Night of the 13th, big meteor shower coming

This one should be very cool, if the skies are clear. I saw a fireball one night out in West Virginia. One of the coolest things I've ever seen in my life. It was not a plain old shooting star. It was literally a ball of fire in the sky. Absolutely amazing. Read More......

Pentagon afraid war opponents (that would be you) might try to poison our troops

Real piece of work, these people.

Hundreds of thousands of holiday cards and letters thanking wounded American troops for their sacrifice and wishing them well never reach their destination. They are returned to sender or thrown away unopened.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks and the anthrax scare, the Pentagon and the Postal Service have refused to deliver mail addressed simply to "Any Wounded Soldier" for fear terrorists or opponents of the war might send toxic substances or demoralizing messages.

Then again, war opponents fear Pentagon leaders will send our troops to a war based on a lie with insufficient manpower, equipment, and plans for victory. Oh that's right, they already have. Read More......

Huckabee: "Nobody's going to find some YouTube moments of me saying something radically different than what I'm saying today." Uh, wanna bet?

From AP:

• Called for the elimination of political action committees and campaign contributions from lobbyists. He also said candidates should not be allowed to receive contributions until one year before an election and said there should be limits on the amount of out-of-state money they could accept.

As Arkansas governor, Huckabee formed a political action committee based in Virginia to raise money for non-federal candidates that allowed him to travel and raise his profile for a potential presidential run. The Hope for America PAC shut down earlier this year as Huckabee entered the White House race.

• Said he would not support any tax increases if elected to the Senate. Huckabee's record of raising some taxes as Arkansas' governor has drawn fire from fiscal conservatives in the presidential race.

• When asked whether the U.S. should take any action to kill Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, Huckabee replied: "The U.S. should not kill Saddam Hussein or anyone else." The U.S. military captured Saddam, an Iraqi court convicted him and he was hanged last December.

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Huckabee: Had I known I was running for president, I'd have lied to you earlier

An amazing admission.

Scrutiny of Mike Huckabee's time in Arkansas continues today with the report that during his years in the governor's mansion, Huckabee denounced the embargo against Cuba. Now five years later and running for president, Huckabee praised that same embargo as "an important tool.”

Huckabee acknowledged his shifting views yesterday, saying the change is due to the “simple reality that I’m running for president.” As governor of Arkansas, Huckabee was carrying around 100 extra pounds, and apparently, over 1,000 pardons. Translation: had he known he was going to run for president, he probably would have done a few things differently.

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Wash Post national poll: Huckabee closing in on Giuliani; Hillary still far ahead in Dem race

But, as Joe always points out, this is a national poll and national polls don't really matter. Why? Because, traditionally, whoever wins Iowa will get a ten point boost going in to New Hampshire (and whoever loses Iowa will get a ten point hit going into New Hampshire). And whoever wins New Hampshire will get a boost for the primaries after that. What matters is how well you do in the first few primary states, not how well you do in national polls, simply because we don't have a one-day, national, winner-take-all primary. From the Washington Post:

Former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani continues to lead the Republican field in the national poll, but his support is at its lowest point this year. Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, has more than doubled his support among likely GOP voters since early November and runs just behind Giuliani....

The Democratic race nationally continues to feature Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) far ahead of Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) and the rest of the field. But a highly competitive campaign in Iowa pitting Clinton, Obama and former senator John Edwards (N.C.), along with signs of a tightening contest in New Hampshire, suggests that the Democratic race is also far from settled.

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CIA still peddling the lie that low-level crazy man proves waterboarding is a good thing

This is just too much. From AP:

According to the former agent, waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah got him to talk in less than 35 seconds. The technique, which critics say is torture, probably disrupted "dozens" of planned al-Qaida attacks, said John Kiriakou, a leader of the team that captured Zubaydah, a major al-Qaida figure.

In fact, dear friends at AP who claim without any sourcing whatsoever that Zubaydah was a "major" Al Qaeda official, he was a low-level official and categorically insane. As Joe wrote the other day, here's how the Washington Post's review of Suskind's book describes him:

Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be. CIA and FBI analysts, poring over a diary he kept for more than a decade, found entries "in the voice of three people: Hani 1, Hani 2, and Hani 3" -- a boy, a young man and a middle-aged alter ego. All three recorded in numbing detail "what people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said." Dan Coleman, then the FBI's top al-Qaeda analyst, told a senior bureau official, "This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality."

Abu Zubaydah also appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations; rather, he was al-Qaeda's go-to guy for minor logistics -- travel for wives and children and the like. That judgment was "echoed at the top of CIA and was, of course, briefed to the President and Vice President," Suskind writes. And yet somehow, in a speech delivered two weeks later, President Bush portrayed Abu Zubaydah as "one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States." And over the months to come, under White House and Justice Department direction, the CIA would make him its first test subject for harsh interrogation techniques.

It is amazing the degree to which these people just lie. Read More......

Being informed is depressing

I had the strongest sense of deja vu reading this fantastic piece on how *depressing* it is to be informed these days. I don't know if I read a similar article before, or if it's just something I've been thinking about for a while, but the tagline really sums it up well: "Staying informed has become -- for so many of us -- a moral obligation that feels like hell."

