"Sen. Strom Thurmond led an extraordinary life," Bush said in a written statement following Thurmond's death Thursday at the age of 100. "He served his country as senator, governor and state legislator ... I saw first hand the tremendous love he had for his constituents, and the admiration the people of South Carolina had for him."
For example, the White House griped that various pay-and-benefits incentives added to the 2004 defense budget by Congress are wasteful and unnecessary — including a modest proposal to double the $6,000 gratuity paid to families of troops who die on active duty. This comes at a time when Americans continue to die in Iraq at a rate of about one a day.
Similarly, the administration announced that on Oct. 1 it wants to roll back recent modest increases in monthly imminent-danger pay (from $225 to $150) and family-separation allowance (from $250 to $100) for troops getting shot at in combat zones.
Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee announced Friday plans to stage their own inquiry on the credibility of prewar intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and its links to the al-Qaida terror network.
The announcement by Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the panel's top Democrat, marked an unusual split with Chairman John Warner, R-Va., on an issue with strong political overtones ahead of next year's elections. Warner and Levin are longtime colleagues on the committee and repeatedly stress bipartisan cooperation.
Levin said he has directed Democratic staff to examine the objectivity and credibility of the intelligence and its effect on Defense Department policy decisions, military planning and operations in Iraq.
He said Warner refused his request to begin such an inquiry.
The prewar intelligence has been called into question both nationally and abroad because of the military's inability to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Also, some evidence cited by the Bush administration has been discredited, including documents on supposed approaches to obtain uranium in Africa, which turned out to be forgeries.
Say, how's that 9/11 Report coming? Is aWol done censoring it yet?
He publicly urged House leaders to join him in supporting a Senate-passed $10 billion, 10-year bill extending the child tax credit for minimum wage workers. But instead the House lumped it into a much more ambitious $82 billion plan of tax cuts.
Now, the House and Senate differences are so great that the child tax credit for low income families appears doomed.
Bush can thus claim credit for supporting the measure, while DeLay and other conservatives possibly can point to victory for blocking its ultimate passage.
Likewise, Bush's support of extending the assault rifle ban cheered by moderates is a largely symbolic gesture. Sentiment is strong in the GOP-controlled Congress to let the ban expire and Bush does not seem to be putting much energy into efforts to extend it.
Bush being the more "moderate" Good Cop, DéLay being the Bad Cop. You might even call it triangulation. Look for more of this as 2004 approaches ...
That question is asked and answered in the inimitable style of the Slaktivist, otherwise known as Fred Clark.
Fred's posts are difficult to describe, which is also what mesk them so worth reading. This one prods at growing inequalities of income and that Republican favorite, the politics of envy, using a newspaper skybox ad that offers homeowners the chance to own their very own luxary spa.
Frank Capra makes an appearance, along with Mr. Potter and George Bailey himself, who was living that "wonderful life" we'd all like to, and didn't know it.
Fred also links to and discusses a story, out of Alabama, I've seen little about elsewhere; seems the new Governor there is determined to bring some fairness into the way the state taxes its citizens, all the more interesting because that Governor, Bob Riley, is a Bible-thumping conservative Republican. In pressing for what you and I might think of as a liberal reform, Governor Riley "has framed his tax reform effort in explicitly moral and religious language." And that could be significant, as Fred sees it.
I´ve really made an effort to not post the story every time another soldier dies in Iraq. It´s a shame, really, as our media seems pretty quiet about it - these poor souls aren´t exactly getting much of a tribute by our Shocked and Awed media. But, deservedly or not it would appear that I was using their deaths to score cheap points - something only the right wing hacks of the blogosphere and the RNC are allowed to do.
One result of Kos's participation in the ePatriot's blogger program - the DNC's head guy put a call in to talk with Kos, who tells us all about it here.
Seems to me that Kos said all the right things about the potential importance of the blogisphere to the Dems, and from his paraphrase of the conversation, one gets the clear impression so did McAuliffe.
McAuliffe asked point blank: "How do you think we should do that?"
It's a question I want you guys to weigh in on, since I promised to put together a memo with suggestions.
