Open Thread

Go for it. Read the rest of this post...

Cliff's Corner

The Week That Was 4/6/2007

Another Week. More preposterousness to report.

Some days you're just in the mood for a walk in the local market.

Other days it's good to have 100 soldiers, 3 Black Hawks and 2 Apaches handy to chaperone you on your mundane stroll browsing for deals among local rug merchants.

John McCain had one of the latter recently, and he proved all those nattering nabobs of negativism wrong once again. That's right, choke on his straight talk and independent maverickness you liberal wusses!

McCain can walk the streets of Baghdad with BFFs Graham and Pence, you wimps! So what if he had an infantry battalion that could have stormed Omaha Beach protecting him? Who cares that all of our soldiers not only don't get that, but are lucky if they're funded by McCain for rodentless & urineless sleeping quarters once they return stateside.

In fact, just in case any varmints chose to fight McCain over there so they don't have to fight him over here--like at Walter Reed for example--I hear the army had "lifelong hunter" Mitt Romney available to take the head shot. If dogs were involved, Mrs. Giuliani "3" was to be ready with scalpel and smelling salts.

I feel for the good Senator, though, I really do. Although he did take what looked to be a relaxed jaunt through town, searching for various odds and ends (I do hear Senator Graham's a fantastic shopping companion!), the protective armor and guys with guns made it just too difficult to maneuver for that perfect haggle.

But at least McCain feels more like himself again, since that easy and safe promenade with a few buds. So much so that he has apparently expanded his list of places where he will confidently walk with that John Wayne swagger: 1) Darfur 2) OJ Simpson's driveway 3) Keith Richards' bloodstream and 4) In between Rush Limbaugh and a vial of Oxycontin after a week in the pokey.

For more on this and other stories, please go to cliffschecter.com. Read the rest of this post...

About those British Marines...

I've never served in the military. Hell, I'm not even permitted to serve in the military. So I'd be curious if some active duty or former service members, US or otherwise, would weigh in here.

Here's my question. When is it okay, if ever, for a member of the military, when captured, to participate in propaganda films on behalf of the enemy?

That's what the British Marines did, and today we're hearing why. They were blindfolded, tied up, and told they might go to prison for seven years if they didn't participate in the propaganda films. Now, when I heard that, I kind of shrugged and said "that's it?" We're not talking your auntie Josephine here, we're talking British Marines. Being tied up the enemy, blindfolded, and told you might go to prison just doesn't sound, to me at least, like a very good reason for a soldier to crack. I mean, look what we do to our prisoners - black hoods, electrodes on the genitals, dogs ripping chunks out of their skin, and more. The Iranians opted for simple threats of prison, and got everything they wanted.

I may be wrong here, and I'm happy to hear from real service members as to what their training is, what's expected of them. For all I know, maybe the British Marines were instructed by the Brits during training to do whatever the enemy asked of them. I have a hard time believing that, but perhaps it's true. And before anyone says "yeah, what would YOU have done?" - I'm not a Marine. If I signed up to be a Marine, I would honestly hope that I wouldn't be doing propaganda films for the enemy.

Am I totally wrong here? Read the rest of this post...

Does the Congressional Black Caucus Institute agree that black churches are cults?

Self-loathing knows no color.

Support black leaders, black media, and black bloggers who are calling on the Congressional Black Caucus Institute to stop selling out its own community. No group that really cares about civil rights would work with racists. Color of Change has more.

Late news is that John Edwards will not appear at the Fox debate. Greg Sargent at TPM Cafe's Election Central has the details. Read the rest of this post...

Monica "Fifth-Amendment" Goodling quits

It's Friday afternoon. And, on schedule, the Bush administration announces some bad news.

According to CNN, Monica Goodling, who has become a central figure in the scandal over the firing of the U.S. Attorneys, announced she's quitting.

Goodling, a Pat Roberton law school graduate, served as the White House liaison between Gonzales and the White House. Read the rest of this post...

Bible-quoting Bushie US Attorney in deep trouble in Minnesota

Seems the 33 year old friend of Gonzales has so provoked her staff with her Bible quoting and her general attitude that several of them have chosen to demote themselves in order to get away from her. Heckuva job, Brownie. Read the rest of this post...

Harry Reid on the stark dangers of the escalating escalation

Trying to bring some sanity to the Bush Iraq policy is no easy task, but the Senate Majority Leader keeps at it. He has to. Reid just issued this statement in response to the revelation that 12,000 more National Guard troops are being sent to war zones overseas:

Democrats are continuing to fight to give our troops the resources they need, including a strategy for success worthy of their sacrifices. The President's new plan to follow up his ill-advised escalation by sending ill-prepared National Guard troops to Iraq is another misguided strategy neither our troops nor the American people can afford. Nearly 90 percent of the Army National Guard has less than half the equipment they need to respond to a national crisis, and the war in Iraq is endangering our National Guard at home.

