Politics, Compassion, and Justice

Well put.
White House Briefing — News on President George W Bush and the Bush Administration:

Peter Baker and Michael Abramowitz write in The Washington Post: ‘For five years, President Bush waged war as he saw fit. If intelligence officers needed to eavesdrop on overseas telephone calls without warrants, he authorized it. If the military wanted to hold terrorism suspects without trial, he let it.

‘Now the Supreme Court has struck at the core of his presidency and dismissed the notion that the president alone can determine how to defend the country. . . .

‘For many in Washington, the decision echoed not simply as a matter of law but as a rebuke of a governing philosophy of a leader who at repeated turns has operated on the principle that it is better to act than to ask permission. This ethos is why many supporters find Bush an inspiring leader, and why many critics in this country and abroad react so viscerally against him.’

Think Progress » ThinkFast AM: June 30, 2006:

Former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke says the administration wants the “public to believe that it had not already occurred to every terrorist on the planet that his telephone was probably monitored and his international bank transfers subject to scrutiny.” “How gullible does the administration take the American citizenry to be?” Clarke wonders.

From the 9/11 Commission Report (just as bad as the NYTimes, I presume):

Al Qaeda frequently moved the money it raised by hawala, an informal and ancient trust-based system for transferring funds.¹²⁴ In some ways, al Qaeda had no choice after its move to Afghanistan in 1996: first, the banking system there was antiquated and undependable; and second, formal banking was risky due to the scrutiny that al Qaeda received after the August 1998 East Africa embassy bombings, including UN resolutions against it and the Taliban.¹²⁵ Bin Ladin relied on the established hawala networks operating in Pakistan, in Dubai, and throughout the Middle East to transfer funds efficiently. Hawaladars associated with al Qaeda may have used banks to move and store money, as did various al Qaeda fund-raisers and operatives outside of Afghanistan, but there is little evidence that Bin Ladin or core al Qaeda members used banks while in Afghanistan.¹²⁶

Stealing food products has always been the domain of the most hardened criminals

Think Progress » 15 years.:

15 years. The sentence handed out to three Louisianans convicted of looting liquor from a grocery store six days after Hurricane Katrina. Meanwhile, two men convicted this week of bribing a federal official to falsify Katrina contracting documents received one year in prison and a $5,000 fine.

Bush’s MO: Wealth for the Wealthy and Power for his Clique achieved by demagoguery over the fundamentalists, homophobes, conspiracy theorists, and those who can’t think past sound bites.
White House Briefing — News on President George W Bush and the Bush Administration:

Kate Zernike writes in the New York Times: “Two Senate Democrats on Wednesday criticized a White House plan to cut money intended for food stamps, student loans and farmers to pay for credit monitoring for veterans whose personal and financial data was stolen last month. . . .

“The Veterans Affairs Department offered to pay for a year of free credit monitoring for the veterans, which it said would cost about $160.5 million. Last week, the department said it would cover most of that cost by taking money from accounts that pay health and other benefits for veterans.

“The department withdrew that idea after Democrats protested. In a letter on Wednesday, Rob Portman, director of the White House Office of Management, recommended paying for the monitoring by taking about $130 million from a food stamp employment and training program, a farmers’ assistance program, student loans and a program for young people released from prison.”

It seems that in addition to the Iraq VP, Pres, and Prim Min who want timetables, the insurgents do too. I’m sure Bush sees this as a strong argument to continue the occupation. “It’s what they want us to do”

Steven R. Hurts and Qassim Abdul-Zahra write for the Associated Press: “Eleven Sunni insurgent groups have offered an immediate halt to all attacks — including those on American troops — if the United States agrees to withdraw foreign forces from Iraq in two years, insurgent and government officials told The Associated Press on Wednesday.”

The insurgents’ offer, if sincere, could be interpreted two ways. One is that the reason they are willing to stand down is so they can regroup and fight harder once the troops leave. But another is that they have no beef with Iraqi democracy, just with the U.S. occupation.

