“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. 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.”God I hope Democrats can learn from this. In that one statement, Team Webb are exposing what an elitist tool Allen is, all the while mocking his ballot-searching backseat-driving on patriotism. It’s not too late Democrats, pay heed!
In Vietnam, the United States entered a divided country with a simmering civil war and left behind a nasty tyranny. In Iraq, the US has unseated a nasty tyranny but may leave behind a simmering civil war that could lead to a divided country. In Vietnam, fearing a nuclear clash with the Soviet Union or a confrontation with China, the US slid in slowly: first sending technical advisers, then undertaking search and destroy missions, and ultimately engaging in a full-throttle war. In Iraq, the US began full throttle, switched to search and destroy, and is now seriously debating whether to begin sliding out.Even if Vietnam and Iraq diverge in their respective details, however, some parallels and applicable lessons remain. George Kennan, a foreign policy titan who remains largely unknown to non-polisci majors, weighed in on Vietnam during Senate hearings convened by Senator Fulbright in 1966. By that time, Kennan, Fulbright, and others could see the worrisome future of our Vietnam policy, and the worries then largely reflect the majority (and growing) public sentiment on Iraq.
"[T]here is more respect to be won in the opinion of this world by a resolute and courageous liquidation of unsound positions than by the most stubborn pursuit of extravagant and unpromising objectives," [Kennan] said. Kennan, were he alive today, would have little patience for the Bush administration's frequent call to stay in Iraq because a commitment was made and so many soldiers have already died. Just because the US had shot itself in one foot, he told the Senate committee, didn't mean it should fire away at the other.Foreign policy requires constant adjustment and reevaluation, especially during wartime. The Bush administration -- and much of the Department of Defense -- has been stuck in 2003 for three years. It's time (and has been for a while) to reassess and improve our policies and tactics. It's time to change the course. Read More......
White House counselor Dan Bartlett says the administration's task now is to determine how to design military tribunals that will pass constitutional muster. Bartlett says Bush could portray any lawmaker who objects to legislation as supporting the release of dangerous terrorists.So is Dan Bartlett married yet? Just asking. Read More......
"restore the constitution to what it was before unelected jurists changed it five to four." He went on to say, "Five lawyers decided 48 states were wrong."Those five unelected lawyers, who Hatch holds with so much contempt you can hear the venom dripping on his every word, those lawyers are commonly referred to as United States Supreme Court Justices. They are the highest jurists in all the land, and they are the governmental equal of Senator Hatch. He and they hold the same rank and power in our system of government.
Some argue that the [Wall Street] Journal should have still declined to run the antiterror story. However, at no point did Treasury officials tell us not to publish the information. And while Journal editors knew the [New York] Times was about to publish the story, Treasury officials did not tell our editors they had urged the Times not to publish. What Journal editors did know is that they had senior government officials providing news they didn't mind seeing in print. If this was a "leak," it was entirely authorized....So, the Wall Street Journal's argument seems to be that they'd sell America to Osama for a quick buck, so long as no one asked them not to.
Terrorists have for many years employed nontraditional communications and money transfers including the ancient Middle Eastern hawala system, involving couriers and a loosely linked network of money brokers precisely because they assume that international calls, e-mail and banking are monitored not only by the United States but by Britain, France, Israel, Russia and even many third-world countries.And, Clarke knows why the Bush team is playing this game. Too bad most of the reporting class (and that means you, CNN) haven't clued in:
While this was not news to terrorists, it may, it appears, have been news to some Americans, including some in Congress. But should the press really be called unpatriotic by the administration, and even threatened with prosecution by politicians, for disclosing things the terrorists already assumed?
There is, of course, another possible explanation for all the outraged bloviating. It is an election year. Karl Rove has already said that if it were up to the Democrats, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi would still be alive. The attacks on the press are part of a political effort by administration officials to use terrorism to divide America, and to scare their supporters to the polls again this year.Read More......
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.Read More......
Theoretically, Bush could get himself out of this mess by trying to solve some of the problems afflicting his presidency. But campaigning is easier.
