The Entire Argument Between The Parties

Debbie Stabenow and Jon Kyl:

KYL: "I don't need maternity care. So requiring that on my insurance policy is something that I don't need and will make the policy more expensive."

STABENOW: "I think your mom probably did."

Who Could Have Anticipated?

Republicans decided to attack the individual mandate today, specifically hitting the notion of penalties for not buying insurance.

WASHINGTON -- Senior Republicans challenged Democratic plans to require nearly all people to carry health insurance, sharpening attacks on the first day of Senate Finance Committee debate over legislation to overhaul the nation's health-care system.

The criticism underscored Republican concerns that the legislation represents unwarranted government intrusion into private matters, and highlighted the partisan divide over the White House's top domestic priority. Put on the defensive, the committee's chairman, Sen. Max Baucus (D., Mont.), cut in half the maximum penalty for families that don't have health coverage to $1,900 from $3,800 per year.

Advocates of a coverage mandate say it is needed to ensure that young, healthy people get insurance and contribute to the system. They say this will ease costs associated with an influx of less-healthy people who are expected to get coverage under the Baucus legislation.

Republicans, who are trying to slow Democratic efforts to pass a health overhaul by the end of the year, rushed to criticize the proposal.

Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley, the Finance Committee's senior Republican, said the mandate is among the reasons that he couldn't support the bill despite months of negotiations with Mr. Baucus. "Individuals should maintain their freedom to chose health-care coverage, or not," he said.

"This bill is a stunning assault on liberty," said Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona, the Senate's second-ranking Republican.

Now of course, Chuck Grassley is full of it. And the Republicans did agree to mandates months ago. But any Democratic official surprised by the intensity of this complaint needs to leave Washington permanently. These are the people who call the repeal of tax breaks a tax increase. They call a reduction in growth of defense spending a spending cut. Their logic has never had to subject itself to the rigors of consistency.

What's more, Obama argued against mandates in the primary campaign. And without a public option, there's a compelling argument to be made that mandates for private insurance is a forced monopoly. Furthermore, it was always going to be the case that criminalizing someone for not having insurance would be unpopular. As Richard Kirsch says, the public option makes mandates popular.

Baucus (D-Mont.) has tried to remedy the situation by halving the penalty on families who decline to buy coverage and increasing the subsidies to those middle-class families purchasing insurance. But Kirsch insists that, without the ability to choose a government run option, consumers - and by extension the politicians who represent them - will turn sour on the mandate.

"We did a poll in Maine and in 91 swing House districts," said Kirsch. "We found that if we asked people if they supported a requirement to buy health insurance they said no. But if we said, 'Do you support a requirement coverage between private and public?' they said yes."

"Conservative democrats are going to be attacked from the right on the mandates but what makes the mandates popular is the public option."

This is especially true if the coverage subsidies are too low.

So really, this is a problem of the Democrats' own making.

...to be clear, I believe in mandates because the system won't really work without them. But from a political standpoint, mandates on just private coverage are a loser.

So You Don't Prosecute Our Friends For Wrongdoing, We'll Politicize 9-11

Danger, Eric Holder - apparently Republican Senators want you to know that if you actually obey the rule of law, you're killing innocent people just like the terrorists did when they flew into the World Trade Center.

Leading GOP lawmakers cautioned U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. on Wednesday against opening an investigation into alleged CIA interrogation abuses, saying that such an inquiry could have serious national security repercussions.

"It is well past time for the Obama administration to lift the cloud that has been placed over those in the intelligence community and let them return to the job of saving American lives," the lawmakers wrote in a letter to Holder signed by nine Republican senators. An investigation that distracts the CIA, the lawmakers said, "could leave us more vulnerable to attack."

Among those who signed the letter were Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), the minority whip; Sen. Christopher S. Bond of Missouri, the ranking Republican on the intelligence committee; and Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the top Republican on the judiciary committee.

If Republicans are being dicks, rest assured that Jon Kyl is in the middle of it. He also thinks immigrants should get a death sentence for overstaying their visas. So I'm sure Kyl wrote this part of the letter himself:

"The 9/11 Commission emphasized that keeping our country safe from foreign attack requires that the Justice Department work cooperatively with the intelligence community, but the appointment of a special prosecutor would irresponsibly and unnecessarily drive a wedge between the two."