President Bush has done more than anyone to damage troop readiness, which are at levels not seen since the Vietnam War. While the Administration continually shifts its stance on when the escalation will end and when we will see results, our military is stretched too thin and our troops are returning to combat too soon and with too little training.

Bush is destroying our military and endangering our nation. Harry Reid and the Democrats need to keep up this pressure. Read the rest of this post...

Fred Hiatt, buy a damn subscription to your own paper

Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt has done it again. He continues to publish editorials that directly contradict articles in his own paper. Well, let me be more clear - he continues to publish editorials that are patently false as shown by articles in his own paper.

He did it again yesterday in his attack on Nancy Pelosi. You see, Hiatt is a big Bush-lover. He loves the war. Can't get enough of it. And no one had better dare stand in Bush's, or Hiatt's way. So he publishes editorial after editorial outright lying about what's going on in foreign policy in an effort to trick the American people into supporting George Bush.

It's yellow journalism at its finest. Don't rely on my word for it. Just read the rest of the Washington Post. This isn't the first time Hiatt has been contradicted by his own newspaper on the SAME DAY he's published one of his erroneous, partisan editorials. It's not even the second time. This is what this guy does. He just makes stuff up.

Read about Hiatt's latest wet kiss to George Bush here. Read the rest of this post...

Escalation: war supporters are right this time . . . they swear!

Except that, of course, they're not. When people who have been wrong (and mendacious) every step of the way on Iraq say that they know the truth -- and it just so happens to coincide perfectly with their political leanings -- I have to admit I'm just a little skeptical. I'm not alone in this, and Greenwald expounds further:

Strictly for journalistic accuracy, every article that quotes someone like Mike Pence claiming that things are improving in Iraq and the Glorious Surge is working ought to include a statement that informs readers that Pence has been making exactly the same claims for four years straight, and that he announced in 2004 that we found WMDs in Iraq. Passing along his claims without including those vital facts is misleading.

I give a lot of credit to the people who started out correct and stayed that way on this war. I give some credit to people who screwed it up to start but have since learned and internalized the right lessons. And I have only scorn for those who were wrong, are wrong, and continue to lie and mislead based on being wrong. It really is stunning that people like Pence and, oh, our vice president, as well as many others, continue to function in the public discourse. There is such thing as being wrong in good faith. This isn't it. Read the rest of this post...

"The epic collapse of the Bush administration"

From Joe Klein at TIME:

A much bigger story is unfolding: the epic collapse of the Bush Administration.

The three big Bush stories of 2007--the decision to "surge" in Iraq, the scandalous treatment of wounded veterans at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the firing of eight U.S. Attorneys for tawdry political reasons--precisely illuminate the three qualities that make this Administration one of the worst in American history: arrogance (the surge), incompetence (Walter Reed) and cynicism (the U.S. Attorneys)....

On April 3, the President again accused Democrats of being "more interested in fighting political battles in Washington than providing our troops what they need." Such demagoguery is particularly outrageous given the Administration's inability to provide our troops "what they need" at the nation's premier hospital for veterans. The mold and decrepitude at Walter Reed are likely to be only the beginning of the tragedy, the latest example of incompetence in this Administration. "This is yet another aspect of war planning that wasn't done properly," says Paul Rieckhoff of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. "The entire VA hospital system is unprepared for the casualties of Iraq, especially the psychiatric casualties. A lot of vets are saying, 'This is our Katrina moment.' And they're right: this Administration governs badly because it doesn't care very much about governing."....

When Bush came to office--installed by the Supreme Court after receiving fewer votes than Al Gore--I speculated that the new President would have to govern in a bipartisan manner to be successful. He chose the opposite path, and his hyper-partisanship has proved to be a travesty of governance and a comprehensive failure. I've tried to be respectful of the man and the office, but the three defining sins of the Bush Administration--arrogance, incompetence, cynicism--are congenital: they're part of his personality. They're not likely to change. And it is increasingly difficult to imagine yet another two years of slow bleed with a leader so clearly unfit to lead.

As I've written before, there are going to be increasing concerns about whether America can afford for George Bush to remain in office another two years. Read the rest of this post...

Congratulations, Reuters - George Orwell would be proud

Apparently the mainstream media has now decided that it's no longer relevant to report that House Speaker Nany Pelosi isn't traveling alone to Syria. She's with a congressional delegation INCLUDING REPUBLICAN MEMBERS OF CONGRESS. It's a bipartisan delegation. Kind of a relevant point when discussing whether Pelosi is somehow a fool for making this trip. And not just a fool, but the implication is very clearly that Speaker Pelosi is playing partisan games here - she's the Democratic bull in the Republican foreign policy china shop. Thus it's rather sloppy and misleading for Reuters' Susan Cornwell to fail to mention the Republican delegation members in her newest article. (CNN's Andrea Koppel did the same thing.)