If it’s the latter, then one could reasonably argue that a timetable would help, rather than hurt a democratic Iraq. And it might also end deaths like this one .

My letter to David Brooks:
Speaking of respect, Mr. Brooks seems to lack it. I don’t know where he got his “facts” on dkos, but it is not a shepherd and sheep site. It is a site that posts important news stories with commentary of a political nature. Anyone is invited to post (except for obnoxious trolls).

I would think that Mr. Brooks would see the importance of people-powered media from his vantage at the Times. Alas, he has succumbed to a right-wing talking point that anyone in the reality-based community of the Daily Kos is a far-left sheeple. If they are “far left” it is only because the right has moved farther right. On the contrary, it is those on the right who believe media reports without respect to the facts that are the sheeple.

Respect Must Be Paid - New York Times:

The Keyboard Kingpin, a k a Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, sits at his computer, fires up his Web site, Daily Kos, and commands his followers, who come across like squadrons of rabid lambs, to unleash their venom on those who stand in the way. And in this way the Kingpin has made himself a mighty force in his own mind, and every knee shall bow.
…
The Kingpin waxed Cheneyesque on the evils of leaking, and this time the squeaking fury of the Kossacks could be heard (to those capable of discerning high frequencies) far and wide. The Kingpin excommunicated The New Republic from the community of the saved. ‘If you still hold a subscription to that magazine, it really is time to call it quits. If you see it in a magazine rack, you might as well move it behind the National Review,’ he wrote on Daily Kos.

‘The New Republic betrayed, once again, that it seeks to destroy the new people-powered movement for the sake of its Lieberman-worshiping neocon owners,’ the Kingpin charged. And so the magazine of Walter Lippmann was expunged from the community of the righteous, and its writers cast into the shadow of oblivion.

The Kingpin is not surprised by such betrayals. Sounding like Tom DeLay — who is his moral doppelgänger — Kos says that those who crash the gates and take on the establishment are bound to be attacked.

But the truth is that the new boss is little different from the old boss — only smaller. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and many other Democrats bow and scrape. He has managed to spread the gospel of Kossism far and wide, which is not really about ideas and philosophy. ‘I’m just all about winning,’ he has said.

I hope the President reads this article about how he’s been manipulated if he doesn’t read the book.
Surrealpolitik | Salon.com:

The Iraq resolution is above all a manifesto of articles of faith. We face “an adversary that is driven by hatred of American values” — not an insurgency against an occupation or a sectarian civil war. Then, “by early 2003,” Saddam Hussein “supported terrorists” — suggesting nonexistent links to al-Qaida. Now, “the terrorists have declared Iraq to be the central front in their war” — suggesting that the effect is its own cause, not that terrorism has emerged in reaction against the U.S. occupation. Finally, we “will prevail in the Global War on Terror, the noble struggle to protect freedom from the terrorist adversary.” Thus we battle one enemy despite his many faces, like Satan, and our goal is nothing mundane like stability or a political solution but “freedom.” Inserted into this credo is the tactical twist against a “timetable” — though Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, submitted a plan, a timetable, in November 2005 to Rumsfeld, at his insistence, for withdrawal of tens of thousands of troops this year. None dare call it “cut and run.”

The Republicans’ tone of theological certainty covers their anxious expediency. In the clarifying polarization of Congress the lethal netherworld of Iraq is held at bay. The politics of the Iraq resolution are the congressional analogue of Bush’s recent five-hour visit to the Green Zone intended to present an upbeat message, leaving unacknowledged, for example, a 23-point cable sent at the same time from the U.S. Embassy to the State Department chronicling the descent of Iraqi embassy employees into sectarian strife and fundamentalist Islamic strictures, putting their “objectivity, civility, and logic” under relentless siege.

