BUSH: You know. Probably not … No, I’m not a literalist, but I think you can learn a lot from it, but I do think that the New Testament, for example is … has got … You know, the important lesson is “God sent a son.”
MCFADDEN: So, you can read the Bible…
BUSH: That God in the flesh, that mankind can understand there is a God who is full of grace and that nothing you can do to earn his love. His love is a gift and that in order to draw closer to God and in order to express your appreciation for that love is why you change your behavior.
MCFADDEN: So, you can read the Bible and not take it literally. I mean you can — it’s not inconsistent to love the Bible and believe in evolution, say.
BUSH: Yeah, I mean, I do. I mean, evolution is an interesting subject. I happen to believe that evolution doesn’t fully explain the mystery of life and …
MCFADDEN: But do you believe in it?
BUSH: That God created the world, I do, yeah.
MCFADDEN: But what about …
BUSH: Well, I think you can have both. I think evolution can — you’re getting me way out of my lane here. I’m just a simple president. But it’s, I think that God created the Earth, created the world; I think the creation of the world is so mysterious it requires something as large as an almighty, and I don’t think it’s incompatible with the scientific proof that there is evolution.
Has there ever been a bigger phony?
Earlier today Chris Matthews was running down a (very short) list that some wingnuts had put together about Bush’s accomplishments. One of them was that he had maintained the honor and dignity of the white house.
I find that deeply offensive. Not only is the man speaking above clearly of embarrassing, substandard intellect and often exceedingly bad manners, he is, more importantly, profoundly immoral:
Risen charges that Tenet caved to Bush entirely on the torture of al-Qaeda detainees. After the 2002 capture of Abu Zubaydah, a bin Laden deputy, failed to yield much information due to his drowsiness from medical treatment, Bush allegedly told Tenet, “Who authorized putting him on pain medication?” Not only did Tenet get the message — brutality while questioning an enemy prisoner was no problem — but Tenet also never sought explicit White House approval for permissible interrogation techniques, contributing to what Risen speculates is an effort by senior officials “to insulate Bush and give him deniability” on torture…
Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be….Abu Zubaydah also appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations; rather, he was al-Qaeda’s go-to guy for minor logistics…
Which brings us back to the unbalanced Abu Zubaydah. “I said he was important,” Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. “You’re not going to let me lose face on this, are you?” “No sir, Mr. President,” Tenet replied. Bush “was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth,” Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, “Do some of these harsh methods really work?”
Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety — against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, “thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each…target.” And so, Suskind writes, “the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered.”
Republicans, many of them good Christians I’m sure, consider such behavior to be a model of honor and integrity. And that is precisely the problem.
Sam Stein at The Huffington Post reports on “growing dissent” on the idea of moving troops from the “bad war” in Iraq to the “good war” in Afghanistan.
Sen. Russ Feingold launched a major salvo just weeks before the election, when he penned an op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor, questioning the wisdom of sending more troops to Afghanistan. He was pre-dated by former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who warned about the United States repeating the Soviet Union’s ill-thought-out efforts in that region, during an interview with the Huffington Post. On Monday, the scales tipped even further, when the chief of the United Nations mission in Afghanistan warned that a re-intervention into the country would be pointless if not done with deep cultural sensitivities […]
“There is a growing dissent,” Caroline Wadhams, a Senior National Security Policy Analyst for the left-leaning Center for American Progress. “I think around town there is new thinking: ‘Well, what do we actually want to achieve?’ The fact that they are doing all those strategic reviews reveals we are suffering the symptom of the same [foreign policy] problems [of the past]: no one is sure what our objectives are and what we should do now.”
The angst is driven by a variety of concerns: what a longer-term military commitment to Afghanistan could mean for Obama’s domestic and foreign policy agendas, whether the Afghanistan has the capacity to improve itself, and whether U.S. military forces are best suited for the task.
“People are understanding now how difficult it is going to be,” said Wadhams. “You realize, ‘Oh my god, we have so much to do and are we any good at this? Are we any good at anti-corruption? We have never been good at counter-narcotics. And how do you improve government?’ These are extremely difficult objectives.”
