Category: Politics

Topic Header

The Blank Check

Jon Ponder
“The moral force we shined outwards to the world as an eternal beacon, and inwards at ourselves as an eternal protection [has been] snuffed out.”

Keith Olbermann:

We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom, to a man who may now, if he so decides, declare not merely any non-American citizens “unlawful enemy combatants and ship them somewhere, anywhere, but may now, if he so decides, declare you an “unlawful enemy combatant” and ship you somewhere, anywhere.

And if you think this hyperbole or hysteria, ask the newspaper editors when John Adams was president or the pacifists when Woodrow Wilson was president or the Japanese at Manzanar when Franklin Roosevelt was president.

And if you somehow think habeas corpus has not been suspended for American citizens but only for everybody else, ask yourself this: If you are pulled off the street tomorrow, and they call you an alien or an undocumented immigrant or an “unlawful enemy combatant,” exactly how are you going to convince them to give you a court hearing to prove you are not? Do you think this attorney general is going to help you?

This President now has his blank check.

He lied to get it.

He lied as he received it.

Is there any reason to even hope he has not lied about how he intends to use it nor who he intends to use it against?

[…]

Tabloids: Bushes Headed for Divorce

Jon Ponder

Bush has been drinking again so Laura is leaving him

It may be a coincidence that both the Globe and the National Examiner are out with cover stories alleging that President Bush’s marriage is ending. It is more than likely that there’s nothing to this story, but, as BuzzFlash pointed out, the tabs were ahead of the mainstream media on the president’s personal problems in the Clinton era.

If it’s true, it’ll be interesting to see how George W. Bush handles becoming the first president to go through a divorce while in office.

The Devil We Know: California Buys Schwarzenegger’s Latest Act

Jon Ponder

What contrarians we Californians are. While much of the country is finally waking up to the fact that Republicans really are incompetent at governing, we are on a glide path to re-electing the biggest faker in the bunch.

If California were a person, I would be worried that she is suffering short-term memory loss. It was just 11 months ago that she held Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger with little more than contempt. He had been on TV a lot promoting his ballot initiatives, and he had his back up over fierce opposition from the unions. The confrontation brought out his natural tendency for bullying, which is unpleasant to begin but sounds especially harsh with a German accent.

This time last year, the only politician less popular in California than the governor was President Bush. Today the president’s numbers are still in the dumper but Governor Schwarzenegger’s approval is 56 percent in the latest Los Angeles Times poll. It appears he’s going to wallop Phil Angelides, the Democrat, in the election next month.

Angelides is part of the problem. Physically, he looks like the 98-pound weakling in the old Charles Atlas ads — the skinny guy who gets sand kicked in his face by the bully who, come to think of it, looks remarkably like der Gubernator.

[…]

An Unhappy President

Jon Ponder

Perhaps President Bush’s expression matched his mood yesterday as he left Washington for a campaign appearance with Rep. Don Sherwood, a Pennsylvania congressman who was recently forced to admit he was having an affair after his mistress reported him for trying to strangle her. Sherwood is one of a very few Republican candidates who would welcome a campaign appearance by the president whose approval numbers are in the mid-30s.

Jews Don’t Heart Huckabee

Buck Banks

From the mouths of dolts: What is it with Republicans this year? Did they all attend the Earl Butz School of Public Speaking? Or the Cheney Institute of Insensitivity?

The latest bumbling blabbers is Arkansas’ governor, who joked that he lost weight at a concentration camp. Jews were not happy, according to the Jewish Telegraph Association:

Mike Huckabee, a Republican, has advertised his diet as a health model for obese Americans, and he bantered Thursday with radio talk show host Don Imus about his weight loss. Imus chided Huckabee that he looked “emaciated.” “I have just come from six weeks at a concentration camp held by the Democrat Party of Arkansas in an undisclosed location, making a hostage tape,” Huckabee replied. “That’s why I look that way.”

The National Jewish Democratic Council said Huckabee, a likely contender for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, “ought to think about the people who he might offend with such insensitive words. At the very least, he owes all of us an apology and explanation for his tasteless comments.”

Kevin Tillman Speaks

Trish

This one needs to be shouted from rooftops.

Kevin Tillman is the brother of Pat Tillman, the former NFL player who died in Afghanistan in what the military first termed as “killed in action” and later admitted was friendly fire. Both brothers enlisted in 2002, shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the September 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can’t be called a civil war even though it is. Something like that.

Kevin has written an extraordinary essay that contains all the thoughts he and Pat knew they would have to keep to themselves while they served our country.

You need to read it in its entirety and then email it to everyone you know. You can do both at Truth Dig but here’s part of this incredible work.

Much has happened since we handed over our voice:

Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the September 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can’t be called a civil war even though it is. Something like that.

…Somehow our elected leaders were subverting international law and humanity by setting up secret prisons around the world, secretly kidnapping people, secretly holding them indefinitely, secretly not charging them with anything, secretly torturing them. Somehow that overt policy of torture became the fault of a few “bad apples” in the military.

…Somehow the more soldiers that die, the more legitimate the illegal invasion becomes.

…Somehow profiting from tragedy and horror is tolerated.

Somehow the death of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people is tolerated.

Somehow subversion of the Bill of Rights and The Constitution is tolerated.

Somehow suspension of Habeas Corpus is supposed to keep this country safe.

…Somehow reason is being discarded for faith, dogma, and nonsense.

Somehow American leadership managed to create a more dangerous world.

Somehow a narrative is more important than reality.

…Somehow being politically informed, diligent, and skeptical has been replaced by apathy through active ignorance.

Somehow the same incompetent, narcissistic, virtueless, vacuous, malicious criminals are still in charge of this country.

