June 2005 Archives

Now Republicans are threatening Major League Baseball about selling any part of the Washington Nationals to a particular owner.

That's right. The Republican chairman of the Government Reform Committee has warned Major League Baseball not to sell the Washington Nationals to a group that includes George Soros. The DCCC's Stakeholder Blog highlights a Roll Call story:

"I think Major League Baseball understands the stakes," said Government Reform Chairman Tom Davis (R), the Northern Virginia lawmaker who recently convened high-profile steroid hearings. "I don't think they want to get involved in a political fight."

Davis, whose panel also oversees District of Columbia issues, said that if a Soros sale went through, "I don't think it's the Nats that get hurt. I think it's Major League Baseball that gets hurt. They enjoy all sorts of exemptions" from anti-trust laws.

Have we reached the point where only Republicans can own Major League Baseball teams? Really, these radicals are completely out-of-control. Does Speaker Dennis Hastert need to create a new oversight committee on sports ownership so the radical right-wingers can vet any sports team sale for ideological purity? Perhaps this is, after all, just a logical spin-off from the radical GOP's K-Street Project.

Here's the lesson: George Bush could own a team (and make millions off of it) and be admired for his savvy. Rupert Murdoch could own a team, and sell it, without a peep. But George Soros can't even have a minority stake without Congress threatening it.

Welcome to the United States of America. One-party rule is grand.

I see that the right-wing media is now working at full capacity to rewrite the nation's response to the September 11 terorrist attacks.

Thankfully, Media Matters for America is there to expose the latest lies.

Fox News managing editor Brit Hume and Weekly Standard staff writer Stephen F. Hayes falsely defended White House senior adviser Karl Rove's recent statement that "liberals saw the savagery of the 9-11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers." On the June 26 edition of Fox Broadcasting Co's Fox News Sunday, Hume claimed that Rove's comment was factually "well within bounds," and "certainly was representative of a significant segment of what liberals in America felt in the aftermath of 9-11." On the June 24 edition of MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews, Hayes said liberals "were generally reluctant to use the U.S. military." In fact, polling conducted immediately after the 9-11 attacks showed that the overwhelming majority of self-identified liberals supported military action.

Over at Think Progress, Faiz catches President George W. Bush in another bit of rank hypocrisy.

We can be sure that our current president will ignore calls for a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq during his primetime speech tonight, but I wonder if he could explain why in 1999 he demanded a timetable for withdrawal from Kosovo from former President Clinton.

The Think Progress staff are going to live blog during the president's speech tonight. I sense that the president will keep them busy.

Chris Mooney highlights the latest effort in the radical GOP's war against science:

House Energy and Commerce Committee chair Joe Barton has sent a threatening letter to the heads of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the National Science Foundation, as well as to the three climate scientists who produced the original "hockey stick" study. Barton isn't simply humoring questionable contrarian attacks on the "hockey stick" graph; he's using his power as a member of Congress to intimidate the scientists involved in producing it.

While Karl Rove wrongly says that liberals are putting our troops in danger, the Bush Administration continues to send our troops into combat without proper equipment. The New York Times' Michael Moss reports:

When Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld visited Iraq last year to tour the Abu Ghraib prison camp, military officials did not rely on a government-issued Humvee to transport him safely on the ground. Instead, they turned to Halliburton, the oil services contractor, which lent the Pentagon a rolling fortress of steel called the Rhino Runner.

State Department officials traveling in Iraq use armored vehicles that are built with V-shaped hulls to better deflect bullets and bombs. Members of Congress favor another model, called the M1117, which can endure 12-pound explosives and .50-caliber armor-piercing rounds.

Unlike the Humvee, the Pentagon's vehicle of choice for American troops, the others were designed from scratch to withstand attacks in battlefields like Iraq with no safe zones. Last fall, for instance, a Rhino traveling the treacherous airport road in Baghdad endured a bomb that left a six-foot-wide crater. The passengers walked away unscathed. "I have no doubt should I have been in any other vehicle," wrote an Army captain, the lone military passenger, "the results would have been catastrophically different."

Yet more than two years into the war, efforts by United States military units to obtain large numbers of these stronger vehicles for soldiers have faltered - even as the Pentagon's program to arm or Humvees continues to be plagued by delays, an examination by The New York Times has found.

But, seriously, how much longer are we going to accept the Bush Administration's excuses for not getting our troops the equipment they need? After all these supplemental budgets and no-bid contracts, you'd think that someone in the Bush Administration would try to make properly supplying our troops a reality.