Kos gets the ball rolling with some excellent suggestions of his own. So far there are 130 plus comments on the thread. Pay a visit and leave a comment. And/or leave one here. We should assume that this will be an on-going discussion across blogdom.
While you're there, Kos has been doing a series on how specific Democratic candidates could put together a win; one such scenario for Howard Dean can be found here; a discussion of non CW scenarios by one of Kos's commentators is here.
Steve Gilliard has another post about Iraq and Kos has one on how complete a screwing military enlistees are getting from the Bush administration.
You could probably spend the whole afternoon there and not a minute would be wasted.
Do come back at some point, I'm working on a post about the Medicare nightmare that is about to descend upon us and our older loved ones, and whether or not we can do anything about it.
Posts roll out of sight and therefore mind awfully quickly with more than one person posting.
So if anyone didn't catch the farmer's post in honor of "Appropriate Michael Savage's Name Day," you can just click here.
And if anyone missed the comments thread to the "Ben Franklin" post, I recommend it;lots of Franklin info, good humor, intelligent conversation, with just a soupcon of bile to add some intensity to the flavor.
As we all know, Howard Dean was savaged by Tim Russert and all responsible pundits for being off by a whopping 7% on the number of troops stationed in Iraq. Bob Somerby reminds us of the somewhat more indulgent treatment President ADHD received a mere 4 years ago.
Over at the New York Times, meanwhile, Paul Krugman continues his lonely work documenting the ongoing takeover of our political system, but then asks the faux naif question, "Why isn't the ongoing transformation of U.S. politics — which may well put an end to serious two-party competition — getting more attention?"
I can only assume that, just as he was once forbidden to use "lie" in connection with Bush Administration utterances, Krugman is constrained from using "whores" to describe a profession of which Krugman is one of the few remaining exceptions. Something tells me that rule won't be lifted anytime soon.
There's already been some reference here to Michael Tomasky's TAP column that lays out Russert's use of statistical talking points about Bush tax cuts prepared, at his request, by the Bush administration, the better to help Russert ambush Howard Dan last Sunday.
The whole column is worth a read. More than Russert's perfidy, Tomasky's larger focus is on what kind of arguments Democrats should be making about those tax cuts.
But the more important question....has to do with Bush's line of attack in the coming presidential election, and how Democrats should respond to it.
Bush will use the campaign to hammer home two economic points: first, that the tax cuts, now scheduled to sunset after seven years (he had to agree to this position to ensure their passage) must be made permanent. And second, that attempts by Democrats to repeal the cuts, or even Democratic opposition to making them permanent, will lead to a massive tax increase on working Americans.
That won't be easy to argue against
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Democrats' historical tendency is to express it in terms of equity and fairness....
Tomasky is all for that, but he thinks it's not enough. He gives three reasons why not, the third being the most important, that arguments which focus exclusively on fairness imply that self-interest is antithetic to equity.
This is a huge problem for post-1960s liberalism, which has decided that self-interest is bad. It's not. Self-interest is just fine. Selfishness is bad. There's a big difference between the two. It's the difference between the basically decent instincts of most Americans and the atrociously indecent agenda of the radical right.
I think Tomasky is onto something important here, about which there is much more to be said. See what you think.
Gene Lyons tell us in his latest column, which the Smirking Chimp has kindly posted on his site for us.
Others have asked why General Clark's mention, on MTP, of having been urged to come to the appropriate conclusion about the "Saddam has WMD" intelligence by someone in the Bush administration, didn't get more attention, by Tim Russert at the time, and by anyone else since.
After acknowledging that banned weapons may yet materialize in Iraq, although nothing resembling the "imminent threat that many feared," Clark reminded Russert of something the pundit - fixated like everybody in Washington on Bill Clinton's zipper at the time - had probably forgotten. "We struck [Iraq] very hard in December of '98," Clark said. "Did everything we knew, all of his [Saddam's] facilities. I think it was an effective set of strikes. Tony Zinni commanded that, called Operation Desert Fox, and I think that set them back a long ways. But we never believed that that was the end of the problem."
