This irks the hell out of me. Media Matters did another study highlighting how the Sunday news shows (other than This Week) continue to feature far more conservatives than liberals, even since the election when the Democrats took control of the congress. The Sunday shows are refusing to address the issue or are snide and dismissive in spite of the study’s data proving that they favor the GOP.
Here’s an example from the producer of Face the Nation:
Responding to Media Matters’ finding that Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham (SC) appeared on her show nine times in 2005 and 2006, Pratt said: “We love Graham. He’s a great guy.” But more notably, Pratt suggested that ideology and balance are irrelevant when it comes to hosting administration officials, many of whom appear on Face the Nation without being countered by someone from the opposite side of the political aisle: “It doesn’t matter whether Secretary [of State Condoleezza] Rice is a conservative or a liberal,” Pratt said. “She’s the secretary of state.” For viewers, the result of Pratt’s position is to be denied the informed views of a guest countering the administration’s message. Pratt’s comments suggest that she believes it is appropriate for the program she produces to consistently offer the government, but not those who may disagree with it, access to the airwaves, and to host more Republicans than Democrats overall.
Thousands have taken action on our site – www.sundayshowreport.com – agreeing to stand up to the imbalanced debate occurring every Sunday morning on the influential network political talk shows. That number is growing by the hour. The Sunday morning shows are not as eager to respond. Media Matters has yet to hear directly from the Sunday shows or the networks. Even the press is getting the cold shoulder, with some reports claiming “[r]epresentatives for Meet the Press and Face the Nation would not comment on the report’s findings” and others claiming the networks are dismissing Media Matters’ findings. Providing equitable access to progressive points of view is critical for the future of our national debate. That’s why we need your help today. You, and people like you, can make the networks hear the truth and get us one step closer to fair and equitable coverage on the Sunday shows. Please click here to view Media Matters for America’s new report and take action. Together, we can force these influential shows to respond and make the necessary changes we seek.
Uncle Alan had some interesting things to say today. I think I like this most of all:
He said it was critical to find ways to address growing income inequality in the United States.
Income inequality “is where the capitalist system is most vulnerable,” Greenspan said. “You can’t have the capitalist system if an increasing number of people think it is unjust.”
So true, so true. So, how does Uncle Alan propose to fix the problem?
The former Fed chief said that increasing the number of immigrants with sought-after skills would increase the labor supply of these workers in the United States and hold down the wage gains of all workers with these skills.
In that way, Greenspan said, the gap between skilled and unskilled workers would be lowered.
The key to making Americans happy with capitalism is to hold down all their wages, not just some of them. Is this a great country, or what?
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said he expects the fallout from subprime-mortgage defaults to spread to other parts of the economy, especially if home prices decline.
“If prices go down, we will have problems — problems in the sense of spillover to other areas,” Greenspan said in remarks to the Futures Industry Association meeting in Boca Raton, Florida today. While he hasn’t seen such spreading yet, “I expect to.”
Subprime borrowers, or those with poor or limited credit histories, are increasingly defaulting after looser lending standards allowed them to take on more debt than they could afford. Last month, Greenspan told an audience in Toronto that “disarray” in the subprime mortgage market isn’t likely to create greater financial instability in the rest of the economy.
“It is not a small issue,” Greenspan said today. “If we could wave a wand and prices go up 10 percent, the subprime mortgage problem would disappear.”
Uncle Alan failed to mention that he had been quite a big booster of those sub-prime mortgages when he was frantically trying to prop up the economy with toothpicks and chewing gum:
“Innovation has brought about a multitude of new products, such as subprime loans and niche credit programs for immigrants. . . . With these advances in technology, lenders have taken advantage of credit-scoring models and other techniques for efficiently extending credit to a broader spectrum of consumers. . . .
Where once more-marginal applicants would simply have been denied credit, lenders are now able to quite efficiently judge the risk posed by individual applicants and to price that risk appropriately. These improvements have led to rapid growth in subprime mortgage lending . . . fostering constructive innovation that is both responsive to market demand and beneficial to consumers.”
Why, you’d be a fool not to run right out and get one! Constructive innovation! Beneficial to customers!
