Category: Politics

Topic Header

UN: Iraq Occupation Has Created 3.7 Mil Refugees

Jon Ponder

The Iraq war has spawned a refugee crisis that will likely become increasingly dire over the next year. According to the United Nations, 3.7 million Iraqi citizens are currently displaced as a result of the civil war the U.S. invasion has unleashed. They include 1.7 million who are homeless inside Iraq and 2 million who are living in other countries.

The United States will accept fewer than 500 refugees out of the 3.7 million Bush’s war has created.

“The current exodus is the largest long-term population movement in the Middle East since the displacement of Palestinians following the creation of Israel in 1948,” said a U.N. report in early January. The U.N.’s refugee commission is seeking $6o million to apply to the crisis.

Astoundingly, the United States — whose president started the war — will accept fewer than 500 Iraqi refugees this year. (Not a typo: 500.)

By comparison, between 500,000 and 1 million Iraqi refugees are living in Syria, 700,000 are in Jordan, 20,000 to 80,000 are in Egypt and up to 40,000 are living in Lebanon.

Obviously, our government is not allowing the people its war displaced to come here because it fears that terrorists would enter the country with them. But one day — thanks to George W. Bush — we’ll pay for this displacement, one way or another.

Jeff Miller Certainly has the Makings of a Fine Lobbyist

Buck Banks

Appalling pol: It’s a field crowded with celebrity creeps and stellar liars, brazen braggarts and darlings of deceit, but when former Tennessee state Sen. Jeff Miller, R-Cleveland, enters the lobbying biz next year, he should slip right to the top of the heap on an impressively slick slime trail. Miller certainly has what it takes to boldly go from the legislative branch to the furtive world of lobbying where one is rewarded not so much by what one accomplishes as by what one gets away with.

Let’s look at some of the qualities that will make Miller the kind of rookie lobbyist that Jack Abramoff would be proud to mentor:

The definition of lobbying in the statute says communicating with a state legislative or executive official for the purpose of influencing.

CHUTZPAH WITHOUT IRONY:Miller, who sponsored Tennessee’s successful constitutional ban on same-sex marriages, recently suggested that the state’s largest gay rights advocacy organization should consider hiring him as a lobbyist.

“I suppose he thinks helping pass discriminatory bills would make him an effective advocate for the gay, lesbian and transgender community,” said Chris Sanders, president of the Tennessee Equality Project. He said Tennessee Equality Project members view Mr. Miller with a “mixture of derision and hostility” and noted his proposal “is certainly not one that we’re going to follow up on.”

Voters overwhelmingly approved the constitutional amendment, directed at “solemnizing the relationship of one man and one woman,” in November despite the opposition of the Tennessee Equality Project and other groups.

SHOTGUN MARKETING:Apparently last week Miller blanketed Tennessee with letters soliciting lobbying business. In it he noted that his his mandatory one-year waiting period ends in November, and included that he had served 12 years in the General Assembly and had been Senate Republican Caucus chairman.

“I have worked closely with and become dear friends with many holding office and those who keep the wheels turning behind the scenes,” wrote Miller.

GOOD DANCER: Miller has so far managed to remain at large while an ethics investigation prosaically called Operation Tennessee Waltz brought about the arrests of several current and former state lawmakers. Because of that investigation, Miler resigned his caucus post last year during a special session on ethics prompted by the probe.

Miller has acknowledged accepting $1,000 from Chattanooga lobbyist Charles Love during the Tennessee Waltz probe but has said the money was a campaign contribution. Last year, at least two former Miller aides were called before a federal grand jury to provide testimony.

SHAMELESS HYPOCRISY: Miller sponsored the effort to put the proposed Marriage Protection Amendment on the November 2006 ballot. Only three days after lawmakers sent the marriage ban to voters, then-Sen. Miller’s wife filed for divorceon Feb. 25, 2005. No irreconcilable diffs here, though, Miller’s wife charged her husband had engaged in “inappropriate marital conduct” with a legislative employee later identified in account as a Miller aide. The Millers divorced last year.

“The hypocrisy was troubling,” Sanders said of Miller.

KNOWS THE OUTER LIMITS OF THE RULES:In his lobbying solicitation letter, Miller was careful to note that while state ethical guidelines prevent him from lobbying until November, “I am more than happy to offer you any advice you may need regarding the legislative process, potentially applicable rules of law and procedure, steps utilized in making policy decisions, or simply to be a go-to person on a particular issue.”

Tennessee Ethics Commission attorney Ann Turner said that so long as Miller does not communicate with former colleagues or state officials, he can act as a “consultant.”