As the author, Courtney Martin, laments,

Some weekends it feels like a masochistic, last-ditch effort to keep myself from going numb. Some weekends, I can hardly read the headlines without feeling myself being pulled into a morass of 21st century existential pain over the challenges of living aware in a globalized world with so much violence, soulless bureaucracy, and disappointing leadership. . . .

It seems to be that we haven't figured out systems -- educational, governmental, non-governmental -- for actualizing the inevitable outrage, sadness, and empathy that we feel as a direct result of contemporary world news.

I've been a news junkie ever since I can remember, and I was giddy when the internet made available more news and analysis on more topics and issues than I ever could have imagined. There's only so much one can read, though, so I started with mostly domestic electoral politics and foreign policy. And there's enough depressing news on those topics to last a lifetime.

A while ago, though, I decided to add to my list of topics to know something about. I decided that I knew embarrassingly little about health care, so I read a few books and started reading health care blogs. Not surprisingly, this is a pretty gloomy subject: lots of people uninsured, underinsured, and generally getting screwed.

Then, God help me, I added some feminist blogs to the rotation. And sure, everybody knows that women are mistreated in a variety of contexts, but when you read the actual stories, day after day, at home and abroad, it's really quite horrifying.

Plus economics here, global warming there, and poverty way over there (but wait, also here), it's pretty overwhelming -- and more importantly, it seems like nothing one individual (or even a small group of individuals) would even begin to make a dent.

No wonder I've made CuteOverload a part of the rotation -- adorable animals are the only thing that can push back against this onslaught . . . Read More......

Huckabee says AIDS may be spread through casual contact

The man is certifiably insane. No one thinks that AIDS may be spread by casual contact, it's simply not true, nor has anyone even considered the possibility for over a decade, if not two. From AP:

Huckabee acknowledged the prevailing scientific view then, and since, that the virus that causes AIDS is not spread through casual contact, but said that was not certain.

Remember that Huckabee is also the guy who doesn't believe in evolution. He's also the guy who hadn't heard of the Iran NIE long after the story was national news. Huckabee may be a smooth talker, but it's becoming increasingly clear that he's nothing more than another dumb guy with a drawl, and our current dumb guy with a drawl in the Oval Office is more than enough for this lifetime. Read More......

Do the French really hate Americans?

AMERICAblog Paris correspondent Chris Ryan and his lovely French wife Joelle Planche visited AMERICAblog world headquarters this past weekend, so we did a little podcast about what Europeans are currently thinking about Americans, the elections, and more. You can listen to the podcast here. It actually ended up being quite fun, and funny, I think - I'm thinking I'm going to get Chris and Joelle online from Paris via skype to do more of these in the future. Oh, and for those still trying to figure out what a podcast is - it's simply an audio recording, like a radio show, that you can listen to on your computer. And if you're even more computer literate, you can have it downloaded to your iPod and listen to it on the way to work, while working out at the gym, etc. They're usually from 15 to 30 minutes long, so perfect for a commute or workout. I think you'll like this one.

As always, you can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes here, you can subscribe to the podcast's RSS feed here, or you can just listen to the file directly here (it's an mp3). And you can listen to any of our old shows via the iTunes link or the Feedburner link above. Read More......

Democrats who refuse to lead

There was an important post yesterday over at DailyKos that I wanted to share with you. In discussing the latest congressional Democratic cave over Iraq, Hunter notes the following: "It is crystal clear that the Congressional Democrats are divided and incapable at best, and incompetent at worst." Yes and no. The problem goes much deeper than capability or competence. The current crop of Democrats don't know how to fight. They're afraid to fight, they're incompetent at fighting, and they're incapable of fighting because they don't know how to fight. They think that issuing a press release with the right talking points is fighting back. They think that holding a simple press conference on the Hill will generate a news story. And they think that a single, or even a week's worth, of news stories is a victory. They simply do not understand what the Republicans all know too well - how to take a story, a theme, and jam it down your opponents' throats for weeks, if not months, if not years, on end. To a Democrat, if you get a blurb in the Washington Post, one day, that's a public relations victory. To a Republican, once that blurb is repeated every day for 30 years then they declare victory.

The current crop of Democrats and their consultants and the non-profit advocacy groups in town have no idea how to fight like a Republican, how to fight to win. It's not just a lack of will, a lack of backbone, they quite literally don't know how to fight, so when they do rarely fight back, and lose because it was done so poorly, the lesson they take away isn't that they need to learn how to fight better, but rather, they think they lost because they fought back. And it will get them nowhere until they realize that they don't know what they're doing, and others do. Read More......

Small businesses in America losing optimism on economy

It's a bit tough to be optimistic when all you see are corporate handouts to the biggest businesses in America. The Democrats really need to step back and think about how they can assist small businesses instead of the never-ending gravy train to big business. Big business is not going to hire new employees and it has been that way for years. Small business is what will carry the US economy to the next level. It will be small business that will hire employees, pay taxes and not suck up corporate welfare.

Looking back over the last few years, everything has been about blocking competition and shoveling over handouts, hand over fist, to the biggest and whiniest companies in America. I expect to see such policies elsewhere, but in the US, this simply does not fit. Democrats ought to be reaching out to small business. There is so much that can be done here and this is where the future is. Allowing the same old big names to dominate didn't work out very well for the Soviet Union and I don't see if working out very well for the US either. Read More......

Tuesday Morning Open Thread

Two weeks til Christmas. How did that happen?

Let's get started. Read More......