10.15.2006 Captain Ed: "I don't believe we're seeing a blue tidal wave. However, the Republican Party's midterm woes come from Republican failures to match their actions to their rhetoric."

6.10.2006 "Time For Us To Go -- Conservatives on why the GOP should lose in 2006."

10.15.2006 Guilty Until Confirmed Guilty NYT Editorial

Mr. Bush wants Americans to trust him to apply these powers only to truly dangerous men. Even if our system were based on that sort of personal power and not the rule of law, it would be hard to trust the judgment of a president and an administration whose records are so bad. The United States has yet to acknowledge that it kidnapped an innocent Canadian citizen and sent him to be abused in a Syrian prison. In another case, a German citizen has accused the United States of grabbing him off the streets of Macedonia, drugging him and sending him to Afghanistan, where he was brutally treated. Then there is the Ethiopian living in London who said he was grabbed by American agents and brutalized by Moroccan torturers until he confessed to plotting with Jose Padilla to set off a “dirty bomb.” Mr. Padilla was never charged with the crime. The Ethiopian remains at Guantánamo Bay.

A judge has denied a Justice Department motion in a Freedom of Information Act suit in which CREW is seeking documents related to the government’s dramatic and last-minute change in its proposed remedy in the tobacco litigation it brought against the major tobacco companies. ... Judge Sullivan had granted CREW’s request for discovery based on the questions the government’s conduct raised about whether DOJ was complying in good faith with its obligations under the FOIA. When CREW noticed the videotaped deposition of Mr. McCallum, DOJ sought and obtained from a magistrate judge an order sealing the videotape based on DOJ’s concern that the media would distort his testimony and cause Mr. McCallum person embarrassment.
Judge Sullivan ruled that any possibility of embarrassment or discomfort to Mr. McCallum was outweighed by the public interest in the conduct of public officials. (Here)

In 2005 McCallum was accused of interfering with the government's prosecution of the tobacco industry by requiring Justice Department lawyers to cut their demand for an industry-sponsored smoking cessation program from $130 billion to $10 billion. As a private lawyer, McCallum had represented a tobacco company. (Here)

As Arianna explained in April:

Starting at the top. Two tobacco companies, Altria Group (formerly Philip Morris) and UST, gave $250,000 each (the maximum contribution) to President Bush's Inaugural Committee. Small price to pay when you consider that just six months after the inauguration, Bush's Justice Department, without explanation, reduced the settlement in the government's case against the tobacco industry from $130 billion to $10 billion.

And it probably didn't hurt that Karl Rove was on the Philip Morris payroll from 1991 to 1996, providing the company with the inside scoop on the politics of puffing.

10.13.2006 Paul Krugman discusses the unanticipated consequences of gerrymandering:

And here’s the thing: because there are many districts that the G.O.P. carried by only moderately large margins in recent elections, a large Democratic surge ­ one only a bit bigger than that needed to take the House at all ­ would sweep away many Republicans holding seats normally considered safe. If the actual vote is anything like what the polls now suggest, we’re talking about the Democrats holding a larger majority in the House than the Republicans have held at any point since their 1994 takeover.

The 2003 redistricting plan was implemented at a time when DeLay still looked invincible in Texas, so in redrawing his own congressional district in the Houston suburbs he was magnanimous toward his Republican colleagues. As the Hill aide Joby Fortson put it in his e-mail analysis of the new district lines, DeLay “gives away enough R’s” to help his neighboring Republican congressman Ron Paul. As a result of his generosity, DeLay won in 2004 with only fifty-five per cent of the vote, against an underfunded and obscure Democratic opponent.

10.13.2006 "Dem Control Might Help Economy, WSJ.com Survey Finds"

10.13.2006 New evidence clears up whether Bush sought to bomb al-Jazeera. But we are not allowed to hear it by Richard Norton-Taylor, The Guardian

At a time when David Blunkett makes money by revealing cabinet discussions, we are prevented from hearing evidence against defendants in a criminal trial simply, say some who have read the memo, to protect ministers from embarrassment. It is a genuine scandal. It is even more so given Blunkett's suggestion on Channel 4's Dispatches programme last night that the US bombing of al-Jazeera would have been justified at the time of the invasion in 2003.

