The Burka
From TPM Reader DC ...
Re 'You're going to look super in a burka': I think this makes sense mainly if you consider that unilateralism is in many ways the flip side of isolationism. To an awful lot of people in places like, say, West Texas [I once lived there], the outside world is seen as a vague, threatening place, full of people who want what we've got. First it was the Nazis, then the Communists, and now the Islamists; they all blur into a single, malignant Other, who need to be stopped well short of our shores [Throw in the Trilateral Commission and the international bankers for good measure]. I recall teaching history in WTX and having to explain to a student that Nazis and Communists weren't the same people; he actually thought they were, and he was a smart guy! And Bush, despite his gestures of tolerance toward the American Islamic community, plays to this sentiment, with his "They hate our freedom" line and the threat that if we leave Iraq "They'll follow us home." To a lot of people, that doesn't mean acts of terror; that means *conquest.* It's perfectly understandable, actually; people typically interpret new problems in terms of what they've long understood already, and in terms set by the larger understandings of their communities. And this is a huge, diverse country--a fact persistently obscured by the sameness with which we experience it from the air or on the interstate. But precisely because this sort of reflexive defensive posture makes sense in a certain epistemological universe, it's extremely difficult to deal with if you're from a different one.
--Josh Marshall
The FISA 'Fix'
When Congress "revised" FISA a few weeks ago, lawmakers gave the White House the unchecked surveillance power Bush wanted -- and then some.
Broad new surveillance powers approved by Congress this month could allow the Bush administration to conduct spy operations that go well beyond wiretapping to include — without court approval — certain types of physical searches of American citizens and the collection of their business records, Democratic Congressional officials and other experts said. [...]
The dispute illustrates how lawmakers, in a frenetic, end-of-session scramble, passed legislation they may not have fully understood and may have given the administration more surveillance powers than it sought. It also offers a case study in how changing a few words in a complex piece of legislation has the potential to fundamentally alter the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a landmark national security law. Two weeks after the legislation was signed into law, there is still heated debate over how much power Congress gave to the president.
“This may give the administration even more authority than people thought,” said David Kris, a former senior Justice Department lawyer in the Bush and Clinton administrations and a co-author of “National Security Investigation and Prosecutions,” a new book on surveillance law.
Several legal experts said that by redefining the meaning of “electronic surveillance,” the new law narrows the types of communications covered in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA, by indirectly giving the government the power to use intelligence collection methods far beyond wiretapping that previously required court approval if conducted inside the United States.
These new powers include the collection of business records, physical searches and so-called “trap and trace” operations, analyzing specific calling patterns.
--Steve Benen
National Review's Victor Davis Hanson is dismayed by the criticism of the war in Iraq from congressional Democrats. (via Steve M.)
[I]t is hard to recall of any war in our history -- the Vietnam hysteria aside -- that a sitting Senate majority leader declared it lost in the middle of hostilities. We have not previously witnessed senior opposition senators alleging that their own American servicemen were analogous to Nazis, Stalinists, Cambodian mass murders, Saddam's Baathist killers, or engaging in habitual terrorizing and killing of innocent civilians.
Now, I suspect Hanson is taking a few liberties when he suggests senior Senate Dems have said U.S. troops are comparable to Nazis, but Hanson may be surprised to go back and look at what senior congressional Republicans were saying as recently as 1999 when then-President Clinton sent American servicemen into Kosovo.
William Saletan noted one specific weekend in May 1999.
Every time the United States goes into battle, anti-war activists blame the causes and casualties of the conflict on the U.S. government. They excuse the enemy regime's aggression and insist that it can be trusted to negotiate and honor a fair resolution. While doing everything they can to hamstring the American administration's ability to wage the war, they argue that the war can never be won, that the administration's claims to the contrary are lies, and that the United States should trim its absurd demands and bug out with whatever face-saving deal it can get. In past wars, Republicans accused these domestic opponents of sabotaging American morale and aiding the enemy. But in this war, Republicans aren't bashing the anti-war movement. They're leading it.
Specifically, Saletan highlighted comments from then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi, then-Senate Majority Whip Don Nickles of Oklahoma, and then-House Majority Whip Tom DeLay of Texas, who, over the course of a few days, said Milosevic's atrocities are America's fault; the failure of diplomacy to avert the war is America's fault; Congress should oppose the war while troops are in harm's way; Congress should micromanage war policy instead of the Commander in Chief; and the mission is doomed to failure. If memory serves, Dems didn't question their patriotism, label them "traitors," accuse them of undermining the military, or condemn them for aiding and abetting the enemy.
I have a hunch Hanson's forgotten about the whole period of time. Come to think of it, current congressional Republicans probably have, too.
--Steve Benen
'You're going to look super in a burka'
There was a fascinating example of far-right ideology on "Hardball" yesterday, when Chris Matthews asked Melanie Morgan -- unhinged, even by contemporary far-right standards -- to respond to how right Dick Cheney was about Iraq before he became Vice President. C&L has an excerpt, which is worth watching, if for no other reason because Morgan helped highlight a twisted worldview for a national television audience.
After Matthews asked Morgan to explain why 1994 Cheney was right while 2002 Cheney was wrong, Morgan refused to engage and suggested Iraq was somehow involved with 9/11. She also attacked the host for bringing up the subject.
Matthews then asked Naomi Wolf to weigh in.
Wolf: It gets back to what I was saying earlier about the nature of lying. Let's not forget that they got us into this war on the basis of a series of lies.... This weaving out of lies was a pretext for an invasion that served their own political purposes. In the wake of the invasion, they were able to terrify the American people, subjugate the American people, drive through a series of laws that dismantled key checks and balances, allowed overreaching executive power, and completely eviscerated what the founders set in place, thus weakening America.
Morgan: Keep attacking, keep attacking Naomi, because you're going to look great in a burka. You're going to look super in a burka.
Perfect. Wolf makes a substantive point about American laws, institutions, and traditions, so Morgan insists Wolf's criticism will lead to radical Muslims seizing control of the United States, forcing women into burkas. This, in effect, encapsulates too much of the left-right debate of the last eight months.
Indeed, Glenn Greenwald explained the broader dynamic perfectly the other day.
Every now and then, it is worth noting that substantial portions of the right-wing political movement in the United States -- the Pajamas Media/right-wing-blogosphere/Fox News/Michelle Malkin/Rush-Limbaugh-listener strain -- actually believe that Islamists are going to take over the U.S. and impose sharia law on all of us. And then we will have to be Muslims and "our women" will be forced into burkas and there will be no more music or gay bars or churches or blogs. This is an actual fear that they have -- not a theoretical fear but one that is pressing, urgent, at the forefront of their worldview.
And their key political beliefs -- from Iraq to Iran to executive power and surveillance theories at home -- are animated by the belief that all of this is going to happen. The Republican presidential primary is, for much of the "base," a search for who will be the toughest and strongest in protecting us from the Islamic invasion -- a term that is not figurative or symbolic, but literal: the formidable effort by Islamic radicals to invade the U.S. and take over our institutions and dismantle our government and force us to submit to Islamic rule or else be killed.
This description may sound hyperbolic, but a surprising number of high-profile conservative voices actually believe that we're this close to an invasion and the replacement of our constitutional system with a radical Muslim theocracy. If you disagree -- about the nature of Islam, or the war in Iraq, or the president's national security policies, etc. -- then you are necessarily helping advance the Islamists' drive for international hegemony.
It's precisely why Morgan, instead of responding to Wolf's substantive points, quickly leapt to her reflexive conclusion: criticizing the president will contribute to the downfall of the United States and the imposition of sharia law.
Morgan probably didn't intend to be helpful, but she captured the gist of this worldview surprisingly well.
--Steve Benen
The dog and pony shows
About a month ago, Sens. Jim Webb (D-Va.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) had a rather heated discussion on "Meet the Press" about Iraq. In one contentious exchange, Webb told Graham, "You know, you haven't been to Iraq." Graham snapped back, "I've been there seven times." Webb, a decorated veteran and a former Secretary of the Navy, replied, "You go see the dog and pony shows. That's what congressmen do."
Jonathan Finer explained today that Graham isn't the only one basing opinions on scripted tours.
Policymakers should be commended for refusing to blindly trust accounts from diplomats, soldiers or journalists. But it's worth remembering what these visits are and what they are not. Prescient insights rarely emerge from a few days in-country behind the blast walls. [...]
It goes without saying that everyone can, and in this country should, have an opinion about the war, no matter how much time the person has spent in Iraq, if any. But having left a year ago, I've stopped pretending to those who ask that I have a keen sense of what it's like on the ground today. Similarly, those who pass quickly through the war zone should stop ascribing their epiphanies to what are largely ceremonial visits.
The next time you hear a pol saying, "I've just returned from Iraq and I saw..." keep Finer's piece in mind.
--Steve Benen
Giuliani endorses Bush’s Social Security plan
After Bush won a second term, he entered 2005 in a relatively strong position. He boasted about having "political capital," his approval rating was around 50%, and he looked at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue and saw a very friendly Republican majority in both chambers. Everything was how Bush and his team wanted it.
