GOP Senator Santorum's staffers are volunteering for the Green Party candidate in Pennsylvania in order to help throw the election

How desperate do you have to be to lend your staff to one of your opponents in order to hope you can thwart the will of the people by throwing the election? And the Green Party candidate seems to be defending the Republican involvement in his campaign. Keep in mind, this the same Green Party candidate who was apparently 100% funded by Republicans (one suspects as a further attempt to help throw the race for Santorum).

The Green Party needs to grow up and get lost. We've had two presidencies thanks to those idiots, and now they're endangering the effort to get rid of Rick Santorum. Seriously, are they fifth columnists for the GOP, or simply stupid?

And Santorum needs to be held accountable for his growing desperation. Read the rest of this post...

Israeli intentionally letting Hezbollah kill Israeli civilians, per some US military analysts

I have no idea if this is true, but Thomas Ricks is the Pentagon reporter for the Wash Post, and this is what he's heard from some US military analysts. I could honestly see Bush approving something like this, but Israel? Anyway, I suspect the Israelis are going to be answering a few questions to their own people tomorrow.

The transcript from CNN:

And joining us now here Washington Anne Compton who covers the White House for ABC News, and Thomas Ricks, Pentagon reporter for "The Washington Post" and author of the new book "Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq."

Tom Ricks, you've covered a number of military conflicts, including Iraq, as I just mentioned. Is civilian casualties increasingly going to be a major media issue? In conflicts where you don't have two standing armies shooting at each other?

THOMAS RICKS, REPORTER, "THE WASHINGTON POST": I think it will be. But I think civilian casualties are also part of the battlefield play for both sides here. One of the things that is going on, according to some U.S. military analysts, is that Israel purposely has left pockets of Hezbollah rockets in Lebanon, because as long as they're being rocketed, they can continue to have a sort of moral equivalency in their operations in Lebanon.

KURTZ: Hold on, you're suggesting that Israel has deliberately allowed Hezbollah to retain some of it's fire power, essentially for PR purposes, because having Israeli civilians killed helps them in the public relations war here?

RICKS: Yes, that's what military analysts have told me.

Read the rest of this post...

Open Thread

Hope everyone enjoyed the weekend...it's going to be a wild week. Read the rest of this post...

Condi Rice says Iraqi "Death to America" protests are actually a good thing

Uh huh.

Crowds of al-Sadr supporters from across Iraq's Shiite heartland chanted "Death to Israel, Death to America" in the one of the biggest pro-Hezbollah rallies since the conflict began July 12...

"That people would go out and demonstrate and say what they feel is the one sign that perhaps Iraq is one place in the Middle East where people are exercising their right to free speech," [Secretary Rice] said. "No. I don't like what they said."

Using that logic, Iran would be the most succesful democracy in the region since it has the lion's share of "Death to America" protests. Read the rest of this post...

Half of US still thinks Saddam had WMD

You know, seriously, you get what you deserve. If half the American people still believe this lie, then whatever happens in Iraq - to our soldiers, Iraqi civilians, Middle Eastern stability, and our national prestige - is all on their heads. It will be interesting to see what they think when Bush and company lie to them about the next war, and the next - and by that time, they'll be drafting their kids. Read the rest of this post...

More Lamont/Lieberman video coverage from PTV

Lamont and Lieberman surrogates Lanny Davis and Jim Dean, slug it out on Meet the Press. Read the rest of this post...

Mehlman launches the GOP terror campaign

Can Orange Alerts be far behind? The GOP has nothing to run on this year, so they'll need to play the fear card -- again:

Amid low approval ratings for President Bush and diminishing support for the Iraq war, Mehlman's speech at the RNC's summer meeting echoed a theme voiced by White House adviser Karl Rove in January: that Republicans should make terrorism a central campaign issue in the fall campaigns and argue that Democrats hold a pre-Sept. 11 view of the world.

Mehlman said that if the Democrats win control of Congress in the Nov. 7 midterm elections, party leaders will stop the National Security Agency from eavesdropping on foreign terrorists and will pursue impeachment of the president.

Read the rest of this post...

Apparently the NSA doesn't have enough electricity to spy on all of us

Gosh, I hate when that happens. Better not plug in a hair dryer. Read the rest of this post...

"Anti-war" movement? What "anti-war movement"?

I just heard Stephanopoulos start his coverage by saying the "anti-war movement" could send political shockwaves through the Democratic party on Tuesday (if Lieberman loses), and I don't like what I'm hearing. Worse yet it's the same kind of somewhat-lazy reporting we're hearing from every other reporter covering the issue.

Here's the problem.

I do think that the Iraq war has doomed Joe Lieberman. But...

1. Iraq is the problem. Not "the anti-war movement." Iraq.

The implication is that I/we don't like Lieberman because we're all generically-anti-war flower-power peaceniks. Some are, many aren't - I for one am certainly not a peacenik. As my readers know, some to their great disdain, I have no problem using military force when I think it's merited and just.

The problem for many of us in Iraq is not "war." It's THIS war, how it got started (a lie) and how it's being run (into the ground).

2. Lieberman's position on the war TODAY is the problem, not his position when the war was launched.

The problem isn't that Joe Lieberman supported the Iraq war, it's that he still thinks the Iraq war is going well today. That's just nuts. But it's worse than nuts. Lieberman has gone out of his way to support George Bush's positions on the Iraq war - not just by claiming that the war is going well when it's clearly gone terribly wrong - but Lieberman did something much worse. He defended Bush and misled the American people about the war in a manner that directly attacked his fellow Democrats. And that is not acceptable for a variety of reasons.

