Mini-report

September 28, 2006

Today’s edition of items that definitely deserve attention, but which I just didn’t get to today.

* As a rule, when a member of Congress sends personal emails to a 16-year-old page, and asks how old he is, what he wants for his birthday, and requests a photo of him, there’s something not quite right about the situation.

* Like Josh Marshall, I think it’s too late for Bob Woodward to redeem himself, but that doesn’t mean his next book won’t be interesting.

* Speaking of Woodward, he says 2006 has been bad in Iraq, but 2007 will be worse.

* I feel entirely comfortable saying that Katherine Harris has had the worst campaign in the nation this year, but New York’s Jeanne Pirro, who was running for the Senate against Hillary Clinton, but is now running for state Attorney General, is a close second.

* The war in Iraq, on top of its cost in human life, now costs $2 billion a week. Wow.

* Fred Barnes thinks George Allen is still a viable presidential candidate for 2008. That sounds more than a little silly at this point.

* Is the Bush-McCain Torture Bill worse than the Alien and Sedition Act? Maybe.

* OpinionJournal.com editor James Taranto is still trying to attack Clinton’s pre-9/11 counter-terrorism efforts. And he’s still wrong.

* Lieberman’s not sure he can forgive Democrats who have endorsed Lamont? To me, the far bigger question is whether Dems who have endorsed Lamont can forgive Lieberman.

* If you have time, Atrios has floor statements from several key Dem senators, including Feingold, Kerry, Clinton, and Obama. They’re worth reading.

If none of these particular items are of interest, consider this an end-of-the-day open thread.

Did someone say Open Thread?

Bill Clinton needs to re-energize the Democrats. His finger pointing on Fox should only be the beginning. No other Democrat has the ability to speak as clearly and convincingly as he does and still connect with everyone. He owes it to America for screwing up his second term.

  • [Woodward] says 2006 has been bad in Iraq, but 2007 will be worse.

    I think it’ll be just the same. No matter what happens, the mechanically regular waste of US lives in Iraq remains unaltered.

    … Feingold, Kerry, Clinton, and Obama [and Harry Reid]…

    … lacked the courage to begin a filibuster or place an individual ‘hold’ on the bill which marks the final day of Democracy in America. We’d have saved ourselves a hell of a lot of trouble if we’d listened to Prescott Bush in 1941.

  • Yes, Dan, I do think someone mentioned Open Thread.

    Diebold. Diebold. Diebold. The Dems need to be investigating, putting a spotlight on, threatening…whatever it takes BEFORE the election this Fall. Even if Kennedy is not totally correct in his 2nd Rollingstone piece this company seems poised to steal elections in November.

  • Democrats who have advocated political strategies that haven’t been succesful have to be ready to abandon those strategies, and those who have clung their favored opinions about methods to reach our political goals that have continually proven to be shoddy literally have to be ready to receive less recognition, until they can catch on to the reality of the present situation a little bit more.

  • “As a rule, when a member of Congress sends personal emails to a 16-year-old page, and asks how old he is, what he wants for his birthday, and requests a photo of him, there’s something not quite right about the situation.”

    Um. This made me feel a bit icky. Hey, howya doin, when’s your birthday? Yeah, great, where do you live? Uh-huh and have you ever seen a grown man naked?

    I like the way the boy’s discomfort with the e-mails is discarded as a smear campaign. Will this be the new approach to any complaints about a congress member’s (har) behaviour?

    Yeah I cut up 15 people and ate their eyeballs but the stories are all part of a smear campaign!

  • My prediction:

    1.5 trillion dollars to be spent buggering up Iraq…

    1,500,000,000,000.

    That’s quite a few commas…

  • I hope I’m not late to the party with this but …. wow.

    Olbermann verbally tears Bush a new one. I had no idea anyone in the mainstream media anywhere held these opinions or had this much guts.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70wOzCkWN5g

    (Sorry if CB posted this yesterday and I didn’t see or something…)

  • Re: #8 D’oh, it was on the mini-report two days ago. Still, it’s definitely worth a repeat.

    Hey, where is the backlash from the right on this? They aren’t the type to sit idly by and let someone expose their crimes without a significant smear campaign.

  • Rian, I was wondering the same thing yesterday. My current theory is that they will declare him an enemy combatant as soon as the ink is dry on the bill, so they’re not wasting the effort now.

    (on a more serious note, he has received a hoax anthrax letter.)

  • Dale, count me in your corner. I think a huge part of Rove/Mehlman’s national Congressional strategy is that they just have to get several key races plausibly close in the last week before the election.

    A Katherine Harris/Jeanne Pirro they can’t salvage; but a Musgrave/Allen/Santorum — they just have to have ’em within spittin’ distance.

  • At $2 billion a week, I wonder how many weeks worth it would have taken to buy off Saddam and his sons. Heck you can always murder them later after they’ve taken the deal.

