Enough of the D.C. Dems
by Molly Ivins
Mah fellow progressives, now is the time for all good men and women to come to the aid of the party. I don’t know about you, but I have had it with the D.C. Democrats, had it with the DLC Democrats, had it with every calculating, equivocating, triangulating, straddling, hair-splitting son of a bitch up there, and that includes Hillary Rodham Clinton.
I will not be supporting Senator Clinton because: a) she has no clear stand on the war and b) Terri Schiavo and flag-burning are not issues where you reach out to the other side and try to split the difference. You want to talk about lowering abortion rates through cooperation on sex education and contraception, fine, but don’t jack with stuff that is pure rightwing firewater.
I can’t see a damn soul in D.C. except Russ Feingold who is even worth considering for President. The rest of them seem to me so poisonously in hock to this system of legalized bribery they can’t even see straight.
Look at their reaction to this Abramoff scandal. They’re talking about “a lobby reform package.” We don’t need a lobby reform package, you dimwits, we need full public financing of campaigns, and every single one of you who spends half your time whoring after special interest contributions knows it. The Abramoff scandal is a once in a lifetime gift—a perfect lesson on what’s wrong with the system being laid out for people to see. Run with it, don’t mess around with little patches, and fix the system.
As usual, the Democrats have forty good issues on their side and want to run on thirty-nine of them. Here are three they should stick to:
1) Iraq is making terrorism worse; it’s a breeding ground. We need to extricate ourselves as soon as possible. We are not helping the Iraqis by staying.
2) Full public financing of campaigns so as to drive the moneylenders from the halls of Washington.
3) Single-payer health insurance.
posted on Sat, 03.11.06 @ 12:11 AM EDT [more..] [No Comments]
Assessing Iraq
"The Country Has Already Collapsed"
With sectarian violence on the rise and a stable government nowhere in sight, things are not going well for Iraq at the moment. SPIEGEL ONLINE spoke with Iraq expert Marina Ottaway about chances for government legitimacy, how to establish stability in Iraq and why the police force in Iraq is a fiction.
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REUTERS Violence in Iraq continues as many fear a coming civil war. Here, the aftermath of a March 2 attack on Sunni political leader Adnan al-Dulaimi in Baghdad. |
Headlines from Iraq seem to be getting progressively worse. Not only are suicide attacks and bombings a daily occurrence, but particularly after the February attack on the Golden Mosque in Samarra -- a Shiite holy site -- deadly sectarian violence has increased. Are we witnessing a country falling apart?
Marina Ottaway: At this point in Iraq, you do not have a central government -- so you don't have a legitimate authority running the country. You don't have a government with the power to establish or maintain order. What you have is a nominal government that can only stay in power because the Americans are there. The government is supposed to have derived legitimacy from the constitution and the elections. But I think the government we end up with, won't have much legitimacy either.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Why not? After all, the Iraqis went to the polls and chose their representatives. That seems pretty legitimate, does it not?
Ottaway: It is now almost three months after the elections and there is still no government. The Iraqis continue postponing the opening of parliament because according to the constitution, after they open parliament, they only have two months to form the government. They don't think they can form a government that quickly. A government that takes over five months to form is not a government that is going to have very much legitimacy in the end. The country has already collapsed. Now the challenge is figuring out a way to deal with this fact.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: The idea, of course, was that the United States was going to help the Iraqis with security until they could help themselves, hopefully providing an atmosphere in which the Iraqis could build a democratic state. What went wrong?
VEEP DOO-DOO
by Hendrik Hertzberg
According to a CBS News poll released last Monday, the “favorability” rating of Vice-President Dick Cheney has sunk to a new low. How low a low? Well, that evening, Jon Stewart, as part of the buildup to the “Daily Show” star’s going global on Oscar Sunday, was the guest on CNN’s “Larry King Live.” When King barked out the number—“Cheney eighteen per cent”—Stewart, citing another well-known poll result, observed solemnly, “Four out of five dentists surveyed recommend sugarless gum for their patients who chew gum.” That is, the proportion of Americans who have a favorable opinion of Cheney is outweighed by the proportion of dentists who recommend sugary gum for their patients who chew gum.
The Vice-Presidency isn’t what it used to be. No one bothered to rate the favorability of Garret Hobart, Charles Dawes, or Alben Barkley. But the clout of that once legendarily insignificant office has been growing for half a century. In his time, Walter Mondale was history’s most powerful Vice-President. So was Al Gore in his. But Cheney is an order of magnitude different. For a number of reasons—his bureaucratic ruthlessness, his domineering influence over a feckless President who seems fated to remain forever inexperienced, his will to power combined with an alleged lack of ambition to succeed his nominal boss—he is universally agreed to be one of the two most powerful officials in the executive branch of the federal government, though it is not universally agreed which one. Truly, this is the Bush-Cheney Administration, in alphabetical order. The hyphen looks like a coy equal sign—not the towhook it was for Clinton-Gore, Reagan-Bush, Carter-Mondale, and Nixon-Agnew, to say nothing of Hoover-Curtis and Roosevelt-Garner.