K-Drum wrote about this a few days ago and catalogued Greenspan’s comments on the issue over the last few years. It’s ironic that he’s finally been reduced to literally talking about waving magic wands. For too many years his utterances were treated like fairy dust and it’s going to be a miracle if we don’t pay a very huge price for it.
And I hope all those Randian libertarian techies and engineers out there who thought Uncle Alan was some sort of wizard are as happy as he thinks they’ll be when income inequality is solved by reducing their wages. After all, in the long run, it’ll all even out. (Of course, as a very smart economist once pointed out, in the long run even Greenspan-loving libertarians will all be dead.)
As little children we were all told a lovely little parable about boys and wolves to illustrate the problem of losing your credibility. (Apparently Barbara Bush was too busy golfing to share that one with her oldest son.) Once you are a proven liar, you often find that people don’t believe you even when you tell the truth.
Similarly, when a government has made a fetish out of torture, which everyone knows is unreliable and forces false confessions, people tend to be just a tad skeptical when the government releases transcripts of a terrorist mastermind’s confessed plots replete with lurid details about beheadings and plans to assassinate the pope. (It’s especially difficult to swallow when they release the information in the middle of an exploding white house scandal, when they’ve had custody of this person for years.)
It may all be true. But because this government has insisted that “sending a message” of toughness will make suicide bombers turn tail and give up — and seems to truly believe that a false confession is a good as a real one, we have no way of knowing. This guy is by all accounts a very bad man, I don’t doubt it. But the details of his confessions are meaningless because of this administration’s short sighted and immoral policies.
Imagine how powerful these confessions could have been in a legitimate war crimes trial if the Bush administration had followed civilized practices and maintained a shred of moral authority and credibility. Too bad we’ll never know.
CHETRY: Well, as the Sam Cooke song goes, “Don’t know much about history,” the same could be said about religion. In a nation where the majority of people say they believe in God, most of us don’t know the specifics, it seems, about religion.
According to the new book “Religious Literacy,” Americans are shockingly ignorant about the bible, or any other holy book, for that matter. Its author says that one out of 10 Americans thinks that Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife. So — that was only one out of 10 — all right.
So, did — we did our own test. We wanted to see if anyone knew who wrote the gospels.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Michael, maybe? Right?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I mean, I know then, but I just can’t name them all.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: OK. I can’t do it.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: All right.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: So that’s what I meant, like gospel writers… don’t know.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CHETRY: Delia Gallagher is CNN’s faith and values correspondent.
Now, I thought that one was pretty easy. For the record, tell us.
DELIA GALLAGHER, CNN FAITH AND VALUES CORRESPONDENT: I thought it was pretty easy, too.
For the record, they’re Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, but surprisingly it was the question that most people had difficulty with, Kiran.
CHETRY: All right. So what were some of the other findings, Delia, about — because the vast majority of people asked say they are religious, and many Christians don’t necessarily know the specifics of the bible.
GALLAGHER: Yes. Well, you know, a lot of people will say they believe, and they are Christian, and they are practicing, but when it comes to really knowing your bible or even knowing about other religions, we found that a lot of people don’t have a great breadth of knowledge about their history and their religious history.
So, for example, one of the things that I found was interesting in our little non-scientific survey, we should say, from some of those people that you saw there was that they did know about Islam’s holy book, the Koran. So, you know, you can see that some of this is seeping through in terms of what’s happening in today’s world, but they don’t necessarily know about Jewish and Christian scriptures in the bible.
CHETRY: All right. So why do we need to know this stuff?
GALLAGHER: Well, you know, it’s — religious history is history in general, so, of course, there is some value to knowing about history, and it’s about the history of the Jewish and the Christian people. And then, of course, you have cultural references from today that refer back to the bible and presidents and pop songs, and all kinds of different references that a lot of people are sort of familiar with, but they don’t really know where it all comes from.
CHETRY: Hey, does this sort of reopen the debate about whether we should be teaching religion in schools?
GALLAGHER: Well, this is part of the point that the author makes in his book. He blames the fact that were are religiously illiterate on the fact that in our schools we do not teach the bible either as history or as literature in any way.
