April 2005 Archives

I see our so-called liberal media wasted no time in sucking up to President George W. Bush. Josh Marshall and Sam Rosenfeld explain how gullible reporters got sucked into the misinformation field surrounding this chief executive.

E.J. Dionne makes a shocking argument: that President Bush is actually an egghead.

But with apologies to both sides, the case for Bush as an egghead is overwhelming. One of the central characteristics of the Bush presidency is a profound commitment to theoretical notions, nurtured in think tanks and ideological magazines, and a relentless -- yes, even principled -- commitment to pushing them regardless of the facts or the consequences.

But it is quite true that the group of radicals running our country today are most concerned about pushing their theories into practice. Regardless of the consequences.

The budget deal passed last night exposes (again) the Republican Party's true priorities.

The last thing we need, however, is any fake concern about the tab we are leaving for future generations as the GOP pushes through their new round of tax cuts. Because while leading Republicans say this:

"The essence of this budget comes down to whether we're going to stick our children and grandchildren with a government they can't afford," said Senate Budget Committee Chairman Judd Gregg (R-N.H.).

The cost of those tax-cut extensions would more than nullify the savings from the spending cuts, allowing Democrats to charge that the budget agreement actually leaves the federal deficit worse than it would be without a deal.

Indeed, the budget instructs lawmakers to raise the federal government's statutory debt limit this fall by $781 billion, to $8.96 trillion. The government's borrowing limit will then have climbed by $3 trillion since Bush took office.

The answer from the GOP is an emphatic yes. Because apparently in today's misguided Republican world it is moral to leave trillions of debt on the backs of our children and grandchildren.

That's quite a legacy.

David Sirota explains why Congressional Democrats should respond to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's ethical problems with a comprehensive reform package.

After all, as Sirota notes, Democrats are finding success with that message in several states. That's right. It is not just the right thing to do, it would be smart politics.

CNN is just pathetic. Oliver Willis posts the video from last night's Daily Show with John Stewart that shows just how bad it is. They'll just let a radical right-winger say anything without bothering to challenge it.

As Stewart says, "Why don't you call them on their bullshit on the air?"

A good question. It's just another example of our so-called liberal media in action.

So, now members of the radical right are happy that the wonderful Marla Ruzicka was killed in Iraq by a roadside bomb? Happy that she died trying to help people?

Really. These people have no shame. And people like this dare lecture the rest of us about moral values?

Debbie Schlussel, just how do you manage to look into a mirror after writing such a piece of filth about the death of someone so wonderful?

Thankfully, Justin Raimondo does an excellent job of defending Marla from this heinous attack.

Holden makes a good observation: how reckless is it for the Bush Administration to make up crises when there are other pressing ones to which we should be paying major attention? Holden points us to this John Vidal article in the Guardian:

One of the world's leading energy analysts yesterday called for an independent assessment of global oil reserves because he believed that Middle Eastern countries may have far less than officially stated and that oil prices could double to more than $100 a barrel within three years, triggering economic collapse.

Matthew Simmons, an adviser to President George Bush and chairman of the Wall Street energy investment company Simmons, said that "peak oil" - when global oil production rises to its highest point before declining irreversibly - was rapidly approaching even as demand was increasing.

"This is a new era," Mr Simmons told a conference of oil industry analysts, government officials and academics in Edinburgh. "There is a big chance that Saudi Arabia actually peaked production in 1981. We have no reliable data. Our data collection system for oil is rubbish. I suspect that if we had, we would find that we are over-producing in most of our major fields and that we should be throttling back. We may have passed that point."

But President George W. Bush regretably sees no need to address it.

I find it hard to believe that it has been three years since Political Parrhesia's first day of posts. Looking back on that first week, I regret to say that many of the issues I wrote about then still need resolving.

But at least I've had an outlet on which I could vent...

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof offered this foreign affairs quiz today:

(1) How many nuclear weapons did North Korea produce in Bill Clinton's eight years of office?

(2) How many nuclear weapons has it produced so far in President Bush's four years in office?

The answer to the first question, by all accounts, is zero. The answer to the second is fuzzier, but about six.

The total will probably rise in coming months, for North Korea has shut down its Yongbyon reactor and says that it plans to extract the fuel rods from it. That will give it enough plutonium for two or three more weapons.

But, of course, no one in this White House can possibly be held responsible for this failure. Instead, as Air America Radio's Rachel Maddow notes, President Bush would like to promote the Undersecretary of State for Arms Control to a new and important position.

