Month: April 2006

Harry Taylor Is the Real Deal

Jon Ponder

Harry Taylor should be treated like an American hero. He had the courage to stand up and say directly to President Bush what millions of Americans feel about the malfeasance and incompetence of this president’s administration.

Harry Taylor is the 61-year-old, prosperous commercial real estate broker with offices in Uptown Charlotte who confronted President Bush in person yesterday when the president addressed the city’s World Affairs Counsel. During the Q&A session, Taylor stood up and said, without wavering:

“I have never felt more ashamed of, nor more frightened by my leadership in Washington, including the presidency, by the Senate … And I would hope … I feel like despite your rhetoric, that compassion and common sense have been left far behind during your administration, and I would hope from time to time that you have the humility and the grace to be ashamed of yourself inside yourself.”

The president responded with his patented Rovian canned patter. (Read President Bush’s response here.) It is obvious now that he had been prepped for just such a blistering assault months ago before he was sent out to do these live sessions with “real” people.

The president’s ready response prompted BuzzFlash and others to wonder if perhaps Taylor was a plant. This suspicion made perfect sense, and is indicative of where we are as a country six years into the through-the-looking-glass reign of George Bush. There is no doubt that Karl Rove’s office might have sent someone like Harry into the meeting as a strawman for Bush to take down — with the resulting sound bite showing the president handling the criticism with the ease of an innocent.

But as an expatriated Charlottean, my impression of Harry Taylor was that he was the genuine article. I did some research and called into the Queen City for some help on the ground. (Thanks, JR.)

[…]

Leaker of the Free World

Trish

Words escape me, except to compare and contrast, for the nine-hundred-eighty-four-thousand-millionth time what would be happening in the country right now if an aide of Al Gore’s said that Bill Clinton authorized him to leak the identity of a CIA agent because he felt snitty toward the person’s spouse. OMIGOD.

P.S. Maybe that impeachment idea isn’t so bad after all. Please, please, let’s all work to put Democrats back in office this year. Thanks.

There Was a War on Wilson

Jon Ponder

Matt Cooper’s article on the Plame Affair in the July 17, 2003, issue of Time Magazine was titled, “A War on Wilson?”

We now know that the answer is “yes.” We learned today that Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff, Scooter Libby, testified that President Bush authorized him to reveal classified documents related to this matter to New York Times reporter Judith Miller.

We also learned that the secret documents had been cherry-picked to bolster the president’s case and discredit Wilson, while information that ran counter to the president’s assertions was omitted from what Miller was shown.

And just as a side note: In every news package on this story I saw today on CNN and MSNBC, the reporters are quick to say, and with 100 percent assurance, that the president did not break any laws in authorizing the release of the classified information.

That may be so, but it is alarming, after all the shenanigans coming from this White House, that the media is still so quick to absolve them of wrongdoing.

Charlotte Man Lets Bush Have It — To His Face: ‘I Have Never Felt More Ashamed’

Jon Ponder

Could This Be the ‘Have You No Sense of Decency, Sir’ Moment for the Bush Regime?

UPDATE: Harry Taylor Is the Real Deal

Harry Taylor of Charlotte spoke for millions at a Q&A session with President Bush today:

“I have never felt more ashamed of, nor more frightened by my leadership in Washington, including the presidency, by the Senate — And I would hope — I feel like despite your rhetoric, that compassion and common sense have been left far behind during your administration, and I would hope from time to time that you have the humility and the grace to be ashamed of yourself inside yourself.”
— Harry Taylor

Q You never stop talking about freedom, and I appreciate that. But while I listen to you talk about freedom, I see you assert your right to tap my telephone, to arrest me and hold me without charges, to try to preclude me from breathing clean air and drinking clean water and eating safe food. If I were a woman, you’d like to restrict my opportunity to make a choice and decision about whether I can abort a pregnancy on my own behalf. You are —

THE PRESIDENT: I’m not your favorite guy. Go ahead. (Laughter and applause.) Go on, what’s your question?