And then the president kicked off a campaign to privatize Social Security. The more Americans learned about the plan, the more they hated it. After a few months of seeing Bush barnstorm the nation to sell his idea, Americans supported his handling of Social Security even less than his handling of Iraq. Bush's poll numbers collapsed, and never recovered. It was, by some measures, the president's jump-the-shark moment.
Even the most sycophantic of Republicans quickly realized that Bush's Social Security policy was poison to be avoided at all costs. Given the public's response, a candidate would have to be a blithering fool to embrace a plan that everyone loathed.
And yet, here's Rudy Giuliani.
Giuliani stressed his desire to have private forces shape the country's economy in education as well as in health care and Social Security. He said he supported President Bush's unsuccessful proposal to allow people to invest some of their Social Security taxes in private accounts.
"I would have preferred, over my lifetime, if I could have invested some of that Social Security money myself," said Giuliani, 63. "I think I would have done much better than the government did. I believe young people today, a lot of them feel that way. I think people who want a private option should be entitled to have it."
Maybe Giuliani realized recently that he doesn't want to be president after all, so he's throwing the race on purpose.
--Steve Benen
Obama campaign to limit his participation in future Dem debates -- because the voters "are the ones who ask the toughest questions." That and other political news of the day in today's Election Central Saturday Roundup.
--Greg Sargent
John McCain, war 'critic'
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) was on CNN yesterday, positioning himself as a critic of the president's Iraq policy.
KIRAN CHETRY: It seems you've been painted as being a huge supporter of the president's Iraq strategy. Is that an inaccurate portrayal?
MCCAIN: It's entertaining, in that I was the greatest critic of the initial four years, three and a half years. I came back from my first trip to Iraq and said, "This is going to fail." We've got to change the strategy to the one we're using now. But life isn't fair.
Poor John McCain. All he did was support the current Iraq policy every step of the way for five years and, for some reason, foolish Americans have come to believe he supports the president's strategy. How terribly unfair.
Look, this notion of who qualifies as a "critic" of the White House's war policy came to a head recently when far too many news outlets falsely characterized Michael O'Hanlon and Ken Pollack as opponents of the war. Their support for Bush's strategy was given greater weight because the media and the GOP establishment told the public they have been war "skeptics." They're not -- O'Hanlon and Pollack supported the invasion, endorsed the so-called surge, and have consistently opposed withdrawal. (Ironically, Jon Stewart, the fake newsman, was one of the few to get this right.)
Similarly, we now see McCain characterizing himself as "the greatest critic of the initial four years." Perhaps it's best if we establish some kind of criteria for who counts as a "critic" and who counts as a "supporter."
Did you:
* endorse the invasion?
* buy into the Cheney vision of a quick, easy-to-resolve conflict?
* support the administration's position on every piece of Iraq legislation since 2002?
* consistently support the status quo? ("I'm confident we're on the right course" -- McCain, March 7, 2004)
* endorse the escalation policy?
* oppose any and all measures to include timelines, scheduled withdrawals, or enforced benchmarks?
If you're McCain, the answer to all six questions is "yes." With that in mind, you don't get to call yourself "the greatest critic" of the president's policy.
--Steve Benen
Edwards slips on single-payer
When it comes to Democratic presidential candidates, I more or less look at single-payer healthcare the same way I look at gay marriage -- it's something the top-tier candidates should support, and probably want to support, but hold back for political reasons. The unstated position seems to be, "I like the idea, but the country's just not there yet."
At YearlyKos, Barack Obama went a little further than his most competitive rivals, acknowledging that if we were starting a healthcare system from scratch right now, he'd gladly support a single-payer system, but given the healthcare structure that currently exists, he doesn't see that kind of overhaul as feasible. It's not the ideal answer for proponents of such a plan, but at least he acknowledged the merit of the idea.
John Edwards, who, by some indications, has offered perhaps of the best healthcare plan of any candidate, has decided to take a far different approach.
Edwards is also careful to temper his progressivism with more centrist positions. Speaking to Rolling Stone, Edwards ... even demonized single-payer health care: "Do you think the American people want the same people who responded to Hurricane Katrina to run their health-care system?"
I can hope Edwards was misquoted, because that's a remarkably bad answer to an important question.
For one thing, Edwards is parroting Mitt Romney's position, almost word for word. Romney, in the midst of blasting Democratic healthcare reform measures, told a New Hampshire audience a few weeks ago, "I don't want the guys who ran the Katrina cleanup running my health care system." Edwards, apparently, agrees.
This should be obvious by now, but the problem with a breakdown like Katrina is not with government; it's with incompetent government. P. J. O'Rourke once joked, "The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work -- and then they get elected and prove it."
The point isn't that FEMA is incapable of responding to a natural disaster. Bush helped turn the agency into a joke, but FEMA used to be extremely well run and fully capable of helping areas in need of assistance. To hear Edwards and Romney tell it, government can't respond to a hurricane, so it certainly can't bring access to quality healthcare to Americans. In reality, it can do both with competent, quality leadership in positions of power.
Indeed, I wonder how far Edwards and Romney are prepared to take this little comparison. Do they want the same people who responded to Katrina running Medicare and providing healthcare to seniors? How about S-CHIP and providing access for children? How about Social Security? Should all of them be privatized because the Bush administration is incapable of governing?
Maybe Edwards was misquoted. Maybe he was kidding and was taken out of context. I'd love to hear an explanation. In the meantime, when leading Democratic candidates repeat misguided Republican talking points on healthcare reform, it's a problem.
--Steve Benen
A Modest Proposal
A thought from TPM Reader RC ...
I noticed several similarities between Rudy Guiliani's performance after the 9/11 attacks and Crandall Creek Mine owner Robert Murray's performance after his mine caved in.Rudy had the guts to go to Ground Zero and talk to the media while rescue workers dug through rubble in the background. Likewise, Murray had the guts to go right down into the bowels of his mine and talk to the media while rescue workers dug through rubble in the background. Both men came across as don't-worry-everything's-under-control-type guys. Both were very reassuring.
Here's my question: If Guiliani's performances in front of the media's cameras and microphones following 9/11 were sufficient to qualify him to be our president, then didn't Murray's recent performances in front of the media's cameras and microphones at least qualify him to be our vice-president?
How about a Guiliani/Murray ticket?
Just an idea.
--Josh Marshall
Yesterday we learned that there's a shortage of Purple Heart medals for injured veterans.
Today we learn there's a shortage on ammunition, too.
Troops training for and fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are firing more than 1 billion bullets a year, contributing to ammunition shortages hitting police departments nationwide and preventing some officers from training with the weapons they carry on patrol.
An Associated Press review of dozens of police and sheriff's departments found that many are struggling with delays of as long as a year for both handgun and rifle ammunition. And the shortages are resulting in prices as much as double what departments were paying just a year ago.
--Steve Benen
Mr. Sensitive
In August 2001, the president read a memo titled "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US." Bush didn't much care, telling his CIA briefer, "All right. You've covered your ass, now."
In August 2007, the president read a style article in a mid-size newspaper about the clothes he wears in Crawford. About this, Bush cared very much.
What really gets George W. Bush riled up? Calling him a fashion victim.
Last week, Marques Harper of the Austin American-Statesman wrote a short piece about the president's sartorial style on his Texas ranch, where Bush is spending a two-week vacation. The article was reprinted Tuesday in a Waco, Tex., paper, and the leader of the free world was not pleased.
Harper received a phone call that morning from White House deputy press secretary Dana Perino, who, Harper told friends, said the president read the article and was unhappy about the way he was portrayed.
First, this comes just days after Karl Rove told Rush Limbaugh about the president's healthy, above-the-fray attitude about criticism in the media. Rove boasted, "The president is very good about saying, 'Look, we came here for a reason. We have an obligation on the country,' and press on by it. I'll be hyperventilating about the latest attack on him by somebody, and he'll say, 'Don't worry. History will get it right and we'll both be dead.' So it's a good, healthy attitude about how to take it." I guess that doesn't apply to his fashion sense.
Second, the article itself was entirely benign, noting that Bush has "opted to look more like 'Walker, Texas Ranger' than a sweaty, tough ranch hand." This mild remark in a brief article was enough for the spokesperson for the President of the United States to call a style reporter for a mid-size newspaper to convey the disappointment of the leader of the free world.
And third, I've heard rumors that George W. Bush is a charming fellow who's easy to get along with. Policies aside, he's supposed to be a "great guy." I don't buy it. Incidents like this one make the president sound temperamental and immature.
Indeed, if we take the White House pitch at face value, Bush is a tough guy, hardened by war, and unconcerned about pettiness -- unless the Austin American-Statesman says something vaguely derogatory about his clothes?
--Steve Benen
By this point, we know all about the partisan, political briefings the White House conducted in government buildings for government employees, despite clear prohibitions by the Hatch Act. The defense from the Bush gang is that the briefings had nothing to do with political corruption; they were just informal meetings about key congressional races for the Republican Party, intended as "team building" and "morale boosting" exercises.