Sigh.

At some point, doesn't the Bush Adminstration have to be held to account for its record in fighting terrorism? From Reuters:

The U.S. count of major world terrorist attacks more than tripled in 2004, a rise that may revive debate on whether the Bush administration is winning the war on terrorism, congressional aides said on Tuesday.

The number of "significant" international terrorist attacks rose to about 650 last year from about 175 in 2003, according to congressional aides briefed on the numbers by State Department and intelligence officials on Monday.

Over at The Left Coaster, Yuval Rubinstein links to a column written by Georgia columnist Bill Shipp. Shipp wonders why the Bush Justice Department cut such a sweetheart plea bargain for anti-abortion terrorist Eric Rudolph.

Some of his possible conclusions are a bit troubling. Shipp writes:

If you’re a conspiracy theorist, you have another answer. The government is reluctant to dig deeply into Rudolph’s background or to identify publicly the forces that inspired him to become a pro-life killer. Letting him enter a guilty plea serves the purposes of the politically-attuned Justice Department as well as the defense. That sounds a bit nutty, you say? That explanation is no nuttier than a leading lawman’s assertion that Rudolph’s avoidance of trial “finally brings closure” to the case. Surely he is kidding.

One other thing: The government through the media has embedded in the national mind a portrait of terrorists as sinister-looking, bearded Middle Easterners who pray five times a day and have a fondness for taking flying lessons.

The trial of Eric Rudolph might have given us another picture: fair-skinned, clean-cut men claiming to be Christians, wearing fatigues and speaking American English, not unlike you and me.

Taken a step further, a picture might even be drawn of a home-grown terrorist who embraces the culture of life and then uses the tools of the death to protect that culture.

I think it is a good question. Unfortuately, few columnists and bloggers seem willing even to ask it.

Not here, of course. But as Think Progress notes, that's what Saudi Crown Price Abdullah did before getting on the plane for his Crawford, Texas, meeting with President George W. Bush.

Okay, that may not be that much of a surprise. But you'd think the Wall Street Journal's editorial board would not insult its paying readership so blatantly. Media Matters for America has all the gory details.

Dear Members of the So-Called Liberal Media:

As Atrios points out, even Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist has called the radical right's end-the-fillibuster strategy the nuclear option.

So, are you really now going to enable Frist and his allies in their attempt to claim that only Democrats use the term?

Over at Americablog, Joe in DC rightly wonders if the so-called liberal media is going to hold Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist to the same standard to which they held Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry during the 2004 campaign.

Do not hold your breath.

Everytime you see a reporter refer to the radical right's determination to end filibusters for judicial nominees as something the Democrats call the nuclear option, please send the reporter a note reminding him or her that the phrase "nuclear option" was first uttered by Senator Trent Lott, R-Miss.

Josh Marshall lays out all the research in this great post.

Perhaps we can start with the radical right's favorite newspaper, the New York Times, where reporter David Kirkpatrick was quick to respond to the right's focus group findings by writing:

Current Senate rules require 60 votes to close debate on a confirmation, allowing Democrats to thwart the action by mustering 41 votes. Republicans want to lower the threshold for closing debate on all nominations to a simple majority. Democrats call this the nuclear option, while Republicans call this a constitutional option.

Anyway, I am sure our radical right leaders are pleased with how quickly some reporters are willing to jump to respond to their latest set of linguistic instructions.

Kim asked me to blog about this story when I returned from hiatus. It is a story with highlighting:

Sen. Rick Santorum collected more than $100,000 from Florida donors during the first three months of 2005, when the Pennsylvania Republican maintained a high profile in the fight over Terri Schiavo.

Santorum received the bulk of the money - $84,300 - on March 31, the day the Florida woman died, according to an analysis by PoliticalMoneyLine, a campaign finance tracking group. The $84,300 was raised during campaign stops March 29 and 30 in four Florida cities, the group said.

Now, I know the Santorum campaign claims that there is no link between the Schiavo case and his fundraisers.

Right. Avoiding such a conclusion would have been simple -- cancel the fundraisers. But I am sure the Senator has his priorities.

Tonight the radical right's war against our government's judicial branch goes prime time with "Justice Sunday." This is the agenda with which Senator Majority Leader Bill Frist will associate himself by appearing via videotape.

