Bush says immigrants can be held indefinitely, with no access to lawyers or much of anything

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

No more. Read the rest of this post...

The latest outrage: Iraq vets can't find jobs when they come hom

Just exactly what does the Bush administration do to support the troops? CNN did a report tonight about how Iraq veterans can't find jobs when they come home. The unemployment rate is double the national average. It's an outrage:

Read the rest of this post...

In Conn., Democrat Joe Courtney's lead is down to 66 votes over incumbent Rob Simmons

Yikes:

Democrat Joe Courtney's lead in the 2nd Congressional District dropped to 66 votes Monday after officials discovered he was mistakenly given 100 extra votes over Republican Rep. Rob Simmons, an election official said.

"It was human error," said Lebanon election moderator John Bendoraitis. "It was strictly misreading one number on one machine."

The discovery significantly tightens one of the closest congressional races in the nation. Preliminary Election Day returns had Courtney winning by 167 votes out of nearly 250,000 ballots cast.

This one is so close and getting closer. Read the rest of this post...

Karen Carter for Congress in Lousiana's Second District

Karen Carter is in a run-off with William Jefferson for Louisiana's Second CD. Last Tuesday, Jefferson, of $90,000 in the freezer infamy, secured 30% of the vote, while Carter came in second with 21% in a 13 candidate race. Let's just say, for an incumbent to get only 30% of the vote doesn't bode well. Under Lousiana's election law, the top two finishers will compete for the seat on December 9th.

Carter, the endorsed candidate of the Democratic party, has to win. To defeat the culture of corruption and keep it's taint from the Dems., Jefferson has to lose.

Friday, Rich Lowry, editor of the National Review, wrote a piece in his magazine titled, "The Culture of Corruption Loses: A corpulent Congress reaps what it sowed." Lowry wrote,

The “culture of corruption” was real. That phrase was a much-contested talking point during the past two years, with Democrats touting it as an accurate description of the degraded ethical state of the congressional GOP and Republicans dismissing it as a smear.

Democrats were much closer to the truth. Voters took a good whiff of the odor emanating from Washington and some of their Republican representatives, and recoiled. One-third of Republican losses in the House came in congressional districts where the party had been tainted, to varying degrees, by scandal.

I rarely, if ever, link to the National Review. But it's clear, the GOP owns the culture of corruption. Defeating Jefferson keeps it that way.

Karen Carter's web site is here. If you live in New Orleans, vote Carter for change. Read the rest of this post...

Anti-gay Senator, with ties to Mark Foley, to head up Republican party

Well, isn't this an interesting pick. The Republicans have chosen Senator Mel Martinez (R-FL), a man who openly embraced homophobia during his Senate race, as the new head of the Republican National Committee (RNC), making him the putative head of the Republican party.

It's probably no surprise that the GOP chose someone anti-gay after rumors had swirled for years about the exact sexual orientation of outgoing RNC chair Ken Mehlman (Mehlman publicly avoided the question for years).

But even more interesting is that a top staffer on Martinez's Senate campaign, Kirk Fordham, was also the former chief of staff to child sex predator ex-congressman Mark Foley. Foley represented Florida in the House. Martinez represents Florida in the Senate.

I'm just saying...

Also of note, it was Martinez's office that sent around the hideous memo about Terri Schiavo in which they bragged what a great opportunity Schiavo's near-death status was for the Republican party.

Of course, in the end, the joke may be on the religious right base of the Republican party.

Martinez didn't just have the openly-gay Kirk Fordham as a top aide on his Senate campaign, he also had a second top aide who was gay. Mr. Martinez may play a homophobe on TV, but he doesn't have a problem having key advisers who are openly gay. Which is great. But it also means that Martinez's personal commitment to the anti-gay agenda is more than just a little suspect.

But I'm not complaining. Washington needs more Republicans who secretly like gay people and help our cabal slowly seize the reins of power in DC. (And with George Allen now gone, someone needs to take over the gay affirmative action office in the Senate.) Having gay people in these kind of senior positions makes it that much harder for the elected officials, and their staff, to do the bidding of the religious right - after all, some of their best friends are gay. And the religious right knows it.

