GOP Senator tied to hooker

Sweet.

Extra points for anyone who can dig up any good "family values" quotes and votes from this guy. Read More......

Progress report on Iraq to conclude that Iraqi government has met ZERO of its targets. Zero.

From AP:

A progress report on Iraq will conclude that the U.S.-backed government in Baghdad has not met any of its targets for political, economic and other reform, speeding up the Bush administration's reckoning on what to do next, a U.S. official said Monday.

One likely result of the report will be a vastly accelerated debate among President Bush's top aides on withdrawing troops and scaling back the U.S. presence in Iraq.

The "pivot point" for addressing the matter will no longer be Sept. 15, as initially envisioned, when a full report on Bush's so-called "surge" plan is due, but instead will come this week when the interim mid-July assessment is released, the official said.

You better believe that the White House would rather address the issue now than in September - come September, Bush will have even fewer Republicans supporting him. He's going to try to lock in some compromise "stay the course" policy now when his hand is better than it will be in two months. A real fascinating turnabout from the White House's tune of the past month, claiming that September was no longer the date on which we would revisit our Iraq strategy. While the White House was pushing for a later date, they've just embraced an earlier one.

Full panic mode. Read More......

Turkish invasion of Iraq could be imminent

And prepare for the entire place to go up in flames (moreso than already, that is), while all we have to respond with is a commander in chief who is an idiot and a military that he's broken. I explained last month why a Turkish invasion would cause a big mess.

No one could have predicted that Turkey might invade Iraq. Oh no, that's right, they did predict it. Read More......

Harriet Miers may finally get her hearing on the Hill

Oh sure, George Bush is invoking executive privilege. And, yes, it's not quite the Supreme Court nomination hearing she once expected, but Harriet Miers may finally end up at a Hill hearing. She probably won't be saying much, besides invoking the Fifth amendment, but she has to be there -- as does Karl Rove's aide, Sara Taylor:

Democrats involved with the two Hill investigations into the firing of the federal prosecutors are insisting that former White House aides Sara Taylor and Harriet Miers show up as requested this week at hearings -- regardless of today's claim of executive privilege.Their arguments can be summarized like this:

-- The subpoena requires two things: 1) to show up and 2) to testify. Invoking privilege does not excuse a subpoenaed witness from appearing. The House Judiciary is telling Miers to show up no matter what, and they are proceeding as if she will. She is due before House Judiciary Committee on Thursday. Taylor was summoned to appear Wednesday before the Senate committee.

Read More......

Senator Webb pushing military readiness and actually supporting the troops. What a concept.

Today, the Senate is re-starting the debate on Iraq. For too long, Bush and the Republicans have bastardized the term "support the troops." Senator Jim Webb (D-VA), who knows a thing or two about the military, is introducing legislation that will actually support the troops. It's not just rhetoric, it's real policy:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senator Jim Webb today discussed Democrats' efforts to change course in Iraq and to ensure that our military and National Guard units deploying for combat operations are supported properly. Following the three deadliest months of the war, Democrats are forcing President Bush and Iraqis to finally accept some measure of accountability for this war through the Defense Authorization bill this week. Starting off the debate, Webb will introduce an amendment to the bill that requires active-duty troops to have at least the same amount of time at home as the length of their previous tour overseas.

“The war is headed in a dangerous direction, and Americans are united in the belief that we cannot wait until the Administration’s September report before we change course in Iraq,” Reid said. “Attacks on U.S. forces are up, Iraqi political leaders are frozen in a dangerous stalemate and a change at every front is required if we are to succeed. We cannot ask our military to continue to fight without a strategy for success, and we certainly cannot ask them to fight before they are ready to do so.”

“Now in the fifth year of ground operations in Iraq, this deck of cards has come crashing down, and it’s landing heavily on the backs of soldiers and Marines who have been deployed again and again while the rest of the country sits back and debates Iraq as an intellectual or emotional exercise,” Webb said. “We’ve reached the point where we can no longer allow the ever-changing nature of this Administration’s operational policies to drive the way our troops are being deployed. In fact, the reverse is true. The availability of our troops should be the main determinant of how ground operations should be conducted.”

Webb knows what's he talking about. On the other hand, as I wrote this morning, Karl Rove is helping to direct the Bush administration's Iraq policy. That means they'll be thinking about politics, like usual, and not the men and women on the front lines of the war Bush started.