To hear the White House tell it, administration officials who received the briefings were never encouraged to do anything with the information; Rove & Co. just wanted officials at agencies -- ranging from HHS to the State Department to NASA -- to be aware of vulnerable Republican and Democratic incumbents. It was an extravagant "FYI," intended to improve bureaucrats' self-esteem. ("I was feeling kind of discouraged about being stuck in an ineffective and incompetent bureaucracy, but now I know that the White House is focused on Michigan's 9th congressional district. Wow, I feel better already!")
The reality, of course, is that these briefings were part of a legally-dubious scheme that not only violated the Hatch Act, but also led to fairly obvious abuse of federal tax dollars.
Top Commerce and Treasury Departments officials appeared with Republican candidates and doled out millions in federal money in battleground congressional districts and states after receiving White House political briefings detailing GOP election strategy.
Political appointees in the Treasury Department received at least 10 political briefings from July 2001 to August 2006, officials familiar with the meetings said. Their counterparts at the Commerce Department received at least four briefings -- all in the election years of 2002, 2004 and 2006. [...]
During the briefings at Treasury and Commerce, then-Bush administration political director Ken Mehlman and other White House aides detailed competitive congressional districts, battleground election states and key media markets and outlined GOP strategy for getting out the vote.
Commerce and Treasury political appointees later made numerous public appearances and grant announcements that often correlated with GOP interests, according to a review of the events by McClatchy Newspapers. The pattern raises the possibility that the events were arranged with the White House's political guidance in mind.
Ya think?
It all ties into the Bush gang's Kremlin-like abuses -- using the power of the state as a tool of the ruling party.
--Steve Benen
Buying the Thompson Hype
The lede in a Politico article yesterday really shows the extent to which some people have bought into the Fred Thompson hype:
When Fred Thompson finally announces his candidacy next month, it will be the closest thing to a successful draft of a presidential candidate in more than a half-century.
There are two big problems here:
1) The Thompson draft, with the image of a reluctant candidate being drawn in, was pretty much fake. And Thompson admitted as much to USA Today a few months ago:
"I can't remember exactly the point that I said, 'I'm going to do this,'" Thompson says, his 6-foot, 6-inch frame sprawled comfortably across a couch in a hotel suite. "But when I did, the thing that occurred to me: 'I'm going to tell people that I am thinking about it and see what kind of reaction I get to it.'"
2) It's not the first successful draft since Eisenhower — and we don't have to go far back to find another. Are our attention spans and long-term recall so short that nobody remembers the Draft Clark movement? It was only four years ago.
--Eric Kleefeld
Awesome!
Just this afternoon we were on Rudy Giuliani's case for suggesting that his flipflop on the endability of illegal immigration was not a flipflop but merely a response to the breakthrough technologies that have been developed over the last decade. But is it possible Rudy's cronyism may be a mightier sword than his bamboozlement.
It turns out that not only does Rudy have a 'technology' in mind but he's been cut in on some equity in the company that makes it and by an odd coincidence he thinks the federal government should buy a whole lot of it.
TPM Reader JN pointed me to this nugget in Peter Boyer's profile of Rudy in the current issue of The New Yorker ...
As for securing the border, Giuliani proposes the construction of what he calls “a technological fence,” which he insists would be much more effective than a simple physical barrier. Giuliani’s security division is a part owner of a company that is developing such technology with the defense contractor Raytheon. The innovation is a sensor-based platform that can be launched aloft and will “see” a twenty-kilometre area, in a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree panorama. “It will be able to conduct a surveillance, actually,” a person familiar with the project told me. “It can follow an individual, or follow a car, at very far distances.” Giuliani emphasized to me, “It doesn’t have to be that technology. We have no desire to have Raytheon benefit or whatever. There are a hundred other technologies similar to that, with the ability to process data and communicate.”
So to review, in 1994, Giuliani believed that with America's ethnic diversity and long borders it simply wasn't possible to end illegal immigration without turning the country into a police state. But now thanks to the onward march of technology that's no longer a problem because Rudy's company can install this ultra fence which appears to constantly spawn mini-Predator drones which will keep the illegals under active surveillance until they show up for work at your local restaurant before vaporizing them with a missile or something.
--Josh Marshall
No End of Fun
A few days ago we posted ten year old video of Rudy Giuliani admitting that there's no way we can end illegal immigration in a country like ours without destroying our civil liberties and probably destroying the economy too. That has proved a bit difficult to reconcile with his latter-day pledge to "end illegal immigration" once and for all.
So faced with this awkward contradiction the Giuliani campaign is grasping for an explanation even more laughable and ridiculous than the original contradiction.
According to the Giuliani campaign, all Giuliani meant was that back in 1994 the technology did not yet exist to hermetically seal the gazillion mile border of the United States and end illegal immigration once and for all.
Like I said, some answers amount to such transparently ridiculous bamboozlement that they absolutely guarantee future hilarity.
What technology would it be that Rudy is talking about? The dramatic breakthroughs in electronic fence design? Google maps? Apparently he says it's new breakthroughs in surveillance technology.
What breakthrough technology do you think Rudy's talking about that will allow the United States to "end" illegal immigration once and for all without damaging our civil liberties or affecting our economy, which is what Rudy said it would do back in 1994?
--Josh Marshall
We Interrupt This Blog
We interrupt this blog to bring you a few moments of straight talk from His Straightness, Sen. Fred Thomspon (R-TN) ...
“We are going to be getting in if we get in, and of course, we are in the testing the waters phase. We’re going to be making a statement shortly that will cure all of that. But yeah, we’ll be in traditionally when people get in this race."
Got that?
--Josh Marshall
Once, Twice, Six Times a Liar
You know Alberto Gonzales the liar. But do you know the lies? Here's our rundown of the top six untruths (or grossly misleading half-truths) that have fallen from our attorney general's mouth.
--Paul Kiel
Patrick Syring, Diplomat
Last night we brought you the news of Patrick Syring, the 20-year career Foreign Service officer, who has been indicted for harassing the staff of the Arab Institute with a string of phone messages and emails saying among other things that the "only good Arab is a dead Arab", that various members of the staff were "wicked evil Hezbollah-supporting Arabs [who] should burn in the fires of hell for eternity and beyond" and lauding the Israelis for "bombing Lebanon back to the Stone Age where it belongs."
Turns out the AP story left a fair amount of Syring's tirades out of their story.
Here's the indictment with all the details.
Late Update: For the record, the folks at the Arab American Institute, the ones on the receiving end of Syring's abuse, released this statement ...
Yesterday afternoon we were notified that the grand jury has returned two indictments charging a long-time State Department employee with Threatening Communication in Interstate Commerce and violating the civil rights of the employees of the Arab American Institute.James Zogby, the president of AAI, said, “We are pleased with word that the grand jury has returned two indictments. This has been a matter of concern to me and my entire office. The Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice has been responsive, and we feel protected. The threats were both intimidating and frightening – and the fact that the defendant was a 20-year career officer at the Department of State made it of even greater concern.”
--Josh Marshall
Minding the Store
Wow, that's great news. CNN is running as a breaking news headline that President Putin says that Russia will resume regular long-range flights of its 'strategic' bombers. To decode what that means, during the Cold War the US and the USSR both keep a fleet of bombers packed with nuclear weapons in the air at all times. That's one third of the trident -- ballistic missiles in the ground, strategic bombers in the air and nuclear submarines hidden in the vast depths of the sea, together making each sides' nuclear arsenal impervious to a first strike knock out blow.
That was the theory at least.
If memory serves both sides stopped regular flights of their strategic bomber fleets during the first Bush administration.
Obviously, having them in the air doesn't mean they're going to be used. And they can be scrambled at any time. But unlike 'targeting' of nuclear missiles, which is I think literally a matter of keying in a few numbers to a computer, not having these jets permanently in the air is more than a symbolic sign of having the finger a bit off the nuclear trigger.
And it raises an important point. Not everything that happens these days is uniquely President Bush's fault. Vladimir Putin is no great shakes either. And you can debate whether this is more a reaction to the White House's aggressive push for missile defense shields and military deals with countries on Russia's border or more part of Putin's own growing authoritarianism, trying to stoke xenophobia and increased militarism.
What is not debatable however is that there is more going on in the world -- more opportunities and more threats -- than what happens in the few hundred mile radius around the ancient capital of Baghdad. There is, as we can see, Russia, which still has a few thousand nuclear warheads which could cause some serious headaches. There's China, a vast economic and potential military power that will bulk larger and larger in our lives over the course of this century. There's Pakistan, India, half a billion people to our south speaking Spanish and Portuguese. The list goes on and on.
But our whole national dialog, hundreds of billions of dollars and a lot more are going to Iraq. And more generally the fantasy 450 year long-war epic battle with the Islamofascists. We're close to breaking the US Army and Marine Corps with over-extended deployments. And in hotspots around the world, there's a vacuum, as the world sort of rushes past us. In many ways this is the greatest danger in Iraq, not that our future as a nation is at stake in staying (as the right would have it) or even that it's necessarily at stake in leaving but that our engagement with the country has fixed us with a dangerous national myopia which is letting many other problems fester unattended for going on a decade.
--Josh Marshall
New polls find Edwards grabbing a lead in Iowa, while Hillary is well ahead in Nevada and California. That and other political news of the day in today's Election Central Morning Roundup.