That dissent is wholly justified given the realities on the ground. The Taliban, by one account, has a permanent presence in 72% of the country and is closing in on the capital, Kabul. Unlike Iraq, the militant groups here have a connection to the local tribal communities – they are not solely foreign fighters imposing their will – and they are determined not to make the same mistakes as Al Qaeda in Iraq, even loosening its doctrinaire extremism to accommodate the locals and multiple insurgent groups. The plan floated to “restart the surge” by enlisting tribal groups to fight the Taliban won’t work with coalition forces targeting them at the same time:
They came in the night and shot Saeed Alam in his bed. His three-year-old son was crying at his feet and his mother had leapt on top of him to try to block the bullets. Both of them were hurled out of the way and an American soldier opened fire.
America’s plans to enlist Afghan militias in the war against the Taliban are running into difficulties while still in their infancy. In eastern Paktia province, the white-bearded Afghan village elders who are crucial to the “Afghan awakening”, are threatening to unite against the Americans unless such night raids by US special forces are halted […]
An American press release claimed the raid helped “decimate” a terrorist network. It described Saeed Alam as a militant and said he was holding a grenade while using his mother and son as a human shield. “The force engaged the militant with small-arms fire, killing him while protecting the women and children,” the statement said. “Coalition forces estimate they safeguarded 16 women and 31 children.”
The elders swore Alam was innocent. At least five of those arrested during the raid have since been released, without charge. Contrary to the American statement, the elders said there were no Afghan troops involved, and they said they knew the soldiers were special forces because they had beards.
“Raiding people’s houses and snatching people away creates a very negative impression in the communities,” said a senior Western policy analyst, working in the region.
The response to additional troops in the region will clearly be additional violence. This is particularly the case if civilian casualties continue, increasing anger among the local population. The US plan appears to be to focus their troops in the Kabul region, which is incredibly ominous, suggesting that the countryside is being given up for the time being. And the supply lines connecting the region have been breached.
In one of the largest and most brazen attacks of its kind, suspected Taliban insurgents with heavy weapons attacked two truck stops in northwest Pakistan on Sunday, destroying more than 150 vehicles carrying supplies bound for U.S.-led troops in Afghanistan.
The predawn attack on the outskirts of the city of Peshawar left the grounds of the truck terminals littered with the burned-out shells of Humvees and other military vehicles being transported by private truckers. At least one guard was reported killed.
Early today, a second attack on Western supplies was reported in the same area. A security guard said 50 containers had been burned and some vehicles destroyed by rocket fire […]
The bold assault underscored the vulnerability of supplies moving by road through Pakistan. About three-quarters of the supplies bound for U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops in Afghanistan — fuel, food and equipment — travel by road through perilous mountain passes after being shipped to the port of Karachi. Afghanistan has no sea access.
If the supply lines are cut, even a strategy focused on reconstruction and economic growth for the locals is doomed to failure.
The Obama transition team needs to think about this, and I’m not sure there’s anyone in the room reflecting the proper skepticism about adding troops into this conflagration, and the consequences for the other aspects of his agenda. Speaking at the Center for American Progress this morning, longtime historian Robert Dallek said it right:
War kills reform. Every time we’ve had a major commitment to a war, it has killed a reform movement. Progressivism was done in by the Spanish-American war. Populism by World War I. FDR said Dr. New Deal has been replaced by Dr. War. The Great Society by the Vietnam War. You cannot have guns and butter. If Obama escalates in Afghanistan, if he draws us into a broader war which takes many lives and much money, it will ruin his chances for reform.
That’s not a small loss.
President Bush has left a score of landmines throughout foreign and domestic policy, but the worst by far is in Afghanistan. It could destroy everything.
The creditor of a Chicago plant where laid-off employees are conducting a sit-in to demand severance pay said Tuesday it would extend limited loans to the factory so it could resolve the dispute, but the workers declared their protest unfinished.
