Month: March 2006

Jaws Of Victory

by digby

Following up on my post below about Lemming Bayh’s revolutionary strategy to stick as closely to the president on national security as he can so that people will trust him with their lives, here’s some interesting news from a new NPR poll today:

A new poll of likely voters finds that President Bush and his party no longer have the advantage on issues of foreign policy and national security, which they used to dominate.

The poll, conducted for NPR by a Republican and a Democratic pollster, suggests that the ongoing instability in Iraq, the Dubai ports deal, job outsourcing and other global issues in the news lately appear to be weighing heavily on voters’ minds in this midterm election year.

Republican pollster Glen Bolger says that, from his perspective, the results are a “bunch of ugly numbers.”

[…]

It’s not uncommon to see polls where Democrats beat Republicans on domestic issues, such as the economy and jobs, health care and Social Security. But in this poll, when asked which party they trust more on issues such as the Iraq war, foreign ownership of U.S. ports and attention to homeland security, majorities chose the Democrats. Only on the question of Iranian nuclear weapons do the president and his party come out ahead.

Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg says the numbers present Democrats with a real opportunity for electoral gains. “All of these issues are related to different kinds of foreign threats to the country,” he notes. “On every single issue, voters favor the Democrats. This is a different landscape — we were looking for 20-point advantages for Republicans on anything related to security. This ought to be the center of where you would trust the Republicans, and that’s not happening here. There’s clearly a new opening, new doubts about the Republicans and new openings for the Democrats.”

[…]

… Glenn Bolger says the poll shows that Republicans in Congress helped themselves politically by abandoning the president.

“One clear piece of evidence in the data is that Republicans benefited by showing some independence from the president on the ports deal,” Bolger says. “Democrats have a 16-point advantage over the president in terms of who [voters] trust, and only an 8-point advantage over the Republicans on the ports deal. So the Republican Congress’ stand of independence cut the Democratic advantage on this issue in half.”

Feingold seems to feel this zeitgeist and so do some others (like the Iraq veteran band of brothers who are running as Democrats.) The rest of the caucus is lagging behind, mired in 2002 thinking.

Separating themselves from the president — and forcing the Republicans to rally around him — is good politics. The NSA wiretapping issue in and of itself is not going to rally the greater public to Bush. It’s the optics of Democrats issuing a rebuke that counts. The base, on the other hand, is hungering for leadership on these specific issues and wants desperately to rally around the party. Yet they are treated with terrible disrespect even though the polls show that two thirds of the country are unhappy and a majority is ready to throw the bums out.

Democrats do themselves no favors by following a cautious strategy in this climate. They are driving their voters crazy and convincing everyone else that they don’t have the will to win. The Republicans have a very slick machine, based in churches and fueled by talk radio, that will work overtime to get their base out. Their survival depends on it. Democrats cannot depend on low GOP turnout to get them over the line.

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What Matters Most

by digby

Hughes For America makes an interesting observation about Republican priorities:

We learned Wednesday that the Federal Communications Commission has proposed a $3.6 million fine against numerous CBS stations and affiliates concerning a 2004 episode of “Without a Trace” that included “teenage boys and girls participating in a sexual orgy.” The FCC also upheld its historic $550,000 fine against CBS for the Janet Jackson incident during the Super Bowl two years ago.

Meanwhile, the Sago mine – where 12 people died in January – was cited 208 times in 2005. The largest single fine, by comparison, was a mere $440. Not only that, but it was also reported that federal inspectors had repeatedly determined that the violations at Sago affected only one person, doing so to avoid the larger fines that come when more miners are involved.

Well, we know that they don’t want to regulate business, even if lives are at stake. That would be wrong and bad for the economy. But regulating 10 PM cop shows (with no nudity) like “Without A Trace” or PBS documentaries about The Blues that use the word “shit” is much too important for such considerations. Little pitchers have ears and all. Too bad those little pitchers down in West Virginia no longer have fathers.