“The definition of lobbying in the statute says communicating with a state legislative or executive official for the purpose of influencing,” Turner said.

Jeff Miller is going to make a heckuva lobb, er, consultant.

Simon Sez, I’m Sorry — Really

Buck Banks

Pop apology: In an entertaining send-up of celebrity apologies, Media Guy Simon Dumenco takes a first step toward healing:

I realize now that I used a phrase in describing Mr. Cowell that is unacceptable in any context or circumstance — even if, say, your shrink just changed your meds, which, by the way, he had.

Editor’s note: In lieu of a Media Guy column this week, we’re publishing the full text of Simon Dumenco’s statement from his press conference where he apologized for his recent unfortunate use of hateful language.

First off, I want to apologize to Simon Cowell, the fans of “American Idol” and not only all big-chested, squared-haired British men everywhere, but all ridiculous British people period, including Rowan Atkinson, Queen Elizabeth, that soccer player with the spiky hair and his Spice Girl wife, the other Spice Girls, Tony Blair, Madonna, J.K. Rowling and Benny Hill, if he’s still alive.

I realize now that I used a phrase in describing Mr. Cowell that is unacceptable in any context or circumstance — even if, say, your shrink just changed your meds, which, by the way, he had. And even if you were being heckled at the time by someone who clearly got off on pushing your buttons, which happened to be the case. And even if you were drunk, which, for the record, I was then, but I’m not now. Also for the record, this water bottle I’ve got right here, it just has water in it. You can taste it if you want to.

Anyway, I realize that in not only saying what I said but repeating it five times — and then also arranging for the production of a limited-edition T-shirt with the phrase that’s available at selected boutiques including Kitson on North Robertson Boulevard in Beverly Hills — I ruined the moods of ridiculous, differently chested, alternatively coiffed British men everywhere. I can neither defend nor explain my outburst or my licensing agreement.

I can also no longer deny to myself that there are issues I obviously need to examine deep, deep within my own soul, and I’ve not only asked for help from the Rev. Al Sharpton and the Rev. Jesse Jackson but for forgiveness from Donald Trump.
[…]

Will the 2008 Prez Election See More ‘Purple States?’

Buck Banks

Electoral speculation: Charlie Cook of the National Journal offers up a trenchant analysis of some of the demographic and population trends that could influence the apparent GOP lock-down on the Electoral College in the next election. Of course, we know that the Electoral College isn’t essential to winning the presidency — all you really need is a crooked state attorney general, a Bubba for a governor and a compliant judiciary.

Top strategists in both parties have identified 11 states as moving away from whichever party long dominated them.

Only three states switched their allegiance between the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. When George W. Bush first ran for the White House, he won New Hampshire but lost New Mexico and Iowa. Four years later, he lost New Hampshire but won New Mexico and Iowa.

Even though the margins in those states, plus a dozen others, were razor-thin, the fact that 48 states ended up in the same party’s column in back-to-back presidential elections suggests a certain amount of stability in Electoral College voting patterns. But, if they’re stable, will they remain so in a country whose recent presidential balloting has been so evenly divided?

Three weeks before Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, Horace Busby, a longtime adviser to President Johnson who later became a first-rate political analyst and the author of a terrific political newsletter, The Busby Papers, declared that there was a “Republican lock on the Electoral College.” Indeed, the GOP won five of the six presidential elections from 1968 to 1988, losing only in 1976 with the election of Jimmy Carter as a direct result of the Watergate scandals and the pardon of President Nixon.

Busby’s theory dovetailed nicely with that of another enormously talented political-operative-turned-analyst, Kevin Phillips, who had been a key strategist in Nixon’s successful 1968 presidential campaign.

Phillips noted that not only population had shifted from Democratic strongholds in the Frost Belt of the Northeast and Midwest to the more Republican Sun Belt of the South and Southwest but also political power had shifted toward the Sun Belt in both Congress and in the Electoral College. Today, this is conventional thinking; then, it was new grist for the mill.
[…]

Bush: Saying ‘Democrat Majority’ in SOTU Was Unintentional

Jon Ponder

As if more proof were needed that George W. Bush is a congenital liar, he’s now claiming that his use of the phrase “Democrat majority” in the State of the Union speech this month was a slip of the tongue:

“I didn’t mean to be putting fingernails on the board. I meant to be saying, Why don’t we show the American people we can actually work together?”

“That was an oversight,” Bush said in an interview Monday with National Public Radio. “I’m not trying to needle … I didn’t even know I did it…

“I didn’t mean to be putting fingernails on the board. I meant to be saying, Why don’t we show the American people we can actually work together?”

