June 2006 Archives

Digby finds a true American hero. Quoting from a Los Angeles Times profile by Carol J. Williams:

The U.S. Navy lawyer who challenged the Bush administration's efforts to try terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, walked a professional tightrope between fellow officers trying to gain speedy convictions and what he considered a moral imperative to buck the chain of command and vigorously defend his client.

Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift could have taken the easy route of arranging a plea bargain for Salim Ahmed Hamdan, the Yemeni alleged to have worked as a driver and bodyguard for Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

But fearful of the dangerous precedent that could be set by denying international standards of justice to those swept up in the war on terrorism, Swift battled to get the rights and protections of the Geneva Convention for his client.

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that President Bush had overstepped his war powers in sending Hamdan and nine others to face military tribunals, America's first since World War II.

"I feel like we all won, that the rule of law won, and that is essentially what we are all about," Swift said of the high court's validation of his three-year campaign on behalf of his 36-year-old client.

It is quite a win. But, it seems likely to mean the end of Swift's career. After all, Swift was initially ordered to get a plea bargain. He bucked the system. So, as the profile explains, he's likely lost his military career as he has been passed over for promotion.

As Digby explains:

It's lucky for this country that we have people like Lt Commander Swift and many others who didn't buy into the argument that this country was so threatened by this loose band of religious psychopaths that it had to discard everything it believed in. That's the real strength of America and the slim reed we all hang onto: individual citizens who are willing to stand up for principle (and a system that's strong enough (so far) to support them) even as they suffer personally for it.

For this, we should all be incredibly thankful this Independence Day weekend.

Dan Froomkin sums up our the present administration:

The approval-rating bumps Bush was counting on, first from his White House staff shake-up and then from the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, never really materialized, leaving the president in deeply unpopular territory.

Theoretically, Bush could get himself out of this mess by trying to solve some of the problems afflicting his presidency. But campaigning is easier.

I guess the only play left in Karl Rove's playbook is to politicize the war on terrorism. Well, Mr. President, there are no white flags here.

Nice job by your communications director to admit that he couldn't name one example of a white-flag waving Democrat. It is, after all, so much easier to "valiantly" condemn a straw man. How pathetic.

Meanwhile, in a sane world, wouldn't leading officials from an administration that leaked Valerie Plame's name stay away from this talking point? As Americablog's Joe in DC writes:

In the new campaign speech, Bush, whose staff outed an undercover CIA spy, had the audacity to say this:

"There can be no excuse for anyone entrusted with vital intelligence to leak it, and no excuse for any newspaper to print it," Bush said.

How can anyone take this line of attack seriously when the biggest offenders work for Bush?

Perhaps our reporters should remember this presidential statement the next time a senior administration official wants to leak anonymously some intelligence information to bolster the president's case.

Atrios catches the latest act, this time from our Supreme Court:

Typical Republican chickenhawk attacking a bronze star recipient:

Justice Thomas refers to Justice Stevens’ “unfamiliarity with the realities of warfare”; but Stevens served in the U.S. Navy from 1942 to 1945, during World War II. Thomas’s official bio, by contrast, contains no experience of military service.

I know the radical right has no shame, but this is beyond any line of decency. As Atrios says, we do not live in a just world.

Wow. A conservative comes to a realistic conclusion about our nation's horrible financial situation. Brad DeLong quotes from a Ben Stein commentary in the New York Times:

It gets worse. The annual trade deficit with the rest of the world is approaching $1 trillion.... [W]e have to transfer ownership of roughly $1 trillion of our assets to foreigners every year to cover our excess of international purchases over sales. But the total worth of all the assets in the United States is not greatly more than $50 trillion.... [W]e are basically transferring the value of an average of one of our 50 states to foreign investors every year....

Right now, inflation is moving out of the Federal Reserve's comfort zone.... To raise rates enough to slow down our economy and thus bring down commodity prices amid skyrocketing demand in developing economies is certainly not easy. To do this correctly, you'd need to be a brain surgeon of monetary policy and a cardiac ace of fiscal policy. In other words, there is a great, great deal to be worried about.