Under the rule, intended to curb fraud by illegal immigrants, such proof as a passport or a birth certificate must be offered at the time a person applies for Medicaid benefits or during annual reenrollment in the state-federal program for the poor and disabled.Remember, this is the party of compassionate conservatives, morality and family values. Beating up on the poor and disabled, isn't that just what Jesus would do? Read More......
Critics fear that the provision will have the unintended consequence of harming several million U.S. citizens who, for a variety of reasons, will not be able to produce the necessary paperwork. They include mentally ill, mentally retarded and homeless people, as well as elderly men and women, especially African Americans born in an era when hospitals in the rural South barred black women from their maternity wards....The new provision is part of last year's Deficit Reduction Act, which President Bush signed into law in February. Despite a federal inspector general's report concluding that there was little fraud by noncitizens, supporters said the measure would ensure that Medicaid dollars go only to citizens or eligible immigrants.
Rep. Charles Whitlow Norwood Jr. (R-Ga.), one of the prime sponsors, decried "the outright theft of Medicaid benefits by illegal aliens."
The Telegraph said it was the first time any of five successive Conservative leaders had been preferred to Blair since Blair took the helm of the Labour party in 1994 as opposition leader under Conservative Prime Minister John Major.Read More......
Tony Blair and David Cameron were both dealt by-election blows in heartland seats today.Voters in Blaenau Gwent, south Wales, failed to re-elect Labour in one of its former strongholds, then the Tories almost lost Bromley and Chislehurst to the Liberal Democrats, previously safe Conservative territory.
In a further setback for the Prime Minister, Labour was relegated to fourth in Bromley and Chislehurst, behind the UK Independence Party.
Read More......
For five years, President Bush waged war as he saw fit. If intelligence officers needed to eavesdrop on overseas telephone calls without warrants, he authorized it. If the military wanted to hold terrorism suspects without trial, he let them.Read More......
Now the Supreme Court has struck at the core of his presidency and dismissed the notion that the president alone can determine how to defend the country. In rejecting Bush's military tribunals for terrorism suspects, the high court ruled that even a wartime commander in chief must govern within constitutional confines significantly tighter than this president has believed appropriate.
For many in Washington, the decision echoed not simply as matter of law but as a rebuke of a governing philosophy of a leader who at repeated turns has operated on the principle that it is better to act than to ask permission. This ethos is why many supporters find Bush an inspiring leader, and why many critics in this country and abroad react so viscerally against him....
"There is a strain of legal reasoning in this administration that believes in a time of war the other two branches have a diminished role or no role," Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who has resisted the administration's philosophy, said in an interview. "It's sincere, it's heartfelt, but after today, it's wrong."
While the decision addressed only military commissions, legal analysts said its skeptical view of presidential power could be applied to other areas such as warrantless wiretapping, and that its invocation of the Geneva Conventions could pave the way for new legal claims by detainees held at the military facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba....NYT
But the court's action was clearly a setback for the White House. At the high court, its approach to the war on terrorism has suffered the broadest in a series of defeats, and the administration has been sent back to the drawing board in dealing with hundreds of suspected members of the Taliban and al-Qaeda -- at a time when international pressure is mounting to shut down Guantanamo Bay....
Legal analysts said that the court's opinion could lead to a challenge to the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program, because wiretapping is already covered by a federal statute, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, just as military commissions were, in the court's view, covered by the UCMJ.
"The same reasoning would seem to apply to the NSA case, because the argument that the authorization to use military force enables them to ignore FISA goes down the drain," said Joseph P. Onek, senior counsel of the Constitution Project, a Washington-based civil liberties organization that opposed the commissions.
"It appears to be about as broad a holding as you could imagine," said one administration lawyer, who insisted on anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the ruling. "It's very broad, it's very significant, and it's a slam."....Read More......
In his majority opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens said that the United States was legally bound by Common Article 3, as the provision is known (it is common to all four Geneva Conventions). He said the article "affords some minimal protection" to detainees even when the forces they represent are not signatories to the conventions themselves.
This doesn't have the force of law but Republicans hope it sends a strong message not just to the media but to those who leak within the Bush administration.Or, this was part of a much larger and ongoing Republican effort to:
Rush Limbaugh Announced as New Viagra SpokesmanRead More......