10.04.2006 Garrison Keillor regarding the Military Commissions Act of 2006:

Congress's Shameful Retreat From American Values ... None of the men and women who voted for this bill has any right to speak in public about the rule of law anymore, or to take a high moral view of the Third Reich, or to wax poetic about the American Ideal. Mark their names. Any institution of higher learning that grants honorary degrees to these people forfeits its honor. Alexander, Allard, Allen, Bennett, Bond, Brownback, Bunning, Burns, Burr, Carper, Chambliss, Coburn, Cochran, Coleman, Collins, Cornyn, Craig, Crapo, DeMint, DeWine, Dole, Domenici, Ensign, Enzi, Frist, Graham, Grassley, Gregg, Hagel, Hatch, Hutchison, Inhofe, Isakson, Johnson, Kyl, Landrieu, Lautenberg, Lieberman, Lott, Lugar, Martinez, McCain, McConnell, Menendez, Murkowski, Nelson of Florida, Nelson of Nebraska, Pryor, Roberts, Rockefeller, Salazar, Santorum, Sessions, Shelby, Smith, Specter, Stabenow, Stevens, Sununu, Talent, Thomas, Thune, Vitter, Voinovich, Warner.

10.11.2006 People for the American Way Address Joseph C. Wilson

This is still a nation where a citizen can get up every morning and shout at the top of his lungs that the President, Vice President, Secretary of Defense and Secretary of State are lying sons of bitches, and survive to see the sun go down. I know. I do it most days.

If this article leaves you too hopeful, read this: "Bush's Tough-Talkin' Korean Bungle" By Robert Parry and this: "Rolling Blunder -- How the Bush administration let North Korea get nukes" By Fred Kaplan

10.11.2006 Dear Leader Brings It On BY Robert Scheer

Over the past six years, our "my way or the highway" president blew up a crucial nonproliferation agreement which was keeping North Korea's plutonium stores under seal, ended bilateral talks with Pyongyang, squashed Japan's and South Korea's carefully constructed "sunshine policy," which was slowly drawing the bizarre Hermit Kingdom back into the light, and then took every opportunity to personally insult the country's reportedly unstable dictator because it played well politically at home.

It's a transparency extravaganza! Three new databases just went live that provide some excellent tools for muckrakers.

Oct. 10 (Bloomberg) -- Stock options that Senator George Allen described as worthless were worth as much as $1.1 million at one point, according to a review of Senate disclosure forms and U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings.

It comes as no "October surprise" to the Republican leadership that there are gay men -- and, yes, lesbians, too -- working on Capitol Hill, some in high-ranking positions. Before the Foley scandal runs its course, we will probably learn of other gay staff members on the Hill. These people are good at their jobs, and their sexual orientation is, of course, irrelevant. The understanding, in these years of Republican hegemony, reportedly has been something akin to don't ask, don't tell.

But some conservative activists are irate that the "values" party would allow such an arrangement. Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media, a conservative watchdog, thundered on the group's Web site yesterday that "House leaders permitted homosexuals to infiltrate and manipulate the party apparatus while they publicly postured as friends of family values and traditional marriage. The facade is now in ruins."

"I came to the conclusion that, given the technology of modern warfare, war is inevitably a war against children, against civilians. When you look at the ratio of civilian to military dead, it changes from 50-50 in World War II to 80-20 in Vietnam, maybe as high as 90-10 today… When you face that fact, war is now always a war against civilians, and so against children. No political goal can justify it, and so the great challenge before the human race in our time is to solve the problems of tyranny and aggression, and do it without war." As quoted by Tom Engelhardt (Here) Read the whole article.