And just who is behind this travesty? Frank Rich explains in an important column today:

Anyone who doesn't get with this program, starting with all Democrats, is damned as a bigoted enemy of "people of faith." But "people of faith," as used by the event's organizers, is another duplicitous locution; it's a code word for only one specific and exclusionary brand of Christianity. The trade organization representing tonight's presenters, National Religious Broadcasters, requires its members to "sign a distinctly evangelical statement of faith that would probably exclude most Catholics and certainly all Jewish, Muslim or Buddhist programmers," according to the magazine Broadcasting & Cable. The only major religious leader involved with "Justice Sunday," R. Albert Mohler Jr. of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has not only called the papacy a "false and unbiblical office" but also told Terry Gross on NPR two years ago that "any belief system" leading "away from the cross of Christ and toward another way of ultimate meaning, is, indeed, wicked and evil."

Tonight's megachurch setting and pseudoreligious accouterments notwithstanding, the actual organizer of "Justice Sunday" isn't a clergyman at all but a former state legislator and candidate for insurance commissioner in Louisiana, Tony Perkins. He now runs the Family Research Council, a Washington propaganda machine devoted to debunking "myths" like "People are born gay" and "Homosexuals are no more likely to molest children than heterosexuals are." It will give you an idea of the level of Mr. Perkins's hysteria that, as reported by The American Prospect, he told a gathering in Washington this month that the judiciary poses "a greater threat to representative government" than "terrorist groups." And we all know the punishment for terrorists. Accordingly, Newsweek reports that both Justices Kennedy and Clarence Thomas have "asked Congress for money to add 11 police officers" to the Supreme Court, "including one new officer just to assess threats against the justices." The Judicial Conference of the United States, the policy-making body for the federal judiciary, has requested $12 million for home-security systems for another 800 judges.

Mr. Perkins's fellow producer tonight is James Dobson, the child psychologist who created Focus on the Family, the Colorado Springs media behemoth most famous of late for condemning SpongeBob SquarePants for joining other cartoon characters in a gay-friendly public-service "We Are Family" video for children. Dr. Dobson sees same-sex marriage as the path to "marriage between a man and his donkey" and, in yet another perversion of civil rights history, has likened the robed justices of the Supreme Court to the robed thugs of the Ku Klux Klan. He has promised "a battle of enormous proportions from sea to shining sea" if he doesn't get the judges he wants.

Just how many judges are going to be hurt or killed because of the hatred spread tonight? Justices Kennedy and Thomas are right to press for more security.

Senator Frist, is the chance to win a few Republican primaries really worth this price?

The Bush Adminstration's policy to increase taxes for future generations of United States citizens continued its stunning progress in March 2005, as the national debt increased by $63.801 billion during the month.

Yes, that's more than $2 billion a day.

The national debt has increased by $180.773 billion so far in 2005. The Bush Administration, moreover, has run up a stunning $2.049 trillion in debt since taking office in 2001.

Way to go, fiscal conservatism.

Via Americablog, we learn that the GOP's war against the judiciary heated up today, this time from United States Senator (yikes) John Cornyn:

I don't know if there is a cause-and-effect connection but we have seen some recent episodes of courthouse violence in this country. Certainly nothing new, but we seem to have run through a spate of courthouse violence recently that's been on the news and I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters on some occasions where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in - engage in violence.

This is utterly outrageous. Outrageous. The GOP is now embracing domestic terrorists who are trying to undermine our democracy. And they're doing it so they can take down the judges who "killed" Terri Schiavo, and instead impose some Pat Robertson-like theocracy on our country. This is absolutely utterly beyond contempt. Tell Judge Lefkow in Chicago that her mother and husband are dead because she brought it on herself.

And the ultimate irony is that it is people like John Cornyn who now risk inciting violence against judges by giving aid and comfort to these homicidal maniacs. Cornyn should resign immediately.

But I won't hold my breath.

Over at the Daily Kos, Jerome a Paris points us to a troubling Financial Times report about the oil market:

Oil importing countries should implement emergency oil saving policies if supplies fall by as little as 1m-2m barrels a day, the International Energy Agency will warn next month.

The figure is much lower than the official trigger of 7 per cent of global oil supply equivalent to 6m b/d agreed in the treaty that founded the energy watchdog for industrialised countries after the oil crisis of the 1970s. A fall in supply of just 1m-2m b/d would be equivalent to the disruptions during the 2003 Iraq war or the 2002 oil industry strike in Venezuela.