Shorter Republicans - if you actually enforce laws against torture, the terrorists will have already won.

Jon Kyl - Objectively Pro-Discrimination

Under current law, health insurance companies can deny you coverage if they decide you actually might use a doctor. They can discriminate against broad classes of Amercians based on what they call in insurance-speak a "pre-existing condition." They can even go back after you turn in a claim and find some typo in your medical history form that allows them to dump you from the coverage rolls.

Jon Kyl, the #2 Republican in the Senate, thinks this is all fine and dandy.

The distance between the parties' leaders on health care was made clear on Tuesday when the No. 2 Republican in the Senate held a conference call with reporters.

Asked by ABC News about a package of insurance market reforms that have been endorsed not only by President Obama but also by the insurance industry, Sen. Jon Kyl came out against all three proposals.

In particular, the Arizona Republican signaled that he opposes requiring insurance companies nationwide to provide coverage without regard to pre-existing conditions; requiring them to charge everyone the same rate regardless of health status; and requiring all Americans to carry health insurance.

"One of the concerns I have about the approach of the Democrats ... is an assumption that there has to be a national mandate on all insurers to do various things," Kyl told ABC News when asked for his position the three issues.

"Those are techniques that states can, and some have, used in the past with fairly disastrous consequences," he said.

Part of what community rating would ban is allowing companies to charge women more money for health insurance, because they may use more care. And actuarial statistics show that the poor have a higher propensity for sickness due to environment and food choices, which means that they are discriminated against at a higher proportion in the insurance market. That's the system Jon Kyl wants to keep in place - a segregated system where large segments of society cannot even have the option of health insurance.

Even the insurance industry supports guaranteed issue and community rating. They want that along with a forced-market monopoly, with no competition from a public insurance option, so that the government can subsidize their businesses and turn people who cannot afford health insurance into criminals. But that would be LESS RADICAL than what Jon Kyl is proposing.

These are the people with whom we must engage in bipartisanship, or so it is told.

As If They Had A Choice

The NYT reports that "Democrats Seem Set to Go It Alone on a Health Bill". In plain English, this means that "Democrats want a health bill." There was never going to be Republican support for anything calling itself health reform that Democrats and the President would support. You could whittle and whittle and whittle the bill down to nothing and it wouldn't matter. Somebody in Washington finally figured this out:

Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, said the heated opposition was evidence that Republicans had made a political calculation to draw a line against any health care changes, the latest in a string of major administration proposals that Republicans have opposed.

“The Republican leadership,” Mr. Emanuel said, “has made a strategic decision that defeating President Obama’s health care proposal is more important for their political goals than solving the health insurance problems that Americans face every day.”

Ya think? Jon Kyl said yesterday that “There is no way that Republicans are going to support a trillion-dollar-plus bill.” Chuck Grassley admitted that he wouldn't vote for his own compromise and legitimized the "death panels" smear despite having voted for it in the past. You're just figuring out that Republicans view their jobs as blocking any legislation at all costs?

We're starting to hear this meme from the right that liberals are interested in negotiation and compromise with Iran and North Korea, but not with Republicans. Well, we've done the negotiations. They led to nothing for months. And the meme itself is false.

In foreign policy, liberals often believe that disputes with foreign actors can and should be settled through negotiation and compromise. That's because international relations isn't a zero-sum affair. Conflict is costly to both parties, good relations bring benefits to both parties, so disagreement is generally amenable to compromise. Ideological disagreement isn't zero-sum either. Neither conservatives nor progressives are wedded to principles that require defense of wasteful Medicare spending. But partisan politics is zero-sum. A 'win' for the Democrats is a 'loss' for Republicans. And the predominant thinking in the Republican Party at the moment is that inflicting legislative defeats on Democrats will lead to electoral defeats for Democrats. That makes the GOP hard to bargain with.

I would say "impossible." They're convinced it's 1994, and they're not needed by virtue of the numbers.