I find it quite interesting that they keep fining CBS so heavily when Fox has some of the most subversive, deviant (and creative) programming out there. In cartoon form. Perhaps the thought police are too busy obsessing over the F word to understand what their kids are watching. Or maybe it’s something more sinister. It’s important to remember that the vast majority of complaints are the result of organized wingnut campaigns. And organized wingnuts know the score.

Hughes for America is holding a fund raising drive. His stuff is better than Riverdance, I guarantee it.

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Words Speak Louder Than Actions?

by digby

So Firedoglake tells me that Lemming Bayh is in favor of the new rage in Washington — if a Republican breaks the law, then just change the law! As the NY Times editorial board wrote earlier this week about president Bush’s domestic advisor Claude Allen: “If the current Congress had been called on to intervene in the case of Mr. Allen, it would probably have tried to legalize shoplifting.”

Bayh, in a torrent of process talk, explained that he doesn’t support Feingold’s measure because:

… the first thing Democrats need to do, Bayh said, is take Republicans on in an area they’ve dominated: national security.

“It’s a threshold issue for us, and it’s a threshold issue for America,” Bayh said. “People aren’t going to trust us with anything else if we first can’t convince them to trust us with their lives.”

All the great Democratic strategists know that the best way to do that is to blather incessantly about “what Democrats need to do,” while simultaneously rubber stamping every crackpot GOP security program no matter how lawless or unnecessary. Yielding submissively to the Republican dominance you profess to be “taking on” is an excellent way to convince people that you can protect them. Great plan. Awesome.

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Attention Deficit

by digby

Matt Yglesias says deficits don’t matter after all, at least not to the public:

Back in 1993, 17 percent of poll respondents said the deficit was the biggest problem facing the country, today that’s way down to two percent.

Oh Ross Perot, where art thou now? We haven’t heard a peep out of the crazy old coot since Bush took office ran through the surplus and then ran up the debt to unprecedented levels, have we? There was a time, when the deficit was much, much lower than it is now, that he felt the problem was so dire that he was compelled to start a third party to make sure that it was dealt with.

I had always thought he was the Bush’s arch enemy and yet he has been strangely silenced throughout Junior’s reign. You don’t suppose that stuff about Republican operatives disrupting his dauighters wedding was true do you? … nah. Karl Rove wouldn’t do something like that.

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Girl Just Wants To Have Fun

by digby

John over at Crooks and Liars has Katherine Harris’ brave interview with Sean Hannity in which she declares. “as God is mah witness I will nevah be hungry again … oh sorry… “as God is mah witness I will spend every last million I have on mah Senate race.”

“Let me tell you what the truth is. I’m staying… I’m going to put EVERYTHING on the line…I’m going to commit my legacy from my father, $10 million. This is everything that I have”

Not exactly everything. Her husband is reportedly worth somewhere around 20 million.

She says that he backs her decision one hundred percent. I wonder if he’s seen this video of his wife canoodling with another man during the debate on WMD intelligence legislation.

Watch out Lindsey. This woman’s a wildcat in the chamber.

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From The This-Is-Way-Too-Weird-To-Be-A-Joke Department

by tristero

Looks like DARPA has a monopoly on all the good dope. And they’ve been having a high old time. They’re seeking proposals for work on creating cyborg cockroaches, beetles, and moths:

DARPA seeks innovative proposals to develop technology to create insect-cyborgs, possibly enabled by intimately integrating microsystems within insects, during their early stages of metamorphoses. The healing processes from one metamorphic stage to the next stage are expected to yield more reliable bio-electromechanical interface to insects, as compared to adhesively bonded systems to adult insects. Once these platforms are integrated, various microsystem payloads can be mounted on the platforms with the goal of controlling insect locomotion, sense local environment, and scavenge power. Multidisciplinary teams of engineers, physicists, and biologists are expected to work together to develop new technologies utilizing insect biology, while developing foundations for the new field
of insect cyborg engineering.

via PZ Meyers, who explains in some detail why this is, shall we say, a bit unlikely to work. PZ writes, “This is like sending some guy who knows next to nothing about avionics into a 747 with a pickaxe, a voltmeter, and a 9V battery, and telling him to hack into the wiring and take control of the plane. It may not be impossible, but it is the next best thing.”

