Wednesday’s political round-up

April 25, 2007

Today’s installment of campaign-related news items that wouldn’t generate a post of their own, but may be of interest to political observers:

* Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) will officially launch his presidential campaign in New Hampshire today, under a cloud of questions surrounding his struggling effort. On the eve of the announcement, McCain fired his campaign’s finance director, who received some of the blame for the senator’s sub par fundraising in the first quarter.

* Speaking of announcements, former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore is traveling to Iowa tomorrow to officially kick off his own presidential bid. Gilmore, whose one term in Virginia is widely considered to be a drastic failure, barely registers in GOP polls and has almost no money in his campaign coffers (Gilmore had $90,107 cash on hand at the end of March).

* The NYT reported today that several states are considering bills to ban automated recorded telephone messages (robocalls) that became excessive during the 2006 campaign cycle. “Get rid of them,” said Stan Jordan, a Republican state representative in Jacksonville, Fla., who has sponsored a bill there. “When they first started, this wasn’t much of a nuisance. But it’s epidemic-level now.” Political calls have been exempt from the do-not-call list; states hope to change that.

* The two leading Democratic presidential candidates, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, pushed back hard against Rudy Giuliani’s argument that a Dem president would make Americans less safe. “Rudy Giuliani today has taken the politics of fear to a new low and I believe Americans are ready to reject those kind of politics,” Obama’s campaign said in a statement. “America’s mayor should know that when it comes to 9/11 and fighting terrorists, America is united. We know we can win this war based on shared purpose, not the same divisive politics that question your patriotism if you dare to question failed policies that have made us less secure. I think we should focus on strengthening our intelligence, working with local authorities and doing all the things we haven’t yet done to keep Americans safe. The threat we face is real, and deserves better than to be the punchline of another political attack.”

* And Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), in the midst of his second presidential run, launched a drive to impeach Dick Cheney yesterday at an event in DC. When a reporter noted that Speaker Pelosi has said his impeachment drive isn’t going anywhere, Kucinich shot back, “Have you talked to her today?” “Yes, I did,” the reporter replied. Kucinich had not expected that answer. “Then I would say I have not talked to her,” he acknowledged. At this point, Kucinich has zero cosponsors for his impeachment resolution.

Laura Bush told Anne Curry on the Today Show, that the American people need to know that “no one suffers more than their President and I do.”

http://americablog.blogspot.com/2007/04/laura-bush-wants-you-to-know-that-when.html

unbelievable.

  • Kucinich is widely seen as a moonbeam by the rest of the country, but I’m willing to bet that within a year, he’ll find a lot of sponsors for his impeachment move.

  • Dennis Kucinich currently has my vote. Finally, someone has the guts to take the only appropriate action. His only fault in this is that he only drew up articles for Cheney, not the entire Administration.

  • Anyone see Jon Stewart’s interview of John McCain? McCain acted like a deluded impotent lying fool. Never seen anyone single handedly destroy a political campaign like he has. Everyday is a new Ramp Strike (tm Tom Cleaver) for Walnuts (tm Wonkette.)

  • Somebody please explain to me why Obama used the wingnut frame “America’s mayor”. Did he do it mockingly? That’s the only way I would use it.

    If Giuliani is “America’s mayor” we better go check the silver drawer.

  • Zero co-sponsors. For shame. Anyone reminded of the perverse scene in Fahrenheit 9/11 where poor Gore had to preside over the joint session where Representative after Representative strongly protested the 2000 election results and not a single senator would co-sign the protest? That was disgusting, too. What on earth were they protecting? What are they protecting now? When is enough enough?

    There should be nearly as many co-sponsors for that bill as there are Dems in the House. Even if the votes aren’t there for a 2/3 majority or whatever is needed to oust him, let’s put a microscope to a lot of his misdeeds over all these years and make him accountable. Who knows how many firm “no’s” would be converted after such an exercise.

    Zero is shameful.

  • Kucinich’s heart is in the right place – we need a drive to impeachment of not just Cheney but the whole Bush regime – but it won’t start with the current congress. If it starts at all it’s going to start with the states. He should be spending his efforts fanning the flames in the state legislatures and with local coalitions trying to force these measures, that’s the only way it will trickle up to the congress. As it stands now, they are still too conservative, even the Democrats who are afraid of backlash, to do anything unless they are assured their constituencies demand it.

  • Has there ever been such an onslaught from so many quarters calling for impeachment that has just been ignored by the US Congress in our history? Finally someone is listening and introduces articles of impeachment on that low life Cheney and he gets zero co-sponsors from Congress. How slow are the DEms we elected to follow our directive. We want these people stopped and out of office and jailed. What is wrong with these congressional Democrats? Do they have to continually have their noses rubbed in the lies and corruption before they will respond? It’s just infuriating and frustrating. Kucinich has my vote and support.