So where to go from here? Well, Democrats in the Senate could demand that their members join no Republican filibuster of any health care measure supported by a majority of their ranks. They can choose to not support the final bill if they wish. They should not keep it from a final vote. That's the simple solution. If that process winds us up with a public option in the House and a weak co-op option in the Senate, the conference committee could actually produce a positive result, provided Harry Reid puts the people on the conference with jurisdiction over the bill, like health subcommittee chair in the Finance Committee Jay Rockefeller (strong public option supporter) and retirement and aging subcommittee chair in the HELP Committee Barbara Mikulski (supporter).

That bill would easily pass the House. The Senate is trickier. But the conference report can't be amended. It can't be changed, or held up in committee. It can be filibustered, and it can be voted against. Those are the options. If three Democrats opposed the legislation and wanted to kill it, they would literally have to filibuster it (this is assuming that Democrats have 60 votes, which is not certain given Kennedy's health). That would be a very hard thing to do at that stage in the game. It would isolate the obstructionists, ensuring funded primary challenges and the enduring enmity of the Senate leadership and the White House. Kent Conrad can say that there aren't enough votes for a public option and imply that he's just protecting the final bill from defeat. But is he willing to be one of those "no" votes? Is he willing to filibuster? That's a different game indeed.

At this point, no Democratic Senator has committed to joining a Republican filibuster, an important distinction. The conservaDems should be asked if they plan to do so.

If that fails and President Nelson (who likes to shout at public option supporters in the media off camera) or some other newly elected President tries to torpedo the bill, there's the option of splitting reform into two bills, with the filibuster-able stuff in one bill, and stuff relevant to the budget packed into a bill that can be achieved with 50 votes in budget reconciliation. That makes those provisions likely to be subject to a sunset, but once a public option, expanded Medicaid, increasing subsidies and other budget-relevant things get enacted, I submit it will be hard for any Congress to allow them to expire. Failing that, there's the straight reconciliation path, which contra Chris Matthews is not "blowing up Senate rules" but part of them (someone who's never talked a word about Senate rules in his whole career should probably not start now), but which could get messy if elements not relevant to the budget got excised.

Or, Democrats could behave like Republicans and rule by fear and questioning opponents' patriotism. But that's, er, unlikely.

The point being, there are options, and lots more open up when you recognize the large majorities in both houses of Congress cancel the need for bipartisanship inside Washington.

Throwing Elbows

This was a nice little move by the White House against blowhard Jon Kyl and St. McCain:

On ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos this past Sunday, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) argued that the $787 billion stimulus package “hasn’t helped yet. … What I proposed is, after you complete the contracts that are already committed, the things that are in the pipeline, stop it.”

The next day Arizona Republican Gov. Jan Brewer received letters from four Obama administration officials — Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan and Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar — pointing out the billions headed for Arizonans. LaHood wrote:

"The stimulus has been very effective in creating job opportunities throughout the country. However, if you prefer to forfeit the money we are making available to your state, as Senator Kyl suggests, please let me know."

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) quickly fired back on Tuesday, saying that he “strongly support the comments of Senator Kyl and call[s] on the administration to retract its threat against the citizens of Arizona.”

What McCain calls a threat I call "asking the Governor of Arizona if she wants to do what her junior Senator suggests." In other words, following right-wing policies is a threat against American citizens. Now I agree with that, but it's funny for John McCain to agree.

If Republicans want to say that all government spending is bad they should be able to live with the consequences. But they never do, of course. Good for Obama and the White House for pushing back.

...Here's another Democrat, Bernie Sanders, forcing Republicans, including John McCain, to confront their own rhetoric.

Sanders: I don't want to shock anybody here, and have people dashing out of the room, but the VA is a socialized health care system, right Mr. McCain? That's what it is. That's not public insurance, but socialized medicine.

McCain: Not exactly my description, but...

Sanders: OK. And, you know, the VA has its problems, we all know that. But by and large, I think it's fair to say, when we go home, we talk to our veterans, you know what, they feel pretty good about the VA [...] All right, that's socialized medicine in the United States of America, anyone want to bring an amendment up to eliminate the VA? I would suggest the chairman accept that amendment. I don't hear too many people.

Beautiful.

Chipping Away

It may be weird to have a member of the Republican leadership say out loud that their goal as a party, in a time of crisis, is to lower Democratic approval ratings, but come on, we all knew this, right? Their public statements are carefully crafted to nitpick elements of spending bills that sound more outrageous that they actually are. When those examples of "wasteful spending" aren't in the bill, they make them up. And then they offer amendments on them anyway.