But perhaps they are too busy dividing America and drawing up the lists of those who are patriots and those who are not. Such activity leaves precious little for the difficult work of taking the steps necessary to keep our soldiers from dying.

Priorities, you know.

While Karl Rove speaks with red meat designed to satiate the radical right-wing base, United States policy seems to shift in a different direction. Billmon captures the hypocrisy well:

No nation can negotiate with terrorists. For there is no way to make peace with those whose only goal is death.

George W. Bush
Remarks to Reporters
April 4, 2002

After weeks of delicate negotiation . . . a small group of insurgent commanders apparently came face to face with four American officials seeking to establish a dialogue with the men they regard as their enemies. The talks on June 3 were followed by a second encounter 10 days later, according to an Iraqi who said that he had attended both meetings . . . further talks are planned in the hope of negotiating an eventual breakthrough that might reduce the violence in Iraq.

The Sunday Times of London
US 'in talks with Iraq rebels'
June 26, 2005

I should say, right off the bat, that I didn't juxtapose the items above because I disapprove of negotiating with the insurgents -- far from it. Fracturing the resistance by reaching some kind of deal with the homegrown, non-Al Qaeda aligned elements of it is one of the few moves left on the Iraq chess board that doesn't end in massive bloodshed.

But the contrast certainly demonstrates how far we have come since the post-9/11 days of "moral clarity" and "you're either with us, or you're with the terrorists." It also highlights the absurdity of Karl Rove's little treatise on the difference between the conservative and liberal approaches to the war on terror.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, one wonders when the Bush Administration is going to be held accountable and forced to answer some blunt questions about its failures in Iraq. As Billmon reminds us:

Rove, of course, is not the only one who should be ordering the crow entree for dinner -- that is, assuming this Sunday Times report is as correct as its stories on the Downing Street memos. Over the past two years, the U.S. Army and its civilian overlords in the Pentagon have gone from denying the insurgency's existence, to predicting its rapid demise, to claiming they are winning the war against it, to promising victory sometime in the future.

Perhaps now we will fight back.

After several years of regularly having radical Republicans smear Democrats and others who disagree with their policies as unpatriotic, America haters, or traitors, perhaps these outrageous comments made by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove have finally crossed a line even inside the beltway.

Perhaps Democrats are finally ready for a coordinated campaign to defend themselves. It's far past time to stop accepting these smears coordinated by the White House. Here, remember, is the Deputy White House Chief of Staff:

"Liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers," Rove said. "Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war."

and

"Has there ever been a more revealing moment this year?" Mr. Rove asked. "Let me just put this in fairly simple terms: Al Jazeera now broadcasts the words of Senator Durbin to the Mideast, certainly putting our troops in greater danger. No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals."

That 98-0 vote in the Senate and 420-1 vote in the House to give President Bush authorization to take whatever steps were necessarily to retaliate for the September 11 attacks sure showed how divided this nation was. How different our approaches were to those attacks.

Worse, perhaps, Rove basically says that Democrats want to see our soldiers killed in combat? How dare you, Mr. Rove. How dare you.

(And, for the record, I don't remember being a member of an Administration that sent any soldiers into combat without proper armor and equipment.)

These Rovian smears are just the latest calculated attempt by leading radical Republicans to make Democrats seem weak, to rewrite history about our response to the attacks, and to claim exclusive use of September 11 as a partisan symbol.

How bleeping offensive is that? It is, to say the least, well past time for the gloves to come off in response.

Any attempt by a radical Republican or conservative to claim that someone who disagrees with their view needs to be refuted with the strongest possible force. We need a no-tolerance policy. Frankly, we've needed one for some time.

Nothing less than resignation is an acceptable outcome now for Mr. Deputy White Chief of Staff Smear Merchant Karl Rove. Nothing. As John at Americablog writes:

The Democratic Party had better realize that these people declared war today in a big way. We do not let this issue go until Karl Rove resigns. There IS no other issue in town, until Karl Rove resigns.

WHERE IS OSAMA BIN LADEN? WHY HAS HE NOT PAID FOR HIS TERROR ATTACKS UPON THIS NATION?

As this American Progress Action Fund Talking Points post explains:

• 1,382 days after 9/11, Osama bin Laden is still at large and al Qaeda is regrouping.
  More than three-and-a-half years ago Bush vowed to capture terrorist
  mastermind Osama Bin Laden “dead or alive.” He’s failed. The
  administration wants you to think it is hot on his tracks, however. CIA
  director Porter Goss said he had “an excellent idea” where Bin Laden is
  hiding. Vice President Cheney said he had “a pretty good idea of a
  general area that he's in.” With all the bluster, you’d think they
  could close the deal.
  