Back then, Republicans charged that Clinton bombed suspected Iraqi WMD sites to distract the public from his Oval Office sex antics, as if THAT were possible. But it's beginning to look as if economic sanctions, UNSCOM inspectors and cruise missiles may have done the job.
But you can bet we'll probably never come near to knowing, unless you think that hand-picked team of new inspectors are going to spend much time trying to figure out if some of the missing WMD and the associated infrastructure got taken out by anything associated with the Clinton administration.
If you were wondering how to respond to the passing of Strom Thurmond appropriately, without losing your own humanity, TBogg has figured it out for you here.
Also courtesy of Tom, don't miss this Bruce Stirling piece about Rumsfeld and why this administration is giving the rest of the known world a tizzie fit.
Or this Bogg post about some bitch slapping going on between conservatives.
Or Tom's take on all the rightwing Rainsesian shock (Claude, not Howell) about Presidential executive orders, Clinton's actual EOs and Gephardt's prospective ones
Avedon Carol at The Sideshow discovers a delightful essay that explains why Anne Coulter ought to be asking that question. Seems that firefighters in Colonial Philadelphia worked at the behest of private insurance companies, a system which worked for no one but the companies.
Eventually, the absurdity and outright danger of this system led one prominent Philadelphia citizen to come up with the idea of a publicly funded and administered fire department.
His name was Benjamin Franklin: America’s first anti-free-enterprise commie pinko nut-case.
If a robust public sector is unAmerican, so is Ben. Wonder if he made it into "TREASON!"?
Sens. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.) and Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) returned from a quick trip to Iraq and predicted this week that U.S. forces would remain in Iraq for at least five years.
The Bush-Cheney campaign says the president expects to raise $27 million to $30 million during the three-month fund-raising period that ends June 30 - and Bush didn't even launch his re-election campaign until May 16.
Seven months before the presidential primary in South Carolina, the state Democratic Party doesn't have the money to pay for it, raising doubts about whether the first-in-the-South primary will take place.
Any questions?
(Thanks to alert reader david for the pointer on South Carolina.)
Now, Judge, in your view, does the Liberty Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment protect the right of women to decide for themselves in certain instances whether or not to terminate pregnancy?
JUDGE THOMAS: Senator, first of all, let me look at that in the context other than with natural law principles.
SENATOR BIDEN: Let's forget about natural law for a minute.
JUDGE THOMAS: My view is that there is a right to privacy in the Fourteenth Amendment.
I have to admit I´m rather annoyed at the limited view the media seems to be taking with the Lawrence decision. It isn´t a victory for gay civil rights - it´s a victory for civil rights period. And, an incredibly sweeping one.
Since the war on terrorism began, [the] flexibility and secretiveness of [special operations forces] have made them a favorite with the Bush administration and with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who has pushed for an ever bigger role for special operations.
Even as the president was making his case to the public for going to war, special operations forces were already at work inside Iraq. When Turkey denied U.S. ground forces permission to use its territory, special ops were allowed in anyway. After Jordan and Saudi Arabia publicly restricted U.S. troops from their soil, they still privately let thousands of special operations forces work from their bases.
In the end, of course, there were no Scud missiles for Iraq to launch at Israel, and there were no weapons of mass destruction on the battlefield. At Hadithah and other dam sites, the U.S. found no firm evidence that Iraqis were preparing to blow them up. In the northern and southern oil fields, Iraqi demolition efforts were nothing like the methodical sabotage by Iraq of Kuwait's oil infrastructure in 1991. Local forces south and east of Baghdad successfully destroyed a couple of bridges, but the Iraqi command doesn't appear to have attempted a scorched-earth plan.
What special operators actually achieved on the ground is therefore difficult to confirm.
Rumsfeld's enthusiasm for special operations remains unchecked by any questions about their effectiveness.
Perhaps most discomforting, though, is the culture of special operators. Like intelligence professionals, they are attracted to the mystique associated with secret operations. They have a "desire," as one senior officer told me, "to be clandestine." Sometimes secrecy is crucial. And sometimes it's just a way of life — one that prevents operators from ever having to worry about public and media scrutiny.
