Friday Orchid Blogging

This is a paphiopedilum from the recent orchid show in DC. I know nothing about it, other than it's cool. The shine is for real - some of these have the most amazing shine to them, and great colors, obviously. Enjoy, JOHN Read the rest of this post...

Karl Rove thinks Americans want to stay in Iraq

God bless you, Karl. I can't wait to see the next election results in 2008 when we win back the presidency too because Karl tells Bush that keeping troops in Iraq is going to lead to great things.

More from Mike Allen at TIME:

Rove took comfort in results of the Connecticut Senate race between the anti-war Democratic nominee, Ned Lamont, and Sen. Joseph Lieberman, who ran as an independent after losing the Democratic primary over his support for the war. "Iraq mattered," Rove says. "But it was more frustration than it was an explicit call for withdrawal. If this was a get-out-now call for withdrawal, then Lamont would not have been beaten by Lieberman. Iraq does play a role, but not the critical, central role."

Yeah, Karl Rove takes comfort in the fact that a Democratic Senator won back his seat and is now helping the Dems keep the majority in the Senate. If that's Karl's definition of comfort, then I'd like to make him as comfortable as possible.

As for Iraq, as noted above, keep the troops there for another two years and, come next election, Rove and Bush are gonna be looking back on the Katrina fiasco as the good old days. And finally, there's this:

At the White House senior staff meeting in the Roosevelt Room at 7:30 a.m. on Wednesday, Chief of Staff Josh Bolten thanked Karl Rove for his hard work in the elections, and the group around the big table burst into spontaneous applause.

Oh, trust me - we were giving Karl the same applause. We couldn't have done it without him. Read the rest of this post...

Why does George Bush insist on making Al Qaeda happy?

Maybe Dick Cheney needs to give George Bush a stern lesson about not emboldening the terrorists. Read the rest of this post...

46% of Evangelicals think Clinton was as good a Christian, or better, than Bush

A new survey of evangelical Christians. Some interesting points:

Over 52 percent still felt Bush was a better Christian than former Democratic President Bill Clinton, while 13 percent felt the reverse was true. About a third rated them evenly.

52% thought Bush was a bitter Christian than Clinton. Okay, but about a third, 33% or so, thought they were even, and 13% thought Clinton was a better Christian than Bush. Combined, that means 46% of evangelicals thought Clinton was as good a Christian, or better, than Bush. That's interesting.

Oh yeah, and they can't stand Jerry Falwell, who keeps claiming he's one of their leaders.

Among Christian leaders, evangelist Billy Graham -- a household name in America who has long distanced himself from overt political activity -- was viewed favorably by 86 percent of the evangelicals polled by Beliefnet.

The Rev. Jerry Falwell, a prominent conservative Christian, was viewed in a favorable light by only 17 percent.

Read the rest of this post...

Bush is concerned that the country doesn't think Republicans are patriotic

That's what he's implying here: that one of the parties needs to prove their patriotism. And we know it's not Democrats.

Democrats believe in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the separation of powers, an independent judiciary, not using our armed forces as political props and throwing their lives away for nothing, the diversity and civil rights of all Americans, and so much more.

Yes, it's clearly the Republicans Bush must be talking about. How sad for Republicans.

"My attitude about this is that there is a great opportunity for us to show the country that Republicans and Democrats are equally as patriotic and equally concerned about the future, and that we can work together," said Bush...

Why doesn't George Bush think Republicans love America? Read the rest of this post...

Hmm... Rummy waterboarded...

If he has nothing to hide...

Just days after his resignation, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is about to face more repercussions for his involvement in the troubled wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. New legal documents, to be filed next week with Germany's top prosecutor, will seek a criminal investigation and prosecution of Rumsfeld, along with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former CIA director George Tenet and other senior U.S. civilian and military officers, for their alleged roles in abuses committed at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Hey, maybe the Germans can try that cute little trick that Bush's CIA did in Italy. Just swoop in and steal people off the street of a NATO ally, then ship them out of the country to be tortured. I mean, after all, America is the beacon of hope in the world and we set the standard for decency. Hell, we are decency country-ified. Anything we do is per se humane and legal. So why couldn't the Germans use the same tactics on us? I understand war criminals don't get the same rights as real people anyway - you know, like habeas corpus or the Geneva Conventions - so no harm no foul.