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE -- NEW YORK – June 28, 2006 -- Pfizer Inc. today announced conservative talk radio commentator Rush Limbaugh has been signed as the new spokesman for the company's erectile dysfunction drug, Viagra (sildenafil citrate). Limbaugh went public with his use of the medication following a security incident June 26 at the Palm Beach International Airport....
Pfizer is hoping the Limbaugh "dittohead" following will give a boost to sales. "His listeners will buy into anything he says, so we're hoping that transfers into them buying our product. With a doctor's prescription, of course."
Previous Viagra spokesmen have included Senator Bob Dole and NASCAR driver Mark Martin. The addition of the controversial radio personality to the Pfizer stable seems to indicate the drug manufacturer intends to target an increasingly conservative demographic.
However, Pfizer's representative denied reports that ultra-right-wing commentator and author Ann Coulter was also being wooed to push the erection-enhancing medication. "We feel that would be antithetical. As clinically effective as Viagra has proven to be, it has its limits."
And, at the very least, the Court severely weakened, if not outright precluded, the administration's legal defenses with regard to its violations of FISA. Specifically, the Court:Read More......
(a) rejected the administration's argument [Sec. IV] that Congress, when it enacted the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force in Afghanistan and against Al Qaeda ("AUMF"), implicitly authorized military commissions in violation of the UCMJ. In other words, the Supreme Court held that because the AUMF was silent on the question as to whether the Administration was exempt from the pre-existing requirements of the UCMJ, there was no basis for concluding that the AUMF was intended to implicitly amend the UCMJ (by no longer requiring military commissions to comply with the law of war), since the AUMF was silent on that question.
This is a clearly fatal blow to one of the two primary arguments invoked by the administration to justify its violations of FISA. The administration has argued that this same AUMF "implicitly" authorized it to eavesdrop in violation of the mandates of FISA, even though the AUMF said absolutely nothing about FISA or eavesdropping. If -- as the Supreme Court today held -- the AUMF cannot be construed to have provided implicit authorization for the administration to create military commissions in violation of the UCMJ, then it is necessarily the case that it cannot be read to have provided implicit authorization for the administration to eavesdrop in violation of FISA.
More importantly, the Court held that Common Article 3 of Geneva aplies as a matter of treaty obligation to the conflict against Al Qaeda. That is the HUGE part of today's ruling. The commissions are the least of it. This basically resolves the debate about interrogation techniques, because Common Article 3 provides that detained persons "shall in all circumstances be treated humanely," and that "[t]o this end," certain specified acts "are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever"—including "cruel treatment and torture," and "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment." This standard, not limited to the restrictions of the due process clause, is much more restrictive than even the McCain Amendment. See my further discussion here.UPDATE: Washington Post:
This almost certainly means that the CIA's interrogation regime is unlawful, and indeed, that many techniques the Administation has been using, such as waterboarding and hypothermia (and others) violate the War Crimes Act (because violations of Common Article 3 are deemed war crimes).
The Supreme Court today delivered a stunning rebuke to the Bush administration over its plans to try Guantanamo detainees before military commissions, ruling that the commissions are unconstitutional.Just coming in now.
The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that President Bush overstepped his authority in ordering military war crimes trials for Guantanamo Bay detainees.Not so quaint after all, those Geneve Conventions.
The ruling, a rebuke to the administration and its aggressive anti-terror policies, was written by Justice John Paul Stevens, who said the proposed trials were illegal under U.S. law and Geneva conventions.
Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a strongly worded dissent, saying the court's decision would "sorely hamper the president's ability to confront and defeat a new and deadly enemy."Three of the four horsemen of the apocalypse would have given Bush a blank check, big surprise. And had Roberts been involved, he recused himself, it's not hard to imagine that he'd have supported Bush's power grab as well. One more vote folks, and there is no stopping this administration. The next Supreme Cour vacancy, if it's one of the reasonable judges, and there will be no more checks on this administration. Read More......
The court's willingness, Thomas said, "to second-guess the determination of the political branches that these conspirators must be brought to justice is both unprecedented and dangerous."
Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito also filed dissents.