The Republic Windows and Doors factory closed last week after Bank of America canceled its financing. About 200 laid-off workers responded by staging a sit-in at the plant, vowing to stay until getting assurances they would receive severance and accrued vacation pay […]
Leah Fried, a spokeswoman for the union representing the workers, said Tuesday that it was too soon to know whether the sit-in will be called off. She said that workers would have to vote to end the action but that negotiations among the bank, the company and union representative continued.
I say “small victory” because it’s not like the workers will have a job to go back to, and because this is the first of what are likely to be many strikes and worker actions as a consequence of the deep recession we’re trapped in.
Still, the labor movement can be proud of their work on this. Now it’s time to get that kind of representation at the banks:
(CNN) — The powerful Service Employees International Union has decided that, because of the $700 billion financial-system bailout, it wants to organize bank workers.
Banks that get taxpayer money need to “ensure their workers have a voice,” a union spokeswoman says […]
“We believe there is special responsibility for companies who receive taxpayer dollars to ensure their workers have a voice on the job,” SEIU’s Lynda Tran said. “And those workers should have a seat at the table at the companies where decisions that impact the future of their families and the companies that employ them” are made.
“We are talking to workers really broadly in banking,” she said.
Of course, Bank of America, the company that denied financing to Republic Windows and Doors, took billions in bailout money.
The minute I heard about Fitzgerald’s press conference, I knew this would follow shortly: Questions Arise About the Obama/Blagojevich Relationship That’s Jake Tapper, not making any charges but bringing up all kinds of cross currents in Illinois politics to suggest that there are “questions.” And all over TV they are talking about “corrupt Chicago politics,” which is being splashed onto Obama.
It’s natural that Obama and many of his staff have crossed paths with the players in this scandal. But according to Lynn Sweet of the Tribune Sun-Times, who has followed Obama for some time and is not a sycophant, says the campaign put a mile between itself and Blagojevich, not even allowing him to speak at the Democratic convention. They are not close.
I don’t know if this will go anywhere. At this point, I think there’s just too much news and too many problems for a phony scandal to have any legs. But, as I wrote almost a year ago, these Chicago shennanigans have elements of a perfect right wing smear by association if they have the energy to launch one and the press decides it’s sexy enough:
The NY Times treated this story [Whitewater] like it was The Pentagon Papers. They legitimized its obfuscatory style of reporting and the confusion that resulted led to the naming of an independent counsel and finally to the partisan impeachment of a popular and successful president. Yet, it was obvious to observers that they were being led around by a cabal of rightwing hit men from very early on. They simply refused to see the story for what it was and instead validated their erroneous reporting with a continuous narrative stream of unproven implications that fed the toxic political environment — and that fed them in return.
I know this is all boring, arcane history now, but it’s important to note that we are seeing similar stuff happening already with respect to various “deals” that are being reported in the press about Harry Reid and John Edwards. So far they are thin, nonsensical “exposes” written by one man, John Soloman, formerly of the AP and now of the Washington Post. Soloman is known to be a lazy reporter who happily takes “tips” from the wingnut noise machine and faithfully regurgitates them. He holds a very important position at the paper that was second only to the Times in its eagerness to swallow Ken Starr’s spin whole.
We are also seeing some similar reporting begin to emerge on Obama, much of it generated by hometown political rivals, just as we saw in the Clinton years. Today the LA Times implies that Obama is exaggerating his activist past. A couple of weeks ago we saw a truly egregiously misleading report on a deal he made to buy some land from a supporter.
These are patented Whitewater-style “smell test” stories. They are based on complicated details that make the casual reader’s eyes glaze over and about which the subject has to issue long confusing explanations in return. They feature colorful and unsavory political characters in some way. They often happened in the past and they tend to be written in such a way as to say that even if they aren’t illegal they “look bad.” The underlying theme is hypocrisy because the subjects are portrayed as making a dishonest buck while pretending to represent the average working man. Oh, and they always feature a Democrat. Republicans are not subject to such scrutiny because a craven, opportunistic Republican isn’t “news.” (Neat trick huh?)
No single story will bring down a candidate because they have no substance to them. It’s the combined effect they are looking for to build a sense overall sleaziness. “Where there’s smoke there’s fire” right?