We are at war, you know. Read the rest of this post...

Religious right thinks GOP Senator George Allen's gay cabal threw the election for the Dems

And maybe they did. Too late now. Read the rest of this post...

Bush Defense pick has heavy baggage, including being accused of cherry picking intell to favor the White House, and lying under oath

Great, same circus, different clowns. This guy is going to be no different than Rumsfeld. And he has the added advantage of being heavily mired in Iran-Contra.

Speaking of which, when does Rummy get his medal?

From Newsweek:

Congressional records and transcripts extensively document the debate over Gates's credentials and record in the Bush and Reagan administrations. In one case, Democrats accused Gates of helping to push an allegedly contentious report about the Soviet Union's influence in Iran....

A report produced by Lawrence Walsh, the independent counsel appointed to conduct a criminal investigation of the Iran-contra affair, criticized Gates for possible lack of candor related to what he knew about the Reagan-era scandal. According to the report, Gates consistently testified that he first learned in October 1986 that money from the sales of arms to Iran may have been diverted to anticommunist contra forces in Central America. Other evidence, however, suggested that Gates got a report on the affair from a senior CIA official several months earlier. Walsh eventually decided that there was not enough evidence to warrant the filing of any criminal case against Gates. "In the end, although Gates's actions suggested an officer who was more interested in shielding his institution from criticism and in shifting the blame to the NSC [National Security Council] than in finding out the truth, there was insufficient evidence to charge Gates with a criminal endeavor to obstruct congressional investigations," Walsh wrote in his report.

Read the rest of this post...

Republican party chair Ken Mehlman was for black people before he was against them

My favorite part of the AP story about Mehlman's imminent departure from the head of the Republican party:

Last year, Mehlman told NAACP members that the Republican Party was wrong for ignoring the black vote for decades and said he hoped the groups could restore their historic bond.

"Some Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization," Mehlman said at the NAACP convention. "I come here as Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong."

Yes, that was July of last year, before the Republicans left thousands of black-Americans to fend for themselves in New Orleans while Bush stayed on vacation, and before Mehlman's own Republican National Committee ran racist ads just two weeks ago against African-American Democrat Harold Ford in Tennessee.

Yeah, Ken would never try to benefit from racial polarization.

Or homophobia. Read the rest of this post...

Conservative Bob Barr: Dems in Congress won't repeat GOP's mistakes

A really excellent analysis from former congressman, the very conservative Bob Barr:

[In 1994,] Many in the new [GOP] House majority incorrectly concluded that their 1994 victory was a mandate for all they had campaigned on: dramatically smaller government, quickly achieved; significantly lower taxes; and a complete rollback of many policies instituted in his first two years in office by their nemesis, President Bill Clinton (whom we repeatedly underestimated).

What many congressional Republicans failed to realize until much later was that their November victory was less of a vote of confidence in them and more a vote against Clinton. This miscalculation led to costly blunders in our first year; including trying to do too much too fast, which placed us far ahead of where the American public wanted us to be and where it felt comfortable being....

The Democrats will do everything in their power to avoid a return to second-class citizenship. They will be more likely than were the Republicans a dozen years ago to take modest steps, and to be careful lest rhetoric overtake feasible action. The goal for Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and her battle-hardened team will be to spend two years laying the groundwork for further gains in 2008, and to push an agenda that will provide a solid and likely centrist platform for their party's standard-bearer.

I think Barr is right on both fronts. The Democrats have put forth solid legislative proposals that the public supports, like increasing the minimum wage and implementing the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission. But in the end, those policies weren't the tipping point that won us the election, at least not exclusively. Bush's incompetence (Katrina), and Republican over-reach (Terri Schiavo), doomed the GOP - and fortunately, at the same time, a good crop of sane Democrats presented policy alternatives that the public endorsed (e.g., time to change the course in Iraq).

That means, the Democrats need to proceed with legislative moderation over the next few months, if not the next two years (as Barr notes in his last paragraph). The next two years aren't just about fixing the Iraq Problem and stopping the progression, and actually beginning to reverse, all the other damage the Republicans have done to our country and the world over the past twelve years. The Democrats need to think about the future, their future, our future. If they're thrown out of power again in 2 years, then any gains we make legislatively over the next 24 months won't mean squat - the GOP will simply reverse everything again.

