Month: August 2007

They’re Doing It Again

by digby

I was at Drinking Liberally not long ago, chattering with my pal D-Day about what long term political reform we would dedicate ourselves to if we had to choose. We both said getting rid of the electoral college, which I thought was quite interesting. It’s long been one of my bete noirs, even before the 2000 election atrocity and it was for him too. I think there are probably lots of liberal activists out there who feel the same way. It’s an anachronistic relic of an era long past that was the result of one of those undemocratic compromises that was necessary to get the smaller states to sign on to the Union. It’s completely unnecessary now and all it does is lead to mischief, dirty tricks and cheating — the specialty of the modern Republican party.

We know for a fact, it’s been demonstrated in living color, that it leads to undemocratic results. In 2000, Bush lost by half a million votes and yet “won” by 537, when the Supreme Court stepped in to stop the Florida vote count, granting all the electors to Bush. It is little wonder that no other country in the world has adopted our vaunted system of government. It’s got some serious problems.

There is one political faction in our country that is determined to win by any means necessary. They have had an ongoing voter suppression effort for decades, which has recently been both professionalized and authorized as a legitimate arm of the federal government under the Bush administration. That’s what the US Attorney scandal is all about — vote rigging and suppression.

And if that doesn’t work, they will not hesitate to challenge the vote in other ways. You remember this?

In the days before the Nov. 7 election, Republicans feared that Vice President Al Gore might win the Electoral College while Texas Gov. George W. Bush could win the national popular vote.

The expectation then was that Green Party candidate Ralph Nader might siphon off millions of votes from Gore nationwide, but not enough in key states to keep them out of Gore’s column.

That could allow Gore to amass the 270 electoral votes needed for winning the presidency while blocking a Gore plurality in the popular vote.

To stop Gore under those circumstances, advisers to the Bush campaign weighed the possibility of challenging the legitimacy of a popular-vote loser gaining the White House.

“The one thing we don’t do is roll over — we fight,” said a Bush aide, according to an article by Michael Kramer in the New York Daily News on Nov. 1, a week before the election.

The article reported that “the core of the emerging Bush strategy assumes a popular uprising, stoked by the Bushies themselves, of course. In league with the campaign — which is preparing talking points about the Electoral College’s essential unfairness — a massive talk-radio operation would be encouraged.”

“We’d have ads, too,” said a Bush aide, “and I think you can count on the media to fuel the thing big-time. Even papers that supported Gore might turn against him because the will of the people will have been thwarted.”

The Bush strategy to challenge the Electoral College went even further. “Local business leaders will be urged to lobby their customers, the clergy will be asked to speak up for the popular will and Team Bush will enlist as many Democrats as possible to scream as loud as they can,” the article said.

“You think ‘Democrats for Democracy’ would be a catchy term for them?” asked a Bush adviser.

The Bush strategy also would target the members of the Electoral College, the 538 electors who are picked by the campaigns and state party organizations to go to Washington for what is normally a ceremonial function. Many of the electors are not legally bound to a specific candidate.

They are always prepared to play it both ways. From partisan impeachments to off-year gerrymandering to the unprecedented California recall to the disputed 2000 election to the longterm efforts at voter suppression and the use of the department of Justice to influence elections with well timed indictments and bogus “vote fraud” investigations, the Republicans have shown that where they don’t cheat outright, they are willing to cast aside all convention, tradition and consensus beliefs that serve to honor the spirit of democracy in order to win at all costs. I don’t think that can be disputed. We’ve watched it unfold before our eyes for the past decade.

So, as far as I can tell very few people are surprised that the Republicans are once again trying to game the system to their advantage by putting another one of those big money initiatives on the California ballot to allocate the California electors according to the votes cast for each candidate instead of winner take all, as all but two states do today.

It’s very clever. If someone were to ask D-day and me, and most Californians, in the abstract, if we thought that was a more fair way to allocate the electoral college votes, we’d probably say yes. It would be. But, needless to say, it isn’t if only one state, particular one as large as ours, does it all by itself. It essentially turns California into two states, diluting its electoral clout, giving the Republicans more than 20 electoral votes they currently don’t have and denying the Democrats 20 they currently do. It is nothing more than typical GOP shenanigans to cheat or change the rules after the fact where they can’t win legitimately.