The major media has never copped to their role in the tabloid sideshow that politics in the 90’s became. They have never copped to their part in elevating Bush to the status of demigod and running beside him like a bunch of eunuchs waving palm fronds during the lead-up to the war. Even today we see them pooh-poohing the significance of a federal trial that exposes them for whores to Republican power.
As I said, I don’t know if this environment is conducive to phony scandal. There’s just so much going on. But if it is, this is one of the ways they do it. Guilt by association, drip-drip-drip of vague allegations and ongoing “questions.” The key to really hammering it home, of course, would be for the Republicans to win back a majority in the congress in 2010, which I think is unlikely. The Republicans were growing in strength during that earlier era and are now in retreat, at least temporarily.
But keep this in the back of your mind. If there is room for scandal and the wingnuts can get traction, this is one of their tried and true methods of getting it “out there.”
Update: The AP is framing it as an Obama “problem” and the Republicans are eagerly jumping into the fray:
Though Barack Obama isn’t accused of anything, the charges against his home-state governor — concerning Obama’s own Senate seat no less — are an unwelcome distraction. And the ultimate fallout is unclear.
As Obama works to set up his new administration and deal with a national economic crisis, suddenly he also is spending time and attention trying to distance himself from Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and charges that the governor was trying to sell the now-vacant Senate post.
The president-elect was blunt and brief in addressing the case on Tuesday: “I had no contact with the governor or his office, and so I was not aware of what was happening” concerning any possible dealing about Blagojevich’s appointment of a successor.
It’s Obama’s first big headache since his election last month, and Republicans were anything but eager to let it go away.
Said Rep Eric Cantor of Virginia, the new GOP House whip: “The serious nature of the crimes listed by federal prosecutors raises questions about the interaction with Gov. Blagojevich, President-elect Obama and other high ranking officials who will be working for the future president.”
Said Robert M. “Mike” Duncan, chairman of the Republican National Committee: “Americans expect strong leadership, but President-elect Barack Obama’s comments on the matter are insufficient at best.”
Hypocritical Republicans just automatically spew that stuff out so it doesn’t really mean anything. The press showing some appetite for that angle is a little bit more troubling. We’ll see.
Update II: Here’s another angle from Richard Viguerie:
The corruption uncovered in the investigation of Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich is just a tiny part of the criminality that runs throughout the country’s politics, Richard A. Viguerie, the Chairman of ConservativeHQ.com, said.
“Before we turn over the car companies, the financial sector, the health care system, and much of the rest of the American economy over to these guys, we need to realize: We are opening doors to a level of corruption like we have never seen before,” he said.
“The American Way is not supposed to be ‘the Chicago Way,’” said Viguerie. “And it doesn’t have to be. There’s still time to save America from becoming one big Chicago.”
Blagojevich is alleged to have, in effect, put his state’s open U.S. Senate seat up for bid. He is also alleged to have made support for a bailout of the Chicago Tribune contingent on the firing of certain members of the newspaper’s editorial board.
“First, this should mean that, whatever else happens in terms of bailouts, media organizations should be excluded absolutely. People should simply assume that any media bailout comes with political conditions, and that any media organization that receives taxpayers’ money is working for the politicians who give them that money.[heh, very clever — ed]
“Second, we should look at all bailouts and infrastructure spending, with an eye on the connections between the politicians who spend taxpayers’ money and the special interests who benefit from the projects.”
[…]
“How are the people supposed to have faith in our government, when the people in charge of investigating the financial crisis are the same ones who forced lenders to give mortgage money to people who couldn’t repay their loans? That includes Chris Dodd, who got a sweetheart deal from mortgage lenders, and Barney Frank, who was censured by the House.”
I expect them to start using the term “culture of corruption” any minute, regardless of the fact that the Republicans just spent 8 years wearing themselves out looting and pillaging the public treasury, some of them even going to jail for it.
But that’s how it works. They are very good at shoving liberals’ words back down their throats at the first opportunity. It usually works too — people either simply assume that there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between the two parties, or forget that it was Republicans who made a fetish out of K Street lobbying and even passed out checks on the House floor and lay it all at the feet of the Democrats. It’s part of the GopSoviet airbrushing of the Bush years.