Now, that doesn't mean the Democrats should be spineless wimps, or veer politically to the right in order to fool the public into thinking they're really Republicans. It's more about being mature than being conservative. The public likes backbone and they like straight-shooters. They don't like wimps, they don't like games, and they don't like extremes. That means, yes, you stand up to Bush when you need to. But it also means, no, you don't make impeachment a very high priority any time soon.

(Not that the public wouldn't support impeachment, some day - but you don't propose extreme solutions to problems until you lay the groundwork for those solutions, which includes convincing the public of the need and justification for those solutions so that the public doesn't think you're nuts. This was the problem with the Alito Filibuster, and so much more offered by certain feel-good Democrats. Feel-good solutions, well, feel good. But they get you nowhere if you don't have a plan for actually winning the hearts and minds of the public.)

The Democrats need to balance 'doing the right thing' with 'staying in power long enough to be able to continue doing the right thing.' And in that regard, I think Reid and Pelosi have set the right tone and promoted the right policies. Both are planning to begin with legislative initiatives the majority of the public welcomes. And both have made conciliatory gestures towards the Republicans and the White House in order to show the public that a Democratic victory isn't about retribution, it's about setting our country on the right course. That's smart policy, and it's smart politics. Read the rest of this post...

GOP redistricting "backfired"

Throughout the election cycle, the punditry repeated the conventional wisdom that the GOP had been so clever in their gerrymandering that it would be extremely difficult for the Democrats to make progress in the House. Today's Wall Street Journal explores the idea that instead of helping GOP incumbents, their overreaching on redistricting was the reason several incumbents lost:

Gerrymandering was supposed to cement Republican control of the House of Representatives, offering incumbents a wall of re-election protection even as public opinion turned sharply against them. Instead, the party's strategy of recrafting district boundaries may have backfired, contributing to the defeats of several lawmakers and the party's fall from power.

The reason: Republican leaders may have overreached and created so many Republican-leaning districts that they spread their core supporters too thinly. That left their incumbents vulnerable to the type of backlash from traditionally Republican-leaning independent voters that unfolded this week.

The conventional wisdom was wrong again -- especially in Pennsylvania and Florida.

Hat Tip Political Wire. Read the rest of this post...

Could Cheney look any happier?

Bush is looking on top of the world as well. Probably didn't help Cheney's mood that Bush dissed him:

It was no doubt inadvertent, but it was hard not to find some symbolism in the moment Thursday in the Oval Office when President Bush seemed to forget that Vice President Dick Cheney was in the room.

Read the rest of this post...

Secretary of Defense: What now?

Obviously the departure of Secretary Rumsfeld is a huge positive sign for Iraq, the U.S. military, and, well, sanity. Last month a poll revealed that 52% of Americans thought Secretary Rumsfeld should be fired -- not that he should leave, but that he should be fired -- and a bipartisan chorus has been calling for his ouster for years. His fatal flaws were myriad, including incompetence, arrogance, delusion, and unrelenting partisanship.

To me, though, the worst element of his tenure was the environment he created at the Department of Defense. Under his autocratic leadership, people began to fear and resist passing "bad" news up the chain of command. In a system where accurate assessments are literally the difference between life and death, the creation of that kind of atmosphere was unconscionable and unforgivable. It's hard for me to believe that his legacy will be one of anything but disgrace, and I can't think of a man more deserving of that fate.

Nominee Robert Gates is an establishment type, and served in the intelligence community over the course of four decades. He is well-liked in national security circles, demonstrated by the big wet kiss Rep. Harman bestowed (prematurely, I think) yesterday. The positives are that he has a long career in intelligence, is not generally thought of as a partisan hack (see: Goss, Porter), and, well, it's hard to imagine anybody worse than Secretary Rumsfeld. On the other hand, people are already up in arms about his connections to Iran-Contra principals, his long-standing connections to the Bush family, and allegations of cherry-picking intelligence analysis.

While I don't think unproven allegations are immediate disqualifiers, these elements will obviously require discussion and transparency. For those who want to see the nomination Borked for spite, remember that second nominations aren't necessarily better than the first (see: trading Miers for Alito). In any case, I don't think most criticism thus far addresses the most important issue: What does he think about Iraq?

