I am a resident of Little Rock, AR, and Sen. Blanche Lincoln never, ever responds to my emails. Sen. Pryor (who’s actually more conservative than Ms. Blank) and Rep. Snyder always reply, whether they agree with me or not. Hell, I’m even married to a gal from Lincoln’s home town and my in-laws are still friends with her family. She is in her own bubble and getting, what I believe, to be bad campaign advice. For some reason, she thinks she can garner some Republican votes (no way) by opposing any kind of public option but all she is doing is completely losing her base of liberals and moderates.
Arkansas politics is a funny monster. The voters here respond to leadership. Period. I’m afraid Ms. Blank ain’t up to it.
You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!
DOWNLOADS: (988)
PLAYS: (2165)
Harry Reid's leadership has been about as bad as it gets. He complained that we needed 60 votes to pass anything and now that we have it, he still is complaining. We're not fighting the Republicans who have no power, but the Conservadems who are blocking real reform.
Bill Frist never had 60 votes. Bill Frist never cared. Republicans ran the Senate as if they owned the place, even when enjoying razor-thin majorities.
Yet when Democrats took the chamber, the first thing Harry Reid did was complain that he couldn't do anything because he didn't have 60 votes.
Then voters delivered 59 votes. And Harry Reid whined that he still couldn't do anything. In fact, nothing would ever get accomplished unless they had 60, and to do that, they had to bring turncoat Joe Lieberman back into the fold, even though he had spent the previous year making common cause with John McCain and Sarah Palin, even speaking at the Republican National Convention in Minnesota. You see, we were told, Joe Lieberman is with us on everything except the war! So we need him for 60, and when we have 60, everyone will get ponies! And if Lieberman strays, why, Evan Bayh said Senate Democrats could punish him!
We're told that Lieberman needs to still be part of the action because he's with us on everything except the war. Now we have to include health care on his list of shit he's against us on. What next?
Kos continues:
And take special note of this sentence:
Senator Reid is focused on crafting a health care bill that will overcome a Republican filibuster.
Republican filibuster? Democrats have 60 votes. There is no Republican filibuster, just a Democratic one. The problem is Reid's inability to keep his caucus together. His office can't even be honest about Reid's leadership failures. Fucking liars.
I'll take a Chuck Schumer-run Senate with 57 Democrats (bye bye Reid, Lieberman, and Lincoln) than a Harry Reid-run one with 75 Democrats.
We need an up or down vote on health care. If Reid can't get his own party to vote for cloture, he should step down as leader. He's a joke.
And Holy Joe is definitely standing in the way of health care reform. Is he just a mean old man who just wants revenge because he was a warmonger that got booted out of the Democratic party by his own voters? Why take it out on America and oppose real reform? He had his chance when he bolted and supported Sarah Palin and McCain.
Harry Reid promised to keep Joe in line and on Cavuto he's actively working against him. Lieberman tells Cavuto that he's against reconciliation because it would kill bipartisanship. How much bipartisanship have you seen during this health care debate? And once again this bitter man is talking the Republican line of "we're doing too much, and we must slow down." If he can't even vote for a bill that appeases the Baucus Dogs, then what will he vote for?
If one Republican vote for the Baucus health insurance "reform" bill makes it bipartisan, how many Democratic "no" votes on cloture does it take to make a filibuster of the public option bipartisan?
Maybe Glenn Thrush knows. Or maybe not. After all, he granted anonymity for this important observation:
"If there really is such a groundswell of support for the public option, perhaps senator Schumer would like to show the caucus, especially the centrist Democrats, how he can come up with the 60 votes necessary to overcome the [Republican] filibuster that he damn well knows is coming," said a senior Democrat.
In a full Senate, a "Republican filibuster" requires 41 "no" votes on cloture to sustain. There are only 40 Republicans in the Senate.
The first person I saw on the Hill tonight was Senator Joe Lieberman. He was exiting the House side of the Capitol and looking for his driver.
I tried to press him a little on his non-committal answer re: filibustering health care over the public option. Maybe I’m inclined toward optimism, but I’m thinking he’s hoping he doesn’t have to make that decision
You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!
DOWNLOADS: (1611)
PLAYS: (1208)
It's one thing for the Bernie Sanderses and Russ Feingolds to openly question the mission in Afghanistan. It's quite another for Dianne Feinstein to do so.
KING: Well Senator Feinstein, you're the chair of the Select Committee on Intelligence. To the question of where this ends, it is eight years after 9/11. We've paused and reflected on that just the other day. You see the things that we can't see, the intelligence. Are we winning in Afghanistan? Are we any closer to finding Osama bin Laden, and does the president have a clear strategy, in your view?
FEINSTEIN: Well, I can tell you this. A lot of the leadership has been taken out of al Qaeda. I can say and I think you would agree that Afghanistan and the Pakistani border are still the major safe haven, the major safe haven for terrorists in the world. And these are people who will, if they can, come after us, not necessarily the Taliban, but certainly al Qaeda and other affiliated groups.
So we have to consider that. We have about 60,000 troops there, another 8,000 are moving in with our allies, it about equals the force that is in Iraq. To the best of my knowledge, the president has had no request for additional troops up to this time. My view is that the mission has to be very clear. I don't believe --
KING: Has to be means it is not now?
FEINSTEIN: I believe it is not now. I do not believe we can build a democratic state in Afghanistan. I believe it will remain a tribal entity.
I do believe that clearing out Al Qaida, clearing out the Taliban is a bona fide part one of the mission. I do agree that training Afghan troops, Afghan -- Afghan police is an important piece of the mission.