5.9.2003 Rumsfeld was on the board of ABB, which sold nuclear reactors to North Korea in 2000. (Here)

10.9.2006 "The Titanic Stayed the Course"

10.9.2006 Italians to prosecute CIA for rendition

... prosecutors say top officials at SISMI -- including the agency's director, Nicolo Pollari -- collaborated with the Americans to abduct Nasr.

10.25.2005 In an explosive series of articles appearing this week in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, investigative reporters Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d'Avanzo report that Nicolo Pollari, chief of Italy's military intelligence service, known as Sismi, brought the Niger yellowcake story directly to the White House after his insistent overtures had been rejected by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2001 and 2002. Sismi had reported to the CIA on October 15, 2001, that Iraq had sought yellowcake in Niger, a report it also plied on British intelligence, creating an echo that the Niger forgeries themselves purported to amplify before they were exposed as a hoax. (Here)

... according to the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research and Educational Trust, health insurance premiums have jumped 87 percent over the past six years, to an average of $11,480 a year per family.

More generally, Mr. Hastert is a leading figure in a political movement that exemplifies what the historian Richard Hofstadter famously called “the paranoid style in American politics.”

Hofstadter’s essay introducing the term was inspired by his observations of the radical right-wingers who seized control of the Republican Party in 1964. Today, the movement that nominated Barry Goldwater controls both Congress and the White House.

As a result, political paranoia — the “sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” Hofstadter described — has gone mainstream. To read Hofstadter’s essay today is to be struck by the extent to which he seems to be describing the state of mind not of a lunatic fringe, but of key figures in our political and media establishment.

10.8.2006 When Lawyers Are War Criminals By Scott Horton

The Present Crisis

Between the fall of 2001 and early 2004, US Government lawyers engaged many of the same issues and took decisions very close to those taken by von Ammann and his colleagues in the (Nazi) German Justice Department. In particular, the Nacht- und Nebelerlass has a close cousin in the United States extraordinary rendition project on a policy plain, though we should quickly note two essential distinctions: the total throughput in human terms has been dozens, not thousands of persons, and it has not involved death sentences, though not a few persons (to be exact: 98) have died in incarceration under circumstances suggesting that torture was involved, if they were not indeed tortured to death. These (American) lawyers adopted a mantra, namely, to quote Alberto Gonzales, that the Geneva Conventions were "quaint" and "obsolete," and did not apply to a "new kind of warfare." In so doing, they thoughtlessly moved in the same paths traversed by lawyers in Berlin sixty years earlier. Indeed, at the General Staff trial, the world public learned for the first time of the valiant struggle of Moltke when one of his memoranda was put into evidence. It pleaded in forceful terms for respect of the Geneva Convention rights of enemy soldiers, civilians and irregular combatants on the East Front, mustering a series of arguments that bear remarkable similarity to a memorandum sent by Colin Powell to President Bush sixty years later. And in the margins, in the unmistakeable pencil scrawl of Field Marshall Keitel, were found the words "quaint" and "obsolete." This was cited as an aggravating factor justifying a sentence of the death against Keitel.

10.8.2006 The Return of Henry Kissinger Will we never be free of the malign effect of this little gargoyle? By Christopher Hitchens

10.8.2006 End of the Revolution -- Sex, lies and power games are just the latest symptoms of a Republican party adrift from its idealsBy KAREN TUMULTY

Every revolution begins with the power of an idea and ends when clinging to power is the only idea left.
...
Compromise, that most central of congressional checks and balances, has been largely replaced by a kind of calculated cussedness that has left the G.O.P. isolated and exposed in times of crisis.
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In the latest Time poll, conducted the week after the news broke, nearly 80% of respondents said they were aware of the scandal, and two-thirds of them were convinced that Republican leaders had tried to cover it up.
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Hastert went on to say, without producing any proof, that the revelation was the work of Bill Clinton's operatives. But that line of argument, of course, suggests that Republicans would have preferred to keep Foley's secrets locked away, presumably at the pages' peril.
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The resignations of Foley and Fordham sparked fears that other gay Republicans would also soon be forced out of both their closets and their jobs. "Kirk is the fall guy," says gay-rights activist Hilary Rosen. "It's going to be open season on gay Republicans. It's the right wing's perfect storm. They never wanted gays in their party anyway."

