Wednesday’s Mini-Report

October 10, 2007

Today’s edition of quick hits.

* The RESTORE Act, with FISA revisions backed by most House Dems, cleared a major hurdle today: “In 20-14 vote today, the House Judiciary Committee passed the RESTORE Act, which seeks to update the hastily-passed Protect America Act and restore a balance between civil liberties and security. Upon the passage of the bill, Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) said in a statement that the bill gives “the Director of National Intelligence everything he said he needed” while still protecting the ‘vital rights of Americans.'”

* AP: “Thousands of Chrysler LLC autoworkers walked off the job Wednesday after the automaker and the United Auto Workers union failed to reach a tentative contract agreement before a union-imposed deadline. It is the first UAW strike against Chrysler since 1997, when one plant was shut down for a month, and the first strike against Chrysler during contract talks since 1985. Negotiators stopped talking after the strike began, according to a person briefed on the talks who requested anonymity because the talks are private.”

* Alberto Gonzales is still worried about the legal questions surrounding him: “No sooner did Alberto Gonzales resign as attorney general last month than he retained a high-powered Washington criminal-defense lawyer to represent him in continuing inquiries by Congress and the Justice Department…. The top concern for Gonzales, and now [George] Terwilliger, is the expanding investigation by Glenn Fine, the Justice Department’s fiercely independent inspector general, according to three legal sources familiar with the matter who declined to speak publicly about ongoing investigations.”

* CNN: “The United States tortures prisoners in violation of international law, former President Carter said Wednesday. ‘I don’t think it. I know it,’ Carter told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. ‘Our country for the first time in my life time has abandoned the basic principle of human rights,’ Carter said. ‘We’ve said that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to those people in Abu Ghraib prison and Guantanamo, and we’ve said we can torture prisoners and deprive them of an accusation of a crime to which they are accused.'”

* Barack Obama criticized Hillary Clinton by name today. That’s a little unusual.

* If Col. Robert P. “Powl” Smith, the chief of operations for the Standing Joint Force Headquarters, U.S. Northern Command, wants to tout the Bush war policy, that’s entirely his call. But doing so at Republican Party events seems like a bad idea.

* No one seems to have any idea what Israel hit via airstrikes in Syria on Sept. 6. Odd.

* What did Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s office have to do with the right-wing smear of a 12-year-old? Questions abound.

* Glenn Beck thinks Scooter Libby went to jail for his role in the Plame scandal. Glenn Beck doesn’t pay close attention to current events. It’s a good thing CNN continues to pay him to host a largely-unwatched show, isn’t it?

* Hillary Clinton got slammed today for equivocating on torture, but the context suggests the WaPo report wasn’t entirely fair.

* Remember, she’s a popular figure in Republican circles: “Deutsch then asked, ‘It would be better if we were all Christian?’ to which Coulter responded, ‘Yes.’ Later in the discussion, Deutsch said to her: ‘[Y]ou said we should throw Judaism away and we should all be Christians,’ and Coulter again replied, ‘Yes.’ When pressed by Deutsch regarding whether she wanted to be like ‘the head of Iran’ and ‘wipe Israel off the Earth,’ Coulter stated: ‘No, we just want Jews to be perfected, as they say.'”

* Greg Sargent: “I’ve just learned that nearly 90 members of the House of Representatives have now added their names to a letter to the President pledging not to vote for any more funding for the war and only to vote for supplementals that fully fund withdrawal and nothing else.”

* VoteVets.org gets the same kind of mail I used to receive at Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

* “Dear Abby” supports same-sex marriage. I think it’s going mainstream.

* And finally, Sen. Larry Craig (R) may be embattled, but he’s about to be inducted into the Idaho Hall of Fame. Of course, just as DC Republicans aren’t thrilled with Craig in Washington, Idaho Republicans aren’t happy either. Kootenai County Republican precinct committeeman Phil Thompson said Idaho Hall of Fame officials should consider at least postponing the induction. “Maybe in 10 or 15 years we can think of this hall of fame stuff. Now is not the time,” Thompson said. “It’s a sad day to be a Republican.” Truer words were never spoken.

Anything to add? Consider this an end-of-the-day open thread.

In case anyone cares:

Fred Thompson lost the debate yesterday, He had a 22% chance of winning the nomination and is now trading at 20.1% down 1.9%

The winners were, in order, McCain +.8, Paul +.5, Huckabee +.4 and Giuliani +.2
The losers were Romney -.1 and Thompson -1.9

https://www.intrade.com/aav2/trading/tradingHTML.jsp?evID=23030&eventSelect=23030&updateList=true&showExpired=false

The intrade market is a far better predictor than any poll or political pundit.

  • Who is this Jimmy Carter of which you write? The man speaks the truth! He should run for President!