Everyone knows that electoral college reform cannot happen piecemeal. All the states must change together because to do otherwise will distort the process even more than it already is. We will have a much higher likelihood of more presidents taking office without winning the popular vote, and that just cannot continue to happen if anyone expects the United States government to maintain legitimacy. (After the partisan impeachment of 1998 and the stolen election of 2000, it’s hanging by thread as it is.)

This may just be a ploy to force democrats to spend money in California on an expensive education campaign to tell Democrats they need to vote in a traditionally low turn out election next June (the primary will have already been held months before) and also let them know that it’s an attempt to essentially rig the Presidential election in November 2008. They are very good at this. They do it all the time. It’s the reason we have a GOP cyborg today instead of a governor.

The Courage Campaign is working with other groups in California to try to beat this initiative. I haveno idea how seriously national Dems are taking this, but I would assume they know very well how devastating this could be and will pull out all the stops to ensure it doesn’t pass. but that’s not guarantee. These pernicious initiatives often pass in this state because they are cleverly misleading and they are on the ballot in low turnout elections. (It’s a huge problem for California generally.) This time it affects the whole country and it would be smart for everyone to get involved.

If you think it can’t happen just reflect back seven years to November 2000. Remember how you felt. Remember the intense frustration and anger when they stole that election and then smugly told us to “get over it.” They’d do it again in a heartbeat.

Our “post-partisan” Cyborgoverner says he doesn’t know what the initiative says. The fact that the people who drafted it are his former lawyers, is purely coincidence. The Courage Campaign has launched an initiative to ‘educate Arnold” by asking everyone to send Arnold a copy of the proposed initiative so he can read it and finally tell his constituents whether he supports this undemocratic act. I suspect he will. He got into office on a similar end-run around established tradition and precedent. He’d be quite the hypocrite standing up for Democratic values and following the rules of the game when his benefactors bought him his governorship with a similarly expensive recall initiative during the 9/11 GOP tide.

But still, he should be forced to tell the nation whether he’s going to help the dirty tricksters of his party steal another election. We have a right to know.

Go here to find out how to send the initiative to Governor Schwarzenegger. I’m sure he’d love to hear from you.

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Family Value$$

by digby

They love fetuses. Babies, not so much:

In an attempt to raise the nation’s historically low rate of breast-feeding, federal health officials commissioned an attention-grabbing advertising campaign a few years ago to convince mothers that their babies faced real health risks if they did not breast-feed. It featured striking photos of insulin syringes and asthma inhalers topped with rubber nipples. Plans to run these blunt ads infuriated the politically powerful infant formula industry, which hired a former chairman of the Republican National Committee and a former top regulatory official to lobby the Health and Human Services Department. Not long afterward, department political appointees toned down the campaign.
The ads ran instead with more friendly images of dandelions and cherry-topped ice cream scoops, to dramatize how breast-feeding could help avert respiratory problems and obesity.

[…]

…current and former HHS officials say the muting of the ads was not the only episode in which HHS missed a chance to try to raise the breast-feeding rate. In April, according to officials and documents, the department chose not to promote a comprehensive analysis by its own Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) of multiple studies on breast-feeding, which generally found it was associated with fewer ear and gastrointestinal infections, as well as lower rates of diabetes, leukemia, obesity, asthma and sudden infant death syndrome. The report did not assert a direct cause and effect, because doing so would require studies in which some women are told not to breast-feed their infants — a request considered unethical, given the obvious health benefits of the practice. A top HHS official said that at the time, Suzanne Haynes, an epidemiologist and senior science adviser for the department’s Office on Women’s Health, argued strongly in favor of promoting the new conclusions in the media and among medical professionals. But her office, which commissioned the report, was specifically instructed by political appointees not to disseminate a news release.

I’m not surprised. These officials represent the same people who think that breast feeding is “dirty,” so it’s really a right wing double whammy. What’s not to like?

The only thing sacred to these people is a blastocyst in a petrie dish and the right to do violence when they feel dissed. Everything else is for sale to the highest bidder.

H/T to Todd Gitlin

The Legacy

by digby

Loosheadprop over at FDL highlights this comment from Paul Kane yesterday in the Wapo, that made me want to hold my head in my hands and moan:

Very interestingly, Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein told myself and Jonathan Weisman in separate interviews Monday that if Bush picks a consensus AG, that the spirit and drive of the Dem investigations into the US attorney firings would likely dissipate.