  • Two comments…

    Kudos to Obama and Clinton for quickly and forcefully disputing Giuliani’s twisted comments.

    Re: Kucinich and impeachment. I think a lot of Dems reject impeachment because they don’t have the votes in the Senate to be successful. Couple that with the fact that, intentionally or not, Republicans so cheapened impeachment as a legitimate tool in their desire to castrate Clinton, that few want to take that road unless they can be successful. My impressions, anyway.

  • Political calls have been exempt from the do-not-call list; states hope to change that.

    The 2004 election was the first time I ever contributed more than a few bucks to various campaigns and progressive interest groups. Not only did my guy not prevail, but now scarcely a day goes by that my ringing phone doesn’t make me regret what, in the grand scheme, was really a pretty insignificant contribution. I’d love to contribute anonymously, just to keep my name off their lists, but they won’t let you do that.

    And, yeah, I get at least three spammy pleas a day in my email, but at least those I can delete at my leisure.

  • yeah, yeah Kucinich is doing the right thing and the impeachment resolution itself is great, but the quality of the messenger has a lot to do with the reception of the message:

    “When a reporter noted that Speaker Pelosi has said his impeachment drive isn’t going anywhere, Kucinich shot back, “Have you talked to her today?” “Yes, I did,” the reporter replied. Kucinich had not expected that answer. “Then I would say I have not talked to her,” he acknowledged.”

    I’m sorry, but that is seriously moonbeam territory. A trainwreck combination of ineffective and just plain nuts.

  • A conservative friend said that no one takes Kucinich seriously. I think it’s because of the way he looks and sounds, which sadly takes away from his message that Cheney should be impeached, convicted and removed from office.

    We all agree about Cheney. Here’s hoping this gets some legs.

  • I expect better from Kucinich.
    Sure, shoot for the sky, but don’t be such an easy target.

    “Have you talked with her TODAY?”, indeed!

    To quote Scott Evil: “Ass.”

  • I gotta disagree with Obama here.

    “Rudy Giuliani today has taken the politics of fear to a new low…”

    Where’s he been? We’ve been this low for years. The only new thing is that the politics of fear are being deployed 18 months before the election.

  • Kucinich has employed a classical “flanking maneuver.” By opening a political front against Cheney, Bush now has to worry about protecting his Chief Flying Monkey. And, establishing a threat against Cheney also opens the door to possible Senate control over who his replacement will be—and for the House to determine if the OVP should simply be defunded.

    “Dennis the Menace” now becomes the hungry fox in the GOP’s henhouse—and the GOP has no defensible leverage over this now. If Pelosi and friends play the “not-gonna-do-it” card, then they might start losing constituent support—across the board—and they risk becoming “GOP Quislings….”

  • From the Guardian article

    9. Dissent equals treason

    Cast dissent as “treason” and criticism as “espionage’. Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of “spy” and “traitor”. When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times, ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times’ leaking of classified information “disgraceful”, while Republicans in Congress called for Keller to be charged with treason, and rightwing commentators and news outlets kept up the “treason” drumbeat. Some commentators, as Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty for violating the Espionage Act is execution.

    Conason is right to note how serious a threat that attack represented. It is also important to recall that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed. And it is important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail for up to five months, and “beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death”, according to the historian Myra MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade.

    In Stalin’s Soviet Union, dissidents were “enemies of the people”. National Socialists called those who supported Weimar democracy “November traitors”.

    And here is where the circle closes: most Americans do not realise that since September of last year – when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 – the president has the power to call any US citizen an “enemy combatant”. He has the power to define what “enemy combatant” means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define “enemy combatant” any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly.

    Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That is why Stalin’s gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantánamo’s, in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.)

    We US citizens will get a trial eventually – for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US citizens fair trials. “Enemy combatant” is a status offence – it is not even something you have to have done. “We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model – you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we’re going to hold you,” says a spokeswoman of the CCR.

    Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder: it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every closing society, at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests – usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn’t real dissent. There just isn’t freedom. If you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now.

    read the whole thing:

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,329789179-110878,00.html

  • Alrighty then…

    Condi finally gets to answer some questions about the Niger forgeries.

    FINALLY!

    The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform today authorized subpoenas for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Republican Party documents as part of probes into a key assertion in the run-up to the Iraq war and alleged violations of presidential records rules.

    On a party-line vote, the committee voted 21-10 to authorize its chairman, Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), to issue a subpoena compelling Rice to testify May 15 on several matters, notably the Bush administration’s use of what Waxman called a “fabricated claim that Iraq sought uranium in Niger.”

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/25/AR2007042501863.html?nav=hcmodule

  • From A New Yorker:
    9/11/01 The attack on the World Trade Center
    President: George Bush
    Governor: George Pataki
    Mayor: Rudolph Giuliani
    REPUBLICANS ALL!

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