The problem, of course, with that, as he points out, is that people are afraid to do this, because you will find yourself in court if you try to teach it, but not preach it. You know, there’s a fine line between those two. And in our public school system, that is something that the schools are really afraid to get into, and one of the reasons why kids today and adults aren’t getting any kind of bible history.
I agree that it’s a little bit odd that the vast majority of people in a country that prides itself as the most religious in the world can’t name the writers of the gospel, but really, whose fault is that? The last I heard, there were tens of thousands of churches in this country. Is it too much to ask that they be in charge of religious instruction? Isn’t that their specialty?
I know that many of the conservative mega-churches spend most of their time instructing their parishoners on Republican politics and holding Christian rock extravaganzas so they don’t have time for actual religious teaching. Understood. But maybe they could send their kids to the mainline and liberal churches once a month so they can get some actual Bible teachings. With all the pressure on public schools to find a way to teach biology that doesn’t offend the Christian Right, they just don’t have the resources to spend on special classes about Biblical references in pop songs and presidents ‘n stuff.
I’m sure there are many churches that would be happy to accomodate those who want their kids (or themselves) to learn about religion.
So, Senator Sununu Jr came out for Gonzales to be fired. Hmmm. Maybe he finally saw the moment to give Bush Jr some payback for his metaphorical assassination of Sununu’s father:
“G.W. played a key role in the ousting of John Sununu,” Ed Rollins says. “John was too high-profile to be Bush’s chief of staff. He saw himself almost as a deputy president. The reality was, John had to go — and G.W. knew it. Others in the Bush administration did not want to take on Sununu, even though they shared G.W.’s view. So G.W. became the messenger who told his father this had to happen. I’m sure G.W. volunteered to fire Sununu himself. There’s a hard-ass side to G.W. that he enjoys.” Because of the Sununu firing, George W. was often asked to do the more unpleasant duties his father wanted to avoid. “That’s how he got the nicknames the Hatchetman and the Enforcer,” says a Bush White House insider. “George W. was the one who carried out the trash.”
I’m so glad we don’t have an aristocracy and all the hideous family infighting they bring with them, aren’t you?
If you aren’t reading Mahablog (along with TPM, of course) on the US Attorney scandal, you should be. She has lot’s of great analysis and sources in many posts over the last few days.
You’ve no doubt heard of the five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance). I’ve come to realize something like that goes on among righties whenever a new Republican scandal washes ashore. I propose that the five stages of reaction to a scandal are:
1. Ignoring 2. Belittling 3. Blaming the Media 4. Evoking Bill Clinton. 5. Boredom
That last stage allows the sufferer to return to stage 1 and ignore the issue. Also note that righties don’t necessarily go through these stages in order or even one stage at a time.
Haha. I think she leaves out one important stage — righteous indignation and evocations of unamerican, unpatriotic motives on the part of critics. Certainly, when we criticize the Justice Department for its political purge of Republicans with integrity, we are prove how much we hate the troops.
President Pissypants goes on the record, which may be a mistake. (C&L has the video):
Q Thank you. The Attorney General acknowledged yesterday that there were mistakes in the firing of prosecutors. What is his future in your cabinet? Do you have confidence in him? And more importantly — or just as important — how effective can he be in Congress going forward when he’s lost a lot of confidence among Democrats and doesn’t have any defenders among Republicans?
PRESIDENT BUSH: I do have confidence in Attorney General Al Gonzales. I talked to him this morning, and we talked about his need to go up to Capitol Hill and make it very clear to members in both political parties why the Justice Department made the decisions it made, making very clear about the facts. And he’s right, mistakes were made. And I’m, frankly, not happy about it, because there is a lot of confusion over what really has been a customary practice by the Presidents. U.S. attorneys and others serve at the pleasure of the President. Past administrations have removed U.S. attorneys; they’re right to do so.
The Justice Department recommended a list of U.S. attorneys. I believe the reasons why were entirely appropriate. And yet this issue was mishandled to the point now where you’re asking me questions about it in Mexico, which is fine. If I were you, I’d ask the same question. This is an issue that — let me just say, Al was right, mistakes were made, and he’s going to go up to Capitol Hill to correct them.