  • I think your analysis of the strategy is right, Confidence Man.

    Here’s the link to Kennedy’s latest article:
    http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/11717105/robert_f_kennedy_jr__will_the_next_election_be_hacked

    Maybe those last-minutes patches were innocent and maybe they weren’t, but the ability to check was absent and that’s suspicious.

    This makes me wonder why the Democratic leadership doesn’t do more of the press’ job since they’re not doing it themselves. I guess they do with the hearings and they position papers etc, but it seems like there is the opportunity to be much more dynamic and urgent about these scandals.

  • Here’s something I sent to the group-list at my school of all the students’ emails:

    Have you ever heard of the White Rose?

    During WWII, the White Rose was the name of a group of young Catholic
    students who opposed the Nazi totalitarian regime and its oppression of
    the Jews. They were all in their late teens to early twenties in age, and
    their interests included the philosophical. They sought to oppose and
    undermine the Nazi rule by spreading pamphelets, and so on. By the war’s
    end, every member of the White Rose was captured and tortured to death by the Gestapo.

    During the War, the Gestapo was a special Nazi secret police force that
    became known for their cruelty and barbarity in torturing suspects of
    disloyalty to the Nazi regime. They had their own idea of how their
    country should be, their own idea of conformity, and they wanted to
    destroy anyone who didn’t see things their way.

    In this country, during Segregation, local police forces worked like a
    sort of Gestapo, in a good-old-boy network that covered up, enabled, and
    participated in lynchings, harassment, framings, and other crimes and
    extrajudicial actions against blacks to enforce an American caste regime
    that was in many ways as harsh as the system which segregated, oppressed and ultimately sought to do even worse to the Jews in Europe during Nazism’s reign.

    Countless African Americans and non-African Americans, Civil Rights
    lawyers and ordinary people lost their lives and worse to contribute to
    bringing down this system of hate. Many of those stories will never be
    told and have not even been preserved.

    From now on, for every day for the rest of my time in law school, I will
    leave a white rose in the atrium of the law school as a memorial to the
    French and German resistance to Nazi Germany, to the Civil Rights lawyers and activists who opposed segregation and oppression in America (and to the many untold victims of that oppression), to all the lawyers and
    ordinary people who work to oppose similar oppression around the world
    today, and to the firefighters and police-men and women of the City of New
    York who died on 9/11/2001 in their effort to save the lives who were lost
    on that day. It is my hope that lawyers of today would oppose, and not
    enable, the development of a Gestapo, anywhere.

    Also, my rose is not dedicated to the few among the police and
    firefighters who died on 9/11 who did not care about the people who they
    were there to save: among a few hundred cops and firefighters, there must
    be a few — the bullies and rapists — who are not there to help, but who
    may go along with others when it’s time to save lives just so they won’t
    look out of place. For anyone who would rape a detainee like Abner Louima, or who would murder an un-armed Amadou Diallo, who rape or extract sexual favors from prisoners, who are racist and who used their power to harass those of another race, and those who victimize women who think they can go to them for protection from the world’s predators, those people do not deserve a memorial, except to remember to keep those like them from getting those jobs that put them in positions of power again.

    When we live in a world where the powerful can do things like this,

    http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/8542.html

    or can tell lies like this,

    http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/8539.html

    to cover up for a man who publicly speaks racial slurs against people of
    color and yet still holds a seat in Congress, we have need to remember.

    The caretakers of the building can do what they want with my rose, and if
    anyone would like to put it to a good purpose, like to place on the
    monument of a family member who embodied or practiced the ideals I am
    memorializing, my heart goes with you. For any law student who would
    commit any kind of offense against that rose, well, I will know how you
    feel.

  • Swan,

    I hope you won’t mind if I pass your “manifesto” to friends and Repubs-of-acquaintance outside the CB’s circle? I find it very moving and easy to understand.

    I guess you wrote it before the Congress decided to declare 28/11/06 the Day of Infamy in a perfect trifecta of votes. Perhaps you could commemorate it with a *yellow* rose.

  • It turns out the White Rose is a symbol of Homeland. So the Gestapo must have been pretty pissed off when those students appropriated it to their own use.

  • To Senator LIEberman, I as a Connecticut Democrat, will never forgive nor forget that you went against the decision of the Democrats in the Ct Primary.

  • Ladies and gentlemen, may I present, not the “Republofascists”, but the “Democratic anti-MagnaCarta pro-torture Caucus”

    I have to say Stabenow and Lautenberg surprised me.

    The dirty dozen:

    Carper (D-DE)
    Johnson (D-SD)
    Landrieu (D-LA)
    Lautenberg (D-NJ)
    Lieberman (D-CT)
    Menendez (D-NJ)
    Nelson (D-FL)
    Nelson (D-NE)
    Pryor (D-AR)
    Rockefeller (D-WV)
    Salazar (D-CO)
    Stabenow (D-MI)

    • Comments are closed.