So, the Dems are throwing in the towel on the US Attorney scandal for nothing in return but the thrilling fact that Fred Fielding and the White House finally listened to them. (They like us they really like us!)

What this means is that the new AG will be some standard GOP clone who will promise never to lie and never to do all those bad things that Gonzales did. I’m sure the Democrats will be very stern about that. They might even demand that this new AG conduct an investigation and report back by a date certain on what he finds, by golly! Heck, they may even ask him nicely not spy on anyone without a warrant unless he really, really has to and promise to only deny habeas corpus to people who really don’t deserve it.

I assume that the Dems have decided that there’s nothing to be gained politically by pursuing these issues any further so they don’t want to bother. And they are right to the extent that the Republicans will howl like she-wolves if a new Democratic administration tries to fire the GOP whores they’ve installed throughout the department and now that Gonzo is out they’ve lost their villain of the piece. Plus the Judiciary Committee would love to strut before the cameras bragging about how they approved the new AG. As if that means diddly.

It’s only 18 months until a new administration comes in and they figure they’ll deal with all these issues when a Democrat gets in the white house. Or not. There’s always the possibility that at least some of them believe these extra-constitutional powers really are a good thing and should be preserved to protect us from the boogeyman. (It should go without saying, however, that Republicans would never let Democrats get away with using these powers. They’d fight it just for the pleasure of it.)

Sadly, the Bush administration and the modern Republican movement have exposed a great gaping hole in our system, one which has previously been held together with respect for tradition, consensus on what was acceptable and a healthy belief in what goes around comes around. What we have learned is that an aggressive and power-mad president who has 34 Senators who can be counted upon to stick with him no matter what, can pretty much do anything he wants. If he has a supine, self-serving press that refuses to do its job, so much the better. But that’s really all it takes for a president to become a dictator, at least temporarily — the will to do it and 34 men and women willing to stand behind him.

This is why the Democrats in congress should pursue these scandals even if they are unable to remove the president from office and he is leaving in less than two years. By allowing these precedents to stand, these executive powers to go unchallenged, they will be waiting for the next would-be tyrant to pick them up and run with them. The constitutional system depends upon the truism that if all else fails and crooks and miscreants are the only ones holding office, that they will at least have enough ego to preserve their own power. If they fail to do even that, the system could be irretrievably broken.

Cheney famously said “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.” He will very likely be likewise telling his little friends at cocktail parties a couple of years from now, “Bush proved congress doesn’t matter.”

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Kabuki On Skates

by digby

Please:

No sooner did Allawi hire Barbour Griffith two weeks ago than congressional staffers said they began to be bombarded with e-mails from Allawi (from an Internet domain registered by the lobbying firm) featuring news stories that depict the Maliki government as hopelessly deadlocked and riddled by sectarian militias. “All the e-mails make the Iraqi government look bad,” said one congressional staffer who asked not to be publicly identified talking about the Iraq issues.The e-mails included an Allawi-drafted “Six Point Plan for Iraq,” which outlines various steps the former Iraqi leader would pursue if he were returned to power in Baghdad. Among the more controversial recommendations in the plan are suggestions that a “State of Emergency” be declared for up to 2-3 years “until security is restored.” The plan flatly recommends that the current Iraqi government be removed “through Parliamentary means” because the “sectarian politics of the Maliki Government … are destroying Iraq.”Adding further intrigue to the lobbying campaign was the disclosure that the Barbour Griffith principal overseeing the firm’s Allawi account was former ambassador Robert D. Blackwill—the former Bush White House deputy national-security adviser in charge of Iraq policy, who later served as U.S. special envoy to that country.Documents filed by Barbour Griffith with Justice show that Blackwill personally signed the firm’s contract with Allawi on Aug. 20, stating that he will “lead the team” that will assist “Dr. Allawi and his moderate Iraqi colleagues as they undertake this work.”In light of Blackwill’s close ties to Bush White House policymakers, his role has lead to speculation that the retention of Barbour Griffith was a move at least implicitly endorsed, if not encouraged, by some elements of the administration that are fed up with Maliki. [Yah think? — ed.] While the White House has been critical of Maliki, they maintain official support for his government and have had no comment on Allawi’s campaign.But as described by Allawi, the arrangement may also have been part of an aggressive campaign by Barbour Griffith to solicit lucrative foreign business.Blackwill himself has not returned phone calls since news of the contract surfaced. Allawi, in an interview Wednesday with NEWSWEEK conducted by telephone from Amman, indicated that Blackwill—whom he described as a “dear friend”—was the one who actually raised the idea that the former Iraqi prime minister hire the firm during a recent lunch the two of them had in Europe.“He contacted me,” Allawi said. “We were having lunch … He spoke to me and he said … there is a vacuum in Washington, and we will be able to help and assist. We know your views. We know the views of your people and we are ready to help in getting your message across to the United States.”[…]