Interestingly enough, all three of Kyl's amendments deal with U.S. policy towards Palestine at a time when signs are pointing to a possible unity government by Fatah and Hamas. The most eyebrow-raising of the three, however, is a bid to prevent any government money from being used to resettle Palestinian refugees from Gaza to America.

As the Mondoweiss blog explains, an Internet rumor making the rounds on the right has accused President Obama of signing an order to resettle hundreds of thousands of Hamas sympathizers in the U.S. ... without a grain of truth to it.

Heck, the entire conception of starting a firestorm around earmarks is self-evidently ridiculous. The elimination of earmarks doesn't reduce spending by one penny - all an earmark does is direct appropriations to a specific project. Without them, money would be appropriated by an executive branch bureaucrat. And Republicans know that.

“I voted to take all earmarks out, but I will come back in the new process and put that back in,” Graham insisted, saying that the convention center is important to stimulate the local economy. “I think I should have the ability as a United States senator to direct money back to my state as long as it’s transparent and it makes sense.”

So of course the entire GOP game plan is to embarrass Democrats. Unfortunately, so far it has succeeded only in embarrassing themselves. But those are only the short-term ramifications. Over the long term, all they are doing is chipping away at the notion that government can perform its core function, demonizing the activities of the Congress, evoking mistrust in elected officials, and poisoning the whole notion of federal spending. That's their REAL project.

New Attorney General Rules

According to Jon Kyl, and I would imagine a substantial portion of the right, you cannot become Attorney General unless you unequivocally support torturing human beings.

KYL: I think Eric Holder will have some problems. He has not been able to stand up to his bosses in the past, President Clinton when he wanted to do pardons that I think Holder must have realized were big mistakes but he facilitated. And he’s also made some very unfortunate statements about our interrogation of prisoners, terrorists, and other things that lead me to believe that he is not going to be supportive of the Patriot Act, the FISA law, and others. And if he can’t be supportive of those laws, then he shouldn’t be Attorney General.

Got that? If you cannot be trusted to violate federal and international law, you cannot be allowed to become the nation's top law enforcement official. This is the looking-glass view of the world on the right.

And it infects the discourse. I would argue the reason for Obama's stilted rhetoric and the general reticence, outside of John Conyers, to prosecute the war crimes of the torture regime is that nobody in the establishment ever really pushed back in a coordinated fashion on the mainstreaming of torture, that allows for this kind of a statement by Kyl, which would have been almost nonsensical a few years ago. The Village got infected with war fever, goosed by the right, and they are only now coming out of it. And so Obama awkwardly tiptoes around ending torture because there are non-trivial political consequences for doing so. That's a very sad commentary on this country, but it's true.

Once we started having a debate in this country about torture, we made it tacitly acceptable. That was the original sin.

No Unemployment Relief For You

The Senate blocked unemployment benefit extension from coming up for a vote. The story is from the AP, who doesn't like bloggers linking to them, so I'll just excerpt a fair-use amount of their text without linking at all.

Senate Republicans blocked legislation Tuesday that would have given an extra three months of jobless benefits for all unemployed Americans, but congressional Democrats plan to bring the bill back by attaching it to an Iraq war funding measure.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., tried to bring the House-passed unemployment extension bill up for quick consideration in the Senate, but was stymied by an objection from Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona, the Senate's No. 2 Republican. It takes unanimous agreement to fast track a bill in the Senate.

Good thing the Republicans are standing up against giving away money to the undeserving, unlike the economic stimulus pac-

Doh!

Of course, UI extension is an actual stimulus to the economy, but the GOP wouldn't want to break their streak of failed policies.

The Wurlitzer Starts

Well, maybe the timing was off, but it certainly feels like the next war is starting, to Seymour Hersh:

The President’s position, and its corollary—that, if many of America’s problems in Iraq are the responsibility of Tehran, then the solution to them is to confront the Iranians—have taken firm hold in the Administration. This summer, the White House, pushed by the office of Vice-President Dick Cheney, requested that the Joint Chiefs of Staff redraw long-standing plans for a possible attack on Iran, according to former officials and government consultants. The focus of the plans had been a broad bombing attack, with targets including Iran’s known and suspected nuclear facilities and other military and infrastructure sites. Now the emphasis is on “surgical” strikes on Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities in Tehran and elsewhere, which, the Administration claims, have been the source of attacks on Americans in Iraq. What had been presented primarily as a counter-proliferation mission has been reconceived as counterterrorism.