The suspect in a domestic assault died early this morning after he fought with Minneapolis police officers and was shot with a Taser police say.
Officers were called to a home in the 1000 block of Knox Avenue N. at around 12:45 a.m. to investigate a report of a domestic assault by a man armed with a rifle, according to Sgt. William Palmer.
Officers found the man on the street and tried to arrest him. He resisted and officers shot him with a Taser, Palmer said.
After the man was subdued, he appeared to be having medical problems, and officers called for an ambulance. The suspect was taken to Hennepin County Medical Center where he died, Palmer said.
It’s a good thing tasers are harmless.
Capital punishment for resisting arrest seems a little bit steep, but maybe people will finally begin to understand that they may have legal rights on paper, but out in the real world you never know when the authorities might decide to use a completely safe, non-lethal weapon to force your immediate compliance and kill you.
The country has been brainwashed by the right into believing that the government should be run like a household, which means that when things get tough, it needs to pay off its debts and save money rather than spending. This works out very well for the conservatives, who hate government spending on anything that doesn’t directly benefit their wealthy benefactors. But it’s disastrous for the country at a time like this. Not that they care.
The fact is that the need for government spending, on a pretty massive scale, is beyond ideology and politics at this point. It’s Keynes 101 and those who are fighting it are anachronistic captives of a bankrupt Hooveresque ideology.The only question really, is how much and where.
To engage the debate, Campaign For America’s Future and over 100 economists and experts have formulated a stimulus plan that might actually fix the economy — and much more.
A group of economists and progressive organization leaders have drafted this Main Street Recovery Program to meet urgent needs unaddressed by efforts to shore up Wall Street financial institutions. This program calls for substantial, strategic, and sustained investment in the real economy—a bold plan to not only address the impact the current recession is having on ordinary Americans but to reshape the economy for the 21st century. We intend this recovery program to be the basis for immediate action by the Obama administration and Congress in the coming weeks.
None of this is going to come as news to anyone, but the need for comprehensive health care reform now is magnified by massive job loss, which also often means a loss of health insurance for those affected (which is typically not just the employee but their family), leading to the phenomenon of the pre-insured.
The crisis is on display here. Starla D. Darling, 27, was pregnant when she learned that her insurance coverage was about to end. She rushed to the hospital, took a medication to induce labor and then had an emergency Caesarean section, in the hope that her Blue Cross and Blue Shield plan would pay for the delivery […]
“This shows why — no matter how bad the condition of the economy — we can’t delay pursuing comprehensive health care,” said Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio. “There are too many victims who are innocent of anything but working at the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Often, when I’m having arguments over health insurance with people, they will trot out the talking point that nobody goes without health care in America because anyone can go to the insurance emergency room (funny typo! -ed.). Aside from that being the most expensive, wasteful and dangerous way to achieve “universal coverage” you can think of, it doesn’t work as a matter of capacity. It’s simply false that everyone has access to the emergency room.
Even before the recession became evident, many emergency rooms around the country were already overcrowded, with dangerously long waits for some patients and the frequent need to redirect ambulances to other hospitals.
“We have no capacity now,” said Dr. Angela F. Gardner, the president-elect of the American College of Emergency Physicians, which represents 27,000 emergency doctors. “There’s no way we have room for any more people to come to the table.”
What’s more, patients entering ERs for routine care prevent doctors from treating those with more pressing emergencies, and frequently patients delay medical care until they have an emergency, making treatment more costly.
Again, anyone who has spent several hours in an emergency room waiting for a bed knows this. Anyone who’s been laid off and seen what it costs to maintain coverage through COBRA knows this. That majority needs to be very present in making sure their concerns are met by any comprehensive health care reform. Of course, we’ve been governed the past eight years by people like this:
Being without health insurance is no big deal. Just ask President Bush. “I mean, people have access to health care in America,” he said last week. “After all, you just go to an emergency room.”—NYTimes.
What do you know? The Canadian Broadcasting Company did independent testing on tasers and it turns out they often quite quite a bit more electricity than the manufacturer says they are capable of. Shocking (no pun intended.)