That same CBS News poll put President Bush’s favorability rating at twenty-nine per cent, also a personal worst. It would be natural to attribute the eleven-point gap to the unpleasantness two weeks earlier at the Armstrong ranch, in Texas. Among respectable commentators, the predominant view of that unfortunate occurrence has been that it was much ado about not very much. As scandals go, this was, like the Vice-President’s lunchtime refreshment, small beer. An accident, nothing more. A private matter, essentially.
posted on Fri, 03.10.06 @ 11:37 PM EDT [more..] [No Comments]
Friday Night Surprise: White House Aide Caught In Shoplifting Scheme
When Claude Allen, the former Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy, resigned suddenly a few weeks ago, the White House gave its official explanation for the departure:
President Bush’s domestic policy advisor, Claude A. Allen, has resigned to spend more time with his family, the White House said.
Many were
skeptical of the White House’s explanation. It turns out the suspicions were justified: Allen was arrested yesterday and charged in a “
retail theft scheme.” From the
police report:
posted on Fri, 03.10.06 @ 11:18 PM EDT [
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Dobson site denies lobbying Norton for Abramoff
Filed by RAW STORY
In a message posted on his Focus on the Family website, Dr. James Dobson's group has denied lobbying outgoing Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton on behalf of fallen lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
"There is no connection," Dobson's site says flatly.
However, in already public e-mails and letters sent in early 2002 between former Christian Coalition head Ralph Reed and Abramoff, Reed insists that he has secured Dobson's support for Abramoff's gaming interest clients in Louisiana, in opposition of allowing competing tribes to expand the state's access to legal gambling.
posted on Fri, 03.10.06 @ 11:08 PM EDT [more..] [No Comments]
Oversight by Capitulation
By Robert Parry
Consortium News
Despite a dip in his opinion polls, George W. Bush's transformation of the United States into an authoritarian society continues apace, with new "compromises" with Congress actually consolidating his claims to virtually unlimited executive power.
Bush's latest success came as part of a supposed "concession" to Congress that would grant two new Republican-controlled seven-member subcommittees narrow oversight of Bush's warrantless wiretapping of Americans.
While "moderate" Republican senators - Mike DeWine of Ohio, Olympia Snowe of Maine, and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska - hailed the plan as a retreat by the White House, the deal actually blesses Bush's authority to bypass the courts in spying on Americans and imposes on him only a toothless congressional review process.
Indeed, the congressional plan may make matters worse, broadening the permissible scope of Bush's wiretaps to include Americans deemed to be "working in support of a terrorist group or organization."
Given Bush's record of stretching words to his advantage - and his claim that anyone who isn't "with us" is with the terrorists - the vague concept of "working in support" could open almost any political critic of the Bush administration to surveillance.
Plus, the only check on abuses would be the closed-door oversight work of the seven-member panels, which would only be informed of a warrantless wiretap after it had been in place for 45 days. Republicans also would have four of the seven seats on each subcommittee and any dissent from the minority Democrats would be kept secret.
In other words, the plan would let Bush and his Republican congressional loyalists conduct wiretaps of anyone whose activities might be called supportive of terrorists, while any Democratic critic would be muzzled from saying anything publicly under penalty of law.
posted on Fri, 03.10.06 @ 10:56 PM EDT [more..] [No Comments]
Bush at his lowest ebb after ports defeat
By Edward Alden and Holly Yeager in Washington
Financial Times
President George W. Bush's defeat over the Dubai ports deal has put him in the weakest political position of his presidency.
Some of his former supporters are now questioning whether the president can regain the initiative during his remaining three years in the White House.
"If this was a European parliamentary system, it would have been a vote of no-confidence," said Ed Rollins, a top political adviser to President Ronald Reagan and now a Republican strategist.
An AP/Ipsos poll on Friday found that confidence in the president continued to fall, even among Republicans. Two-thirds of Americans said the country was now on the wrong track, up from 61 per cent a month ago, and 77 per cent believed a civil war would break out in Iraq.
On Thursday, Dubai Ports World, the state-owned company which had acquired five US port terminal facilities as part of its $6.8bn purchase of P&O, was ordered by the ruler of Dubai to divest the ports in the face of congressional opposition.
That may not be enough to end the controversy, however. A person close to the deal said last night that DP World would not necessarily sell all of its interest in P&O's US assets and could retain as much as 49 per cent.
posted on Fri, 03.10.06 @ 09:34 PM EDT [more..] [No Comments]
Sandra Day O'Connor Warns Of "Beginnings" Of Dictatorship...
NPR's Nina Totenberg aired an amazing story this morning about a talk that just-resigned Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor gave at Georgetown University. The first woman to serve on the High Court wouldn't allow her actual words to be broadcast, and that's a shame, because -- based on Totenberg's report -- every American needs to hear what she said. The Reagan appointee who became a moderate and an American icon -- Bush v. Gore notwithstanding -- all but named names in thinly veiled attacks on former House majority leader Tom DeLay and Texas Sen. John Cornyn, and ended with a stunning warning.
O'Connor told her Georgetown audience that judges can make presidents, Congress and governors "really really mad," and that if judges don't make people angry, they aren't doing their job. But she said judicial effectiveness is "premised on the notion that we won't be subject to retaliation for our judicial acts." While hailing the American system of rights and privileges, she noted that these don't protect the judiciary, that "people do":
Listen here.
Read some of the transcript here.
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