--Greg Sargent
Today's Must Read
How much did John Ashcroft really know about the warrantless surveillance program? As Alberto Gonzales (repeatedly) said on July 24 in testimony, it's "complicated."
--Spencer Ackerman
Didn't Get the Whole 'Diplomacy' Idea
It seems that 20-year career Foreign Service officer Patrick Syring wasn't cut out for bringing America's message of tolerance, peace and democracy to the Middle East.
Last summer, while the bloody but inconclusive war between Israel and Hezbollah raged over the skies of Israel and Lebanon, Syring reached out to James Zogby, the highly-respected head of the Arab-American Institute to let him know that "The only good Lebanese is a dead Lebanese. The only good Arab is a dead Arab."
That was in a phone message left on Mr. Zogby's voice mail.
Later he followed up in an email, noting that "You wicked evil Hezbollah-supporting Arabs should burn in the fires of hell for eternity and beyond. The United States would be safer without you." And while Zogby does not represent the Israelis, Syring made a point of praising them for "bombing Lebanon back to the Stone Age where it belongs."
And if all Syring's other shortcomings weren't enough it seems he's also a little lacking in brainpower since he identified himself in his voice mails and sent the emails from his personal email account.
Syring retired from the Foreign Service last month and was indicted on Wednesday for sending threatening messages by phone and email.
Late Update: It seems Syring sort of made a habit of this. In a letter to the editor in response to Robert Schmuhl's 'Going our Way: A New Foreign Policy', a foreign policy think piece published in the Notre Dame alumni magazine, Syring wrote, "Professor Schmuhl's implicit defense of the wicked regime of Saddam Hussein, and his sympathy for Arab terror, is abhorrent and despicable. His evil brings shame to American scholarship and to the University. He should burn in hell for eternity for the terrorism he advocates."
Also nice to know, back in 1994, Syring was working out of the US Embassy in Lebanon.
--Josh Marshall
Following the Rules to Kill Fewer People
At Huffington Post, Arianna and her crew have been following this angle of the Utah mine story. And it really deserves a lot more attention. We've seen a series of these mine tragedies in recent years. And pretty much every time it ends up being a mine -- not surprisingly -- with a terrible record of safety violations.
Again, that's not exactly a shocking correlation. But it does throw into sharper relief the essential fact that these are not random lightning bolts of tragedy visited on small towns in middle America. These are guys who got killed because they worked for companies that routinely broke the rules put in place to keep their employees alive.
And there's more. It turns out that the guy in charge of mine safety for the federal government, Assistant Secretary of Labor Richard Stickler, couldn't even get approved by the Senate back when it was under Republican control because his own record on safety issues was so questionable. President Bush had to put him in with a recess appointment.
Perhaps it's not time to assign fault while active rescue operations are underway. But once that's over, maybe it would be worth the networks taking a tenth of the time they use milking ratings from these mine sagas and cast a little light on how a lot of this is preventable if the mine owners would stop breaking the rules and the federal government stopped looking the other way.
Deal?
--Josh Marshall
Looks like the voting in the 2008 Presidential election just might start in 2007 after all. That and other political news of the day in today's Election Central Happy Hour Roundup.
--Greg Sargent
Droppin' Like Flies
Roll Call (sub.req.): Rep. Chip Pickering (R-MS) expected to retire.
--Josh Marshall
Black Enough
For about two centuries it was widely understood that being black at all was a disqualifying qualification for being elected president. So why don't more people see it at as more than vaguely nauseating that the first black candidate for president with a realistic chance of getting the job is continually asked if he's black enough?
--Josh Marshall
In sum, I shall Kick Global Ass
Fred Kaplan offers a comprehensive analysis of Rudy's ridiculous Foreign Affairs article.
--Josh Marshall
Ignorance Is Strength!
You know that Mitt Romney is a huge phony. What's more concrete and troubling is that he seems remarkably ignorant of anything beyond America's shores. His new kick is demanding an apology from Barack Obama for saying something that the President of Afghanistan, the Ambassador from Afghanistan, US Commanders on the ground in Afghanistan and even President Bush thinks is true. Learn about Mitt's unparalleled ignorance in today's episode of TPMtv ...
--Josh Marshall
Dem Presidential candidates go on the attack -- against China. That and other political news of the day in today's Election Central Morning Roundup.
--Greg Sargent
Today's Must Read
A panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals all but laughs at the Justice Department's pleas to throw warrantless-surveillance lawsuits out of court.
--Spencer Ackerman
Petraeus Report (TM)
This weekend we learned that Gen. Petraeus' Report will actually be written by the White House. Now it turns out that the White House is pushing to have the general's increasingly nominal report delivered by Condi Rice and Bob Gates, with Petraeus relegated to a "private congressional briefing."
The Democrats on the Hill appear to be saying, No, this isn't going to be like a has-been 60s band touring under its founders name twenty years after the guy dropped out and went to live in an Ashram. We actually want to hear from Gen. Petraeus.
And the oddest part of the article in the Post reporting this is that the authors claim, "The skirmishing is an indication of the rising anxiety on all sides in the remaining few weeks before the presentation of what is widely considered a make-or-break assessment of Bush's war strategy." (emphasis added)
Perhaps I'm missing something. But doesn't this sound like the anxiety is a little more pronounced on the White House side since they're the ones trying to bag on the report that has been the building focus of our Iraq policy for months now?
--Josh Marshall
New "Gays for Giuliani" pseudo-ad to actually hit the airwaves in South Carolina. That and other political news of the day in today's Election Central Happy Hour Roundup.
--Greg Sargent
Sane Rudy of Yesteryear Comes Back to Haunt Nutso Rudy of Today
Yesterday in South Carolina, Rudy Giuliani promised he could and would "end illegal immigration." But we got video of him back in 1996 saying that's just not possible and you've just got to accept that.
It's a pretty big flip-flop. But it's also a pretty good example of a case where the problem isn't what Rudy said ten years ago, it's what he's saying today.
If you look at what he said up at the Kennedy School ten years ago, it's eminently reasonable and even eloquent. He says that you simply cannot completely control immigration in this country if you want to have the kind of America we have now, which is to say, an America which is not a police state. That doesn't mean you shouldn't have an immigration policy. You should. But with borders as big as ours, a population as diverse as ours and civil liberties as robust as ours it's just not possible to put an end to illegal immigration. Not to mention the fact that you'd create pretty massive dislocations in the service economy.
What's completely ridiculous is what Rudy's saying now.
--Josh Marshall
Don Young v. The Constitution
Okay, so here we are. For two centuries or more, once a bill passes Congress, only Congress can change it. The president can veto it or not. The Supreme Court can rule a law unconstitutional. But that's it.
But it turns out that back in 2005, to guarantee an earmark payoff to one of his political contributors, Rep. Don Young (R-AK) actually went in and rewrote the text of a transportation spending bill after the thing had been passed by Congress and it was waiting to be signed by the president.
We explain what happened in today's episode of TPMtv ...
(ed.note: There was a case back a couple years ago when a bill went through Congress but a transcription error led to the bill appearing with slightly different text in the House and Senate versions. Frist and Hastert got together and decided to send the House version on to the president since that was what the conference committee agreed to. A court has since ruled the judiciary won't second-guess this decision. That, I would say, is pretty iffy itself. But at least the leaders of both bodies speak in some fashion for each House. And it was basically setting right a technical error. So even though it was pretty bad, it's simply not comparable to one member -- with no standing -- sneaking a new pay-off into the bill after final passage through Congress.)
--Josh Marshall
Run It By Tom
We've known for a while that the administration briefed the so-called Gang of Eight on the warrantless wiretap program back in 2004. That Gang is composed of the both parties' senior leaders in each house as well as both parties' senior leaders in each house's intelligence committee.
But the day after the notorious Ashcroft hospital room showdown, the White House gave a special briefing to then-Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX).
--Josh Marshall
For those of you interested in the US constitution, we've got a special report coming up later this morning on Rep. Don Young's (R-AK) plot to overthrow the constitution. Find out more about his insidious plans and what he's already done.
--Josh Marshall
Today's Must Read
Homegrown U.S. jihadism? The New York Police Department warns that it's found two dozen "clusters" of U.S. Muslims in the northeast on a "path" to terrorism.
--Spencer Ackerman
Ghost Written
From the LAT ...
Despite Bush's repeated statements that the report will reflect evaluations by Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, administration officials said it would actually be written by the White House, with inputs from officials throughout the government.
--Josh Marshall
Time Warner Destroys America and a Political Mag Near You
I haven't had time to look far enough into this to know all the details. But even in its outlines I can tell it's a pretty big deal -- and one that doesn't seem likely to get a lot of attention. The short and sweet of it is that Time Warner has proposed and postal regulators have accepted a proposal which is actually reducing postage costs for mega-mags like Time and Newsweek while dramatically raising them for small independent publishers. From small mags on the right and left I've been deluged in recent weeks by letters saying the new rates are tipping them into financial crisis.
Here for instance is a passage from a blast email I got this morning from the Nation's David Corn ...