HARRY TAYLOR: Okay, I don’t have a question. What I wanted to say to you is that I — in my lifetime, I have never felt more ashamed of, nor more frightened by my leadership in Washington, including the presidency, by the Senate, and —

AUDIENCE MEMBERS: Booo!

THE PRESIDENT: No, wait a sec — let him speak.

HARRY TAYLOR: And I would hope — I feel like despite your rhetoric, that compassion and common sense have been left far behind during your administration, and I would hope from time to time that you have the humility and the grace to be ashamed of yourself inside yourself. And I also want to say I really appreciate the courtesy of allowing me to speak what I’m saying to you right now. That is part of what this country is about.

THE PRESIDENT: It is, yes. (Applause.)

HARRY TAYLOR: And I know that this doesn’t come welcome to most of the people in this room, but I do appreciate that.

Big props to my hometown!

Quote du Jour

Buck Banks

It is not by accident that our schools and colleges, our universities and foundations, even the churches, are the instruments of big business. It is no accident that the press is now a branch of big business too. It would be madness to let the purposes or the methods of private enterprise set the habits of the age of atomic energy.

— Harold Laski, (1893-1950), British political scientist

President Bush’s Response to Harry Taylor

Jon Ponder

Here is President Bush’s response to criticisms from Harry Taylor on April 6, 2006, in Charlotte:

THE PRESIDENT: I’m going to start off with what you first said, if you don’t mind, you said that I tap your phones — I think that’s what you said. You tapped your phone — I tapped your phones. Yes. No, that’s right. Yes, no, let me finish.

I’d like to describe that decision I made about protecting this country. You can come to whatever conclusion you want. The conclusion is I’m not going to apologize for what I did on the terrorist surveillance program, and I’ll tell you why. We were accused in Washington, D.C. of not connecting the dots, that we didn’t do everything we could to protect you or others from the attack. And so I called in the people responsible for helping to protect the American people and the homeland. I said, is there anything more we could do.

And there — out of this national — NSA came the recommendation that it would make sense for us to listen to a call outside the country, inside the country from al Qaeda or suspected al Qaeda in order to have real-time information from which to possibly prevent an attack. I thought that made sense, so long as it was constitutional. Now, you may not agree with the constitutional assessment given to me by lawyers — and we’ve got plenty of them in Washington — but they made this assessment that it was constitutional for me to make that decision.

I then, sir, took that decision to members of the United States Congress from both political parties and briefed them on the decision that was made in order to protect the American people. And so members of both parties, both chambers, were fully aware of a program intended to know whether or not al Qaeda was calling in or calling out of the country. It seems like — to make sense, if we’re at war, we ought to be using tools necessary within the Constitution, on a very limited basis, a program that’s reviewed constantly to protect us.

Now, you and I have a different — of agreement on what is needed to be protected. But you said, would I apologize for that? The answer — answer is, absolutely not. (Applause.)

Gospel According to Jarding and Mudcat: The Blue State South Will Rise Again

Jon Ponder

“To me, as far as gays are concerned … what’s two queer guys gettin’ married got to do with me losing my job?”
— Dave “Mudcat” Saunders

Steve Jarding and Dave “Mudcat” Saunders are on a mission to bring Southern whites back into the Democratic fold. Or, more accurately, the political consulting team is doing it the other way around. They want the Democratic Party to return to its populist roots, which will make it appealing to working class and rural voters again.

They have had some success, especially in Mudcat’s home state of Virginia where they helped turn rural, normally GOP precincts out in support of telecom magnate Mark Warner, who was elected governor, and is now on the short list of Democratic presidential nominees for 2008. Even when their candidates have lost, Jarding and Mudcat have made some noise: They were behind former Florida Sen. Bob Graham’s sponsorship of a NASCAR truck during the 2004 presidential primaries. (They also consulted briefly on former N.C. Sen. John Edwards’ presidential campaign.)