May I respectfully suggest that in this environment, ending the estate tax is not a major sensible priority? May I suggest that having the lowest taxes in 65 years on high-income taxpayers is not really as prudent as it might be if we were not running stupendous deficits, with far worse in the future?

I know you are a Republican, and so am I. Now and then, scornful fellow Republicans ask me what kind of Republican I am, since I'm for higher taxes on the rich. I tell them that I am an Eisenhower Republican, the kind who wants to leave a healthier America to posterity. That includes an economy not headed for the status of a banana republic's economy.

Looking ahead to the future? Thinking of future generations? Yes, believe it or not, more Republicans used to think that way.

Plus, I'm always happy when a fellow member of the Alpha Delta Phi Society sees the political light. :)

Hey, hey! We appear to have a Democratic candidate who is going to fight back when the right-wing radicals attempt to smear him. Americablog's John in DC writes about Virginia Senatorial candidate Jim Webb:

Republican Sen. George Allen attacked his Democratic challenger's opposition to a flag-burning amendment, and James Webb retaliated by calling Allen a coward who sat out the Vietnam War "playing cowboy at a dude ranch in Nevada."

The statement by a senior adviser to Webb, a decorated veteran and former secretary of the Navy, went to extraordinary lengths to question Allen's fortitude, even repeatedly using the middle name the senator detests and never uses, Felix.

"While Jim Webb and others of George Felix Allen Jr.'s generation were fighting for our freedoms and for our symbols of freedom in Vietnam, George Felix Allen Jr. was playing cowboy at a dude ranch in Nevada," said Webb strategist Steve Jarding in the statement Tuesday....

"People who live in glass dude ranches should not question the patriotism of real soldiers who fought and bled for this country on a real battlefield," Jarding said.

Democrats should not allow radical Republican smears to go unchallenged. This was one of the big mistakes John Kerry made in 2004 -- letting the Swift Boat Liars attack go unanswered for days.

If a candidate won't fight to defend his or her own reputation, after all, why should voters expect the candidate will fight for them?

Turns out that supposed moralist and man of integrity Joe Lieberman and his campaign are having issues telling the truth.

(Hat tip: Atrios)

The Rockridge Institute's George Lakoff, Marc Ettlinger and Sam Ferguson make an important argument:

Progressives have fallen into a trap. Emboldened by President Bush’s plummeting approval ratings, progressives increasingly point to Bush’s “failures” and label him and his administration as incompetent. Self-satisfying as this criticism may be, it misses the bigger point. Bush’s disasters — Katrina, the Iraq War, the budget deficit — are not so much a testament to his incompetence or a failure of execution. Rather, they are the natural, even inevitable result of his conservative governing philosophy. It is conservatism itself, carried out according to plan, that is at fault.

We should not overlook the fact that conservatives have been trying to destroy government for decades. The government is the enemy. Starve the beast.

Is Bush incompetent? Or is what we are seeing today the logical result of the conservative anti-government philosophy?

Rockridge does us all a service by asking that we look at the bigger picture.

Over at the Huffington Post, Jason Pollock writes about another important documentary about to be released:

From time to time a film comes out and I leave the theater thinking about it for days after the screening. Yesterday I saw a film at the LA Film Festival called Who Killed The Electric Car?. This is a film that will stew in my mind not just for days, but for months to come.

The film chronicles the history of the electric car and all its wonder. Few Americans probably know this but many Californians were driving around in totally electric vehicles in the mid-'90s and early part of this century. Everyone from Mel Gibson to Ed Begley Jr. had one. This was years before the the war in Iraq and the price of gas climbing to record highs. The film discusses this perfect mode of transportation and why it eventually died out.

I won't go into it too much because I don't want to ruin the film for you, but let me just say that these cars could run for 100 miles per charge and had absolutely no exhaust or dependence on oil whatsoever. The cars were sleak, clean, and held promise for the future.

But something happened to them. The car companies took them away from their customers and got them off the roads completely.

With gasoline at $3 a gallon, GM's decision to go with the Hummer instead of the electric car looks golden, eh?

Decisions have consequences. When it comes to our dependency on foreign oil, our political and business leaders have made a string of bad ones over the last couple decades.