AN independent commission set up by Congress with the approval of President George W Bush may recommend carving up Iraq into three highly autonomous regions, according to well informed sources.

The Iraq Study Group, co-chaired by James Baker, the former US secretary of state, is preparing to report after next month’s congressional elections amid signs that sectarian violence and attacks on coalition forces are spiralling out of control. The conflict is claiming the lives of 100 civilians a day and bombings have reached record levels.
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Bush and Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, have resisted the break-up of Iraq on the grounds that it could lead to more violence, but are thought to be reconsidering. “They have finally noticed that the country is being partitioned by civil war and ethnic cleansing is already a daily event,” said Leslie Gelb, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Gelb is the co-author with Senator Joseph Biden, a leading Democrat, of a plan to divide Iraq. “There was almost no support for our idea until very recently, when all the other ideas being advocated failed,” Gelb said.

"Why does the government need a list of my phone calls?" he asked. "And what business does a democracy have running secret prisons? ... Do you believe that anyone would have known about these secret prisons or what was going on in Abu Ghraib if it had been left to the government to announce it?

"Some would argue these revelations hurt our cause. I argue just the opposite. Bringing mistakes to the fore is a strength, not a weakness."

Schieffer said America's great strength comes from emphasizing the values and principles that separate it from its enemies — "not by adopting their methods and their techniques."

10.7.2006 "In Shenandoah Valley, Va., a high school without any appreciation for irony has banned a display of banned books." (Carpetbagger)

10.7.2006 Past comes back to haunt us in form of Kissinger Helen Thomas:

Woodward said on CBS-TV's "60 Minutes" on Oct. 1 that "Kissinger's fighting the Vietnam War again because, in his view, the problem in Vietnam was we lost our will." Well, Kissinger was right about that. The reason is simple: People saw no reason to lose more lives there.
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The administration would prefer not to evoke memories of the Vietnam quagmire, the 58,000-plus American war dead, and its bitter legacy, yet it all sounds too familiar when we hear officials insist we need to "stay the course" and deride dissenters as those who want to "cut and run."

They seem to forget that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

10.6.2006 Bush says he can edit security reports

In the law Bush signed Wednesday, Congress stated no one but the privacy officer could alter, delay or prohibit the mandatory annual report on Homeland Security department activities that affect privacy, including complaints.

But Bush, in a signing statement attached to the agency's 2007 spending bill, said he will interpret that section "in a manner consistent with the President's constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch."
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Bush's signing statement Wednesday challenges several other provisions in the Homeland Security spending bill.

Bush, for example, said he'd disregard a requirement that the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency must have at least five years experience and "demonstrated ability in and knowledge of emergency management and homeland security."

His rationale was that it "rules out a large portion of those persons best qualified by experience and knowledge to fill the office."

"The American Bar Association called signing statements ``contrary to the rule of law and our constitutional separation of powers." It said presidents cannot sign bills and then declare parts of them unconstitutional because a president has only two choices -- to sign a bill and enforce it as written, or to veto it and give Congress a chance to override the veto." (Here)

Secrets, and the obvious, revealed By Tim Rutten, LA Times Staff Writer

"State of Denial" reports that, after Bush's reelection, then-White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card and former chief speechwriter Michael Gerson urged the president to fire Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who emerges in this account as the boss from hell — petty and petulant, vindictive and territorial, arrogant and self-pitying, a micromanager who resolutely refuses to accept responsibility for his decisions. As recently as last May, according to Woodward, Rumsfeld circulated a secret memo arguing that "the charge of incompetence against the U.S. government should be easy to rebut if the American people understand the extent to which the current system of government makes competence next to impossible."

10.5.2006 Bilmon:

The Dow Jones Industrial Average hit a record high today: 11,727 -- four points higher than the previous record, set January 14, 2000. So if you invested $1,000 in the 30 companies in the Dow six years and almost nine months ago, you'd have $1000.34 today!