I appreciate the fact that he’s taken some action, because anytime anybody goes up to Capitol Hill, they’ve got to make sure they fully understand the facts, and how they characterize the issue to members of Congress. And the fact that both Republicans and Democrats feel like that there was not straightforward communication troubles me, and it troubles the Attorney General, so he took action. And he needs to continue to take action.
—
Q Thank you, Mr. President, President Calderon. On the dismissal of U.S. attorneys, there have been allegations that political motivations were involved. Is political loyalty to your administration an appropriate factor? And when you talked to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales last year, what did you say, and what did you direct him to do?
PRESIDENT BUSH: Thanks, Kelly. I’ve heard those allegations about political decision-making; it’s just not true. Secondly, just so you know, I get asked — I get complaints all the time from members of Congress on a variety of subjects — this senator, this congressperson so-and-so — there’s occasionally frustration with the executive branch. And they will pull me aside and say, are you aware of this, are you aware of that? And I did receive complaints about U.S. attorneys.
I specifically remember one time I went up to the Senate and senators were talking about the U.S. attorneys. I don’t remember specific names being mentioned, but I did say to Al last year — you’re right, last fall — I said, have you heard complaints about AGs, I have — I mean, U.S. attorneys, excuse me — and he said, I have. But I never brought up a specific case nor gave him specific instructions.
Q Sir, might he have inferred that you discussed it with him was a need for him to take action?
PRESIDENT BUSH: You’re going to have to ask Al that question, but as I say, I discuss with my Cabinet officials complaints I hear. When members of the Senate come up and say to me, I’ve got a complaint, I think it’s entirely appropriate and necessary for me to pass those complaints on. I don’t every single time, but people view their moment with the President sometimes as an opportunity to unload their frustrations about how things may be working in their state — or congresspersons how things may be working in their district. And whether it be the Attorney General or the Secretary of State or other members of my Cabinet, I pass those complaints on at times.
I guess it depends on what the meaning of the phrase “specific cases” is:
Dan Bartlett, counselor to the president, told reporters traveling with Bush in Mexico on Tuesday that the White House had received complaints about U.S. attorneys’ handling of election fraud cases in New Mexico, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and Bush had a brief conversation with Gonzales about the complaints in October.
All of these alleged complaints were bullshit Karl Rove obsessions that Bush just happened to pass-on the month before the election. Uh huh.(Here again, is Rove speaking to the Republican National Lawyers Association last year.)
It’s hard to know how Bush speaks to his minions in private. But we do have a clue about how he speaks to foreign leaders when he doesn’t know the mic is on:
Bush: Yo Blair How are you doing? Blair: I’m just… Bush: You’re leaving? Blair: No, no, no not yet. On this trade thingy…[inaudible] Bush: yeah I told that to the man Blair: Are you planning to say that here or not? Bush: If you want me to Blair: Well, it’s just that if the discussion arises… Bush: I just want some movement. Blair: Yeah Bush: Yesterday we didn’t see much movement Blair: No, no, it may be that it’s not, it maybe that it’s impossible Bush: I am prepared to say it Blair: But it’s just I think what we need to be an opposition Bush: Who is introducing the trade Blair: Angela Bush: Tell her to call ’em Blair: Yes Bush: Tell her to put him on them on the spot.Thanks for the sweaters it’s awfully thoughtful of you Blair: It’s a pleasure Bush: I know you picked it out yourself Blair: Oh, absoultely, in fact I knitted it myself BUSH: “Right . . . What about Kofi? That seems odd. I don’t like the sequence of it. His attitude is basically ceasefire and everything else happens.” BLAIR: “I think the thing that is really difficult is you can’t stop this unless you get this international presence agreed.” . . . Bush: Yeah Blair: I don’t know what you guys have talked about but as I say I am perfectly happy to try and see what the lie of the land is but you need that done quickly because otherwise it will spiral Bush: I think Condi is going to go pretty soon Blair: But that’s that’s that’s all that matters. But if you, you see it will take some time to get that together Bush: Yeah, yeah Blair: But at least it gives people… Bush: It’s a process, I agree. I told her your offer to… Blair: Well…it’s only if I