This year Jarding and Mudcat are working on the campaign of James Webb, a former Republican — and Reagan appointee, no less — to unseat Sen. George Allen of Virginia. Allen is formidable, but he has been thick as thieves with the Bushies, and Webb plans to make the president’s incompetence an issue and tie that rotten record around Sen. Allen’s neck.

Jarding and Mudcat have put their ideas for retaking the South from the Republicans in a book, “Foxes in the Hen House: How the Republicans Stole the South and the Heartland and What the Democrats Must Do to Run ’em Out,” which should be of interest to every liberal politician who yearns to see red turn to blue on the map of the old Confederacy and beyond.

Here are some other elements of the Jarding and Mudcat prescription for the comeback of the Democratic Party in the South:

[…]

If You Think the Solution to the Healthcare Crisis Should Come from the Private Sector, Here Is a Question…

Jon Ponder

What’s stopping them?

Working with their minions in the Republican Congress, the healthcare, insurance and pharmaceutical lobbies killed “Hillary-care” in the early 1990s. They called her program, which would have insured every American, “socialistic.”

“Let the private sector deal with this,” said the Republicans. “We don’t need another government program.”

That was 12 years ago or so. In the interim, not only has the private sector not resolved the healthcare crisis, things have gotten steadily worse.

Most tellingly of all, nobody has a solution in the works. It isn’t even being discussed in a serious way by the people who run the country.

Someone is bankrupted by healthcare costs every day. It happened last month to someone I know.

Really. What is stopping the healthcare or the insurance industries from solving this problem?

The answer is obvious. Those industries are not having a problem. They are making money hand over fist.

Chris Matthews Caught on Tape Sucking Up to Tom DeLay

Jon Ponder

DeLay on Hillary: “Nothing worse than a woman know it all.”

Harry Shearer has a video clip of Chris Matthews talking with Tom DeLay just seconds before they went on the air on “Hardball” earlier this week.

Watch DeLay’s body language. In contrast to his smiling mug shot and high-fivin’ public demeanor, he is clearly a doomed and defeated man.

I typed up a rough transcript:

MATTHEWS: Thank you for calling me.

DELAY: Well…

MATTHEWS: It was a good thing for me.

DELAY: Was it?

MATTHEWS: Oh, of course it was. We got it on the air as fast as we could.

DELAY: Yeah, well…

(Cross talk.)

MATTHEWS: If Shannon had told me there was an embargo, I would have honored it, but I didn’t

DELAY: Well, she’s mad at me now because I told you. I didn’t tell you that.

(Indistinct female voice off-camera.)

MATTHEWS: I didn’t.. I didn’t get an embargo. But ah… You just said to me, if you’re on the morning news tomorrow morning, this is something you can use, which is fine. But she called me and said, “Don’t worry. He’s not calling to complain.” (Laughter.)

[Tape is edited. Continues…]

MATTHEWS: Have you seen this new, ah, new focus group stuff on the {Democratic] candidates?

DELAY: No, I haven’t.

MATTHEWS: (Indistinct.)

DELAY: Really?

MATTHEWS: I’ll send it to ya. It’s great… It’s great stuff.

DELAY: Really?

MATTHEWS: Hillary, John Kerry… all these guys. All Democrats. How they do…

VOICE off camera: Thirty seconds, everybody.

MATTHEWS: It’s [Republican pollster] Frank Luntz who did it. And ah…

DELAY: Ooh, I like Luntz…

MATTHEWS: Hillary did not do well.

DELAY: Really?

MATTHEWS: Kerry did well.

DELAY: You’re kidding?

MATTHEWS: I am not kidding. They didn’t like Edwards. They thought he was a rich lawyer pretending to care about poor people. Hillary was “know it all.”

DELAY: Nothing worse than a woman know it all.

[Tape is edited. Continues…]

MATTHEWS: Thanks. I owe you one. I owe you two!

DELAY: No, you don’t.

MATTHEWS: Today and last night. No, I do.

DELAY: I appreciate it…