The shift in targeting reflects three developments. First, the President and his senior advisers have concluded that their campaign to convince the American public that Iran poses an imminent nuclear threat has failed (unlike a similar campaign before the Iraq war), and that as a result there is not enough popular support for a major bombing campaign. The second development is that the White House has come to terms, in private, with the general consensus of the American intelligence community that Iran is at least five years away from obtaining a bomb. And, finally, there has been a growing recognition in Washington and throughout the Middle East that Iran is emerging as the geopolitical winner of the war in Iraq.

Which makes the Lieberman/Kyl amendment, passed in the Senate this past week, all the more dangerous, since it specifically labels the Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization, and therefore counterterrorism efforts to attack them have credibility. What does not have credibility is the idea that the Revolutionary Guard are Iran are doing any kind of major attacks within Iraq. I'm sure at some level they're providing some advice, and certainly they're strengthened by having a Shiite theocratic state in power, but foreign fighters are the least of our worries in Iraq. This is a scapegoating play designed to shift the blame for failure in Iraq from the Administration to Iran. And right-wing propaganda groups are joining in that chorus.

The New York Times reports that next month, the White House-front group Freedom’s Watch “will sponsor a private forum of 20 experts on radical Islam that is expected to make the case that Iran poses a direct threat to the security of the United States”:

“If Hitler’s warnings were heeded when he wrote ‘Mein Kampf,’ he could have been stopped,” said Bradley Blakeman, 49, the president of Freedom’s Watch and a former deputy assistant to Mr. Bush. “Ahmadinejad is giving all the same kind of warning signs to us, and the region — he wants the destruction of the United States and the destruction of Israel.”

We are seeing a lot of the same signs as we did in the fall of 2002: a neutered Congress, a propaganda war, an inevitability strategy for war in friendly media, resources within the intelligence community moved to Iran, and telling the IAEA to go fly a kite.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice cautioned the U.N. nuclear watchdog group Wednesday not to interfere with international diplomacy over Iran's alleged weapons program.

Condoleezza Rice criticized the U.N. nuclear watchdog group Wednesday while en route to the Middle East.

The International Atomic Energy Agency "is not in the business of diplomacy," Rice told reporters traveling with her to the Middle East.

The IAEA's role should be limited to carrying out inspections and offering a "clear declaration and clear reporting on what the Iranians are doing; whether and when and if they are living up to the agreements they have signed," she said.

Maybe it's because they carried out inspections in Iraq, were on their way to finding nothing, and got kicked out of the country before they were done, leading to a global foreign policy disaster. They're "butting in" because they don't want to see disaster number two.

All of which goes back to this Lieberman/Kyl vote, a major win for the neocons which now puts practically all the impetus for stopping a war with Iran on the MILITARY, which is simply an un-American scenario. Ezra Klein gets this exactly right.

Five years after the start of the Iraq War, after seeing all of George W. Bush's deceptions and mismanagement, after seeing our forces chewed up and our prestige shredded, you might imagine Democrats would be reticent to allow any steps towards a confrontation with Iran, particularly under this president. But quite the opposite: 29 Democrats voted to go to war with Iraq. Five years later, 30 voted to push us towards war with Iran. They are still cowards, and they have still learned nothing.

Read all of Hersh's article.

Ahmadinejad spoke at a college!!! Is America still whole?

The right wing in this country really can't take debate, whether it's debating laws (talking about surveillance will kill Americans!!!!) or a powerless clown like Ahmadinejad at Columbia. Even President frickin Bush understands that a country that's confident in their democracy can afford to hear WORDS without turning to jelly:

President Bush said Ahmadinejad's appearance at Columbia "speaks volumes about, really, the greatness of America."

He told Fox News Channel that if Bollinger considered Ahmadinejad's visit an educational experience for Columbia students, "I guess it's OK with me."