Teresa Stack, The Nation's president, explains the crisis this way: Postal regulators have accepted a scheme designed in part by lobbyists for the Time-Warner media conglomerate. In short, mailing costs for mega-magazines like Time-Warner's own Time, People and Sports Illustrated will go up less than other magazines or even decrease. But smaller publications like The Nation will be hit by an enormous rate increase of half a million dollars a year.
To be clear, I'm not pitching for contributions to The Nation, a publication we have no ties to. I reprint that passage only by way of example and because the email was in my inbox this morning. I've gotten similar messages from other publications on the left and right and in recent weeks.
Anyway, since TPM mails nothing but an occasional utility bill, I can tell you without reservation that it's not a matter of self-interest for us as a business. But it is a matter of self-interest for every consumer of independent media. And that certainly includes us and I suspect you as well. It's one thing to rail against the MSM and say you get your information from the internet. But still today and I suspect for some time into the future a lot of the independent news you read on the web still comes from reporting sustained by independent print-based publications that are going to be heavily affected by these changes.
For two hundred years US postal rate has been geared to support independent media and political discourse. It's something small magazine publishes and press theory types understand very well but it's not that widely understood in the general public. If that comes to an end it will be a very big deal. Here's a link to where you can find out more.
--Josh Marshall
Rudymania
It will certainly be amusing to watch the press barons and sundry journo worthies ignore all this stuff ...
Your "Clinton's sexual impulse control" crack got me thinking. It's not easy to choose Giuliani's most outrageous sexual escapade, but I think from the standpoint of evaluating his fitness for public office, his fling with Cristyne Lategano takes the cake.Let me refresh your memory, in case the details are a little hazy. Lategano was working as Giuliani's Press Secretary when their affair began, and was later elevated to Communications Director. When the affair ended in May of 1999, he installed her at the helm of the city's tourism bureau, a $150k/year plum. Lategano, now married, denies that anything improper took place, but Rudy himself has issued a series of artful non-denial denials. His ex-wife, Donna Hanover, has blamed Lategano in public statements and court papers for the demise of her marriage. Wayne Barrett, a sort of dark Boswell to Rudy's Johnson, assembled a vast amount of circumstantial evidence backing the allegation. And no one who moved in those circles bothers doubting it for a second; the affair was, by its conclusion, common knowledge in the city - what would once have been termed 'open and notorious adultery.'
I raise this because, this evening, I performed a Lexis-Nexis search for news references to 'Lategano' in the last year. I found a dozen references - every one of them in the New York City media. (The Voice, the Observer, the News, the Post - not even the Paper of Record.) In other words, since Rudy has emerged as a serious national candidate, his relationship with Lategano has received zero scrutiny. Even voters who've learned of his tempestuous marriages know nothing of this affair.
And that's not right. Because the Lategano affair embodies the very worst of Rudy - his penchant for mixing private relationships with public business, his duplicity, and his cronyism. Giuliani had an affair with a (much younger) subordinate, and then pensioned her off on the public dime.
At least Lewinsky was an *unpaid* intern.
I raise it because, unlike so many moral issues that intrude into campaigns, this one actually has a direct bearing upon the crucial issues. And from the press, utter silence. Sure, nothing was ever proven, and Lategano's subsequent denials make this an awkward subject. It's a sad, tawdry story. But the NYC media hasn't had any problem covering it. So what's up with the national press?
Of course, if that doesn't pan out, they can look into why his main activity at the NYC terror command headquarters prior to 9/11 seems to have been cheating on his wife.
--Josh Marshall
Martin Kramer
Meet Martin Kramer, Rudy Giuliani's "Senior Middle East Advisor". The link is to Kramer's website.
--Josh Marshall
Don't Say He's Lost the Old Gingrich Charm
From the Cox News Service ...
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Tuesday he is "sickened" that President Bush and Congress went on vacation "while young Americans in our cities are massacred" by illegal immigrants.Gingrich, who is considering a run for the White House, was referring to a recent crime in Newark, N.J., where three college students were murdered execution style in a school playground.
One of the suspects -- Jose Lachira Carranza -- is an illegal immigrant from Peru who was on bail on charges of raping a child when the murders occurred.
--Josh Marshall
Dream Candidate
As TPM Reader DC puts it, Giuliani combines Bush's foreign policy genius with Clinton's sexual impulse control.
(ed.note: Look, I love Bill. But this one was too good to pass up.)
Then there's TPM Reader TP who notes that had the Captain of the Titanic survived we probably wouldn't have feted him as the go-to guy on iceberg defense.
--Josh Marshall
Summa Brownnosica
Jon Chait finds the one remaining member of the Rove personality cult: Fred Barnes.
Barnes on Rove: "Rove is the greatest political mind of his generation and probably of any generation."
Actually the whole quote is even better: "Rove is the greatest political mind of his generation and probably of any generation. He not only is a breathtakingly smart strategist but also a clever tactician. He knows history, understands the moods of the public, and is a visionary on matters of public policy. But he is not a magician."
In other words, celebrate him as an intellectual giant among men. Don't fault him for not being God. Is it not enough that he walked among us?
Sadder than reading this stuff is realizing that Barnes probably means every word of it.
--Josh Marshall
Giuliani: Catastrophe Waiting to Happen, pt. II
As I noted yesterday, beyond all the high-button issues about Rudy Giuliani's record as Mayor, colorful personality and open-minded approach to marriage, what doesn't get discussed very often is that a Giuliani presidency would be a foreign policy catastrophe from which the nation might simply not recover. As Eric Kleefeld explains in this post, Giuliani's new ghost-written article in Foreign Affairs shows that a Giuliani foreign policy would best be described as Bush-plus and premised on the idea that President Bush has not pursued his terrible ideas aggressively enough.
What seems apparent about Giuliani is that he's not kidding when he says that being Mayor of New York City is a lot like being president and running American foreign policy. And reading through not just his emphasis on the War on Terror but the particular way he describes it shows that he believes that being on the receiving end of a mass casualty terrorist attack -- even though his record of preparing for it is at best mixed -- gives him a unique understanding of how to combat the threat. And into this general ignorance is poured a group of extremist advisors who would likely have us blowing up various other countries in no time.
In other words, he's the Bush pattern all over again -- only this time starting not from a period of relatively high American standing in the world but into the mess Bush has already gotten us.
As with Bush, the agenda Giuliani sets forth is covered with a patina of enlightened foreign policy internationalism, with emphases on nation-building, investing money in helping destabilized countries build rule-of-law based societies. But just as with Bush even a cursory look at the people slated to implement the policies shows a cadre rooted in militarism and ideological escapism.
Republicans looking for a non-insane candidate and Democrats interested in preventing the Rudy disaster should really look into this stuff.
--Josh Marshall
Hillary says she's "struck a nerve" in the White House with her Iowa ad blasting the President. That and other political news of the day in today's Election Central Happy Hour Roundup.
--Greg Sargent
Frum on Rovism
David Frum, conservative writer and one-time Bush speech writer, has a column the New York Times evaluating the legacy of Rovism. The verdict, which I hinted at in my post last night, is that Rovism was not only a disaster in terms of public policy and governance. It was also a disaster in political terms -- the latter fact just took longer to reveal itself.
The only specific point of disagreement I have with David is that he says that strictly speaking the only wedge issue Rove ever used was immigration. Even by the somewhat narrow definition he employs, I don't see how this can be true. Gays were clearly Rove's wedge issue of choice when the going got rough in recent years. And the biggest wedge issue may not appear to be one at first glance because it wasn't a social issue, at least not in the old-fashioned sense: namely, the War on Terror. There are of course numerous other examples of lesser magnitude one could cite. The difference with the 1980s variant, Lee Atwater wedge issue menagerie is that Rove did not so often or as explicitly target African-Americans as a wedge issue. Attention to them was reserved for keeping them away from the polls.
The point on which I think Frum is correct is when he says that Rove reminded him "of a miner extracting the last nuggets from an exhausted seam." That is right on the mark and it suggests that people should go back to re-reading Judis and Teixeira's The Emerging Democratic Majority, a book which seems now not to have been dead but only asleep.
Having said all this, I think there is one other issue about Rove that could use a little more saying. Everyone knows that Rove's popularity in the Republican party has dropped dramatically as President Bush's popularity went into free fall and took much of the GOP with him. But it's more than just that and more than just Iraq, which of course the congressional Republican party supported more or less to a man. There's a distinct and additional level of unpopularity tied to the fact that even as the president's popularity has dropped -- which obviously he and Rove didn't plan or want -- they've basically been indifferent to the fate of the congressional GOP, even the future of the GOP as a whole. Again and again over the last year the White House has had chances to take some of the heat off congressional Republicans -- to ease back on Iraq, to can Alberto Gonzales, to let go or punish this or that crook. And they haven't done one. And that's spawned a level of rage -- though seldom openly expressed -- that in some respects almost rivals that felt by Democrats.
As with the country going back seven years now, they've shown little interest in the future fate of the GOP after they leave or even at present unless it bears directly on their ability to protect themselves.
In other words, they are now treating the Republican party much as they've treated the country for the last six years.
--Josh Marshall
Thank God!
Alberto Gonzales given special new powers over imposition of the death penalty.
--Josh Marshall
Decider
Does President Bush need a primer on the US Constitution from Gen. Petraeus?