  • If the right wingers were people of their word and really believed that private charity should help families like the Frosts rather than having government programs intervene, shouldn’t they be donating money and raising funds like crazy to help the family out rather than doing their damnedest to flog them publicly?

    The easiest way to set this nation’s moral compass is to see what the right would do and head in the opposite direction.

  • I hope sincerely that Alberto spends many many many hours with his lawyers. And reaches the fiscal bankruptcy already apparent in his moral and legal bankruptcy.

    And then he heads to the Hague with the rest of this war criminal cabal.

  • Chrysler…they’ve got a backlog of cars that go on forever—and ever—and ever. They were getting ready to idle a bunch of plants anyway—and they won’t have to ante up on unemployment benefits with those employees on the picket lines. This one could conceivably last a while—kinda like the URW strike back in ’76.

    The newest Christmas offering for the kids—Gonzo on a Rope (twistin’ in the wind, hopefully…).

    Good to see President Carter coming out and throwing punches at the Bushylvanians. The smearing of Carter by the dark forces of the Reich will commence in “funf…fier…drei…zwei….”

    Finally—so if we gave the whacked-out loon in Tehran a blonde wig and a couple of dimestore breast implants, we’d have another Anne Coulter. The horror………the horror………

  • Ann Coulter: She has a new book out…cue the outrageous statements.

    Hillary Clinton and her equivocating: When you equivaocate, you open yourself up for not being quoted completely. Why can’t she say, “(T)his country will not engage in torture in a Clinton administration. It will be a priority of my administration to do an immediate and thorough review of what methods have been implemented, and if we find that the CIA has been engaging in torture, it won’t matter that they call it ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ because in my administration, it will stop.”

    If she’d said that, it would be clear what her position is even if parts of her remarks had been left out.

    Alberto Gonzales: Orange is definitely his color.

  • Who’s gonna ask Coulter how she intends to “perfect” her new beau, Andrew Stein?

    I thought that mAnn [expletive] [expletive] [expletive] Coulter was opposed to homosexuality.

  • Alberto Gonzales is still worried about the legal questions surrounding him

    Open question to all: can Bush preemptively pardon Gonzalez and Rove and others?

    If not, can we slow down the investigations and go for convictions after 1/21/09? Otherwise, won’t Bush just pardon everyone involved in his malAdministration?

  • The mini-posts about torture/President Carter, and Ann Coulter reminded me of an interview several years ago in which Coulter was asked if she thought all non Christians were condemned to hell for eternity. She answered unequivocally in the affirmative. For some reason, that has stuck with me.

    Now we talk about how cruel and inhuman(e) torture is as a practice, and I can’t help but think of the billion or so Christians worldwide who truly believe God would punish humans for a few short years of questionable deeds by torturing them for an eternity in hell.

    Do people really believe in a God that would do this? I can’t imagine the cruelty one has to muster to torture a mouse for a second, and yet God would torture a human soul for an infinity of years?

  • When Col Smith told the Republicans, “We can’t let the patient die,” he inadvertently compared Iraq to Terry Schiavo. No further comment necessary.

  • Does anyone know if Col. Smith was stupid enough to do any of these appearances in his uniform? If he did, he would be in violation of the UCMJ and subject to Court Martial. One can only hope.

  • We have to recognize our mistakes or we are doomed to repeat them. That is why the vote taken by the House Foreign Affairs Committee was so important and historic. To the committee members voting Yea- Thank you for being brave, telling the truth, and doing the right thing.

    Congressional panel OKs Armenian measure
    …The measure that would recognize the World War I-era killings of Armenians as a genocide…

  • Anne, I don’t think it’s our job to apologize for people interpreting liberals in the worst way possible merely because it was semi-plausible from the words the liberal used, and then putting the jump-the-gun interpretation into print.

    * No one seems to have any idea what Israel hit via airstrikes in Syria on Sept. 6. Odd.

    If this was a successful attack, I think we would have heard all about it right away. I think there was some kind of botch-up, probably a U.S.-intelligence botch-up, that led to hitting the wrong target, and the Israelis and the WH coordinated how this thing would be released to the press because it would be too embarrassing now for the Republican-appointed exec branch to be botching up the “war on terror” even more.

  • These are deeply disturbed people that listen to Rush…dangerously…or so they would have us believe. They use the writing style of David Broder who decides that if he thinks this way then most Americans think this way…ignoring all the polls to the contrary. I’m beginning to believe that 30% of our nation’s people are insane, living in some tv movie fantasy.

    What is deeply disturbing is that Rush can edit his program and despite showing these people that he edited out the portion that shows him to be lying, they will ignore it and call the real transcript the lie. If all the newspapers and tv channels came out and showed the two transcripts side by side and all said that Rush was lying, these violently insane dips would call it propaganda. This means of course that the truth no longer matters to these people, that the truth is what they choose to believe rather than what the facts really are.