Somehow this is tolerated.

Worst. Congress. Ever.

Jon Ponder

The debate over whether President Bush is the worst president in our history is settled. He is. Now there is a growing sentiment that we may be enduring the final months of the Worst Congress Ever, too:

American government was not designed for one-party rule but for rule by consensus — so this current batch of Republicans has found a way to work around that product design. They have scuttled both the spirit and the letter of congressional procedure, turning the lawmaking process into a backroom deal, with power concentrated in the hands of a few chiefs behind the scenes. This reduces the legislature to a Belarus-style rubber stamp, where the opposition is just there for show, human pieces of stagecraft — a fact the Republicans don’t even bother to conceal…

These days, [the Democrats] consider themselves lucky if they manage to hold a single hearing on a bill before Rove’s well-oiled legislative machine delivers it up for Bush’s signature.

Apparently, Republican politicians were all picked on in grade school:

The GOP’s “take that, bitch” approach to governing has been taken to the greatest heights by the House Judiciary Committee. The committee is chaired by the legendary Republican monster James Sensenbrenner Jr., an ever-sweating, fat-fingered beast who wields his gavel in a way that makes you think he might have used one before in some other arena, perhaps to beat prostitutes to death. Last year, Sensenbrenner became apoplectic when Democrats who wanted to hold a hearing on the Patriot Act invoked a little-known rule that required him to let them have one.

“Naturally, he scheduled it for something like 9 a.m. on a Friday when Congress wasn’t in session, hoping that no one would show,” recalls a Democratic staffer who attended the hearing. “But we got a pretty good turnout anyway.”

Sensenbrenner kept trying to gavel the hearing to a close, but Democrats again pointed to the rules, which said they had a certain amount of time to examine their witnesses. When they refused to stop the proceedings, the chairman did something unprecedented: He simply picked up his gavel and walked out.

“He was like a kid at the playground,” the staffer says. And just in case anyone missed the point, Sensenbrenner shut off the lights and cut the microphones on his way out of the room.

The article is long and worth the read.

GOP Falling Apart over Staying the Course in Iraq

Jon Ponder

So much for the GOP’s vaunted strict party discipline:

Even some of President Bush’s staunchest allies in solidly Republican states are publicly questioning the administration’s war policies, while others are scrambling to find new ways to talk about Iraq in the face of rising voter frustration over management of the war.

Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), who earlier this year stood by Bush during some of the most damaging sectarian violence, this week said that Iraq was in “chaos” and that it was “worth trying” to partition the country into semiautonomous regions, a proposal that sharply diverged from White House policy.

In Washington state this week, the Republican candidate for the Senate called on Bush to replace Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, a position also taken by a Republican congressman from Connecticut and the party’s Senate candidate in New Jersey, Thomas H. Kean Jr.

Kean said this week that the Bush administration had made “horrendous mistakes” in Iraq.

In Minnesota and Iowa, congressmen in tough reelection battles have called for withdrawing troops. So, too, has the Republican candidate in the congressional district around Boulder, Colo.

And in Virginia and Tennessee, states that Bush won handily in 2004, Senate candidates have been put on the defensive over their earlier calls to “stay the course” in Iraq, a line Republicans once hoped would demonstrate resolve. Both candidates there are now saying the U.S. must change tactics in Iraq.

“We haven’t found one part of the country, even in the South, where it is good to say, ‘Stay the course,’ ” said Sarah Chamberlain Resnick, executive director of the Republican Main Street Partnership, a group for GOP centrists. But Republicans “don’t want to do a major in-your-face with the president. They are trying to work around the issue in their districts.”

WaPo: ‘During National Character Counts Week, Bush Stumps for Philanderer’

Jon Ponder

Pres. Bush campaigns with Rep. Don Sherwood, his wife Carol and daughter Linda (far left)

Did you know that the Senate has proclaimed this week as “National Character Counts” week? No? Well, President Bush was well aware that Americans were celebrating character this week and yet he went to Pennsylvania to campaign for GOP Rep. Don Sherwood anyway.

You may recall that Sherwood is the congressman whose girlfriend called 911 in Washington D.C. one night claiming that Sherwood was trying to strangle her. After being sued by the girlfriend, Sherwood admitted the adultery but denied the strangling attempt and settled with his ex for $5 million.

The president’s campaign stop with Sherwood yesterday during National Character Counts week was too much even for as stalwart a member of the mainstream press as the Washignton Post’s Dana Milbank. Under the headline,”During National Character Counts Week, Bush Stumps for Philanderer,” Milbank wrote:

So it has come to this: Nineteen days before the midterm elections, President Bush flew here to champion the reelection of a congressman who last year settled a $5.5 million lawsuit alleging that he beat his mistress during a five-year affair.

[…]

GOP Ads Targeting Blacks Refer to Women as ‘Ho’s’ and Whites as ‘Crackers’

Jon Ponder

As Trish reported last week, a white Republican group called America’s PAC has ads up on urban radio that are intended to convince black people to vote for Republicans. I just came across the transcripts for a couple of the ads. So not making this up:

“If you make a little mistake with one of your ‘hos,’ you’ll want to dispose of that problem tout suite, no questions asked,” one of the men says.

“That’s too cold. I don’t snuff my own seed,” the other replies.

“Maybe you do have a reason to vote Republican,” the first man says.

And:

“I can understand why a Ku Klux Klan cracker like David Duke makes nice with the terrorists,”a male voice in the ad says. “What I want to know is why so many of the Democrat politicians I helped elect are on the same side of the Iraq war as David Duke.”

Black Americans who use the street argot mangled in these ads are generally too disaffected to vote. Everybody else will think they’re as funny as they are offensive.