From the Times ...
His view, he says, is that he is “on a very important mission that derives from a policy made by folks at one end of Pennsylvania Avenue, with the advice and consent and resources provided by folks at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. And in September, that’s how I’m going to approach it.” Whether to fight on here, he says, is a “big, big decision, a national decision,” one that belongs to elected officials, not a field general.
--Josh Marshall
Ames Straw Poll, the Shocking Truth
As we get deeper into the election cycle this year, we're going to be involving readers more and more in TPMtv. We're going to be up in New Hampshire in a few months reporting from on location about the primary. We'll be at the conventions. And we'll probably make a few other trips too. But we're a tiny operation. So there's just no way we're going to be able to be in all the places where events are happening.
As I noted a while back, we're particularly interested in verite footage of campaign events on the ground. How do the candidates look, what's their presentation when the national TV cameras aren't rolling. Of course, if you get footage of Tom Tancredo slipping and calling for summary execution of illegal aliens caught on American soil, yeah, we'd like that video. But that's not mainly what we're interested in. We want to bring readers a sense of the retail politics of how the campaign is unfolding around the country. So take your handcams, keep them running and send us in the results.
Today, we have a short video that TPM Reader Greg Hauenstein shot at this weekend's Ames Straw Poll. I didn't have much of a sense of what the event was actually like until I watched ...
--Josh Marshall
A new report details Mitt Romney's $250 million in assets. That and other political news of the day in today's Election Central Morning Roundup.
--Greg Sargent
Today's Must Read
Is Room 641A of 611 Folsom Street in San Francisco the heart of the Terrorist Surveillance Program? And does that room hold the key as to whether the National Security Agency engaged in warrantless domestic surveillance as well? If the Justice Department prevails in a court hearing tomorrow afternoon, we might never know.
--Spencer Ackerman
Money Travels North
Here's an interesting graphical representation of where the federal earmarks go, courtesy of the Sunlight Foundation. The image shows earmarked federal dollars on a per capita basis by state.
I had to scrunch this image down a little. But as you can see, one fact stands out pretty clearly: Alaska bags a lot of earmarks. The runner up states tend to be smallish states. And that's a clear effect of the disproportionate weight small states get in the senate. But, still, Alaska gets almost four times more in federal earmark dollars than the next runner up, Hawaii.
Another interesting way to look at this is, look at the top three states: Alaska, Hawaii, and West Virginia. All smallish states but each also have senators that have been in office, respectively from 1968 (Stevens), 1963 (Inouye) and 1959 (Byrd).
All this said, I think earmarks in many ways have gotten a bad name. Earmarks seldom change or in theory at least never change the amount of money being spent. It simply takes the decision-making power over how money gets spent out of the hands of federal bureaucrats and puts it into the hands of legislators. It's a system rife with potential for abuse. But there's nothing wrong with it in itself. If a big federal transportation bill goes through you probably want your representative to do his or her best to make sure some of that money is allocated for making sure the bridge in your city gets fixed. The problem of course, or one of them, comes when he or she is earmarking money for some project on the other side of the country because it'll make millions for some campaign contributor who's bought your member of Congress.
--Josh Marshall
Like a Whisper
Is it me or is the most remarkable thing about Karl Rove's resignation that it seems almost like a non-event? I had the feeling as the day wore on that all of us in the news and commentary business were trying to make it a big event. But somehow it just wasn't there.
Rove has been one of the two or three central, polarizing figures of the decade -- an often feared and hated figure among Democrats, at the center of most of the major political scandals of the Bush era, the architect (or so it seemed) of a Republican dominance slated to last a generation. Little more than a year ago you could find a half dozen newly-minted books on the shelves explaining the perpetual motion machine of right-wing dominance he had created. And yet today, when he resigns, I sense that no one really has much to say about it.
Yes, every politics or hard news publication has at least a couple articles marking the moment. But not with much ooomph or much to say.
In part this must be because Rove's departure seems unequal to his billing. It fits no one's expectations. He's certainly not leaving in triumph. And, for the moment, not in handcuffs either.
As I wrote years ago now, Rove's whole model of political advocacy and organization was built on a confidence game. Say improbable things are true often enough, and confidently enough, and the believing of it by enough people will make it so. The pyramid scheme, borrow-against-tomorrow nature of their game now seems exposed for all to see -- whether it's in the agony of Iraq or more prosaically in low state in which he appears to be leaving the Republican party. But judged in purely amoral, functional terms, for three straight elections, it was quite a run. It was only because of that improbable string of successes that many people, deep into the 2006 election cycle, still refused to believe what the polls were manifestly showing them.
I continue to think that there's an unrevealed factor behind Rove departure. But at this point it almost doesn't matter. This feels like a non-event because the story is already played out. The question of Iraq remains bitter and intense. But on the cynicism of Bush-Rove rule, its damage to the country and its destructiveness to the Republican party, across a broad swath of the electorate, it's difficult to find much of an argument. So really what is there left to say?
--Josh Marshall
Hillary to shore up minority support with black celebrity fundraiser while Obama tests out events with smaller crowds. Those items and other political news of the day in today's Election Central Happy Hour Roundup.
--Greg Sargent
Gul Renominated
For those of you who follow Turkish politics, you'll be interested to learn what I take it is the at least somewhat surprising news that Prime Minister Erdogan has renominated (or I guess technically proposed) Abdullah Gul as the next President of Turkey.
Gul's nomination was what precipitated the mini-crisis in Turkey that was resolved by the calling of new elections, which Erdogan's Justice and Development Party won decisively.
My understanding had been that most observers expected that Erdogan, with a renewed popular mandate behind him, would nevertheless make the conciliatory gesture of nominating someone else beside Gul. But apparently that's not the choice he's made.
--Josh Marshall
Romney Meet Faust
New York TPM Reader KB on why the catastrophe of a Rudy presidency may force us to embrace the self-respect fiasco of Romneyism ...
Josh, I totally agree with you about the danger to the Republic Rudy represents. He is totally and utterly unsuited to the oval office. Which is why, as allergic as you are to Romney's phoniness, you have to see that as plastic and anodyne as Romney may be, he doesn't represent quite the same danger as Rudy at the controls. As a Dem I'm hoping Romney gets the nomination, not only for this reason, but also because the media tends to run with the hero worshiping b------t narratives. No matter how hard we try, the narrative of a Rudy nomination will not be the one from the Village Voice's Wayne Barett. It will be the one from Roger Ailes's Fox News. Here's to rooting for Mitt...
Also, very much a good point that the Fox News, in addition to operating as an adjunct of the Republican party as usual will also fall clearly behind Rudy since that's what Roger Ailes wants.
--Josh Marshall
Giuliani: Catastrophe Waiting to Happen
I know I'm not telling you anything you don't know by noting that being mayor on 9/11 doesn't give Rudy Giuliani any expertise on terrorism, no matter what he might think. But it's only crystallized in my mind in recent days -- from watching him speak and seeing who his advisors are -- that Giuliani appears to know virtually nothing about either the Middle East or counter-terrorism policy. And he looks very much like another George W. Bush in the making. Indeed, not the President Bush we now have, who has slowly lost the greater proportion of his more fanatic deputies and has Bob Gates and Condi Rice as his two main policy advisors, but the President Bush of 2001.
With Giuliani you have a man who appears to have very little familiarity with the Middle East but does have a personality which prioritizes gut-instinct, point-scoring and aggression. And like Bush he appears to believe he can make up for his lack of knowledge and experience with attitude and ass-kicking. To round things out, his foreign policy advisory team looks quite like the crowd of neocons who were advising President Bush while he was running for president. If anything they look like a group that was too extreme to gain entry into the original 'vulcans' group.
The fact that he set up his pre-9/11 counter-terrorism HQ as a love nest may make for good sizzle. But the direction he'd take US policy on the Middle East would likely be a genuine disaster.
--Josh Marshall
Tell Him What He's Won!
Iiiiiit's a charming dinette set! Actually no - rather, this past Saturday Mitt Romney won the Ames Straw Poll, taking 32% of a surprisingly low-turnout vote. In today's Sunday Show Roundup episode of TPMtv, we hear from the winning contestant himself and consult the Sunday morning pundits to find out about all the fabulous prizes.
--Ben Craw
O'Reilly v. O'Reilly
In case you missed it, fibbing goof Bill O'Reilly goes up against fibbing goof Bill O'Reilly on Fox News' coverage of John Edwards ...
--Josh Marshall
Exit Rove
So Karl Rove is resigning. I got up in the middle of the night last night and since I was awake I flipped on my computer. And lo and behold Karl Rove is resigning. Now, I have to admit that when I first saw this, given the way it was announced I figured it was just one of those late in an administration departures. Lots of big wigs don't stay around until the final day of an eight year term. They leave to get a jump start on the rest of their lives and leave it to the B Team to round out the second term.
But then I thought, who am I kidding? Am I channelling Jay Carney? The innocent explanation is never right with these guys.