mean… you know. If she’s got a…, or if she needs the ground prepared as it were… Because obviously if she goes out, she’s got to succeed, if it were, whereas I can go out and just talk Bush: You see, the … thing is what they need to do is to get Syria, to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it’s over Blair: [inaudible] Bush: [inaudible] Blair: Syria Bush: Why? Blair: Because I think this is all part of the same thing Bush: Yeah. Blair: What does he think? He thinks if Lebanon turns out fine, if we get a solution in Israel and Palestine, Iraq goes in the right way… Bush: Yeah, yeah, he is sweet Blair: He is honey. And that’s what the whole thing is about. It’s the same with Iraq Bush: I felt like telling Kofi to call, to get on the phone to Bashad [Bashir Assad] and make something happen Blair: Yeah
Notice how he orders the prime minister of Britain about, tasks him to give the president of Germany her marching orders and then talks about the UN Secretary general like his the gay houseboy in “La Cage Aux Folles.” Does the man in that excerpt sound like the type who wouldn’t inappropriately give his Attorney General orders? And do you suppose that Attorney General who owes his entire professional career to this president wouldn’t get the message?
George W. bush thinks every utterance is an order. He is not the president, he’s “the decider.”
The American people must understand when I said that we need to be patient, that I meant it. And we’re going to be there for a while. I don’t know the exact moment when we leave, David, but it’s not until the mission is complete. The world must know that this administration will not blink in the face of danger and will not tire when it comes to completing the missions that we said we would do. The world will learn that when the United States is harmed, we will follow through.
The world will see that when we put a coalition together that says “Join us,” I mean it. And when I ask others to participate, I mean it.
Sure, it’s totally believable that when that guy “mentioned” these complaints about voter fraud in the month before the election, his Attorney General just ignored him.
The WSJ editorial page published a typical fun-house mirror version of reality this morning when they wrote about Clinton’s firings, suggesting that he did it in order to stop the Rostenkowski prosecution and Whitewater investigations. They gloss over the salient fact that Rosty went to jail — and that even a partisan Republican independent counsel with a blank check couldn’t find any wrongdoing in Whitewater.
Regardless of the WSJ‘s distortions about Clinton, as Joe Conason points out in his column today in the NY Observer there was a precedent for the particular brand of politicization of the Justice Department we are seeing today. Poppy had a little episode that might have been the prototype:
There was once another Republican prosecutor who insisted on behaving professionally instead of obeying partisan hints from the White House. His name was Charles A. Banks, and the Washington press corps said nothing when he was punished for his honesty by the administration of the first President Bush.
The cautionary tale of Chuck Banks begins during the summer of 1992, as the Presidential contest entered its final months with Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton leading incumbent President George H.W. Bush.
At the time, Mr. Banks had already served for five years as the United States Attorney in Little Rock. As an active Republican who had run for Congress and still aspired to higher office, he counted Mr. Clinton among his political adversaries. The first President Bush had recently selected him as a potential nominee for the federal bench. Nothing could have better served Mr. Banks’ personal interests than a chance to stop the Clintons and preserve the Bush Presidency.
In September 1992, a Republican activist employed by the Resolution Trust Corporation provided that opportunity by fabricating a criminal referral naming the Clintons as witnesses in a case against the Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan Association (the small Arkansas savings and loan owned by Whitewater partner and Clinton friend James McDougal).
The referral prepared by L. Jean Lewis lacked merit—as determined by both Mr. Banks and the top F.B.I. agent in his office—but Ms. Lewis commenced a persistent crusade for action against the hated Clintons. The F.B.I. and the U.S. Attorney repeatedly rejected or ignored her crankish entreaties.
Eventually, however, officials in the Bush White House and the Justice Department heard whispers about the Lewis referral. Obviously, that document had the potential to save the President from defeat in November by smearing the Clintons as corrupt participants in a sweetheart land deal. (They had actually lost a large sum of money in Whitewater.)
