand Avenue, which was approved by city and county officials in February 2007, is one of the last of several proposed “mega projects” in downtown that are still alive since the real estate market crashed in 2008.

Paul Novak, the land planning deputy for L.A. County Supervisor Mike Antonovich, a longtime critic of the project, said he doesn’t think there is an appetite downtown for Grand Avenue’s upscale offerings.

“OK, you’ve got very high-end condos and a high-end hotel,” Novak said. “But the condo market is in the dumps downtown, and downtown already has a five-star hotel.”

Officials with Related said they have already secured millions of dollars in equity but have had trouble securing loans to pay the $1.1 billion required to build the first phases of the project.

During the last renegotiation of the construction deadline, Related agreed to pay a penalty of $3 million a year to push construction back. Under the new extension, which Related may ask for in the coming weeks, it must pay the joint city-county authority that controls the land an additional $1 million in penalties. The penalties would be paid once construction begins.

Witte and others say they hope the Broad museum and the new Civic Park will raise the profile of Bunker Hill and make it easier to secure loans for Grand Avenue.

Witte said Related is considering altering its plans for the project, but he would not say what changes are being considered.

Steve Needleman, who owns the Orpheum Theatre and lofts on Broadway, said Grand Avenue’s developer should consider making changes “like building office space or more modestly priced apartments.”

“I think the Grand Avenue project, by the time it gets built, will change again,” Needleman said. “You’re having to reevaluate what makes sense.”

Carol Schatz, the executive director of the downtown-based Central City Assn., also acknowledged that aspects of the development may have to be reconsidered.

“The Grand Avenue project made a great deal of sense at the time that it was approved,” Schatz said. “But things are different now.”

kate.linthicum@latimes.com
Grand Avenue project faces 2-year delay over funding