Let's repeat: "Even as the president was making his case to the public for going to war, special operations forces were already at work inside Iraq."
So "making the case" was just a charade, right? So the Congressional resolution was just a charade, right? So the power of Congress to declare war is just a charade, right?
And our secret, unaccountable shadow government grows and grows and grows....
It's hard to run an occupation with no phone system. And why would that be a problem? Trudy Rubin writes:
Worst of all, the Pentagon provided no communications system for the civilian occupation team - even though U.S. bombs had destroyed Baghdad's phone network. The civilians tasked with running the country couldn't even talk to each other until the end of May, let alone to the Iraqi ministries they were supposedly running. Only now are they getting a limited cell-phone network.
Why the delay? In part, due to political machinations back in Washington over the phone contract. Guess who got the $45 million no-bid deal? MCI/WorldCom, the company that bilked its shareholders out of $11 billion and has very little experience in building wireless networks.
Whoever was responsible at top levels in the Pentagon for postwar planning should be fired.
But then no one would be fired. Three weeks in Iraq makes very clear that no one in the Bush administration made serious postwar plans before the start of the Iraq war.
Back in November, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz told me he believed that the London-based Iraqi opposition (headed by Ahmad Chalabi) would return to Baghdad and assume the reins of power, just as Gen. Charles DeGaulle and the Free French returned triumphantly to postwar France.
Top White House and Pentagon officials refused to listen to warnings that Chalabi and other Iraqi exiles did not command sufficient support inside Iraq. Nor did they heed warnings that Saddam's highly centralized government structure would collapse once he was ousted.
"The expectations at the Pentagon were that [government] ministries would emerge unscathed" and take over the running of the country, one senior U.S. official told me when I was in Baghdad. No one foresaw the virtual collapse of many ministries, nor their physical destruction by looters.
"We failed in our duty on the looting," the official continued, a reference to the fact that the military failed to secure ministries, key infrastructure and suspected weapons sites. "I didn't think [the administration] would let it get so out of hand."
Starting to look like photo-ops and lying is all these guys are really good at.
Alert reader Tresy points out that contact information and suggested letters to Gov. Locke and the Elections Commission can be found at here and that the deadline for comments is TOMORROW.
Do your bit to preserve democracy, Washingtonians! (If that is the word for a citizen of the state of Washington)
She starts out with the administration's answer to the problem of global warming - "edit it out."
Think of the possibilities presented by this ingenious solution. Let's edit out AIDS and all problems with drugs both legal and illegal. We could get rid of Libya and Syria this way – take 'em off the maps. We can do away with unemployment, the uninsured, heart disease, obesity and the coming Social Security crunch. We could try editing out death and taxes, but I don't think we should overreach right away. Just start with something simple, like years of scientific research on global warming, and blue pencil that sucker out of existence. Denial is not just a river in Egypt.
There's a reason why that last sentence is coming back in vogue. Denial has become a central principle of governance since Bush took office. It's almost another Bush Doctrine. And when we say governance, let us not forget that with this administration, the political is policy, policy is the political.
Inspiring as the remarkable Bush approach to resolving global warming is – the simplicity of it, the beauty of it, I cannot get over it – does it not suggest a certain cavalier je ne sais quoi about the future? What I mean is, is anybody there concerned about what happens to people?
Molly proceeds to discuss the API (American Petroleum Institute to you), AmeriCorps, and gutsy girl that she is, brings up that whole issue of the "L" word.
The nation's richest people paid a lower proportion of their income in federal taxes last year than in 1992, new government figures show.
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Over the nine-year period, the minimum adjusted gross income to get on the top 400 list more than tripled, from $24.4 million to $86.8 million.
In 2000, the 400 paid 22.3% of their income to federal income taxes, down from 26.4% in 1992.
The richest 400 made 1.09% of U.S. income in 2000, more than double the percentage in 1992, when they accounted for just 0.52%, the IRS said.
FDR would be floored; so would his cousin, Teddy; so would Harry Truman; so would President Eisenhower; so would JFK and LBJ and RFK.......be my guest, make your own list.
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