With opposition to the war threatening to hurt the GOP in this fall's congressional elections, Bush gave an impassioned plea for voters to re-elect Republicans who have supported his national security policies. He repeatedly pointed his finger in the air to emphasize his points and at several points his voice rose to a shout.As Think Progress noted, White House aide Dan Bartlett couldn't really name anyone who wants to wave the white flag. But we all know that doesn't stop Bush from saying it. He lies.
"Make no mistake about it, there's a group in the opposition party who are willing to retreat before the mission is done," Bush said. "They're willing to wave the white flag of surrender. And if they succeed, the United States will be worse off and the world will be worse off."
"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? Read More......
But the important thing here is the principle, is that we don't let Congress tell the press what they can and cannot publish. You know, I -- I lived in Eastern Europe for five years during the 1990s and reported there. And I know what happens in countries where the government tries to suppress or intimidate or censor the press, because that's what the communists did to my friends.Yes, that's what communists did -- not what nations with freedom of the press do.
I remember it being 2AM and it was colder than hell out. I was walking the wall with a friend, and there were still tons of people. We were looking for any chink we could find in order to get even a small piece of it. I finally found a two-foot stretch of re-bar (basically, big long metal pole that goes inside of concrete to help be its frame, I guess), sticking halfway out of the wall. I twisted and pulled and pushed that thing for 20 minutes to try to get it to break off, and as I did so, pieces of the wall, only a few inches across, but with paint on them (!), started to come off. Finally, the re-bar, now hot as hell from the torquing back and forth, broke off. I was ecstatic. I had quite possibly one of the most unique souvenirs ever from the Berlin Wall. (Yes, I brought it on the plane, but such was the advantage of traveling with Congress, we had our own plane.)
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."Then there are the final two paragraphs of the article, the absolutely best part:
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.
Webb left the Republican party over Bush's handling of the war in Iraq. He has written novels informed by his Vietnam experience and a recent non-fiction book "Born Fighting."Read More......
Allen is a first-term senator mentioned as a possible 2008 presidential candidate. While he was a student at the University of Virginia, Allen worked summers at ranches in the Southwest.
[Barbara] Walters didn't discuss on the air why Reynolds, an original cast member who's been on the show for nine years, wasn't being asked back. She said in an interview Tuesday that research showed audience members were turned off by [Star Jones] Reynolds' dramatic weight loss and glitzy wedding to banker Al Reynolds in 2004.Now, Starr Jones occasionally gets on my nerves. But firing a woman because the audience didn't like the fact that she lost weight? When she used to, frankly, be enormously obese. And this is a problem. Geez.
17% - Human Rights Campaign (gay civil rights)Read More......
0% - NARAL (pro-choice group)
34% - Humane Society
44% - ACLU
74% - NAACP
50% - John Birch Society (insanely conservative)
50% - Eagle Forum (Phyllis Schlafly)
53% - Christian Coalition
100% - National Education Association (they're a good education group)
56% - League of Conservation Voters
78% - Children's Defense Fund
45% - US PIRG
92% - National Rifle Association
House Republicans failed Wednesday to advance a bill protecting the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. Only a day earlier, the GOP had placed the measure on its "American Values Agenda" in hopes of bolster the party's prospects in the fall election.Read More......
But Republicans could not muster a simple majority on the issue in a committee where they outnumber Democrats by six....
A simple majority is required to report a bill to the House floor with a favorable committee recommendation. The House Judiciary Committee split 15-15 on the pledge bill Wednesday; Rep. Bob Inglis, R-S.C., joined 14 Democrats to oppose it.
Ten of the committee's 23 Republicans did not show up for the vote. The chairman, Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., said he would try again for a majority on Thursday.
Bush administration officials have been lining up to condemn The New York Times for revealing a program to track financial transactions as part of the war on terrorism. But if the Times’ revelation about a program to monitor international exchanges is so damaging, why has the administration been chattering about efforts to monitor domestic transactions for nearly five years?Read More......
Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, many journalists — including this one — were briefed by U.S. Customs officials on Operation Green Quest, an effort to roll up terrorist financiers by monitoring, among other things, "suspicious" bank transfers and ancient money lending programs favored by people of Middle Eastern descent.