Matthew Yglesias catches another right-wing messenger making an argument regardless of the facts:

Wesley J. Smith reviewing The Party of Death, observes that Ponnuru's "thesis about Democrats is unassailable. Supporting the 'right to choose' is an uber litmus test for any ambitious party member seeking national influence." Unless you want to achieve national influence by, say, becoming Minority Leader of the United States Senate, that is. And David Bonior was Minority Whip in the United States House of Representatives until he stepped down to run for governor.

Laura Rozen makes an important observation:

Just listening to Bill Kristol on Fox News saying Gonzales should consider prosecuting the NYT for running the SWIFT network monitoring story. But - didn't Mr. Kristol's magazine publish classified information just a few years ago leaked to it during the height of the Iraq war? I believe it did. As Mr. Kristol's magazine brags below, it published excerpts from a top secret intelligence document...

Being a member of the right-wing message machine has its privileges.

Posted on Google Video, here's one take on what would happen if Microsoft were marketing the iPod.

(Hat tip: Stirling Newberry at the Blogging of the President)

Sorry, Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.): we actually well remember that just a few short days ago you were in favor of granting amnesty to Iraqi insurgents who were killing U.S. soldiers while the conflict was still on-going.

You can try to spin all you want, but as 19 Republican Senators also just voted for it there can be no doubt that this horrible anti-troops plan belongs to the Republican Party.

(Hat tip: Americablog)

Read Billmon. Read him now.

After all, just last week Republican leaders smeared anyone who talked about a timetable for reducing the number of troops in Iraq. Now that our top military commanders are discussing doing just that (and hey, just in time for the mid-term elections!), our so-called liberal media is doing a great job of forgetting all of that smearing happened.

The Los Angeles Times' Robert Lee Hotz reports on developments that should worry all of us:

The Greenland ice sheet — two miles thick and broad enough to blanket an area the size of Mexico — shapes the world's weather, matched in influence by only Antarctica in the Southern Hemisphere.

It glows like milky mother-of-pearl. The sheen of ice blends with drifts of cloud as if snowbanks are taking flight.

In its heartland, snow that fell a quarter of a million years ago is still preserved. Temperatures dip as low as 86 degrees below zero. Ground winds can top 200 mph. Along the ice edge, meltwater rivers thread into fraying brown ropes of glacial outwash, where migrating herds of caribou and musk ox graze.

The ice is so massive that its weight presses the bedrock of Greenland below sea level, so all-concealing that not until recently did scientists discover that Greenland actually might be three islands.

Should all of the ice sheet ever thaw, the meltwater could raise sea level 21 feet and swamp the world's coastal cities, home to a billion people. It would cause higher tides, generate more powerful storm surges and, by altering ocean currents, drastically disrupt the global climate.

Climate experts have started to worry that the ice cap is disappearing in ways that computer models had not predicted.

By all accounts, the glaciers of Greenland are melting twice as fast as they were five years ago, even as the ice sheets of Antarctica — the world's largest reservoir of fresh water — also are shrinking, researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of Kansas reported in February. (emphasis added)

From the Futurama universe, a video containing a terrifying message from former Vice President Al Gore.

If you haven't seen An Inconvenient Truth, I hope you'll make plans to do so.

Americablog's Joe quotes Vice President Dick Cheney saying he is "offended" by leaks of classified information.

Does our vice president really think we have all forgotten that his Chief of Staff released the name of a CIA operative in a bungled attempt to discredit her husband?

Can someone please send him back an his undisclosed location?

Andrew Sullivan's opinion of President George W. Bush sure has changed since those strangely awe-filled days after the September 11 terrorist attacks.

ESPN's Bill Simmons writes an excellent column that explains why I have not bothered to watch the NBA in many years.

To sum up: The style of play isn't exciting. The officials are horrible. The games aren't fixed, but you can often guess what kind of game you are going to see based on which officials are assigned by the league. See Simmons' discussion of Game 5 of the NBA Finals for a definitive examination of this phenonmenon.

Perhaps NBA Commissioner David Stern thinks all of this is okay. If so, he isn't the genius his legion of sycophants would lead you to believe he is.

At least now I know that I don't need to waste my time or money on the NBA for at least several more years.