First off, it's not "good bipartisanship" when you attack your own party for trying to raise legitimate criticisms of a commander in chief who is grossly incompetent and endangering our national security and future.

Secondly, it's incredibly duplicitous to undercut your party's criticism of said commander in chief when the country has gone through nearly five years of post-September-11 "shut up and salute" mania and your party is daring to speak up regardless of the risk.

We have a serious problem in America today in which debate and dissent and checks and balances are no longer considered patriotic. Just when the Democrats are starting to get the nerve to occasionally and meekly challenge George Bush publicly, Joe Lieberman steps in to stab them in the back. That makes his crime that much worse, not just in terms of how serious a betrayal it was to a party that was already on thin ice speaking out in a land where speaking out is no longer welcome, but it's also a betrayal of America's values. Lieberman decided to associate himself with the worst McCarthyite wing of modern-day conservatism. And that's a far bigger deal than simply his point of view on "one issue."

3. A word about the "netroots."

We are not "anti-war activists organized on the Internet," as Stephanopoulos claimed. Most of us who Stephanopoulos is talking about are bloggers. We are political writers and political activists. We are partisans, to be sure, but the war is NOT our only issue any more than it is the only issue of any publication or political partisan. To the extent the Iraq war is an issue we focus on, most of us are critical of the war, as indicated above, not because we're "anti-war activists," but because we are getting our butts kicked in Iraq and no one seems to have the courage to note that fact publicly. And if we can't talk about what's really happening in Iraq, then we can't find a way to win or a way to get the hell out if we've already lost. So, the problem a lot of us have with Iraq isn't that we are per se opposed to war (though some of us are), it's that this war is a bloody disaster and no one seems to have the spine to say so.

The media continues to portray the Netroots as monolithic - far-left liberal monolithic, to be exact. And yeah, some bloggers are far-left, many of us are not. Many are liberal (whatever that means - most of us, I know, use the word "liberal" to mean the opposite of Republican, rather than to mean the far-left of the Democratic party). Some of us are strident and doctrinaire, some aren't. Some of us have political experience, some don't. Some of us see ourselves as writers and journalists, some as activists, and some as both.

The point being, it is disingenuous and misleading to portray this thing called "the netroots" as some kind of all-powerful sieg-heil far-left monolith. It is not, we are not. Collectively we have some power and some anger (see below), to be sure, but far-left and anti-war as our running credo we are not.

One thing that I think does unite us is our anger and frustration at both our party and the direction our country has taken over the past six years. But our concern over our country is that it's heading in the wrong direction (and the majority of our fellow citizens agree with us, so that's hardly a partisan viewpoint). And our concern over our party is that it hasn't shown a lot of backbone in fighting to get our country back on the right track. That viewpoint, again, is hardly a minority view nationwide, let alone in the Democratic party.

The "netroots" - which is simply a trendy way of saying "politically-active Americans" - are motivated by a profound concern about where America finds itself today. That kind of concern isn't liberal, it isn't anti-war, it isn't even partisan. It's American. And check out the polls, George and all the rest of ya - most of the country agrees with us, not most of the Democratic party, most of the COUNTRY.

So please, for the love of God, stop labeling us all as cumbaya peaceniks. It's getting real old. Read the rest of this post...

Video of Lamont and Lieberman on ABC's THIS WEEK

Haven't seen it yet, but apparently it's Stephanopoulos' coverage. Read the rest of this post...

Sunday Talk Shows Open Thread

Featured this week are the Lamont/Lieberman race and another round of foreign policy spin from the part of the team that's gotten us in to all these messes -- Condi and Hadley:

FOX NEWS SUNDAY...: National security adviser Stephen J. Hadley ; Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.); Israeli Ambassador Daniel Ayalon ; Mohamad Bahaa Chatah , senior adviser to the Lebanese prime minister.

THIS WEEK (ABC...: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice ; Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.); Connecticut Senate candidate Ned Lamont ; Nora Ephron , screenwriter.

FACE THE NATION (CBS...: Sens. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) and Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.).

MEET THE PRESS (NBC....: Rice ; Lieberman supporter Lanny Davis ; Lamont supporter Jim Dean .

LATE EDITION (CNN...: Hadley ; Israeli Vice Premier Shimon Peres; Lebanese Economy Minister Sami Haddad ; Lebanese political analyst Roula Talj ; Shlomo and Karnit Goldwasser , relatives of kidnapped Israeli soldier; former secretary of state Henry A. Kissinger ; former defense secretary William S. Cohen .

If you're watching, what are they saying? Read the rest of this post...

56% of Americans want a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq

Someone needs to push the 44% on exactly what they propose we do to fix this failed campaign in Iraq. Double the number of troops? Institute the draft? Click our heels three times?

It's time to shift the onus to those who continue to support the biggest foreign policy disaster since Vietnam (and possibly bigger) and ask them to justify exactly what they suggest we do to win the war?

Otherwise, we should get the hell out and accept the fact that the patient is terminal, the business is bankrupt, the well is dry.

At some point, a loss is a loss - and no amount of Republican Mussolini rhetoric is going to change that fact. Read the rest of this post...

Lookie there, Osama's top guy is still alive and kicking

Don't hear a lot about Osama and Zawahri from George Bush any more. Or about Mullah Omar, the former leader of the Taliban in Afghanistan. None of them were ever caught, yet somehow it's like they never existed.

Wonder why that is... Read the rest of this post...

Open Thread

Let's just keep it going...at least til John wakes up in Paris. Read the rest of this post...