That fall, Edith Holiday, secretary to the Bush cabinet, asked Attorney General William Barr whether he knew anything about such a referral. Although Mr. Barr knew nothing, he quickly sent an inquiry to the F.B.I. Weeks later, the President’s counsel, C. Boyden Gray, posed a similar improper question to a top Resolution Trust Corp. official.
The queries and hints from above created intense pressure on Mr. Banks to act on the Lewis referral despite his opinion, shared by the F.B.I., that her work was sloppy and biased. After Mr. Barr ordered him to act on the referral no later than two weeks before Election Day, he replied with a roar of conscience.
“I know that in investigations of this type,” he wrote in a remarkable memo to his boss, “the first steps, such as issuance of … subpoenas … will lead to media and public inquiries of matters that are subject to absolute privacy. Even media questions about such an investigation in today’s modern political climate all too often publicly purport to ‘legitimize what can’t be proven’ ….
“I must opine that after such a lapse of time, the insistence for urgency in this case appears to suggest an intentional or unintentional attempt to intervene into the political process of the upcoming presidential election ….
“For me personally to participate in an investigation that I know will or could easily lead to the above scenario … is inappropriate. I believe it amounts to prosecutorial misconduct and violates the most basic fundamental rule of Department of Justice policy.”
Needless to say, Banks no longer had a career in GOP politics. And L. Jean Lewis later gave one of American history’s most memorable testimonies before congress when she “fainted” under Democratic questioning. (She and her husband were both rewarded with jobs in the Junior Bush administration.)
Unfortunately the GOP spin is penetrating. I was talking to a fellow liberal this morning who has received all his news about the US Attorney scandal from TV and this is what he said, “Well, they all do it, right? Didn’t Clinton fire all the prosecutors so he could put his own people in?”
So, I would suggest that we stop discussing this in terms of a “purge” or “firings” because the truth is that the firings in themselves are not the problem. It’s the reasons for the firings. These prosecutors were removed because they failed to prosecute Democrats for political reasons — or they insisted on prosecuting Republicans on corruption charges. (One was removed in order to give a patronage job to Karl Rove’s little buddy and the fact that it was in Arkansas should not be ignored. Hillary Clinton is running for president, after all.)
And you have to wonder how many other GOP prosecutors played ball with Karl Rove on this stuff. I think a cloud hangs over the whole department in light of this. These recent firings aren’t the only cases of political interference:
Former Sen. Peter Fitzgerald (R-Ill.) said Tuesday that White House political adviser Karl Rove told him in the spring of 2001 that he should limit his choice for U.S. attorney in Chicago to someone from Illinois.
According to Fitzgerald, who was determined to bring in a prosecutor from outside the state, Rove “just said we don’t want you going outside the state. We don’t want to be moving U.S. attorneys around.
Fitzgerald said he believes Rove was trying to influence the selection in reaction to pressure from Rep. Dennis Hastert, then speaker of the House, and allies of then-Gov. George Ryan, who knew Fitzgerald was seeking someone from outside Illinois to attack political corruption.
Fitzgerald said he announced his choice, Patrick Fitzgerald (no relation), a New Yorker, on May 13, a Mother’s Day Sunday, to pre-empt any opposition.
A year or so later, according to Peter Fitzgerald, Rove “said to me that Fitzgerald appointment got great headlines for you, but it ticked off the base.” Peter Fitzgerald said he believes the “base” was Illinois Republican insiders upset at the prosecutor’s assault on corruption.
Aides to Hastert say they never heard about any directives regarding the appointment.
“He [Sen. Fitzgerald] set up his own process, never talked to anyone about the process and then released the name before he told the president,” said Mike Stokke, who was Hastert’s deputy chief of staff at the time.
Oh, the irony.
Update: The WSJ says that the Washington State US`Attorney is a Democrat:
But it should have been enough to prompt Mr. McKay, a Democrat, to investigate, something he declined to do, apparently on grounds that he had better things to do.
I wrote earlier about the Washington State Republican party’s effort to phony up a voter fraud scandal where none existed. And I had some strong suspicions that this GOP voter fraud fraud is a very special Karl Rove initiative.