Same gay circus, different gay clowns.

More from TowleRoad. Read the rest of this post...

Sen. Levin (D-MI) offers plan for Iraq redeployment

While Bush was doing a photo op with the Iraq Study Group, headed by James Baker, the soon-to-be Chair of the Senator Armed Services Committee, Carl Levin (D-MI, offered a new plan for redeploying U.S. troops from Iraq:

The Democrat in line to become chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee offered a grim assessment today on the situation in Iraq, accusing the administration of ignoring the reality that "we're getting deeper and deeper into a hole - that we should stop digging and that we should look for alternatives in order to promote the chances of success in Iraq."

Levin said the study group's report "is going to have an impact on whatever action might be possible in this Congress and in the next Congress," when Democrats take control. Levin said earlier that U.S. troops should begin coming home in phases within four to six months, a loose timetable that other Democratic leaders have not endorsed.

The situation in Iraq gets worse every day. Bush and the GOP don't have a plan. They never did. They're pinning all their hopes on the Baker report.

Levin got the debate started in earnest today. We learned last week where the American people stand on this. Read the rest of this post...

She Survived Iraq -- Then Shot Herself at Home

This isn't winning. Read the rest of this post...

Wal-Mart selling Nazi paraphernalia

Reportedly, Wal-Mart pulled its SS shirts, but now we find out they didn't. Hope this isn't a sign of Wal-Mart moving even further to the anti-gay right. We know the religious right has been boycotting Wal-Mart forever because - get this - Wal-Mart isn't conservative ENOUGH (that's after Wal-Mart openly discriminated against people with disabilities, and so much more). Well, the Nazis sent gays to concentration camps to be exterminated, along with Jews, people with disabilities, gypsies and others - they even put pink triangles on the gays. Wonder if this is anti-gay enough to appease the hate-groups trying to curry favor with Wal-Mart?

Here is a copy of the SS Totenkopf logo on the top of a book at the particular SS unit.

Read the rest of this post...

Anti-"gay marriage" stance sinks yet another Republican

This is the third story this past week about how the religious right anti-"gay marriage" juggernaut has actually hurt Republican candidates. First it was Virginia (where an anti-gay ballot initiative may have cost George Allen the election, and Republicans the US Senate) and Wisconsin, now it's New York, where an anti-gay member of Congress lost her seat, quite likely because of her support for the anti-gay Federal Marriage Amendment.

From the NY Daily News:

GOP Rep. Sue Kelly won't leave office until January, but she may have ended her political career Sept. 30, 2004. That was the day she voted for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage – and caught the attention of a Westchester County constituent, Adam Rose....

[I]n September, he called Majority Action. "I'm this guy in New York you've never heard of and I want to do anything I can to beat Sue Kelly," he recalled saying. "I'm sending you $500,000. I need your address."

Of course, a part of me still thinks Hall won because people thought they was the other half of Hall & Oates :-)

Oh yeah, then there's this from Kelly's campaign consultant:

Majority Action... hit her for taking contributions from oil companies. The group also linked her to the scandal over former Florida GOP Rep. Mark Foley's relationship with teenage pages.

"They were basically calling her a coddler of pedophiles," her campaign consultant, Jay Townsend, said bitterly. "It was legal, but it was filthy politics..."

Boo frigging hoo. Too bad Sue Kelly wasn't as concerned about dirty filthy politics when she tried to make an entire class of human beings second-class citizens, all for political gain. Read the rest of this post...

Recount starts in the very suspicious 13th CD in Florida

This race in Katherine Harris's old district is this year's most egregious example of the need for election reform. It's very suspicious how so many votes just didn't show up -- 18,000+ votes didn't show up:

Elections officials began the tedious process Monday of recounting votes and investigating allegations of voter machine malfunctions in southwest Florida's 13th Congressional District, a race in which the Republican contender leads by a thin margin.