That excuse might be marginally believable if he hadn’t been reading from a script that said “Democratic majority.”

Here’s what we know for certain: Anyone who uses “Democrat” as an adjective is an asshole. Here’s proof:

the term became controversial as far back as the 1950s. Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) famously used it to deride Democrats during his hearings investigating whether Communists had infiltrated the U.S. government.

It isn’t like we Democrats are disappointed when jerks like the president and others in his party use the term to needle us.It is what we have come to expect.

What is disappointing is that this president feels no compunction about using the State of the Union speech to extend one hand in bipartisanship while ussing the other slap us in the face — and then saying it was a slip up.

Go peddle it somewhere else, GOoper.

Most U.S. Soldiers Killed in Iraq Come from Rural Areas

Buck Banks

IED fodder: Due to local economic conditions, lack of educational and employment opportunities, and other pretty obvious reasons, most of the U.S. volunteer army comes from the hinterlands, not the cities. It’s not an uncommon story — young men and women from small towns getting their asses shot off while rich Republicans get richer off the spoils of war.

This might be considered part of a long-term White House strategy of fighting two significant wars abroad while demobilizing the population at home.

Demographer William O’Hare and journalist Bill Bishop, working with the University of New Hampshire’s Carsey Institute, which specializes in the overlooked rural areas of our country, have actually crunched the numbers in an important study that has gotten too little attention. Matching a data set from the Department of Defense listing the dead and their hometowns against information from the White House Office of Management and Budget on which counties in this country are metropolitan, they found that the American dead of the Iraq and Afghan Wars do indeed come disproportionately from rural America. Quite startlingly so.

According to their study, the death rate “for rural soldiers (24 per million adults aged 18 to 59) is 60 percent higher than the death rate for those soldiers from cities and suburbs (15 deaths per million).” Of rural areas, Vermont has the highest rate of casualties, followed by Delaware, South Dakota, and Arizona. Only eight of our states have higher urban than rural death rates.

Demographer O’Hare, who himself grew up in the small Michigan town of Flushing, tells Tomdispatch:

“We know that soldiers from rural America are dying at higher rates than those from urban America, strikingly higher, 60 percent higher. We know, from other research, that the rural young join the military at higher rates than those from metropolitan areas. The dearth of opportunity in rural areas simply leaves more young people there with fewer alternatives to the military.

“Dozens of case studies show that opportunities are moving away, part of a long-term shift. The opportunity differential between rural and urban America is probably higher now than at any time in the past. Our study highlights the price some young folks and their families are paying for lack of opportunity in rural America.”

What does this mean? Just over 3,000 Americans have died in Iraq. If the U.S. population is 300 million, then that’s just 0.001 percent of it. Add into this the fact that the American dead come disproportionately from the most forgotten, least attended to parts of our country, from places that often have lost their job bases; consider that many of them were under or unemployed as well as undereducated, that they generally come from struggling, low-income, low-skills areas. Given that we have an all-volunteer military (so that not even the threat of a draft touches other young Americans), you could certainly say that the President’s war in Iraq — and its harm — has been disproportionately felt. If you live in a rural area, you are simply far more likely to know a casualty of the war than in most major metropolitan areas of the country.

No wonder it’s been easy for so many Americans to ignore such a catastrophic war until relatively recently. This might, in a sense, be considered part of a long-term White House strategy, finally faltering, of essentially fighting two significant wars abroad while demobilizing the population at home. When, for instance, soon after the 9/11 attacks the President urged Americans to go to Disney World or, in December 2006, to go “shopping more” to help the economy, he meant it. We were to go on with our normal lives, untouched by his war.

Fleischer’s Testimony Contradicts Libby Claim, Bolsters Perjury Charge

Jon Ponder

Ari’s testimony at Scooter Libby’s perjury trial in the CIA Leak scandal certainly does not bode well for Scooter:

Former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer testified Monday that then-colleague I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby told him over lunch that the wife of a prominent war critic worked at the CIA.

Fleischer said the conversation happened June [sic] 7, 2003, days before Libby told investigators he was surprised to learn about the CIA operative from a reporter. That discrepancy is at the heart of Libby’s perjury and obstruction trial.

This and AP sources say Fleischer testified that his lunch with Libby was on June 7, 2003, but apparently the correct date was July 7. (Which Firedoglake confirms here.)