• 1,382 days after 9/11, terrorist attacks are at an all time high.
  By quantitative measures, the Bush administration’s approach to
  combating terrorism is an abject failure. Last year “[t]he number of
  serious international terrorist incidents more than tripled,” according
  to the Washington Post. State Department data shows that
  “attacks grew to about 655 last year, up from the record of around 175
  in 2003.” How did the administration respond? By halting the
  publication of the State Department report.
  
• 1,382 days after 9/11, the Iraq war—a complete diversion from the fight against al Qaeda—has produced more terrorism not less.
  According to the CIA, “[t]he war in Iraq is creating a training and
  recruitment ground for a new generation of "professionalized" Islamic
  terrorists.” An in-house CIA think tank concluded that in the poorly
  planned aftermath of the invasion, “hundreds of foreign terrorists
  flooded into Iraq across its unguarded borders.” There is a serious
  risk that Iraq is now “creating newly radicalized and experienced
  jihadis who return home to cause trouble in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and
  elsewhere.”

It's time for some personal accountability moments, Mr. President. Rove must resign. And you need to answer for how 1,382 days have passed without bin Laden having paid for his terror attacks against this nation.

You really must read this Digby post that exposes (again) the hypocrisy, bias, and laziness exhibited by our establishment political media every day.

Woodruff pointed out that the Republicans have wisely learned to throw their red meat "below the radar" -- through the local news and direct mail ---while the Democrats haven't. No comment on why the Republican red meat remains "below the radar" when the creme de la creme of Washington punditry clearly knows all about it. Nor was there any speculation about how it came to pass that Dean's comments dominated the cable news networks with an obsessive glee usually reserved for Bill Clinton's pants, while Tom Delay can put out a hit on federal judges and it gets a one minute segment betwen the blog report and Bay Buchanan.

Certainly, the press wasn't in any way responsible. The news is apparently an organic thing, unconnected with those who report it. The subjects of the news determine how it's going to be reported and evidently the Democrats consistently mishandle that responsibility quite badly. Dean was asking for trouble and he got it. As Ifil pointed out, Democrats need to learn to "act right all the time because someone's always watching." (Unless they can figure out how to cleverly stay "under the radar," as those awesome Republicans do.)

The Washington Post's Dan Eggen and Julie Tate report:

Flanked by Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, Bush said that "federal terrorism investigations have resulted in charges against more than 400 suspects, and more than half of those charged have been convicted."

Those statistics have been used repeatedly by Bush and other administration officials, including Gonzales and his predecessor, John D. Ashcroft, to characterize the government's efforts against terrorism.

But the numbers are misleading at best.

We are long past the point where such tactics should shock us. But perhaps we have reached the point where people take notice and look at the sandy foundation beneath these sound bites. As Eggen and Tate explain:

Taken as a whole, the data indicate that the government's effort to identify terrorists in the United States has been less successful than authorities have often suggested. The statistics provide little support for the contention that authorities have discovered and prosecuted hundreds of terrorists here. Except for a small number of well-known cases -- such as truck driver Iyman Faris, who sought to take down the Brooklyn Bridge -- few of those arrested appear to have been involved in active plots inside the United States.

Hey! What do you know? For once, the Washington Post deigns to put this kind of story on its front page, rather than buring it somewhere like A18. Walter Pincus writes:

A briefing paper prepared for British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top advisers eight months before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq concluded that the U.S. military was not preparing adequately for what the British memo predicted would be a "protracted and costly" postwar occupation of that country.

The eight-page memo, written in advance of a July 23, 2002, Downing Street meeting on Iraq, provides new insights into how senior British officials saw a Bush administration decision to go to war as inevitable, and realized more clearly than their American counterparts the potential for the post-invasion instability that continues to plague Iraq.

There should be no statute of limitations on presidential lies when it comes to matters of war and peace. Perhaps now that the polls conclusively show that George W. Bush is an unpopular president, our so-called liberal media may find the courage to ask a few serious questions about these memos.

Since, just to start, they show that the Bush Administration was repeatedly lying to us about seeking peace when they were looking only to find a way to justify a war of choice.

While Joel Klein was speaking of the Democratic Party, I think he has reached a point where his punditry has "absolutely no redeeming social value."

This man is considered by the mainstream media to be a liberal pundit. That's all you need to know about media bias.