Or like putting some guy who knows next to nothing about anything in charge of the world’s most powerful country and giving him the opportunity to send troops to invade the Middle East without provocation. And expecting good to come out of it.

[UPDATE: Via comments comes this link to the world’s smallest flying robot. Be sure to check out the groovy video of the gadget hovering and maneuvering with eerie precision in the air.]

Manly

by digby

Why do you suppose that in the Pew poll, the second most popular word (after incompetent) to describe the president is “idiot?” Hmmmm.

Good thing he isn’t one ‘o them brie ‘n cheese eatin’ liberals or somebody might look at all that fancy expensive gear and call him an elitist rich guy. Can’t he just shoot his friends in the face like real men do?

Via Pearlswine, who says this may be the most unpresidential picture ever taken, and that was before he noticed the little pink socks.

They are cute.

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Dear Amy Sullivan

by tristero

I see you’ve apologized for the knee-jerk left comment. I’m glad you have the guts to know when you’re wrong and admit it.

But then you persist in getting it all wrong:

I do think there is a tendency on the part of some on the left to criticize conservative politicians on the basis of their religious views.

Jeebus, Amy, of course there is! That is a GOOD THING! They SHOULD be criticized! They HAVE to be criticized! And YOU should be among the first to let them have it! Why?

First of all, they’re the ones that bring the subject of religion up in a political context, over and over and over, and – as with the fight over science in the classrooms – when it is wildly inappropriate. They’re the ones making a political issue out of religion. Therefore, it can, and must be forcefully addressed.

Secondly, they’re certifiably crazy. Case in point: This fanatical, bigoted bastard is a close friend of Bush. THAT is why sensible people like Moyers and Phillips are alarmed about an imminent theocracy. And Graham is only one of dozens, many of whom make this guy look as liberal as Jesse Jackson. Amy, do you know how close this country came recently to approving a Christian Reconstructionist agenda as science in public schools? These people are serious about a theocracy. And seriously insane.

Thirdly, they are trying to disguise their purely secular lust for power by hiding behind the skirts of priests. I’d think a religious person like yourself would be the first to be horrified and disgusted at their corruption of Christian belief for political gain. They are cowards and they are liars. They cannot be permitted to advance a secular agenda under the guise of faith.

And fourth, do you have any idea of the filth that spews from these pigs’ mouth on a regular basis about the religious beliefs of liberals? Of Democrats? Of well-known public figures? Against Muslims? Against Jews? Against members of Christian denominations they disagree with? What makes their beliefs immune to criticism? Because they talk the Good Talk, and profess they are people of faith in the traditional cadences of evangelical American Christianity ? Anyone can do that, and has done that. But people of faith aren’t cowards and sneaks who pretend that a religious agenda is a scientific theory that deserves equal time. But that’s what these people do.

Bottom line, Amy: You want people to stop criticizing your religious beliefs, you don’t deliberately make them a political issue. You don’t make them the focus of serious discussions of government policy. Otherwise, your personal religious beliefs are fair game.

And this is said by someone who has demonstrated the utmost respect, tolerance, and interest in the beliefs of all faiths. It is because of their persistent intolerance of other people’s religion and politics that conservative political operatives get no free pass from me. They blaspheme Christ by bringing the Gospels into a partisan political struggle. I am amazed that you, of all bloggers, think that’s not proper to criticize. It most certainly is. The Republican exploitation and hijacking of religious belief is a dangerous travesty of public piety. And it’s at these people – the Dobsons, the Falwells, the Grahams, the Frists, and yeah, the Brownbacks – your anger should be directed. Not at pious, intelligent patriots like Bill Moyers, for heavens sakes!