Contra Costa Times political editor Lisa Vorderbrueggen links to a League of Conservation Voters analysis of the just-completed California primary elections. LCV-endorsed candidates won 90 percent of their races.

Including, I'm happy to say, in the race on which I did some volunteer work: Contra Costa County Supervisor Mark DeSaulnier's win in the Assembly District in which I win. As the LCV report explains:

Nothing exemplifies this improvement more than the race in Assembly District (AD) 11 where Contra Costa County Supervisor Mark DeSaulnier defeated Laura Canciamilla, wife of current termed-out Assemblymember Joe Canciamilla who has the dubious distinction of being an urban Democrat with a very poor record on the environment. DeSaulnier, as a member of the California Air Resources Board, has established an outstanding record of supporting cutting edge policy to address air quality challenges in California. He will not only be a good vote on environmental issues in the Assembly, but will bring a record and knowledge on air pollution that should catapult him into a leadership role on our issues. We have high expectations of DeSaulnier!

The DeSaulnier/Canciamilla match-up exemplifies the “add-value” results in the Assembly primaries. Other races that feature new Assemblymembers who will be a significant improvement over their predecessors are Mary Salas replacing Juan Vargas in AD 79 and Ed Hernandez replacing Ed Chavez in AD 57.

Brad DeLong posts several excerpts from Ron Suskind's new book, The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies since 9/11 on his Semi-Daily Journal blog.

After reading the excerpts, you won't wonder why DeLong ends the posts with a simple plea.

Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach him now.

Nineteen Republican members of the United States Senate yesterday voted against a nonbinding resolution condemning a proposal to offer amnesty to Iraqis who have killed United States troops.

Yes. Read that again.

They support the troops so much they don't mind them being killed.

Americablog has more of the details.

Can someone explain to me how this isn't a big story?

Writing at the Daily Kos, Hunter uncovers a set of shocking secrets: Kos has opinions. Yes, the writer of a political blog has opinions. And takes advertising.

Oh. My. God.

Can someone explain to me why the Washington Post story about obtaining a shocking memo about the situation in Iraq (link to pdf document) from the United States embasssy in Baghdad is not the top news of the day?

The President of the United States has the gall to pull off a photo-off stunt surprise trip to Baghdad a few days after the transmission of a warning that, as Al Kamen describes:

Hours before President Bush left on a surprise trip last Monday to the Green Zone in Baghdad for an upbeat assessment of the situation there, the U.S. Embassy in Iraq painted a starkly different portrait of increasing danger and hardship faced by its Iraqi employees. This cable, marked "sensitive" and obtained by The Washington Post, outlines in spare prose the daily-worsening conditions for those who live outside the heavily guarded international zone: harassment, threats and the employees' constant fears that their neighbors will discover they work for the U.S. government.

Arianna Huffington reminds us that it is extremely likely that a loose-lipped Time magazine reporter saved Karl Rove from indictment in the Valerie Plame case.

Your so-called liberal media, hard at work.

The American Prospect's Greg Sargent correctly wonders why the Washington Post thinks it is okay to reprint without challenge or correction lies told by Vice President Dick Cheney (among other GOP leaders).

This picture tells an important story.

New York Observer columnist Joe Conason writes about the shameful silence that was accompanied Ann Coulter's latest hate-filled publishing effort, especially Coulter's attack on the September 11 widows.

Conason rightly reserves his harshest judgment for Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman, who often speak of moral courage, but have not yet bothered to defend the widows -- women with whom they both worked closely on the legislation that created the 9-11 Commission. As Conason writes:

The truth about the Jersey Girls—Kristen Breitweiser, Patty Casazza, Mindy Kleinberg and Lorie van Auken—is that they loved their husbands deeply, of course. They and their children continue to suffer from the loss that Ms. Coulter so heartlessly mocks. The truth is that in their suffering, these courageous women joined with other widows and family members to demand a serious investigation of 9/11. Together, they organized, researched and lobbied for thousands of hours to win the appointment of an independent commission, against the determined political opposition of the White House. The truth is that their success was an important victory for every American, without regard to party or ideology, and a vindication of grassroots democracy. The nation owes them all a debt of gratitude.