Florida law requires a recount in all five counties in the district. But all eyes are on Sarasota County, where touch-screen voting machines recorded that 18,000 people - 13 percent of voters in the Nov. 7 election - did not cast a vote for either Republican Vern Buchanan or Democrat Christine Jennings. That rate was much higher than surrounding counties in the district.

"I do see some interesting things that are happening in regards to votes that seemed to have disappeared or people didn't vote," said Chief Financial Officer Tom Gallagher, a member of the state Election Canvassing Commission that ordered the recount. "You don't know if they chose not to vote or whether they didn't, and possibly a paper trail would show more clearly."

Disappearing votes in America in the year 2006. How can that be acceptable? And, possibly a paper trail would show more clearly? Possibly? Read the rest of this post...

McCain is wrong about so much, but the media loves him

The media deifies John McCain. In their eyes, he can do no wrong. Now, they're all giddy that he's running for President again. They'll be fighting for the chance to ride on his campaign bus, cause that's what the cool kids do.

McCain is right wing conservative. He suffered as many losses from last week as anyone. The GOP tanked in the elections and McCain was out there spreading the losing GOP message:

During the 2006 election cycle, McCain attended 346 events and raised more than $10.5 million on behalf of Republican candidates. He also donated nearly $1.5 million to federal, state and county parties.

America's voters rejected McCain last week, too.

McCain has been wrong about Iraq from the beginning. He owns this war almost as much as Bush does. Yesterday, on Meet the Press, McCain kept making predictions about the war, but his track record has been abysmal. Think Progress documents his lengthy list of inaccurate guesses about how that war was proceeding. It's like he's just making things up, because he can, because he's John McCain.

Finally, voters in McCain's home state rejected his hate-mongering and gay bashing. McCain starred in two anti-gay television ads in Arizona. He was opposing the state's anti-gay marriage/anti-civil union referendum. But, fortunately, Arizona was the first state to defeat one of these amendments. McCain's message of hate didn't resonate with his own constituents.

This man wants to be your President. Read the rest of this post...

The all new Bush reaches out to Democrats, or at least that's what he says

Amazing, but it sounds like the same old program that the country just routed last week. Stay the course, George, please. There are plenty more people for you to alienate and you need to lose a few more battles, so keep supporting Bolton. Read the rest of this post...

Why speculating on what "we" can do to Fix Iraq is meaningless

Iraq is the most important political and strategic issue of our time. It took a while for some people to realize this fact, but the elections erased any last doubts, and now the most important issue in the public consciousness is the most important issue in government. In addition to the elections, the impending final report from the Iraq Study Group (ISG), also referred to as the Baker-Hamilton Commission, is keeping Iraq policy in the forefront of news and political machinations. The ISG is a 10-person bipartisan panel, appointed by Congress in March to present an "independent assessment" of Iraq and provide analysis and recommendations. What unique insight into Iraq Sandra Day O'Connor and Vernon Jordan have, for example, I'm not sure, but in general it's a cast of political and foreign policy all-stars. Everybody seems to be waiting with bated breath for the report.

However, and it gives me no pleasure to say this, it doesn't really matter what they say. They're not going to come up with anything that hasn't already been proposed, and I doubt they'll even recommend a specific policy course. Even if they did, the idea that there's some magical pony plan to Save Iraq is pretty silly, and the idea that a panel of 10 Sensible Centrist Thinkers is going to come up with it is even sillier. With apologies to Chasing Amy, let me illustrate this with a question: In the middle of an intersection of roads lies a $100 bill. On the corners stand Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, Continuing Sectarian Violence, and Something The U.S. Can Do That Will Save Iraq. Who wins the race to the money? Continuing Sectarian Violence. Why? Because the other three are figments of your *@%#ing imagination!

I'm not saying Iraq is destined for long-term failure, but many Americans, especially, for some reason, our elected officials, seem to hold onto the idea that we can control Iraq's near-term future. Nothing within our range of options will have a significant immediate -- within, say, a year (i.e., two Friedman Units) -- impact, as Iraq's daily events are far more controlled by domestic influences than by the Coalition forces. I think people overestimate the (beneficial) effects of having the number of troops there that we do, and I think they correspondingly overestimate the impact of increasing OR decreasing those numbers by anything under 50% in either direction.