And don't even get me started on the fact that neither Cornwell, nor anyone else in the mainstream media, is bothering to mention that a Republican congressional delegation preceded Pelosi in Syria by a few days. But you didn't hear boo from the Bush administration, or the media, about them. Why? Because that fact would kill the great story that Nancy Pelosi is a partisan boob.

Your media. Stenographers. The only difference between the mainstream media and Jeff Gannon is their rates. Read the rest of this post...

Analyzing the "incredible shrinking presidency" of George W. Bush

Reuters:

With George W. Bush struggling to stay relevant in his final 22 months in the White House, his administration is looking more and more like the incredible shrinking presidency.

He finds himself increasingly hemmed in by public approval ratings stuck in the low 30 percent range, a hostile Democratic majority in Congress and an unpopular war that has eroded his credibility at home and abroad.

"The real danger is that the president becomes politically irrelevant, that he presides instead of leads," said Terry Madonna, a political scientist at Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania.

Actually, the real danger is that Bush is the President. Read the rest of this post...

Dick "Last Throes" Cheney, overseer of the worst foreign policy mistake in US History, attacks the Speaker. The media lap it up.

Dick "Last Throes" Cheney launched an attack on Nancy Pelosi yesterday via Rush Limbaugh as reported in the LA Times:

Vice President Dick Cheney scolded House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday for "bad behavior" in traveling to Syria, a country that he said promoted terrorism.

In a conversation with fellow conservative Rush Limbaugh on Limbaugh's radio show, Cheney belittled Pelosi's public statement after she met with Syrian President Bashar Assad in Damascus on Wednesday.

"It was a non-statement, a nonsensical statement, and didn't make any sense at all that she would suggest that those talks could go forward as long as the Syrians conducted themselves as a prime state sponsor of terror," Cheney said.

Stop media. You know Dick Cheney lies and has no credibility. Just because he says something to Rush Limbaugh of all people doesn't mean it's true. But lets talk about nonsensical statements that don't make any sense. On March 29, 2003, the Washington Post provided a synopsis of Cheney's pre-war spin:

On CBS's "Face the Nation" on March 16, Cheney said the fight would be "weeks rather than months. There's always the possibility of complications that you can't anticipate, but I have great confidence in our troops." Cheney also predicted the fight would "go relatively quickly, but we can't count on that." That same day on NBC's "Meet the Press," Cheney said, "I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators." It was then he predicted that the regular Iraqi soldiers would not "put up such a struggle," and that even "significant elements of the Republican Guard . . . are likely to step aside." Asked if Americans are prepared for a "long, costly and bloody battle," Cheney replied: "Well, I don't think it's likely to unfold that way. . . . The read we get on the people of Iraq is there is no question but what they want to the get rid of Saddam Hussein, and they will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that." Cheney has spoken that way for months.

How about his post-war comments as this debacle has dragged on and gotten worse. Does anyone in the media remember Cheney's comment about how the insurgency was in the "last throes"? He said that on June 20, 2005.

Yet, the media is buying the White House spin that Nancy Pelosi made a foreign policy blunder. The entire Bush administration has been a foreign policy blunder -- and a lot of people are dead because of those failures.

As Dan Froomkin noted earlier this week, "too many reporters prefer uncritical transcription to the kind of tough but fair analysis that would be required to put what the president [or vice president] says in context." Too many reporters never provided context to White House statements. They regurgitate them -- even when it's Dick Cheney spewing on Rush Limbaugh. That's just absurd on its face. But, the White House knows how to play them. As usual, Tim Russert fell for it this morning on the Today Show -- acting all sanctimonious as he discussed this issue with foreign policy expert Matt Lauer. The Bush team counts on just that kind of reaction from the patsies in the press. And, true to form, they got it.

George Bush is a miserable failure as President. The American people know it. Read the rest of this post...

Friday Morning Open Thread

Updates. News. Commentary. Analysis. Bitching.

Start doing it. Read the rest of this post...

Romney the hunter, Take 2

What?

The former Massachusetts governor has called himself a lifelong hunter, yet his campaign acknowledged that he has been on just two hunting trips — one when he was 15 and the other just last year.

Campaigning in Indianapolis on Thursday, Romney said he has hunted small game since his youth.

"I'm not a big-game hunter. I've made that very clear," he said. "I've always been a rodent and rabbit hunter. Small varmints, if you will. I began when I was 15 or so and I have hunted those kinds of varmints since then. More than two times."

Read the rest of this post...

What exactly is the FDA doing these days?

The Chinese government and alleged producer of the tainted wheat gluten are denying any responsibility for the food problems and while I may not believe them, the bigger issue here is again, what is the US FDA doing besides ignoring, foot dragging and generally just letting business do whatever it wants to do. When is the FDA going to get back to protecting Americans again instead of being yet another tool for big business? Chinese food issues are China's issue and they are well known, so why act surprised now? Protecting the food source is not very easy since the entire organization has been gutted and ruined by Republican policy. Maybe it's time the FDA gets back to its mission. Read the rest of this post...