In a striking synchronicity with the emergent scandal surrounding the GOP coverup of Congressman Mark Foley's apparent longstanding habit of sexual predation on minors, a BBC documentary program that aired yesterday, sparking a firestorm of protest from the Vatican, featured allegations that Pope Benedict XVl played a key role in covering up child molestation within the Catholic Church and that in 2001 Benedict - as Cardinal Ratzinger - issued a secret edict advising church officials to cover up instances of sexual predation within the Catholic Church. The edict has been decribed as an updated version of an earlier church document known as the Crimen Sollicitationis.

It’s been clear for years that Dick Cheney and Rummy have been using the Bush presidency like an elaborate vanity production to replay Watergate and Vietnam, and to try to reverse things that bothered them during prior stints in the Nixon and Ford administrations.

As Mr. Cheney told his pal Rummy when W. gave him a second crack ­ a quarter-century later ­ at the defense chief job: “Get it right this time.”

The vice president has been diabolically successful in exploiting 9/11 to restore the Imperial Presidency to where it was before Congress and the public became such Nosy Parkers after Watergate. Mr. Cheney and Rummy have been less successful in their attempt to exorcise the post-Vietnam American skittishness about using force; their abysmal misadventure in Iraq has only reinforced it.

10.4.2006 Highlights of the new NBC/Wall Strret Journal poll: No More Mister Nice Blog

Bush's job approval rating is at 39 percent among registered voters, a drop of three points since September....

And here's what I love about this poll: According to the detailed breakdown (PDF), 48% of respondents say they voted for Bush in '04 and only 38% say they voted for Kerry.

How bad would things be looking for the GOP if the poll reflected the actual makeup of the '04 electorate (Bush 51%, Kerry 48%)?

I think that in the case of Paul (Krugman), he's a numbers guy who really understands economics, and he was appalled -- and rightly so -- in the earliest days of the Bush administration when he saw their fuzzy math. The numbers just didn't add up, and I think it offended his professionalism as an economist. I don't think there was anything particularly ideological about it.

In my case, it wasn't the numbers that caught my eye, but the stagecraft. Why are they always putting on a show? Why does everything have a backdrop with Orwellian words telling you what to think? What are they hiding? What is this "Wizard of Oz"-like theater they've set up?

After all the time I spent thinking about the theater, including Washington theater, if I know nothing else, I know empty spectacle when I see it. Not to make light of something that's been tragic for many Americans and the world, but their whole spectacle is like a big empty Andrew Lloyd Webber contraption -- chandeliers rising and falling, people landing in planes on aircraft carriers and celebrating victory -- and it's empty inside.

He predicted that "truth predictor" software would, within five years, "hold politicians to account." People would be able to use programs to check seemingly factual statements against historical data to see to see if they were correct.

"One of my messages to them (politicians) is to think about having every one of your voters online all the time, then inputting 'is this true or false.' We (at Google) are not in charge of truth but we might be able to give a probability," he told the newspaper.

Tucked away in fine print in the military spending bill for this past year was a lump sum of $20 million to pay for a celebration in the nation’s capital “for commemoration of success” in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A Denver-area man filed a lawsuit today against a member of the Secret Service for causing him to be arrested after he approached Vice President Dick Cheney in Beaver Creek this summer and criticized him for his policies concerning Iraq.

The Republican-dominated National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) voted along party lines to slash long-time federal labor laws protecting workers’ freedom to form unions and opened the door for employers to classify millions of workers as supervisors. Under federal labor law, supervisors are prohibited from forming unions.

10.3.2006 Woodward Tells King: Book Could Have Been Called 'Crisis' Editor and Publisher staff

Asked by the host to compare his current reporting to Watergate, he replied, “There are no crimes alleged here,” though some would take exception to that. He added: “But this is a war…and the stakes could not be higher…It pains me to see the approach they decided on from the beginning was denial,” hoping “maybe we’ll get a break.”