The doctors and engineers consulted by the CBC to interpret the results determined the higher electrical current was enough to raise the risk of an irregular heartbeat to as much as 50 percent for those with existing heart troubles. The risk level depends on various factors, including whether the heart lies between the Taser’s barbs and how long the shock lasts. The risk would decline if, for example, the Taser’s barbs fell off or didn’t fully penetrate the skin. Savard also concluded that multiple shocks from normally working Tasers posed up to a 5 percent risk of ventricular fibrillation, the abnormal heart rhythm associated with a heart attack. Savard said he is worries that police are given Tasers that are potentially deadly but are told they are totally safe. He suspects such pronouncements have led to a dangerous “drift” in usage of the weapons. “If you’re told there’s zero risk . . . you can start using it just to save time because you’re tired of talking with the subject,” he said.
Here’s an article laying out some of the arguments about “Card Check” aka the Employee Free Choice Act:
Is it pay-back time or about time? When it comes to “card-check,” slang for the Employee Free-Choice Act – one of the first pieces of legislation likely to go before Congress when it reconvenes in January – it depends on who you ask.
Today, if a union organizer goes into a workplace and gets 30 percent of the employees to sign a “union interest” card, an election is ordered by the National Labor Relations Board. A secret-ballot vote is held six weeks later, giving both union and employer time to lobby the workers.
Under card-check, not so much: If a majority of employees sign a union card, then the union becomes the bargaining unit. No more six-week campaigns, no more elections. It’s a done deal; you’re essentially a union shop. […]
“Card-check gives a better opportunity for workers to have an easier way to form a union at their workplace,” explains Bill George, president of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO.
He pushes back at critics who say it goes against the fundamental American right to a secret ballot: “Bottom line is that there is too much power in the hands of employers, and middle-class workers are not getting their fair share of the profits.”
“If you want to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to a union, you should be able to do that in the privacy of the voting booth,” counters James Sherk, a Bradley Fellow in Labor Policy at the Heritage Foundation.
“Promoting unionism is not a wise idea in the middle of a recession,” Sherk adds. The real issue in his mind is not whether unions are good or bad. “The issue is, are these specific conditions” – not using secret ballots – “good or bad? I would argue (that) no matter the economic circumstances, workers have the right to a private vote.
“They have the right to vote ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on unionism without the union officials or their co-workers being aware of how they voted.”
You can make an argument that each side sees a benefit to a different process, says Purdue University professor Bert Rockman.
“Signing the union petition card is an indication of discontent with present conditions in the workforce; the unions argue that is sufficient,” he explains. Democrats are likely to cave to that argument since unions are an important, if fading, constituency of their party.
A secret ballot, on the other hand, allows employers to do many things. They can respond to some of the discontent, indicating that they care and that everyone is better off without a union, or they can argue about the cost to the workers of unionization.
Can you see what’s wrong with that argument?
The secret ballot allows employers to “indicate they care” and “argue about the cost to the workers of unionization.” Why would anyone object to that? No mention of the retaliation, threats and intimidation workers often suffer for six long weeks until they can cast their vaunted secret ballot.
This is a bizarre issue for the Republicans to go to the mattresses on, but that appears to be what they are doing. I’ve mentioned before just how weird it is that the crowds at McCain rallies would break out into a near frenzy at the mention of “secret ballot.” Clearly, the talk radio gasbags have primed them. There must be a reason why, in the midst of their doldrums and retrenchment, their guns are still blazing at something this obscure and I would guess that it’s because they feel fundamentally politically threatened by this is some ways that aren’t completely obvious. They’ve never liked unions, but I would guess that they see a particular threat in the midst of this economic crisis.
Health care and unionization — if they happen, the right has both a political and structural problem on their hands which will make it very difficult for them to come back in a big way — at least for quite some time. When it comes to our two party system, the Republicans understand quite well that these are the kinds of successes from which long term realignments are made.
that they were being led around by a cabal of rightwing hit men from very early on. They simply refused to see the story for what it was and instead validated their erroneous reporting with a continuous narrative stream of unproven implications that fed the toxic political environment — and that fed them in return.