Of course, if there's more to this resignation, it's not necessarily that easy to narrow down the list of possibilities since Rove is connected to pretty much every instance of high-level wrongdoing. And then there's the extra added wrinkle that if anything the White House's ability to keep Rove off the witness stand is decreased, if only marginally, by his leaving the White House. With the recent news of cutbacks on funding of human intelligence in the intel budget, there's the possibility that there were no more CIA agents whose cover could be blown and he decided to move on to greener pastures.
So what do you think? Why now?
Late Update: Special Rove resignation presentation of TPMtv's look at Karl Rove's 2006 voter suppression speech ...
--Josh Marshall
Looks like the GOP Presidential candidates will be showing up at CNN's YouTube debate, after all. That and other political news of the day in today's Election Central Morning Roundup.
--Greg Sargent
Today's Must Read
Fear-mongering, obstructionism and threat-inflation: all in all, a proven recipe for gutting the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
--Spencer Ackerman
Crooked or Feloniously Inefficient?
The Post is starting us off right this week with a story about PACs that do little but raise money to raise more money and keep the staff employed -- which leads to an analysis the Posties did of ex-everything-and-nothing Linda Chavez's network of political action committees with names like "Republican Issues Committee, the Latino Alliance, Stop Union Political Abuse and the Pro-Life Campaign Committee."
Here's the key passage ...
Of the $24.5 million raised by the PACs from January 2003 to December 2006, $242,000 -- or 1 percent -- was passed on to politicians, according to a Washington Post analysis of federal election reports. The PACs spent even less -- $151,236 -- on independent political activity, such as mailing pamphlets.Instead, most of the donations were channeled back into new fundraising efforts, and some were used to provide a modest but steady source of income for Chavez and four family members, who served as treasurers and consultants to the committees. Much of the remaining funds went to pay for expenses such as furniture, auto repairs and insurance, and rent for the Sterling office the groups share. Even Chavez's health insurance was paid for a time from political donations.
"I guess you could call it the family business," Chavez said in an interview.
The Post notes that this is not illegal: a political has-been may under current election law run a network of political rip-off operations to squeeze money from witless ideological compatriots. You can look it up.
But this left me wondering: how did they manage to burn through that money? With simple arithmetic even I can manage we can see that well under half a million dollars went to anything that can be considered "political action", as in political action committee. And that leaves over $24 million raised over 4 years. So $6 million a year on operating expenses and salaries for Chavez, her husband and sundry offspring.
The answer? Oddly enough not all that much of that money seems to have gone to Chavez and her husband and sons. Evidence turned up by the FEC suggests that the telemarketing solicitation firm they contracted with kept as much as 95% of the money raised on the PACs' behalf.
In other words, the PACs, rather than being cash cows for the Chavez clan, seem mainly to have been in the business of making money for the telemarketing firm. So where'd they get their money? For their own salaries, the Chavez family relied mainly on their nonprofits like One Nation Indivisible and Stop Union Political Abuse.
Along the way there were apparently many sojourns into unwitting parody -- as when one mailing from a Chavez anti-union PAC concluded: "If we stop now, the terrorists win."
As a special bonus, the article includes a thumbnail sketch of the the ups and downs of life in the capital for Chavez and husband Christopher Gersten.
It seems that as the Reagan-Bush years were winding down and the air whizzed out of the Chavez publicity balloon, the family fell on somewhat hard times. After Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, Chavez and Gersten were running a Mexican restaurant in the DC suburbs "with Chavez taping television interviews on politics during the day and working the cash register at night." The restaurant went broke. But as luck would have it, as Gersten recalls, that was around the time the "partial birth abortion" crusade picked up steam.
So as the eatery was tanking, Chavez and Gersten rode the partial-birth wave into financial security in the phony PAC and nonprofit racket. First there was the Institute for Religious Values, then the Pro-Life Campaign Committee. By the time the Bush years rolled around, they were operating a one family Keiretsu of public policy bamboozlement.
Give this article a read. It's the kind of thing that should make these two embarrassed to ever show their face in Washington again. But that's not how it works down there.
--Josh Marshall
The Brookings Institution's Michael O'Hanlon caused quite a stir a couple of weeks ago with an NYT op-ed, co-written with Ken Pollack, on U.S. "progress" in Iraq. The piece immediately became The Most Important Opinion Piece Ever, at least as far as Bush and his supporters are concerned.
The two, who recently returned from an eight-day visit to Iraq, argued that U.S. forces are "finally getting somewhere in Iraq." O'Hanlon and Pollack added that they were "surprised by the gains" they saw, and now believe there's a potential for "sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with."
The White House, GOP presidential candidates, and the rest of the GOP establishment embraced the op-ed as gospel -- and proof that any talk about troop withdrawal is premature. After all, the right said, O'Hanlon and Pollack work for the "liberal" Brookings Institution, and are "critics" of the war.
Within a few days of the NYT op-ed being published, the two started backpedaling just a bit, conceding the lack of political progress in Iraq, which was, of course, the original point of the surge. O'Hanlon shed additional light on his perspective in a fascinating interview with Salon's Glenn Greenwald, which was published today.
The whole thing is worth reading, but Glenn emphasized a point that was omitted in the original Times piece, and went largely unmentioned in the ensuing coverage: O'Hanlon's and Pollack's perspective was shaped in large part by what the Pentagon allowed them to see.
GG: The first line of your Op-Ed said: "viewed from Iraq where we just spent the last eight days interviewing American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel..." How did you arrange the meetings with the Iraqi military and civilian personnel?
MO: Well, a number of those -- and most of those were arranged by the U.S. military. So I'll be transparent about that as well. These were to some extent contacts of Ken and Tony, but that was a lesser number of people. The predominant majority were people who we came into contact with through the itinerary the D.O.D. developed.
It's a very informative interview. Be sure to take a look.
--Steve Benen
The LAT had an interesting item today, speculating about whether presidential candidate Fred Thompson will follow Senate candidate Thompson's style, and campaign in his favorite prop.
Thompson was the front runner for the GOP nomination [in the late spring of 1994], but Rep. Jim Cooper, his presumed Democratic opponent, had a big lead in the polls, greater name recognition and a lot more money. Thompson was in the doldrums.
"He was a very unhappy candidate," said political consultant Tom Ingram, who masterminded the campaign. "He was complaining about all the Republican events -- the coffees and teas and chicken dinners. So I said, 'What would you like to do?' "
Thompson, the son of a used-car dealer who had grown up in modest circumstances, told Ingram he would like to get a truck and drive around the state meeting people. Up to that point, Thompson had been tooling around Tennessee in a Lincoln Town Car. "So why don't you do that?" said Ingram.
As the piece explained, Thompson hopped in an old red pickup and won voters over with his folksy charm, accentuated by the prop.
Now, the LAT includes some perspectives from Thompson detractors, who characterize the actor/lobbyist/senator as a "phony," and the truck as a cynical "gimmick," but as long as this story continues to circulate, it's probably worth reminding folks of the details. The problem isn't just that Thompson drove an old red pickup as a shameless ploy; it's that he didn't really drive the old red pickup at all.
Way back in 1996, Michelle Cottle explained the reality.
True story: it is a warm evening in the summer of 1995. A crowd has gathered in the auditorium of a suburban high school in Knoxville, Tennessee. Seated in the audience is a childhood friend of mine who now teaches at the school. On stage is Republican Sen. Fred Dalton Thompson, the lawyer/actor elected in 1994 to serve out the remainder of Vice President Al Gore's Senate term (when Gore's appointed successor retired after just two years). The local TV stations are on hand as Thompson wraps up his presentation on tax reform, in the plain-spoken, down-to-earth style so familiar to those who have seen him in any of his numerous film and television performances.
Finishing his talk, Thompson shakes a few hands, then walks out with the rest of the crowd to the red pickup truck he made famous during his 1994 Senate campaign. My friend stands talking with her colleagues as the senator is driven away by a blond, all-American staffer. A few minutes later, my friend gets into her car to head home. As she pulls up to the stop sign at the parking lot exit, rolling up to the intersection is Senator Thompson, now behind the wheel of a sweet silver luxury sedan. He gives my friend a slight nod as he drives past. Turning onto the main road, my friend passes the school's small, side parking area. Lo and behold: There sits the abandoned red pickup, along with the all-American staffer.
Thompson didn't even drive the thing -- as Kevin Drum recently noted, "Basically, he just drove the thing the final few hundred feet before each campaign event, and then ditched it for something nicer as soon as he was out of sight of the yokels."
Expect to hear quite a bit more of this in the coming weeks, after Thompson makes his announcement.
--Steve Benen
In describing the resent FISA "revisions," Newsweek's Jonathan Alter gets shrill.
I hate to sound melodramatic about it, but while everyone was at the beach or "The Simpsons Movie" on the first weekend in August, the U.S. government shredded the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, the one requiring court-approved "probable cause" before Americans can be searched or spied upon. This is not the feverish imagination of left-wing bloggers and the ACLU. It's the plain truth of where we've come as a country, at the behest of a president who has betrayed his oath to defend the Constitution and with the acquiescence of Democratic congressional leaders who know better. Historians will likely see this episode as a classic case of fear -- both physical and political -- trumping principle amid the ancient tension between personal freedom and national security. [...]
Democrats obtained a sunset clause that requires the whole thing to be reauthorized in six months. But real damage has been done. At a minimum, we have suspended the Fourth Amendment for the time being.