Asked if the administration should be charged with deviousness or incompetence, Woodward answered: “Inattentiveness.” Was Bush manipulated into the war by Cheney and Rumsfeld? No, “it was Bush’s decision, clearly.”

Around the time of that July meeting, Rice and Bush were more focused on their pet issue: missile defense. And Bush wasn't interested in "swatting flies" -- he was already looking for a reason to attack Iraq.

Today, in the midst of a national debate on how to treat captured terror suspects, my mind flashes back to Room 600 at Furtherstrasse 22. We gave Goering and the other war criminals a chance not only to defend themselves but in some cases, preach hate and violence.

In a ruined Germany, where so many corpses still lay buried in the rubble, and life seemed so very fragile, we found it in ourselves to give the worst of men due process.

For too long, Republicans promised smaller government and less intrusion in people’s lives. Yet with a government dominated top to bottom by Republicans, we’ve seen the exact opposite. No one will ever mistake a Democrat of just about any stripe for a doctrinaire libertarian. But we’ve seen that one party is now committed to subverting individual freedoms, while the other is growing increasingly comfortable with moving in a new direction, one in which restrained government, fiscal responsibility and—most important of all—individual freedoms are paramount.

10.1.2006 Aaron's questions about the Colorado elections apply here too. I'll start checking.(Here)

10.1.2006 Captain Ed wakes up and smells the brimstone:

Republicans have to act swiftly to remove the stench of Foleygate from the party. They need to demand the resignation of Hastert as Speaker, as well as Boehner as Majority Leader if he lied to protect Hastert. Allowing Foley off the hook was a mistake in judgment, but this is a betrayal of those who trusted Hastert to lead the House with dignity, honesty, and integrity. See also: "Glenn Reynolds finally gets it!"

There's a long tradition in America--one reinforced by our prevailing journalistic norms--of seemingly reasonable people insisting, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Republican and Democratic politicians are equally guilty of deception and demagoguery. Those who wish to remain above the fray and avoid being labeled a partisan are quick to criticize both sides, even when one side is a far worse offender. Indeed, this rhetorical imbalance is 'The Great Unmentionable' in American politics today. Merely raising the issue is a surefire way to get labeled a partisan loon. And if you work for a major news organization, raising the issue at all, even internally, is a highly risky move
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But this clown show is what our political discourse has become. This entire debate was a transparent political ploy. The Republican party intentionally threw its weight behind a bill so awful and un-American that any principled Democrat would have to vote against it. They voted down all amendments that might possibly make the bill slightly less awful and increase its odds of garnering bipartisan support. They didn't want a good bill, a constitutional bill, a bill consistent with American values and principles. They wanted a bad bill, a provocative bill, a bill just good enough to get Republicans to sign on (a very low bar) but sufficiently problematic to keep most Democrats from following suit. Come to think of it, that's pretty much been the Republican approach to legislating for years now.

... the news about Mark Foley has a kind of grim inevitability to it. I don't know Foley, although, like any other gay man in D.C., I was told he was gay, closeted, afraid and therefore also screwed up. What the closet does to people - the hypocrisies it fosters, the pathologies it breeds - is brutal. There are many still-closeted gay men in D.C., many of them working for a Republican party that has sadly deeply hostile to gay dignity. How they live with themselves I do not fully understand. But I have learned you cannot judge someone's soul from outside. That I leave to them and their God, and some I count as good friends and good people.

What I do know is that the closet corrupts. The lies it requires and the compartmentalization it demands can lead people to places they never truly wanted to go, and for which they have to take ultimate responsibility. From what I've read, Foley is another example of this destructive and self-destructive pattern for which the only cure is courage and honesty. While gays were fighting for thir basic equality, Foley voted for the "Defense of Marriage Act". If his resignation means the end of the closet for him, and if there is no more to this than we now know, then it may even be for the good. Better to find integrity and lose a Congressional seat than never live with integrity at all.

Senate Democrats were successful in blocking inclusion of one measure, which would have given legal immunity to communications companies that supply subscriber records to the administration's warrantless surveillance program.