Love,

Tristero

Depraved Government

by digby

Every once in a while I’m struck anew by the utter lawlessnes and barbarity of the United States government under Republican rule. I follow this stuff so closely that it all blurs for long periods of time until something, out of the blue, shocks me almost physically. Today, I have been catching up on some things and started reading in depth about the decision of Federal District Judge Trager’s heinous decision to dismiss Maher Arar’s case against the US for kidnapping him at Kennedy Airport and rendering him to Syria to be tortured for almost a year.

This is a Kafkaesque tale that makes shivers go down my spine when I read about it. I simply can’t wrap my arms around the idea that the American government is openly and proudly doing these things — or that those who dissent are veritably dared to speak out against it lest they be branded terrorist sympathizers.

We have normalized torture, which I find akin to normalizing pedophilia for all its deviant — if not uncommon — malignity. To be clear: what shocks me is not that torture happens or that our government tortures. We have ample evidence that it has historically done so. What is unprecedented is this banal, rather dull acceptance that torture is perfectly natural and necessary.

Nat Hentoff has an article in this Week’s Village Voice about this Arar case in which he cites a previous Apellate Court decision about torture from 1980:

In this landmark decision, Filártiga v. Peña-Irala, David Cole points out, the appeals court decided that “the prohibition on torture was so universally accepted that a U.S. Court could hold responsible a Paraguayan official charged with torturing a dissident in Paraguay . . . The [U.S.] court declared that when officials violate such a fundamental norm as torture, they can be held accountable anywhere they are found.”

Notice the language in that decision, “enemy of all mankind.” Here’s the final paragraph in the opinion in its entirety:

In the twentieth century the international community has come to recognize the common danger posed by the flagrant disregard of basic human rights and particularly the right to be free of torture. Spurred first by the Great War, and then the Second, civilized nations have banded together to prescribe acceptable norms of international behavior. From the ashes of the Second World War arose the United Nations Organization, amid hopes that an era of peace and cooperation had at last begun. Though many of these aspirations have remained elusive goals, that circumstance cannot diminish the true progress that has been made. In the modern age, humanitarian and practical considerations have combined to lead the nations of the world to recognize that respect for fundamental human rights is in their individual and collective interest. Among the rights universally proclaimed by all nations, as we have noted, is the right to be free of physical torture. Indeed, for purposes of civil liability, the torturer has become like the pirate and slave trader before him hostis humani generis, an enemy of all mankind. Our holding today, giving effect to a jurisdictional provision enacted by our First Congress, is a small but important step in the fulfillment of the ageless dream to free all people from brutal violence.

So much for that. In our quest to deliver the almighty God’s gift of freedom to each man and women in this world, we seem to have decided that the fundamental human right to be free of torture is no longer operative.

This was 1980. In 2006, just 26 years later we see this (from Hentoff again):

Now let us hear how Judge Trager justifies his dismissal of Maher Arar’s suit for the atrocities he endured in Syria because of the CIA. In his decision, Trager said that if a judge decided, on his or her own, that the CIA’s “extraordinary renditions” were always unconstitutional, “such a ruling can have the most serious consequences to our foreign relations or national security or both.”

A judge must be silent, even if our own statutes and treaties are violated! What about the separation of powers? Ah, said Trager, “the coordinate branches of our government [executive and legislative] are those in whom the Constitution imposes responsibility for our foreign affairs and national security. Those branches have the responsibility to determine whether judicial oversight is appropriate.”

Gee, I thought that the checks and balances of our constitutional system depend on the independence of the federal judiciary, which itself decides to exercise judicial review.

Judge Trager went further to protect the Bush administration’s juggernaut conduct of foreign policy: “One need not have much imagination to contemplate the negative effect on our relations with Canada if discovery were to proceed in this case, and were it to turn out that certain high Canadian officials had, despite public denials, acquiesced in Arar’s removal to Syria.”