Bollinger, the President of Columbia, was so caustic toward Ahmadinejad, calling him a "petty and cruel dictator) (he apparently doesn't get the Iranian political hierarchy either), that it was clear he had been cowed by the right into being overly belligerent. But the point of open debate being vital to society was proven when Ahmadinejad claimed that his country doesn't have any homosexuals. I know some members of the right immediately responded to that by booking flights to move there, but the point is that such a patently ridiculous statement exposed Ahmadinejad for the fool that he is. We should be encouraging that, not stifling it.

And here's another debate we really SHOULD be having. Apparently the Senate exists only to make Sense of the Senate resolutions, but this one is scary (naturally, Lieberman wrote it):

(b) Sense of Senate.--It is the sense of the Senate--

(1) that the manner in which the United States transitions and structures its military presence in Iraq will have critical long-term consequences for the future of the Persian Gulf and the Middle East, in particular with regard to the capability of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran to pose a threat to the security of the region, the prospects for democracy for the people of the region, and the health of the global economy;

(2) that it is a vital national interest of the United States to prevent the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran from turning Shi'a militia extremists in Iraq into a Hezbollah-like force that could serve its interests inside Iraq, including by overwhelming, subverting, or co-opting institutions of the legitimate Government of Iraq;

(3) that it should be the policy of the United States to combat, contain, and roll back the violent activities and destabilizing influence inside Iraq of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, its foreign facilitators such as Lebanese Hezbollah, and its indigenous Iraqi proxies;

(4) to support the prudent and calibrated use of all instruments of United States national power in Iraq, including diplomatic, economic, intelligence, and military instruments, in support of the policy described in paragraph (3) with respect to the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its proxies;

(5) that the United States should designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps as a foreign terrorist organization under section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act and place the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps on the list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists, as established under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and initiated under Executive Order 13224; and

(6) that the Department of the Treasury should act with all possible expediency to complete the listing of those entities targeted under United Nations Security Council Resolutions 1737 and 1747 adopted unanimously on December 23, 2006 and March 24, 2007, respectively.

When we have the President being advised on Iran policy by the guy who is pleading to blow it up, this kind of resolution is not only unhelpful, it's dangerous. We'll see if we have a functioning democracy today by seeing if the Democrats can manage to strike this nonsense down.

Babies As Far As The Eye Can See

We really have become a nation of children, so worried about the harming power of words - WORDS - that we'll put together a Senate resolution condemning them when they are used in a pun. The latest mau-mauing from the right concerns Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to the UN and Columbia University. We are for some reason given the impression that "President" must mean some sort of ruler/despot, which shows both how strong the Imperial Presidency has grown in this country, and how globally illiterate Americans, and particularly the media that seeks to inform them, are (and the media deserves practically all the blame here). Ahmadinejad is like the Speaker of the House of Iran. He actually wields a little less power than that. He doesn't control foreign policy, he doesn't control the military, he doesn't control Iran's weapons arsenal. What's more, he's very unpopular in his own country, and is unlikely to win re-election. The only thing an outcry like this does is increase the power of someone who is essentially powerless. The mullahs are using him as a lightning rod so they can curtail civil liberties and dissent at home. While we focus on one guy, ordinary Iranians see the man attracting all this criticism and rally around him.

In demonizing Mr. Ahmadinejad, the West has served him well, elevating his status at home and in the region at a time when he is increasingly isolated politically because of his go-it-alone style and ineffective economic policies, according to Iranian politicians, officials and political experts.

Ahmadinejad would just wither on the vine if we'd only stop screaming about him. But the neocons won't, because they have a very specific plan that Matt Stoller outlines well.

1) Empowering Ahmadinejad: He's not particularly important within Iran, but this kind of mindless attention helps him domestically.

2) Leading Us into a New War: Wars require villains. Ahmadinejad, as an ineffective buffoon with a weak domestic power center, wasn't enough of a villain. He must be built up into an all-powerful character that can only be removed by American force. The divestment from Iran campaign, currently swirling around the states, is accomplishing this, and will almost certainly continue, at least PR-wise, into the next Democratic administration. This will make negotiations much harder and the path to a military strike much more likely.