So whether the ISG says we should increase troops one more time (by, say, 20 or 30 thousand) or start to draw down forces over the course of a year or two, or even if they recommend actual changes in policy, like moving to superbases to reduce U.S. casualties or moving into cities for classical counterinsurgency, the fact is that our presence (and impact) has largely been overtaken by domestic influences. And none of these strategies will 1) definitely work or 2) even be implemented just because a blue-ribbon panel suggested them. Aside from the danger that the ISG will be used to deflect blame away from those who deserve it, which is highly possible, there is no magic solution, though I hope the ISG endorses modest but helpful things that the administration has thus far dismissed, like talking to Iran and Syria.

The phrase, "you break it, you own it" gets thrown around a lot, but you know what? We don't own Iraq. The Iraqis do. We should absolutely do as much as we can to help them move forward, but let's not kid ourselves: the reason why most political debate about Iraq involves when we should leave is because we don't have the ability to affect (or effect, for that matter) much of anything else. Read the rest of this post...

Repubs. now blame Bush, not because Iraq is a disaster, but because he didn't play better politics

Oh, sure. The Republicans all stood by Rumsfeld. They all stood by Bush. They never challenged their President. But, now that Bush caused them to lose power, the GOPers are saying they wanted Bush to play smarter politics with national security.

The Republicans weren't willing to stand up to Bush over Iraq. Now that he's a defeated lame duck, they're piling on. Bush gets what he deserves. But, it's so disingenuous for Republicans to say Bush should have acted differently on Iraq when they never, ever questioned his Iraq policies:

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has suggested that if Bush replaced Rumsfeld two weeks before the election, voters would not have been as angry about the unpopular Iraq war. Republicans would have gained the boost they needed, according to Gingrich, to retain their majority in the Senate and hold onto 10 to 15 more House seats.

Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., the outgoing chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, agreed with that assessment.

Bush should have removed Rumsfeld "as soon as he had made up his mind. And that's a hard thing to calculate. But it's highly doubtful that he made up his mind between the time the election returns came in on Tuesday and Wednesday when Rumsfeld was out."

"And if Rumsfeld had been out, you bet it would have made a difference," Specter said. "I'd still be chairman of the Judiciary Committee."

The same thought occurred to veteran Rep. Clay Shaw, R-Fla., who was on the verge of becoming chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. After the election, Shaw said that if Rumsfeld had stepped down before last Tuesday, Shaw and other Republicans might have won.

"It could have made a difference in who is running the Congress," said Shaw.

They're only upset because they lost politically, not because the policy is a disaster. They're pathetic. The message isn't that Bush should have canned Rumsfeld because Iraq is a disaster. They wanted him gone for their own political gain. That's been one major problem with Iraq all along. The GOP is still missing the point. To the GOP, firing Rumsfeld was a political stunt and had nothing to do with the underlying policy failure. Read the rest of this post...

159 more dead in Iraq; Insurgency grows in Afghanistan

God help us.

First Iraq.

Then Afghanistan.

Insurgent activity in Afghanistan has risen fourfold this year, and militants now launch more than 600 attacks a month, a rising wave of violence that has resulted in 3,700 deaths in 2006, a bleak new report released Sunday found.

Read the rest of this post...

Monday Morning Open Thread

Clearly, this week won't be as exciting as last week. Congress comes back for the lame duck session. Let's see what the GOP tries to ram through.

Today, ground will be broken for a memorial to Martin Luther King, Jr. on the mall here in DC. Still inspired by the "I have a dream" speech he gave on the mall in August of 1963:

With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

And this will be the day -- this will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with new meaning:

My country 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.

Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrim's pride,

From every mountainside, let freedom ring!

And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.

And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.

Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.

Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of
Pennsylvania.

Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado.

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California.

But not only that:

Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee.

Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi.

From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

And when this happens, when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:

Free at last! Free at last!

Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

Read the rest of this post...