On Iraq, the Democrats are focusing on real policies that will support the troops. All we'll get from Bush are more games, more spin, more slogans -- and that only means more dead and wounded American soldiers. Letting Rove play politics with Iraq is a sick way to show support for the troops. We'll see who the GOP Senators side with -- the troops or George Bush and Karl Rove. Read More......

Iraq government continues to falter; no-confidence vote next?

CBS reports that members of the Iraqi Accord Front (IAF), the largest Sunni bloc in Iraq's parliament, will call for a vote of no confidence for Prime Minister Maliki next week. CBS says a "broad political alliance" called the "Iraq Project," apparently led by the IAF, claims it has the votes to pass the no-confidence vote.

Frustratingly, the report doesn't identify the parties that (allegedly?) make up the Iraq Project. For a no-confidence motion to come to the floor, either 50 members of parliament (OR the prime minister and president, though obviously that's not the case here) must call for such a vote. There are enough Sunni representatives to reach that number, with the 44 IAF members joined by 11 in the National Dialogue Front, and even some disaffected Shia may also move to bring a full floor vote on no-confidence. In the event of the passage of a no-confidence vote, the government is considered resigned. It's important to note that this would not trigger new elections for the entire parliament, but -- as far as I understand -- would necessitate the formation of a new governing coalition that would have to achieve a majority. That majority coalition would then nominate a new prime minister, and by any math I can figure, it would still be a ruling combination of primarily Shia and Kurds.

But to pass a vote of no-confidence, an absolute majority (138 of the 275 members) is required. I just do not see the votes. The Kurds will not support it, as they have no interest in throwing the government into further chaos, so that's 58 against. I seriously doubt SIIC (formerly SCIRI) will vote with the Sunnis to depose a Shia PM, despite Maliki's ineffectiveness, which is roughly 30, plus Dawa (Maliki's party) has 15, for a total of 103 opposing. Even if all the Sunnis and the smaller parties join together, that's only about 60 votes, with the rest being Shia parties, including Sadrists, the Virtue Party, and Allawi's secular Iraqi National List. I don't think the Sunnis will get enough defections from those groups for a no-confidence motion to pass.

They may succeed in getting the vote, however, and it will be very interesting to see where the parties line up. Further, the report claims that Cheney "discussed in detail" this possibility with Tariq Hashimi, one of the leaders of the IAF, but it does not say what his reaction was to the plan. A failed vote of no confidence might actually strengthen Maliki, especially if it forced Shia parties to publicly decide between him and voting with the Sunni bloc, but it's certainly not a good sign that over a year into Maliki's tenure he still has not consolidated enough power to obviate this kind of maneuver.

Most importantly, the stated goal of the escalation was to provide room for political progress. It is manifestly not doing that. Read More......

Bush says he won't let former staff testify about whether he broke the law

Executive privilege or obstruction of justice?

President Bush invoked executive privilege Monday to deny requests by Congress for testimony from two former aides about the firings of federal prosecutors.

The White House, however, did offer again to make former counsel Harriet Miers and one-time political director Sara Taylor available for private, off-the-record interviews.

Here we go again with the "you can talk to them so long as you don't tell the public what they said, and so long as you don't take any notes and they're not under oath - so they can lie." Bush thinks he is accountable to no one, to hell with the law. Read More......

Rep. Dingell (D-MI) tried to gut global warming efforts and CAFE standards last month

And Pelosi, to her great credit, stood up to him. And she's right. It would have been all out war had Dingell tried to pass this crap. This happened last month, reportedly:

[John] Dingell (D-Mich.) [chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee] appeared in the speaker's conference room to walk through a bill that would override California's attempts to combat global warming by raising fuel efficiency standards, strip the Environmental Protection Agency of its authority to regulate greenhouse gases and promote a controversial effort to turn coal into liquid fuel.

This time, Pelosi was in no mood to mollify Dingell. The bill he was sponsoring, she said, was unacceptable. The environmental costs would be too severe, the political costs for the Democratic caucus too high, she said.

We've written about Dingell before. The man is a shill for the auto industry, and couldn't give a damn about global warming or helping ween us from our dependency on oil. Maybe a Democrat who pushes Senator Inhofe's extreme loony-tunes agenda doesn't deserve to be a Democratic committee chair. Read More......