Due to the massively failed current policies, it's vital that confirmation hearings be comprehensive and inclusive. The Senate must determine what Mr. Gates believes should be done in Iraq, and I'd be reassured by a repudiation of past policy. If he wants to work with officials on both sides of the aisle to change course, his appointment could be a beneficial development. If, however, he's being used as a fig leaf for continued poor strategy, that's unacceptable. It's up to the Senate to find out. (It's not encouraging, of course, that the President is trying to push him through in the upcoming session -- his nomination should be considered by the Senate Americans voted into power this week.)

Between the elections and Rumsfeld's ouster, the President has clearly entered lame duck territory. The question is, will the massive Democratic Congressional mandate force him to actually compromise and get things done to benefit the country, or will he dig in his heels? The press conference Wednesday was encouraging (if frequently bizarre), but I want to see some good faith from the administration and from Congressional Republicans before Dems start reaching out. Besides, with a Democratic majority in both houses, the question isn't whether we'll work with President Bush, but whether he'll work with us. We'll see. As The Wolf memorably said in Pulp Fiction, "Let's not start sucking each other's . . ." well, you know what he said. Secretary Rumsfeld's departure was long overdue, but with his ouster, and especially along with the Democratic landslide in Congress, I am, for the first time in a while, hopeful. Read the rest of this post...

Chafee to block Bolton decision

Payback is a bitch. Especially when it is your own party that is paying back.

Along with Bolton's nomination, Bush said he would like to move forward on legislation to retroactively authorize the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program.

Bush said he would like to see action on both issues before year's end. The Democratic-controlled Congress begins its term in January.

But Republican Sen. Lincoln Chafee, who was defeated in this week's election, said he would block Bolton's nomination.

Chafee, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, told reporters that he did not believe Bolton's nomination would move forward without his support.

"The American people have spoken out against the president's agenda on a number of fronts, and presumably one of those is on foreign policy," the Rhode Island moderate told The Associated Press.

"And at this late stage in my term, I'm not going to endorse something the American people have spoke out against."

Read the rest of this post...

Friday Morning Open Thread

Heckuva week.

We're all slowly starting to grasp just how much America changed this week. The GOP has been omnipotent. The GOP abused their power. The GOP abused Americans. The GOP abused the world. The list goes on and on.

It's over. We've got our country back.

Heckuva week. Read the rest of this post...

30% of Georgia voters support Newt for president

That many? Maybe Newt isn't quite presidential material after all. If he can only muster up a sorry 30% from his home state, maybe he ought to stick to pontificating on Fox News and save everyone a lot of time and money. Hmmm, then again...go for it Newt and stay true to your beliefs. Read the rest of this post...

Daddy's men to the rescue, but same old Junior

For an arrogant guy who has dismissed, if not ridiculed his fathers approach, this is very interesting. My own initial reaction to this "daddy's men to the rescue" situation was that these must be humbling times for Junior, but looking at his attempt to push Bolton through a lame duck Senate tells me that Bush has learned nothing from the thrashing that he just received. Even in the face of defeat and talk of finding middle ground he is still locked in pre-2006 mode. With Cheney still on board it looks as though it's going to be the same old Bush, daddy's men or not.

One by one, Daddy's wise men are coming back to rescue the struggling son.

First was James Baker, Secretary of State under Bush the elder, chosen to chair the bipartisan panel seeking a way out of the Iraq mess. Now it is the turn of Robert Gates, CIA director between 1991 and 1993. To him has fallen the toughest job of all: taking over the government department which actually runs the war.

Read the rest of this post...

Harry Reid and Britney

Funniest, and most interesting, newspaper lead ever. From the NYT profile of Harry Reid:

Harry Reid began Election Day with 50 situps and 80 push-ups (very red state of him) and 40 minutes of yoga (very blue state of him).

He spent most of the momentous day in his Senate office, waiting. Just after 2 p.m., he finally heard some actual news: Britney Spears was filing for divorce.

“Britney Spears,” Mr. Reid said, shaking his head. “She loses a little weight, and now she’s getting all cocky about things.” He added, “Britney has gotten her mojo back.”

Few would peg Mr. Reid, 66, as someone with anything to say about Britney Spears or, for that matter, someone who would ever use the word “mojo.” But he is a tricky figure to pigeonhole or predict, a Democrat who is a Mormon opposed to abortion and who looks more like a civics teacher than someone set to become the most powerful person in the Senate.

Read the rest of this post...