Officials familiar with U.S. and U.K. intelligence activities denied that either British or American agencies had any connection to Allawi’s recent hiring of Washington lobbyists or his current campaign to depose the Iraqi government and replace Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. Any suggestion of CIA support for Allawi’s current lobbying activities is “ludicrous,” a U.S. intelligence official said. A British official said that M.I.6 officials “distanced themselves” from Allawi several years ago.

This is just plain insulting. We are really supposed to believe that all this dump Maliki and install Allawi talk being orchestrated by a top GOP lobbying firm isn’t a Bush administration operation? It’s just all a big coincidence?

Atrios has been blogging today about the latest by Bush tool David Ignatius, whose collected works during the past seven years make a good case study in toadyism and intellectual bankruptcy. But Matt Yglesias dredged up this Ignatius blast from the past that speaks directly to the very crude kabuki the administration is staging:

The paradox of Bush is that when you examine his actual policies in Iraq over the past six months, they appear to reflect precisely the sort of learning from experience that the president refuses publicly to acknowledge. The key architect of Iraq policy today is probably Robert Blackwill, a thoughtful former diplomat who serves on the staff of the National Security Council — not the neoconservatives in the Pentagon such as Paul Wolfowitz, who urged the president to war. Wolfowitz’s idealism has been replaced by Blackwill’s calculating pragmatism, at least for the moment.

Right. The moment passed. That was in 2004. But times have changed. Now that he’s working for big bucks at Haley Barbour’s high powered lobbying firm, the white house has outsourced Blackwill’s “pragmatic”view to the private sector to do their dirty work. After all, Blackwill approached his good friend Iyad, not the other way around.

The pragmatic view, of course, is that we need a “strongman” to fix things in Iraq. Like Saddam, only with bases. It makes you proud to be an American doesn’t it?

*And, by the way, can someone please explain to me why Clinton and Levin jumped on the dump Maliki bandwagon? This campaign is clearly being orchestrated by the White House. It strikes me as a either a major error in judgment or something much more nefarious — a signal that the Dems are backing this coup. Am I missing something?

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Back From The Precipice

by digby

I am very glad to see this:

HUNTSVILLE, Texas – Gov. Rick Perry accepted a parole board recommendation Thursday to spare condemned inmate Kenneth Foster, the getaway driver in a 1996 murder who had been scheduled for execution within hours.

The sentence had drawn protests from death penalty opponents because Foster wasn’t the actual shooter.

Foster was convicted of murder and sentence to death under Texas’ law of parties, which makes non-triggermen equally accountable for a crime. Another condemned man was executed under the same statute earlier this year.

“After carefully considering the facts of this case, along with the recommendation from the Board of Pardons and Paroles, I believe the right and just decision is to commute Foster’s sentence from the death penalty to life imprisonment,” Perry said in a statement.

“I am concerned about Texas law that allowed capital murder defendants to be tried simultaneously and it is an issue I think the Legislature should examine.”

That law is a moral abomination. There is no doubt that someone who was involved in such a crime should pay a price, but to make it a death penalty crime when he wasn’t even armed and didn’t know it was happening turns the whole death penalty argument of an eye for and eye on its head. (Not that I agree with an eye for an eye either.)

That the Governor of one of the most bloodthirsty states in the nation and the successor to the the execution-happy George W. Bush, did this — and issued that statement about the law itself — means that there is a glimmer of hope that this insanity about expanding the death penalty may have finally hit the wall. Fairly recently there were rumblings of making child molestation and rape capital crimes again.

I’m getting so sick of the state killing and torturing it makes me want to vomit. Too much blood is already being spilled in this world without the government of the United States losing all restraint and morality too. The only message all the bloodletting sends is that Americans are as barbaric as the enemies and criminals from whom we are allegedly protecting ourselves. (Hint: it’s not working.)