    Look what private ownership of the press has given us…propaganda machines more effective than the truth for some. 30%…the dead enders…the partially dead…the nation’s poison has pooled into the right wing of the republican party. They like to think they are a majority, but they are not. They like to think that most Americans back their hate filled rhetoric and their despicable actions…but we don’t. These are very sick, violently disturbed people who have been empowered by the right wing media with disastrous results. Just looking for a lynch mob to join and rabble-rousers like Rush and Beck to rile them into a frenzy. They truly are America’s poison.

  • Anne, @7,

    I wonder what’s wrong with us — the white, well-educated, middle-aged women — that we just don’t seem to be able to warm up to Hillary who, by all superficial yardsticks, is “one of us”…

    Also today, the House Foreign Affairs Committee approved the Armenian Genocide resolution. — Daniel, @11

    That’s the *Committee*; let’s wait with the 3-cheers till we see how the whole Congress votes. Bush is against it, naturally… Because in Turkey, even the newly elected, more religious govt is likely to oppose any admission of genocide (perhaps even more so than the previous, more secular but also more military one) and Bush depends on Turkey’s goodwill for a lot of “stuff”.

    I sure wish Turkey would beat its breast in public about the Armenian slaughter and that Japan would ditto about their treatment of the Chinese and Koreans in WWII… Germans apologised for their WWII sins and it didn’t kill them… Why do some nations think that apologising for atrocious behaviour — especially something done by their fathers and grandfathers (ie the current generation is not bearing any responsibility for it) is, somehow, losing face?

  • Here’s an article that I read today:

    “Homeland security strategy gets update”
    http://www.star-telegram.com/national_news/story/262875.html

    My favorite line from the article?:

    “Homeland security both as a policy matter and as a concept didn’t exist prior to 9-11 and prior to … President Bush assuming office,” said Frances Fragos Townsend, the White House homeland security adviser.

    If by “homeland security both as a policy matter and as a concept..”, you mean create a massive federal department that has turned into a revenue-sucking paper tiger who’s only success has been in color-coding the terror-alert level for the country, then I guess the answer is no, the Clinton administration never did that.

  • If one could wave a wand and make everyone Christian, I imagine many many people other than Coulter would wave that wand.

    Heck I’d be tempted myself if only it meant the Sunni and Shiites would have no more reason to butcher each other. I’m not technically Christian either. Homogeneity has its downside, but he temptation is understandable.

    It’s a dumb question. Maybe appropriate under the circumstance

    BTW, is the CPR-worthy?

  • Swan – in case I wasn’t clear, I’m not apologizing for Hillary at all – in fact, I’m saying it’s her equivocating that opens the door to the media choosing to put their own spin on what she says. It’s true that whoever the reporter was heard the entirety of her comment, and chose – or an editor made the choice – to quote her in a way that made it unclear what her position is on torture. If the candidate knows going in that this is how the game is being played (and don’t you think she should know this by now?), he or she needs to be so clear that it is pretty much impossible to pull a quote that turns the words into something else.

    libra – I go back and forth on Hillary. I know she’s smart, and I know she would do a better job than any Republican I can think of, but I also think she shares some personality traits with Bush – she’s a little too dig-in-her-heels for me – and I feel a little squeamish about her having the same kind of power Bush has taken for himself and established as precedent for his successor. And then, there’s that triangulation thing…I worry that she’d sell out core Democratic principles on the theory that half a loaf is better than none – I’m pretty much sick of that with the Democratic leadership we have now. If she’s the candidate, I will vote for her, but I may not be all that excited about it.

  • That Coultergeist interview was unbelievable. The fact that lots of people find her entertaining is truly frightening. The fact that she gets so much media attention is even worse. But it was good to see Christian “tolerance” on full display. I can see her shoving people into the gas chambers in 1944, laughing and swinging her hair around, wondering why her victims are offended by her conduct.

    It’s too bad the interviewer didn’t ask her about her “kill their leaders and convert them to christianity” schtick, or her “women shouldn’t vote” schtick. She is a performance artist, and it’s almost like she wants to be killed by an enraged jew or muslim, just so she can die while she’s still young and avoid the inevitable drop in her ratings as she ages and her loyal dittohead followers quit drooling over her skanky self.

  • Anne wrote: Swan – in case I wasn’t clear, I’m not apologizing for Hillary at all

    No, I know what you wrote, and I’m saying you’re apologizing for all the people who are intrepreting liberals’ words in the worst way possible all the time. The goal-posts shouldn’t get moved the second the words come out of our mouths, and liberals shouldn’t have to do three tries or more until after everyone stops listening to get treated like they meant no more than they said. You’re response was that she has to use a very precise formula of words, or otherwise, oops, it’s her fault if she gets hit up by the WaPo, which has become a reliably compromised mouthpiece. The hell with that.

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