3) Attacking Free Speech at Columbia: Dismantling or weakening institutions that stand up against the right or could conceivably do so is one of the long-term conservative movement strategic interests. The Freedom Watch ad calling Columbia University 'appeasers' is meant to intimate, and it often works in subtle ways.

Are we so fearful of losing our own democracy that we think one lone nut's words can take it down? That's ridiculous. We've weathered the storm of dissent before and we will again. Neoconservatives want to mirror the mullah-led state of Iran here in America because it would make it easier to take the country to war that way. And a pliant media, mindful that black-and-white worldviews and good-versus-evil constructions are easier to market, willingly goes along, setting up Ahmadinejad like he's Sinestro or something. Meanwhile this isn't mentioned.

While all eyes are on Manhattan, precious few are watching what's happening in Washington. On Thursday, Senators Jon Kyl and Joseph Lieberman filed an amendment to the 2008 Defense Authorization Bill that would make it official U.S. policy to "combat, contain and roll back" Iran and its surrogates in Iraq. Section 5 calls for the United States to formally designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization. If passed, this amendment would open the door even wider for military action against Iran.

Why hasn't this bit of news sparked similar debate?

Because our traditional media are a pack of babies whose buttons are easily pushed by the babies on the right. Who are afraid of somebody saying something. Please.

Panic! at the Disco.

The White House is worried about the shifting on Capitol Hill around the Iraq debate. Repeat, they're not worried about the SAFETY AND WELL-BEING OF THE TROOPS IN THE FIELD OR OUR NATIONAL SECURITY, they're worried that Congress might come and take their war away.

What the White House ought to be worried about is the fact that the Iraqi government has not hit one critical target that the Congress set up as benchmarks for progress toward a political solution. Zero. Zilch.

(By the way, though there's a lot to be said about the capitulation in May by the Democrats, and I've said a lot, one thing they were able to extract is a mandate for progress reports. The first one has revealed this total lack of benchmark progress, and it comes precisely at the time when the defense budget is up for debate. To the extent that it may accelerate the end of the war, good show.)

What the White House out to be worried about is the 140,000 Turkish troops amassed at the Iraqi border, a potential crisis that they've done absolutely nothing to stop or even slow down.

What the White House ought to be worried about is the 12 billion dollars a month that this country is spending on wars that are not making any significant progress, and are in fact backsliding into catastrophe. You can bet that the Democratic Congress is worried about that.

What the White House probably does not have to worry about is the behavior of Senate Republicans, who will huff and puff in public but in the end never commit to one amendment that sides with the Defeatocrats.

With the Senate taking up the Defense Department authorization bill during the next two weeks, Senate Republican Conference Chairman Jon Kyl (Ariz.) said Monday that recent GOP statements urging Bush to change his war strategy likely would not translate into many votes for Democratic proposals to redeploy or withdraw troops from Iraq by early next year. Kyl added that most Republican Senators believe September remains the appropriate time to judge the success of the U.S. efforts to stabilize Iraq.

"We are quite unified as a Conference on most of the amendments and the big issues," Kyl said. "Some in the Republican Conference might join some of the Democrat amendments, but, by and large, our approach will be consistent with the administration."

Kyl could be wrong, but I don't think he is. If I had to guess, I'd gather that the Salazar-Domenici "pretend to adopt the pretend Iraq Study Group recommendations" will pass, and the President will make a big show out of saying "We always embraced the Iraq Study Group report," and they'll set a vision for withdrawal if they hit a triple bank shot and everything goes just perfectly (because everything ALWAYS goes perfectly in Iraq), and of course it'll be bullshit and a complete rejection of earlier rhetoric and that will generate fearsome Think Progress blog posts, but beyond that nobody will really care, and the punditocracy will call it a great triumph for sensible centrism, the Republican kind, and nobody will bother to point out that the Salazar-Domenici bill is nonbinding and has no force of law, and in the Office of the Vice President, Fourthbranch and his staff will be high-fiving each other and getting out the maps for Tehran.

Harry Reid, prove me wrong.

Immigration Day

Sorry for the delay, adjusting to a new schedule.

So the battered and bruised immigration bill has another day in the Senate, and they'll try to move debate forward and then work through a pile of amendments before a final vote. Chances of passage are slim, if you ask me. But it's nice to know that the Republicans are bringing in the most genteel of supporters to help craft this legislation:

Conservative talk radio's impact on the immigration debate reached new heights last week, with one host effectively writing an amendment for when the Senate returns to the imperiled bill this week [...]

Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., the key conservative negotiator behind the compromise bill, told reporters Friday that California-based radio host Hugh Hewitt "had several ideas" that "we are trying to include" in amendments to be offered in an upcoming series of crucial votes.

Hewitt, a conservative who has criticized many aspects of the bill, had Kyl as a guest on Thursday and asked: "Does the bill provide for any separate treatment of aliens, illegal aliens from countries of special concern?"

Kyl replied: "It's going to, as a result of your lobbying efforts to me."

Hugh Hewitt, a guy with about as much logic as Baghdad Bob when it comes to denying the realities of America, is writing immigration legislation in this country. We'll see if it finds a positive hearing on the Hill.

This bill is going to result in such draconian measures for immigrants that even the AFL-CIO has turned against it. And the temporary worker program should be completely eliminated. Trent Lott has said that, if we dont pass anything now, we'd have to wait until 2009, and "who knows who'll be President then." It's a gamble I may be willing to take.

UPDATE: They just voted to proceed on the bill, but there will be plenty of poison pills along the way.

Prosecutor Purge Update

It's pretty clear that this gambit to fire US Attorneys who weren't sufficiently loyal to the President and the Republic Party is falling apart. First, the most egregious replacement, a former oppo research specialist and aide to Karl Rove who was installed as US Attorney in Arkansas, gave up the post rather than face a confirmation fight in the Senate. Actually he said he would stay on until a replacement is confirmed. Under current law, the White House never has to pick a replacement; that's the whole point. Under a little-seen provision of the Patriot Act, the Justice Department could install interim US Attorneys without having to go through the Senate.

The upshot of this purge is that the law will change.

Congressional Democrats and some Republicans are trying to change part of the USA Patriot Act that allows the Bush administration to fire and replace federal prosecutors indefinitely without Senate confirmation.

Freshly briefed by the Justice Department on the forced resignations of some of the seven U.S. attorneys since the act took effect, Senate Democrats planned to bring a bill to the floor Thursday that would impose a 120-day deadline on the amount of time a replacement could serve without Senate confirmation.

Of course, Sen. Reid tried to schedule a vote on this yesterday, but Sen. Jon Kyl blocked it on constitutional grounds. See, if the executive branch names no replacement within 120 days, under the new bill a federal judge would step in. Kyl claimed that raises separation of powers issues. Sen. Patrick Leahy had a good response to this:

I have heard not a word from the apologists who seek to use the Constitution as a shield for these activities about what the Constitution says. The Constitution provides congressional power to direct the appointment power. In Article II, the part of the Constitution that this Administration reads as if it says that all power resides with the President, the President’s appointment power is limited by the power of Congress. Indeed, between its provisions calling for appointments with the advice and consent of the Senate and for the President’s limited power to make recess appointments, the Constitution provides: “But the Congress may by law vest the appointment of such inferior officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the courts of law, or in the Heads of Departments.” Thus, the Constitution contemplates exactly what our statutes and practices have always provided. Congress is well within its authority when it vests in the courts a share of the appointment power for those who appear before them.

Funny how the separation of powers only comes up in the context of protecting executive authority, isn't it?

Carol Lam, who indicted Brent Wilkes and Dusty Foggo this week, has apparently moved on to work for Qualcomm, though some Democratic lawmakers would like her to prosecute the case as outside counsel. Regardless of that, Kyl and the other Bush apologists aren't going to be able to hold back this tide for long. The great prosecutor purge of 2007 will end, and another Administration power grab will be overturned. The problem is that they just don't quit.

Some Carrot To Go With That Stick

While the Senate simply must lead on Iraq and Iran, I do have to give them a world of credit for overwhelmingly passing a minimum wage increase today. It includes some tax breaks for small business but not nearly as many as the Republicans initially wanted. The working poor just got a major boost today, and they have deserved it for a decade.

Special thanks go out to Ted Kennedy, who worked tirelessly for this for years.

Tom Coburn (R-OK), Jim DeMint (R-SC), and Jon Kyl (R-AZ), on the other hand, hate working people.