This is a step back from the brink. Sadly, it happens far too infrequently.

Hats off to James Rucker at ColorofChange and to Sean-Paul Kelly who organized calls to the Governor’s office. You can make a difference.

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One Step Beyond

by digby

I’ve been meaning to bring this up. Yglesias got there first:

One sees this mentioned now and again in the blogosphere, but in these dark days of FISA-ignoring surveillance and so forth, one can always console oneself with the thought that things aren’t as bad as they were during the Palmer Raids of the waning days of Woodrow Wilson’s administration…

On the other hand, even at what was the peak (especially in terms of the breadth of violations) of civil unlibertarinism in America, I don’t think you had top government officials arguing that what the country needed was the systematic application of torture.

For all its alleged reverence for tradition, the right has successfully destroyed one of society’s long standing taboos in record time. It’s now a legitimate subject of debate: should we or should we not torture suspects?

I knew these guys were capable of a lot of things, and I’m not especially surprised by their disregard for civil liberties and the constitution. But I don’t think I ever could have predicted that they would be able to put torture back on the menu and the congress and the press would pretty much turn the other cheek. It’s still kind of a shock.

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Ba-dum-bum

by digby

With a triple rim shot…

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Tucker Carlson: He-man

by digby

He’s a he-man if you think telling completely unbelievable stories about how you used to beat up gay’s for hitting on you to be “he-man” activity, which he apparently does:

Via Media Matters,
From the August 28 edition of MSNBC Live at 9 p.m. ET:

CARLSON: Let me — let me put it this way. Whether he’s gay or not actually is not our business, and I do think it’s indefensible that the newspaper in Idaho spent a year interviewing 300 people to answer the question, Is he gay? That’s none of your business. Having sex in a public men’s room is outrageous. It’s also really common. I’ve been bothered in men’s rooms. I think people who do –

SCARBOROUGH: Really?

CARLSON: Yeah, I have. You know what, Let me just say.

SCARBOROUGH: Wait, hold on a second. Dan, hold on a second. I don’t mean to take over, but have you been bothered in public restrooms, Dan? Because I know I haven’t.

CARLSON: I have. I’ve been bothered in Georgetown Park. When I was in high school.

ABRAMS: Really?

CARLSON: Yes.

SCARBOROUGH: Wow.

CARLSON: And let me just say, I think —

SCARBOROUGH: That’s something.

CARLSON: — people should knock that off. I’m not anti-gay in the slightest, but that’s really common, and the gay rights groups ought to disavow that kind of crap because, you know, that actually does bother people who didn’t ask for being bothered. So yeah, I think it’s outrageous that he did that.

[…]

SCARBOROUGH: Hey, Tucker?

CARLSON: You know what I mean? It’s insane!

SCARBOROUGH: Was he the guy in Georgetown, Tucker?

CARLSON: No, actually. I got that — my point is — let me just say —

ABRAMS: Tucker, what did you do, by the way? What did you do when he did that? We got to know.

CARLSON: I went back with someone I knew and grabbed the guy by the — you know, and grabbed him, and — and —

ABRAMS: And did what?

CARLSON: Hit him against the stall with his head, actually!

[laughter]

CARLSON: And then the cops came and arrested him. But let me say that I’m the least anti-gay right-winger you’ll ever meet —

[laughter]

CARLSON: — but I do think doing this in men’s rooms appears to be common. It’s totally wrong, and they should knock it off. I mean that. I think it’s — I can’t bring my son to the men’s room at the park where he plays soccer because of all these creepy guys hanging around in there. I actually think it’s a problem. I’m sorry.

That’s like some gothic high school tale from the 1940’s. And it’s just as credible. Really, does anyone think this actually happened? I don’t. (And then cops came and arrested the guy? Please.) I think Tucker’s odd obsession with gay men’s room sex is revealing, actually. He seems to be have had quite a bit of experience with unwanted male attention (even today he won’t let his son go into a public bathroom) while other straight guys say they very rarely if ever have this kind of interaction. One can’t help but wonder what kind of signals ‘lil Tuckie is sending out.

Furthermore, if Carlson and his high school pal, whom he allegedly left the bathroom to find and then came back to assault this gay man, did this as a result of the guy “tapping his feet” on the floor and sliding his foot under the stall divider, as Larry Craig admitted to doing, then Tuckie knows a hell of a lot more about gay cruising signals that the average straight fellow. I asked my husband if he would have had a clue what it meant if someone did that and he didn’t know what I was talking about.