According to this Plame case timeline, NBC’s Tim Russert received a phone call from Libby on July 10 or 11, 2003, in which they discussed the network’s coverage of the purported Iraq-Niger uranium deal — but during which the subject of Amb. Joe Wilson and his wife, the secret agent, Valerie Plame, did not come up. However, Libby would later claim in testimony before a Grand Jury that he first learned about Plame’s identity from Russert during that call.

Guess Who’s Coming to the White House Press Club’s Dinner?

Trish

Remember last year when Stephen Colbert addressed the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and ripped them a new one for their cowardice at reporting all things Bush?

Do we really need a neon sign to proclaim the coziness of the White House press corps and the White House’s occupant?

But, listen, let’s review the rules. Here’s how it works. The President makes decisions, he’s the decider. The Press Secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Put them through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know, fiction.

Well, the press club isn’t going to make the mistake of having a relevant, funny, coherent speaker again this year. No, they’re opting for Rich Little instead.

Yes, I said it, ’70s-era impersonator Rich Little. Go ahead, check deadoralive.com if you don’t believe me but the guy is still breathing, and being dragged out of mothballs to deliver those wacky impressions that make the reporters and politicians laugh out loud. Or at least not squirm uncomfortably in their chairs.

While the name is probably unfamiliar to people under 40, Little was a popular Las Vegas performer and guest star on TV variety shows of the 1960s and 1970s. He’s best known for impressions of celebrities (Johnny Carson, Jimmy Stewart, Jack Benny) and presidents (Nixon and Reagan) who are no longer with us…

Which is why, according to Little, he was hired in the first place. “One of the reasons they picked me is because I’m not controversial,” he said yesterday from his home in Las Vegas. “They did get some flak about the guy they had last year. I don’t think they wanted someone political or controversial again.”

In light of this announcement I, for one, feel terrible about all the times I accused the mainstream media of turning away from the facts or weak-sister reporting.

Still, some people are talking about giving the new improved version of the dinner a miss. Like forever.

Another reason to scrap the dinner altogether, suggests Rem Rieder, editor of the American Journalism Review. After the Colbert controversy last year, and an earlier one in which Bush joked about not finding weapons of mass destruction, Rieder wrote that such press-politico events reflect the “smugness” and arrogance of the news media, suggesting that they are “part of a wealthy elite, completely out of touch with ordinary Americans.”

The hiring of “a controversy-free” Little underscores the point, he says: “Do we really need a neon sign to proclaim the coziness of the White House press corps and the White House’s occupant? It’s really hard for me to understand making a decision like this, particularly so close to the WMD debacle. The dinner must go.”

Clinton: Bush Must End War before He Leaves Office

Jon Ponder

Campaigning in Iowa over the weekend, Sen. Hillary Clinton issued a demand that Pres. Bush bring troops home from Iraq before he leaves office:

Clinton’s proposal provides an answer to the Republican talking-points challenge that Democrats don’t have a plan for getting out of Iraq. You want plan? Here’s a plan: You broke it, you fix it.

“This was his decision to go to war with an ill-conceived plan and an incompetently executed strategy,” the Democratic senator from New York said her in initial presidential campaign swing through Iowa.

“We expect him to extricate our country from this before he leaves office” in January 2009, the former first lady said.

This is smart because it pushes the responsibility for the war back onto the president, who has been trying to toss his hot potato to Democrats since they took control of Congress in November.

The proposal also provides an answer to the Republican talking-points challenge that Democrats don’t have a plan for getting out of Iraq. You want plan? Here’s a plan: You broke it, you fix it.

The senator’s challenge also reflects polling that shows that most Americans (52 percent in the most recent ABC/WaPo) want U.S. troops to leave Iraq, whether or not civil order is restored.

What Sen. Clinton’s proposal does not do is prevent U.S. forces from needlessly dying or being injured for two years while Bush dithers.

Poll: Dems Move Up in North Carolina

Jon Ponder

In the last statewide elections in North Carolina, Democrats held onto the governor’s mansion and the Assembly and won back the state Senate. Now new polling suggests Democrats are becoming more popular in the state, while Republicans, especially the state’s two nitwit U.S. senators, are becoming less so:

Approval/Disapproval

N.C. Gov. Mike Easley (D) 50/33
Sen. Elizabeth Dole (R) 36/36
Sen.Richard Burr (R) 32/34 (NC’s junior senator)
Iraq surge 40/57

And:

67 percent of voters in North Carolina want out of Iraq within the next year.

While North Carolina has always had its share of baccky-chewing rednecks, it has also always had a sizable “sensible middle” that has kept the rednecks at bay. It appears that the war and the GOP’s disastrous performance over the past six years may have energized the radical center in the Old North State.