The Seattle Times reports tonight that a chairman of the Washington state Republican Party with ties to Karl Rove pressured U.S. Attorney John McKay to launch a criminal probe during the hotly contested 2004 governor’s race, which had been certified in favor of the Democratic candidate. The ex-chairman, Chris Vance, “said that he was in contact with the White House’s political office at the time.”
Vance said then-U.S. Attorney John McKay made it clear he would not discuss whether his office was investigating allegations of voter fraud in the election. He said McKay cut off the conversation. “I thought it was part of my job, to be a conduit,” Vance, who now operates a consulting business, said in a telephone interview. “We had a Republican secretary of state, a Republican prosecutor in King County and a Republican U.S. attorney, and no one was doing anything.“
Vance’s revelation may be new evidence of a wider level of involvement by Karl Rove in the U.S. Attorney purge. Vance and Rove reportedly worked closely on state politics. The Republican gubernatorial candidate in 2004, Dino Rossi, was the candidate “Vance and Rove wanted,” the Seattle Times noted in 2005. Rove and Vance also reportedly worked to get Rep. Jennifer Dunn (R-WA) to launch a Senate bid. McKay is a Republican and was appointed by President Bush. The alleged voter fraud he was being pressured to probe had already been investigated by prosecutors in his office and the FBI, who “never found any evidence of criminal conduct.” Nevertheless, he was pressured both by a GOP official and Rep. Doc Hastings’s (R-WA) office to convene a federal grand jury.
I can’t help but bring up again how we were just treated to day after day of Republicans self-righteously howling about how poor little Scooterpie was railroaded by an out of control prosecutor who shouldn’t have pursued him once he knew that there was no underlying crime.
These people are simply breathtaking in their total, all encompassing intellectual and moral corruption.
WASHINGTON (AP) – Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards was skeptical about voting for the Iraq war resolution and was pushed into it by advisers looking out for his political future, according to an upcoming book by one of his former consultants.
Democratic strategist Bob Shrum writes in his memoir to be published in June that he regrets advising Edwards to give President Bush the authority to go to war in Iraq. He said if Edwards had followed his instincts instead of the advice of political professionals, he would have been a stronger presidential candidate in 2004.
[…]
Shrum writes that Edwards, then a North Carolina senator, called his foreign policy and political advisers together in his Washington living room in the fall of 2002 to get their advice. Edwards was “skeptical, even exercised” about the idea of voting yes and his wife Elizabeth was forcefully against it, according to Shrum.
But Shrum said the consensus among the advisers was that Edwards, just four years in office, did not have the credibility to vote against the resolution and had to support it to be taken seriously on national security. Shrum said Edwards’ facial expressions showed he did not like where he was being pushed to go.
Like Bunch I don’t blame Edwards alone for this. After all, the entire House and Senate presidential hopeful club adhered to this advice, not just Shrum. They all followed that advice because it wasn’t just good old Bob wearing his loser presidential campaign hat:
The 2004 election proved that the Democratic Party needs leaders—not poll-driven consultants, who too often sacrifice principle for what appears expedient.
For example, Kerry voted for Bush’s Iraq war resolution, following the “guidance” offered by Democracy Corps, a non-profit “dedicated to making the government of the United States more responsive to the American people.”
On October 3, 2002, prior to the Iraq war resolution votes, Democracy Corps (founded in 1999 by James Carville, Stan Greenberg and Bob Shrum) advised Capitol Hill Democrats: “This decision [to support or oppose an Iraq war resolution] will take place in a setting where voters, by 10 points, prefer to vote for a member who supports a resolution to authorize force (50 to 40 percent).”
The mistake was not only in the rank immorality of voting for this ridiculous war (on the basis of 10 points in the polls, no less.) It was also a huge tactical political error. If the war went well, it was going to be nearly impossible to beat Bush in 2004 and everyone knew it. If the war was going badly, then a vote for it was going to tie these candidates up in knots and make them look weak and irresolute, which is exactly what happened to Kerry. There was no margin in Democratic presidential candidates voting for the war.
These so-called strategists were wrong on the substance and wrong on the strategy on the most important vote in decades. You’d think they’d be just a little bit more humble.