When the “signals” are that obscure, only the people who are in on the code know what’s going on. Everyone else just thinks it’s some guy sliding his foot around weirdly and tapping his toes while he sits on the toilet and they don’t respond. The guy moves on to someone who knows the code and responds that they are interested.

In other words, if Tucker is picking up these signals as a gay come on, then he’s far more clued in to the gay world than any straight guy, except maybe a cop, would normally be. We don’t know, of course, what really happened to Tucker that day when he was “bothered” in the men’s room. Perhaps it was really aggressively sexual and traumatizing. But he didn’t make any distinctions and made the case that he’d been a victim of someone like Craig, so Craig’s behavior is all we really have to go on.

As far as the raucous laughter on the show when he described banging that guy’s head against a wall for having the temerity to make a pass at he-man Carlson, well, these are probably the same guys who would call a woman who was offended at a man’s crude come-on, a castrating bitch. You can’t win.

I confess, I’m a little bit surprised at the reflexive response of hearty male laughter to violent gay bashing on that show, though. Dan Abrams, the general manager of MSNBC and participant in that conversation, is reputedly gay.

On the other hand, he and Scarborough may have just been laughing at the complete absurdity of the poncy Tucker’s story from beginning to end. I’m actually leaning that way.

Update: To be perfectly clear here. Aside from the “gay panic defense” that Carlson apparently believs excuses bashing someone’s head against a wall for making an unwanted sexual advance, Carlson’s logic on the rest of this is equally disturbing and wrong. By bringing this story up in the context of Craig’s admission, Carlson was implying that the case against Craig was that he was arrested for making crude, unwanted passes at innocent straight men and boys. That’s not the case.

There is evidently a very deliberate and complex signaling that goes on that someone who wasn’t clued in would never get, much less be offended by, because it requires that the target respond in a certain way before it goes to the next step (as the cop in the case did.If someone does feel weird about these signals they are easy enough to repel. Obviously, the reason they are so tentative and obscure is in order not to cause a disturbance.

The reason the police were in that bathroom wasn’t because Craig and his ilk were preying on innocent straight teenagers but because they were meeting up with mutually interested gay men for a casual sexual encounter — which may be icky, but it’s not the same thing as deliberately “bothering” straight high school boys. Carlson made it sound like lots of gay men make a habit of doing that. It’s not true.

There are laws against having sex in public and if someone makes a crude pass in a bathroom you certainly have a right to tell him to fuck off and the cops have a right to arrest him. Nobody has a right to bash his head against a wall. And Tucker doesn’t have a right to say that gay men like Larry Craig, —as reprehensible a hypocritical perv as he might be — make a habit of preying on little boys which is what he was saying when he said he couldn’t let his son go into the bathroom in the park because of all the creepy guys hanging around.

Tucker has now “clarified” his remarks. He says that he didn’t actually bash the guy’s head against the wall, he and his friend just held him until a security guard showed up. (This presumably means there was no police report either.)

Apparently, his bragging about bashing the gay guy’s head against a wall for having the temerity to “bother” him (today he characterizes it as “grabbed” him and “assaulted” him) was just a fish story.

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What Me Worry?

by digby

August 29, 2005:

Two years ago today:

7AM CDT — KATRINA MAKES LANDFALL AS A CATEGORY 4 HURRICANE [CNN] 7:30 AM CDT — BUSH ADMINISTRATION NOTIFIED OF THE LEVEE BREACH: The administration finds out that a levee in New Orleans was breached. On this day, 28 “government agencies, from local Louisiana parishes to the White House, [reported that] that New Orleans levees” were breached. [AP] 8AM CDT — MAYOR NAGIN REPORTS THAT WATER IS FLOWING OVER LEVEE: “I’ve gotten reports this morning that there is already water coming over some of the levee systems. In the lower ninth ward, we’ve had one of our pumping stations to stop operating, so we will have significant flooding, it is just a matter of how much.” [NBC’s “Today Show”] 11:13 AM CDT – WHITE HOUSE CIRCULATES INTERNAL MEMO ABOUT LEVEE BREACH: “Flooding is significant throughout the region and a levee in New Orleans has reportedly been breached sending 6-8 feet of water throughout the 9th ward area of the city.” [AP] MORNING — BROWN WARNS BUSH ABOUT THE POTENTIAL DEVASTATION OF KATRINA: In a briefing, Brown warned Bush, “This is, to put it mildly, the big one, I think.” He also voiced concerns that the government may not have the capacity to “respond to a catastrophe within a catastrophe” and that the Superdome was ill-equipped to be a refuge of last resort. [AP] MORNING — MAYFIELD WARNS BUSH ABOUT THE TOPPING OF THE LEVEES: In the same briefing, Max Mayfield, National Hurricane Center Director, warns, “This is a category 5 hurricane, very similar to Hurricane Andrew in the maximum intensity, but there’s a big big difference. This hurricane is much larger than Andrew ever was. I also want to make absolutely clear to everyone that the greatest potential for large loss of lives is still in the coastal areas from the storm surge. … I don’t think anyone can tell you with any confidence right now whether the levees will be topped or not, but there’s obviously a very very grave concern.” [AP] MORNING — BUSH CALLS SECRETARY CHERTOFF TO DISCUSS IMMIGRATION: “I spoke to Mike Chertoff today — he’s the head of the Department of Homeland Security. I knew people would want me to discuss this issue [immigration], so we got us an airplane on — a telephone on Air Force One, so I called him. I said, are you working with the governor? He said, you bet we are.” [White House] MORNING — BUSH SHARES BIRTHDAY CAKE PHOTO-OP WITH SEN. JOHN MCCAIN [White House] 11AM CDT — MICHAEL BROWN FINALLY REQUESTS THAT DHS DISPATCH 1,000 EMPLOYEES TO REGION, GIVES THEM TWO DAYS TO ARRIVE: “Brown’s memo to Chertoff described Katrina as ‘this near catastrophic event’ but otherwise lacked any urgent language. The memo politely ended, ‘Thank you for your consideration in helping us to meet our responsibilities.’” [AP] LATE MORNING — LEVEE BREACHED: “A large section of the vital 17th Street Canal levee, where it connects to the brand new ‘hurricane proof’ Old Hammond Highway bridge, gave way late Monday morning in Bucktown after Katrina’s fiercest winds were well north.” [Times-Picayune] 11AM CDT — BUSH VISITS ARIZONA RESORT TO PROMOTE MEDICARE DRUG BENEFIT: “This new bill I signed says, if you’re a senior and you like the way things are today, you’re in good shape, don’t change. But, by the way, there’s a lot of different options for you. And we’re here to talk about what that means to our seniors.” [White House] 4:30PM CDT — BUSH TRAVELS TO CALIFORNIA SENIOR CENTER TO DISCUSS MEDICARE DRUG BENEFIT: “We’ve got some folks up here who are concerned about their Social Security or Medicare. Joan Geist is with us. … I could tell — she was looking at me when I first walked in the room to meet her, she was wondering whether or not old George W. is going to take away her Social Security check.” [White House] 8PM CDT — RUMSFELD ATTENDS SAN DIEGO PADRES BASEBALL GAME: Rumsfeld “joined Padres President John Moores in the owner’s box…at Petco Park.” [Editor & Publisher] 8PM CDT — GOV. BLANCO AGAIN REQUESTS ASSISTANCE FROM BUSH: “Mr. President, we need your help. We need everything you’ve got.” [Newsweek] LATE PM — BUSH GOES TO BED WITHOUT ACTING ON BLANCO’S REQUESTS [Newsweek]

In A Nutshell

by digby

Avedon Carol:

Conservatives have always supported intrusive government, they have always endangered Americans by aggravating other countries, and they have always been very happy to collect taxes from ordinary working people and use that tax money to fatten the Malefactors of Great Wealth while depriving the rest of us of our freedoms. Those same people conned a number of libertarian-minded young people in the ’70s and ’80s into believing that conservatism was liberalism and vice-versa because a few intolerant lefties went overboard in their objections to morally reprehensible expressions of racism and sexism. I would have thought these kids would have grown up by now and realized that they’re still paying taxes but under the Republicans they’re getting less for them – and that’s before the bill for all that “strong defense” comes due. How dumb they have to be to think it makes sense to be both Republican and gay after all this just doesn’t bear thinking about.

Sounds right to me.

Click through for the whole thing.

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