That sums things up quite nicely, actually. In related news...
* Anonymous Liberal explains why the new FISA law is even worse than it sounds.
* The Washington Post offers a fascinating tick-tock account of how the legislation was proposed, debated, and passed.
* The New York Times editorial board accuses the Bush White House of intentionally keeping the details muddled so as to mislead lawmakers and the public.
* And Kevin Drum wades through the details to discover that there is "virtually no oversight on NSA's data collection at all."
--Steve Benen
Fans of the "All Muck is Local" feature on TPM Muckraker will enjoy the latest edition, featuring a wild story out of West Virginia. In 2002, State Senator Oshel Craigo (D-W.Va.) was defeated by Lisa Smith (R), thanks in large part to accusations that Craigo was under a federal investigation for falsely filing a campaign finance report. Charges were never brought, but it didn't matter -- the rumors sunk his campaign.
As it turns out, the same time his Republican challenger was making accusations of criminal wrongdoing, she was also apparently committing tax fraud and submitting false campaign finance statements. She was later indicted -- but was briefly declared mentally unfit for trial.
It's quite a story. Take a look.
--Steve Benen
Mitt Romney got the win he wanted out of the Ames Straw Poll, but it came at a high price -- more than $400 per vote (nearly eight times the cost per vote for second-place finisher Mike Huckabee). That and other political news of the day in today's Election Central Saturday Roundup.
--Steve Benen
George Will takes Senate Dems to task today for their opposition to Leslie Southwick's nomination to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. In the process, Will plays a little fast and loose with the facts.
[B]ecause [Southwick] is a white Mississippian, many liberals consider him fair game for unfairness. Many say his defect is "insensitivity," an accusation invariably made when specific grievances are few and flimsy.
Obama, touching all the Democratic nominating electorate's erogenous zones, concocts a tortured statistic about Southwick's "disappointing record on cases involving consumers, employees, racial minorities, women and gays and lesbians. After reviewing his 7,000 opinions, Judge Southwick could not find one case in which he sided with a civil rights plaintiff in a non-unanimous verdict." Surely the pertinent question is whether Southwick sided with the law.
First, the notion that Dems oppose a judicial nominee because he's white is ridiculous, even by Will's standards. Second, Will is missing the point of the 7,000-case example.
As Emily Bazelon recently explained, during Southwick's confirmation hearing, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) asked Southwick to name an example of an unpopular decision he made in which he favored the little guy -- "a poor person, or a member of a minority group, or someone who'd simply turned to the courts for help." Southwick couldn't name a single case.
Will's argument is that Southwick's concern as a jurist should be for the law, not the downtrodden. Perhaps. But in hearing 7,000 cases over several years, Southwick's reading of the law seemed remarkably one-sided -- he always favored powerful interests. What a coincidence that the law was so consistently on their side.
Bazelon added, "Southwick voted 'against the injured party and in favor of business interests' in 160 of 180 cases that gave rise to a dissent and that involved employment law and injury-based suits for damages. When one judge on a panel dissents in a case, there's an argument it could come out either way, which makes these cases a good measure of how a judge thinks when he's got some legal leeway. In such cases, Judge Southwick almost never favors the rights of workers or people who've suffered discrimination or been harmed by a shoddy product."
Opposition to Southwick's nomination has nothing to do with him being "a white Mississippian." Will surely knows better.
--Steve Benen
More U.S. cities will soon have more cameras watching more Americans.
The Department of Homeland Security is funneling millions of dollars to local governments nationwide for purchasing high-tech video camera networks, accelerating the rise of a "surveillance society" in which the sense of freedom that stems from being anonymous in public will be lost, privacy rights advocates warn.
Since 2003, the department has handed out some $23 billion in federal grants to local governments for equipment and training to help combat terrorism. Most of the money paid for emergency drills and upgrades to basic items, from radios to fences. But the department also has doled out millions on surveillance cameras, transforming city streets and parks into places under constant observation.
How much surveillance are we talking about here? Thanks to generous homeland security grants, St. Paul, Minn., will have 60 new cameras for its downtown; Madison, Wis., will have a 32-camera network; and Pittsburgh is adding 83 cameras to its downtown. Those are just from announcements regarding big cities over the last month.
And what about smaller towns? They're getting in on the fun, too.
Recent examples include Liberty, Kan. (population 95), which accepted a federal grant to install a $5,000 G2 Sentinel camera in its park, and Scottsbluff, Neb. (population 14,000), where police used a $180,000 Homeland Security Department grant to purchase four closed-circuit digital cameras and two monitors, a system originally designed for Times Square in New York City.
"Being able to collect this much data on people is going to be very powerful, and it opens people up for abuses of power," said Jennifer King, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley who studies privacy and technology. "The problem with explaining this scenario is that today it's a little futuristic. [A major loss of privacy] is a low risk today, but five years from now it will present a higher risk."
--Steve Benen
McClatchy's Matt Stearns on the debate surrounding U.S. policy towards Iran:
Taking military action against Iran could put President Bush on a collision course with Congress, leading Democrats and a Republican lawmaker cautioned Friday following Bush's threat of unspecified consequences for alleged Iranian meddling in Iraq.
It's been the consensus for months among the Democrats who hold the majority that Bush must get congressional authorization before any military strike.
But the authorization would be no easy sell. Two knowledgeable U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because intelligence on Iran is highly classified, said that the administration so far doesn't have "smoking-gun" evidence that could be used publicly to justify an air attack.
Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.), the vice-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he expects the administration to request authorization before taking action.
"I doubt the President could or would do so without coming to Congress," he said.
Right, because if there's one thing we've seen from the Bush gang, it's a willingness to respect congressional authorization, confirmation, and notification, particularly on matters of foreign policy and national security.
--Steve Benen
'We're tough, we're determined, we're relentless'
George W. Bush openly mocked the very idea of "nation building" as a presidential candidate in 2002, but after 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan, Bush seemed to appreciate the importance of his responsibilities and the task at hand. He was aware of the fact that Afghans had been abandoned by the West before, and the president, in April 2000, vowed to avoid the syndrome of "initial success, followed by long years of floundering and ultimate failure."
"We're not going to repeat that mistake," he said. "We're tough, we're determined, we're relentless."
At the time, I was cautiously optimistic that he meant it. I thought it was at least possible that the president would see the mission through and, with 9/11 in mind, make a real commitment to Afghanistan. As the New York Times explains today in a gripping retrospective, Bush, through a combination of incompetence, arrogance, neglect, and poor judgment, managed to throw "the good war" badly off course. As the administration's Iraq policy failed spectacularly, Afghanistan was relegated to an "afterthought."
At critical moments in the fight for Afghanistan, the Bush administration diverted scarce intelligence and reconstruction resources to Iraq, including elite C.I.A. teams and Special Forces units involved in the search for terrorists. As sophisticated Predator spy planes rolled off assembly lines in the United States, they were shipped to Iraq, undercutting the search for Taliban and terrorist leaders, according to senior military and intelligence officials.
As defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld claimed credit for toppling the Taliban with light, fast forces. But in a move that foreshadowed America's trouble in Iraq, he failed to anticipate the need for more forces after the old government was gone, and blocked an early proposal from Colin L. Powell, then the secretary of state, and Mr. Karzai, the administration's handpicked president, for a large international force. As the situation deteriorated, Mr. Rumsfeld and other administration officials reversed course and cajoled European allies into sending troops.
When it came to reconstruction, big goals were announced, big projects identified. Yet in the year Mr. Bush promised a "Marshall Plan" for Afghanistan, the country received less assistance per capita than did postconflict Bosnia and Kosovo, or even desperately poor Haiti, according to a RAND Corporation study. Washington has spent an average of $3.4 billion a year reconstructing Afghanistan, less than half of what it has spent in Iraq, according to the Congressional Research Service.
The White House contends that the troop level in Afghanistan was increased when needed and that it now stands at 23,500. But a senior American commander said that even as the military force grew last year, he was surprised to discover that "I could count on the fingers of one or two hands the number of U.S. government agricultural experts" in Afghanistan, where 80 percent of the economy is agricultural. A $300 million project authorized by Congress for small businesses was never financed.
The NYT piece is more a reminder than an eye-opener, but given the attention directed at Bush's mistakes in Iraq, Bush's mistakes in Afghanistan are too frequently overlooked. The administration had a rare opportunity to do some real good -- Afghans welcomed the U.S. presence, the international community supported our mission, the American electorate had largely rallied behind the cause, and there was reliable intelligence pointing the way towards what needed to be done.
And the Bush gang managed to screw it up anyway.
On May 1, hours before Mr. Bush stood beneath a "Mission Accomplished" banner, Mr. Rumsfeld appeared at a news conference with Mr. Karzai in Kabul's threadbare 19th-century presidential palace. "We clearly have moved from major combat activity to a period of stability and stabilization and reconstruction activities," he said. "The bulk of the country today is permissive, it's secure."
The Afghanistan announcement was largely lost in the spectacle of Mr. Bush's speech. But the predictions of stability proved no less detached from events on the ground.
The whole piece is definitely worth reading. Take a look.
--Steve Benen