What is most disturbing about this episode is not that these women can be victimized by a brutal bully like Ms. Coulter, nor even that the mainstream media, which abandoned traditional standards of fairness and decency years ago, would eagerly assist her. That is our hideous political culture. What is most disappointing is the abject dereliction of the prominent politicians who worked so closely with the Jersey Girls.

John McCain and Joseph Lieberman, the Senate sponsors of the bill that created the 9/11 Commission, both believed that an independent investigation was essential for reasons of honor and national security. They both know that they could not have prevailed against the White House—and the Republican Congressional leadership—without the help of the widows.

There is no excuse for enabling Coulter. Since they will not stand up for the 9/11 widows, I think we could all use a little less moral lecturing from Sens. McCain and Lieberman.

David Sirota points out John Stossel's latest lies. To Stossel. On television.

That's public service tee-vee.

Ezra Klein rightly calls out Time's Ana Maria Cox for making the argument that less substance in questions to political leaders is better.

The L.A. Weekly's Bill Bradley noticed something about the California election returns that should give everyone working in the state's political circles pause:

In 1976, anti-Vietnam War leader Tom Hayden ran in the California Democratic primary against incumbent U.S. Senator John Tunney. (One of two models forRobert Redford's character in The Candidate.) In private polling in a three-way contest, Hayden, who began with 13% of the projected primary vote, climbed into a dead heat with Tunney before being knocked back by a barrage of negative advertising. He ended up with under 40% of the primary vote. 1.2 million California Democrats cast their votes for Hayden, enough support for he and his then wife Jane Fonda to launch the Campaign for Economic Democracy, which spawned Phil Angelides for Governor campaign leaders Cathy Calfo and Bob Mulholland. Angelides himself was a volunteer. Then Governor Jerry Brown won the California Democratic presidential primary that year, a campaign in which I was a volunteer.

Last week, 30 years later, now Treasurer Phil Angelides narrowly won his two-way race for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination with eBay honcho-turned-state Controller Steve Westly. He received just under 1.1 million votes. Fewer votes than Hayden received three decades ago in losing the Senate primary by a wide margin. Only one candidate in a contested race in this year's California primary exceeded the number of votes cast for Hayden in his losing U.S. Senate bid. Jerry Brown garnered 1.4 million votes in his landslide Democratic primary win for state attorney general.

It's an interesting historical perspective, don't you think?

To say the least. California's population has grown from 22.8 million to over 36.1 million, yet the primary winners last week received fewer votes than a primary loser 30 years ago.

This is, I think, a problem. Where have all the voters gone?

Sorry for the hiatus. I was caught up in a local campaign (which the candidate I supported won on June 6), and then work, family, and general tiredness has kept me from the blog since.

But, it's time to wipe the dust off this place and start writing and linking again.

Of course, if you use an RSS reader like Bloglines, you can find out when I publish something here without the guesswork.

If we cannot trust the Associated Press to get it right, I really do fear for our nation. Josh Marshall and his crew have all the gory details:

The AP sent out a detailed response to our reporting and that of Media Matters on John Solomon's piece on Harry Reid. Paul Kiel, over at TPMmuckraker, had intended to respond to it today. But he got so bogged down with the new distortions and bamboozlement in Solomon's follow-up reporting that he didn't get to it.

Now, I just noticed that Media Matters has their response to the AP, along with the AP's original defense of its reporting, posted at their site.

So this gave me a chance to glance over some of the AP's claims about TPMmuckraker's reporting. And most of the assertions are so demonstrably false that it's hard for me even to figure what sort of meltdown is going on over there.

As many a wise person has noted, it is often much easier, when caught in an error, to admit the mistake than to pile other lies on top of it.

Via Attytood, we learn that College Republicans think that "928 peer-reviewed scientific studies that agree with the scientific consensus that the earth’s temperature is rising due to human activity" can be debunked by handing out snow cones on campus or having a beach party.

Back in the reality-based community, we can watch An Inconvenient Truth, opening in more theatres across the country today.

I'll be going to the first show in Pleasant Hill, California, the closest theatre to my home showing the film.