I interviewed Marcy Forman, director of Green Quest, at her Washington offices in December 2001, when I was a writer for Government Executive magazine. Our meeting was sanctioned by Customs' public affairs office, and came at a time when the White House was eager to talk about all the work federal agencies were doing to hunt down terrorists. Forman told me the kinds of people, transactions, even locations that the government was targeting. (These are details, it should be noted, that the recent Times piece did not reveal.) Among the potentially sensitive items Forman told me, which were published:
“Operation Green Quest is focusing on the informal, largely paperless form of money exchange known as hawala, which is Arabic for ‘to change.’”
“Few undercover agents can penetrate Middle Eastern communities and money laundering rings because they look like outsiders and don't speak the language…. As a result, Green Quest has to be more clever, by setting traps on the Internet and working to flush currency traffickers out of their hiding places.”
“Treasury and FBI investigators have identified hawala as a means by which the alleged Sept. 11 terrorists may have received money from overseas.”
“Green Quest investigators, who've spent their careers dismantling money laundering rackets, were blindsided by the existence of the system. ‘Most of us couldn't spell hawala’ before Sept. 11,’ Forman said.”
“The agencies' [involved in Green Quest] cooperative efforts have recently culminated in raids of alleged money laundering operations that aid suspected terrorist networks.”
“Green Quest also wants to lower the threshold at which bank deposits and electronic funds transfers must be documented. Dropping the ceiling from $10,000 to $750, Forman said, may force money traffickers to try to get their cash out of the country by hand. They would then be subject to capture by a beefed-up cadre of Customs Service officers at border crossings, airports and seaports.”
WASHINGTON -- Sen. Barack Obama chastised fellow Democrats on Wednesday for failing to "acknowledge the power of faith in the lives of the American people," and said the party must compete for the support of evangelicals and other churchgoing Americans.Read More......
"Not every mention of God in public is a breach to the wall of separation. Context matters," the Illinois Democrat said in remarks prepared for delivery to a conference of Call to Renewal, a faith-based movement to overcome poverty.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld most of the Texas congressional map engineered by former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay but threw out part, saying some of the new boundaries failed to protect minority voting rights.Read More......
The fractured decision was a small victory for Democratic and minority groups who accused Republicans of an unconstitutional power grab in drawing boundaries that booted four Democratic incumbents out of office.
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority, said Hispanics do not have a chance to elect a candidate of their choosing under the plan.
Other bills are certain to spark controversy.Yes, for Republicans that was the true lesson of Hurricane Katrina. Not enough guns. Read More......
One would to strip the Supreme Court and other federal courts of jurisdiction over cases challenging the constitutionality of the Pledge of Allegiance. The legislation is a response to a 2002 Appeals Court ruling that held the pledge is unconstitutional because of the presence of the words "under God." A federal judge made a similar ruling last fall, citing the appeals court precedent.
Another measure would block the payment of attorney fees in challenges to the display of the Ten Commandments in public areas and other, similar church-state lawsuits.
An abortion-related proposal would require that some women seeking to end their pregnancies be informed the procedure "will cause the unborn child pain" and they have the option of receiving drugs to reduce or eliminate it. A separate measure would ban human cloning, a prohibition that cleared the House in the previous Congress.
Two measures relate to the rights of gun owners. One would prohibit the confiscation of legal firearms during national emergencies, barring practices such as the one that officials said arose in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina hit.
The measure is backed by the National Rifle Association, which has hailed the recent passage of a state law in Louisiana. "The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina became the proving ground for what American gun owners have always feared: the day that government bureaucrats throw the Bill of Rights in the trash and declare freedom to be whatever they say it is," Wayne LaPierre, NRA executive vice president, said in a statement posted on the organization's Web site.
Italian Environment Minister Alfonso Pecoraro Scanio said in Luxembourg at a European Union session on the environment that the bear, a protected species, should have been shot with tranquilizers and transported back to Italy. The Italian news agency Apcom said Scanio complained that his German counterpart, Sigmar Gabriel, appeared unaware of Italy's offer to send specialists to capture and repatriate the animal."We consider very serious and irresponsible the shooting of a bear, which was an example of a protected species being reintroduced in Italy," Scanio told reporters. "It is not credible that the EU asks all the world to protect species threatened with extinction, such as elephants or rhinoceroses in Africa, and then allow a protected bear to be slain on its own territory."
Like he said.
Not really.
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