“More generally,” Trager went on, “governments that do not wish to acknowledge publicly that they are assisting us would certainly hesitate to do so if our judicial discovery process could compromise them.”

Right. He didn’t even use a legal reason, just bought into the bedwetting cowardice that seems to have overtaken most of the government after 9/11 and hid under the covers. He left all the scary stuff to the preznit and his big strong armymen, rather than do his duty and follow the constitution or supreme court precedent. Nothing to see here.

When in American history have so many government officials in the other branches submitted themselves so willingly to executive authority? We are now three five years away from 9/11. The smoke has cleared and the rubble has been cleaned up. The “War on Terror” has been going on longer than WWII. If anyone thought that people would gather their wits about them and come to their senses about these things, the rubber stamp congress and deferential judiciary have shown that they have no intention of stopping the Bush administration’s attack on the constitution or it’s normalization of the depraved.

Democrats have got to win this next election. They are, for all their flaws, all we have standing between us a this continued abasement of American values. Taking the Republicans out of the majority is essential to the survival of what few ideals we have left.

If you find yourself wondering why you bother with politics, go read Arthur Silber’s masterful series on torture. You’ll be reminded why it’s important.

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Constitutional Infirmity

by digby

I’m beginning to think they are actively trying to destroy the constitution just for the hell of it.

President May Have Known of Constitutional Defect Before Bill Signing

Wednesday, March 15, 2006 — Rep. Waxman asks the White House to respond to information that the Speaker of the House called President Bush to alert him that the version of the Reconciliation Act he was about to sign differed from the version that passed the U.S. House of Representatives. Rep. Waxman writes: “If the President signed the Reconciliation Act knowing its constitutional infirmity, he would in effect be placing himself above the Constitution.”

The nutshell version of this story is that the Senate passed the Omnibus Budget bill with a two billion dollar error regarding certain medicare payments in it. The vote was as close as possible — Cheney had to break the tie. The clerk found the error, which happens from time to time apparently and requires a re-vote on the correct version of the bill. But the Republican leadership didn’t fix it because they were afraid that when they brought it back up for the required re-vote in the Senate, it wouldn’t pass. They kept it to themselves and the House passed the incorrect version of the bill on another close vote — 216-214 and they sent it to the president who signed it — error and all.

Waxman now has reason to believe that the president was informed by Hastert that he was signing an incorrect version of the bill and Bush unconstitutionally signed it anyway.

This is the kind of corrupt, partisan, iniquitous leadership these assholes have perpetrated since they took power. They commonly hold votes open for as long as it takes to bribe a member to vote for it. Democratic members are locked out of meetings and not allowed to see bills before they are required to vote on them. They design the votes to be as close as possible so they don’t get any Democratic support — the more they can take the Democrats out of the process, make them look impotent to their constituents, the more likely they are to demoralize Democratic voters and make them feel helpless to change things.

But, it’s unconstitutional to do what they did. Just because you have to do a tough vote over again to make it legal, you don’t get to just ignore the constitution to avoid having to do it. Or at least that’s the way it used to be.

This is the kind of thing that would be ripe for hearings if the Democrats were to win the elections in the fall. It needs to be exposed, so that people can see the Republicans held accountable for their reign of political terror in the congress. The public does not understand, nor should they need to understand, the arcane rules governing the Senate. But anyone can understand that the Republican congress passed, and the president signed, a budget knowing that it was unconstitutional. And they did it because if they fixed it, as required by law, they knew it wouldn’t pass.

Waxman will be the Chairman of the committee that will investigate these atrocities — and he’s been making a list and checking it twice since 2001. If the country would like to see some accountability, he’s a guy who will do it. After all, he’s the one who got the tobacco chiefs to say they didn’t believe smoking was addictive — under oath, I might add, something that’s gone out of fashion since the Republican vassals were put in charge of overseeing their liege lord, the prince of the Codpiece.

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