Rove still setting Bush's Iraq policy

Iraq has always been first and foremost a political issue for the Bush White House. Same for national security. Politics trumps policy every time. In today's NY Times, we see one more time that Karl Rove is playing a key role in setting the Bush administration's Iraq policy. Bush doesn't listen to the military. He listens to Karl Rove. So, one more time, we see that politics matters more than anything:

Last week, Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, called in from a brief vacation to join intense discussions in sessions that included Karl Rove, Mr. Bush’s longtime strategist, and Joshua B. Bolten, the White House chief of staff.

Officials describe the meetings as more of a running discussion than an argument. They say that no one is clinging to a stay-the-course position but that instead aides are trying to game out what might happen if the president becomes more specific about the start and the shape of what the White House is calling a “post-surge redeployment.”

The views of many of the participants in that discussion were unclear, and the officials interviewed could not provide any insight into what Vice President Dick Cheney had been telling President Bush.

They described Mr. Hadley as deeply concerned that the loss of Republicans could accelerate this week, a fear shared by Mr. Rove. But they also said that Mr. Rove had warned that if Mr. Bush went too far in announcing a redeployment, the result could include a further cascade of defections — and the passage of legislation that would force a withdrawal by a specific date, a step Mr. Bush has always said he would oppose.

To the Bush team, the politics and appearances are more important than anything. Now, this strategy has gotten Bush down to a 26% approval rating and has the U.S. trapped in the middle of a civil war. But, Bush and Rove are never wrong. Ever. Read More......

Monday Morning Open Thread

Things are heating up in D.C. -- literally and figuratively. The heat will be "oppressive" this week. More importantly, we're going to find out if the Republican Senators who claim to have changed their positions on Iraq are just blowing hot air. They'll say they want a change in Iraq, but will they actually vote for change?

Might as well get it started. Read More......

Iraq Foreign Minister: US pullout could lead to civil war

As opposed to the civil war already in motion? If the Iraqi government cares so little about training its own military after four years, why should anyone else? Read More......

Blair spin doctor releases new book

Let the post-PM spin begin on shaping the Blair legacy. Alastair Campbell's new book is obviously kind to the man he helped position in the British media though there are a few interesting tidbits in there. While I'm not buying the "Bush really isn't as much of a thicko as everyone thinks" spin (haven't we heard that before?) I do find the prewar discussion interesting.

The Campbell book sheds light on a dispute at the highest levels of the Bush administration over whether it should back Britain's call for another UN resolution. Six months before the invasion, Karen Hughes, President George Bush's communications adviser, said "not too convincingly" that the US President was always going to go down the UN route, Mr Campbell writes. But Dick Cheney, the Vice-President, "looked very sour" throughout talks at Camp David because he favoured immediate action. "After dinner, when TB and Bush walked alone to the chopper, Bush was open with him that Cheney was in a different position," says Mr Campbell.

President Bush joked to Mr Campbell: "I suppose you can tell the story of how Tony flew in and pulled the crazed unilateralist back from the brink." Mr Campbell insists the President is "far more impressive close up" and believes he "comes over better than people might expect" in his book.

The good-cop-bad-cop method is time tested and considering Cheney's reputation, it could easily be pulled off. So was Bush playing this game or does it just provide more support to the talk about who really runs the White House? Either way is still sounds like basic spin to help Blair justify his own theory on how he softened the position of the Bush team. Looking over the past six years, he was never successful in showing any progress with softening the radical agenda of Bush-Cheney, right up until the very last G8 meeting when Bush rejected serious discussions on climate change. In the end, Blair was just a gullible fool. Read More......

More problems at Department of not-so-much Homeland Security

How can DHS continue to have so many problems and why is there such little regard for the impact both on the organization as well as the impact on Americans who are looking towards DHS to perform its duties? The latest excuse - and that's all they ever have at DHS, excuses - is that they are far behind on hiring because of the number of new positions suddenly available. Anyone who has ever done business with the government knows that nothing "suddenly" just happens. Processes take time, a very long time, with the government so how could they not be prepared for the need to hire new professionals? How is it even possible to be surprised at the growth of an organization that you are running?

Of the 138 vacant positions, the DHS provided no explanation for 70, according to the House report. Seven others had tentative or pending appointees and 60 were under recruitment.

The department currently has 130 vacancies at senior levels, Knocke said, with 92 now in the process of recruitment.

Unfortunately after recent examples with this administration, it's highly likely that the delay is connected with finding the proper number of political hacks to dictate political policy instead of general competence in a field. This group is so cynical and has nothing but contempt for the American system. Read More......