I believe the mission should be time limited, that there should be no, well, we'll let you know in a year and a half, depending on how we do. I think the Congress is entitled to know, after Iraq, exactly how long are we going to be in Afghanistan.
Feinstein is actually more charitable about the presence of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan than the commanding general on the ground, Stanley McChrystal, who said this week that there are no signs of major Al Qaeda anywhere in the country.
But as far as the wariness of the viability of Constitutional democracy in Afghanistan, you need only look to their recent election, into which the opposition leader is now seeking a criminal investigation. He has accused Hamid Karzai of treason and "state-engineered fraud". Despite this, Karzai will probably win election on the first ballot, and a vote that has been horribly compromised will be made official. We saw in Iran how this can lead to violence and chaos, and Afghanistan is not nearly as stable. Without a viable partner in the government, as Feinstein says we cannot expect an endless commitment. Yet because Karzai is Pashtun the US will likely back him in this fight, alienating the other ethnic groups in the region. Kalashnikovs are flying off the shelves in the Tajik areas. Civil war is not an unlikely scenario at this point.
This further limits the mission, away from state-building and toward dealing with the elements in the country willing to deal. Otherwise we set ourselves up for a decade-long slog that will only end with more dead and more treasure squandered, to little effect. And yes, as Sen. Feinstein says, that process should have an end date.
The Washington Post does the most insidious form of "journalism" today: they do an "on the other hand" story about torture. "Some say" it's wrong, but "others say" it works, so the implied conclusion is, how can it be wrong?
And therein lies the problem. Why does it matter? After eight years or so of deceptive leadership and an inbred corporate media corps eager to lend its imprimatur, we have gotten to the point where we're actually arguing that torture is okay if it works.
Life is full of challenges and dilemmas, but morally aware people don't take to the low road when they have to deal with them. For instance, I'm worried about paying for my COBRA coverage. If I could rob a bank and get away with it, would that be okay? Of course not.
And can I point out again that the most useful intelligence we got from detainees was because their interrogators were kind to them?
These scenes provide previously unpublicized details about the transformation of the man known to U.S. officials as KSM from an avowed and truculent enemy of the United States into what the CIA called its "preeminent source" on al-Qaeda. This reversal occurred after Mohammed was subjected to simulated drowning and prolonged sleep deprivation, among other harsh interrogation techniques.
"KSM, an accomplished resistor, provided only a few intelligence reports prior to the use of the waterboard, and analysis of that information revealed that much of it was outdated, inaccurate or incomplete," according to newly unclassified portions of a 2004 report by the CIA's then-inspector general released Monday by the Justice Department.
The debate over the effectiveness of subjecting detainees to psychological and physical pressure is in some ways irresolvable, because it is impossible to know whether less coercive methods would have achieved the same result. But for defenders of waterboarding, the evidence is clear: Mohammed cooperated, and to an extraordinary extent, only when his spirit was broken in the month after his capture March 1, 2003, as the inspector general's report and other documents released this week indicate.
Over a few weeks, he was subjected to an escalating series of coercive methods, culminating in 7 1/2 days of sleep deprivation, while diapered and shackled, and 183 instances of waterboarding. After the month-long torment, he was never waterboarded again.
"What do you think changed KSM's mind?" one former senior intelligence official said this week after being asked about the effect of waterboarding. "Of course it began with that."
Mohammed, in statements to the International Committee of the Red Cross, said some of the information he provided was untrue.
"During the harshest period of my interrogation I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear in order to make the ill-treatment stop. I later told interrogators that their methods were stupid and counterproductive. I'm sure that the false information I was forced to invent in order to make the ill-treatment stop wasted a lot of their time," he said.
Critics say waterboarding and other harsh methods are unacceptable regardless of their results, and those with detailed knowledge of the CIA's program say the existing assessments offer no scientific basis to draw conclusions about effectiveness.
"Democratic societies don't use torture under any circumstances. It is illegal and immoral," said Tom Parker, policy director for counterterrorism and human rights at Amnesty International. "This is a fool's argument in any event. There is no way to prove or disprove the counterfactual."
Tom Ridge wants to have it both ways. He sat on his hands then to save his job and now he wants to get paid again. Remember, he could have made a difference. Now he describes the terror alerts he propagated as "political" when he has a book to sell, but it's not sitting well with a lot of us, especially when he already knew that in 2004.
First, the timing of terror alerts raises questions that aren’t adequately answered.
If there’s no intent to benefit the president in a re-election year, Ridge should say more than “we don’t play politics” at the Department of Homeland Security.
Especially after doing a virtual campaign ad by announcing “new” threats just after the Democratic convention and praising “the president’s leadership in the war against terror.”
And it wasn’t said off the cuff or in answer to a question. It was said in prepared remarks.
It makes Ridge more salesman than guardian, more political servant than public servant.
Same with failing to divulge the full context of information on potential terror sites later revealed as three to four years old.
How does pushing the president while holding back the truth give anyone confidence “we don’t play politics”?
Maybe he’s told what to say, when and how, and maybe that’s why he wants out. A source close to Ridge tells me the relationship between Ridge and the White House “isn’t what it used to be.” Still, it’s his gig.
In this picture provided by the environmental group Greenpeace, Greenpeace climbers rappel down the face of Mount Rushmore National Memorial in Keystone, S.D. on Wednesday, July 8, 2009 to unfurl a banner that challenges President Obama to show leadership on global warming. Obama is at the G8 meeting in Italy to discuss the global warming crisis with other world leaders. A federal prosecutor says a dozen people were taken into custody on Wednesday after the incident.