On Tuesday, Vice President Dick Cheney, in a speech at the National Press Club, defended his statement of May 2005 that the Iraqi insurgency was in its “last throes.” “I don’t think anybody anticipated the level of violence that we’ve encountered,” he added. His comment, besides strangely echoing Bush’s on Hurricane Katrina (”I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees”), belied precise warnings from the CIA, the Army War College and 70 experts gathered by the National Defense University, who sent a report before the war to the administration but never received acknowledgment of receipt. But for the moment at least, Cheney’s restatement of optimism or obliviousness expresses regained political confidence.

Suskind begins at the briefing of President Bush at his Crawford, Texas, homestead on Aug. 6, 2001, about a CIA memo titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” Upon listening to the CIA briefer, Bush says, “All right, you’ve covered your ass, now.” He asks no more questions.

Cheney took it upon himself to withhold crucial information from the president on the theory that fostering Bush’s ignorance was a defensive wall of “plausible deniability.” Cheney’s thinking ran back to Nixon in Watergate. “He [Nixon] was accountable, and that doomed his presidency,” writes Suskind. Cheney created an unaccountable executive, who subsisted on information given him on a “need to know” basis determined by the vice president and “could essentially be ‘deniable’ about his own statements.” At first, Cheney acted as a visible regent. “Bush asked Cheney not to offer him advice in crowded rooms. Do that privately. Cheney did.”

Cheney decided not to give Bush the entire National Intelligence Estimate on WMD in Iraq, but only a one-page summary of “key findings,” which excluded caveats, including statements from the Energy Department and the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research that the aluminum tubes that Cheney and the neoconservatives insisted were proof of Saddam’s ongoing nuclear weapons program “more likely are intended for conventional weapons.” Bush read or skimmed what he was handed and asked no questions. He was the perfect “deniable” president.

In March 2002, Abu Zubaydah, touted as a top al-Qaida commander, was captured by a CIA and FBI team in Pakistan. Bush was prompted to call him “chief of operations” for al-Qaida, naming him as “No. 3″ to bin Laden. Dan Coleman, one of FBI’s top agents on al-Qaida, was assigned to read Zubaydah’s diary. In it, he writes in three incoherent voices, reflecting different personalities, writes Suskind. “The CIA had long suspected that the ubiquitous Zubaydah was involved in the August 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Africa. He [Coleman] looked for entries in the summer of 1998 in Zubaydah’s diary. Nothing … nothing but nonsense.” Coleman reported to an FBI official: “This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality.”

Bush was briefed. “I said he was important,” the president complained to Tenet. “You’re not going to let me lose face on this, are you?” “No sir, Mr. President.” So Zubaydah became the first experiment in the new rules on torture in which the Geneva Conventions did not apply.

On Oct. 29, 2004, Osama bin Laden released his “October surprise,” an 18-minute tape attacking Bush. The CIA analyzed the tape and concluded that “bin Laden’s message was clearly designed to assist the President’s reelection.” That day, at a meeting at the CIA, acting director John McLaughlin remarked, “Bin Laden certainly did a nice favor today for the president.”

Thus Bush, in his 2003 State of the Union address, delivered his infamous 16 words: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Bush’s falsehoods were an accomplishment of Cheney’s “deniable” presidency. Inside the CIA, Cheney was nicknamed “Edgar,” after ventriloquist Edgar Bergen

After the presidential election, in mid-November 2004, Suskind writes, Cheney directly pressured Miscik to leak a distorted part of a CIA report to “prove” that the war in Iraq was quelling, not inciting, terrorism. Cheney intended to declassify it and have the CIA make it public. But Miscik knew that the report “concluded nothing of the sort,” and refused to take part in leaking false information. She was told that the new CIA director, Porter Goss, had said, “Saying no to the vice president is the wrong answer.” “Actually,” she replied, “sometimes saying no to the vice president is what we get paid for.” Within a few weeks, she was forced out. Soon much of the CIA’s top echelon was purged for adhering to its residual professional standards.

The passage of the Republican congressional resolution on Iraq stands on the wreckage of those standards. (The Pentagon talking points refer to Zubaydah as “bin Laden’s field commander.”) The continuing primacy of apparatchiks Cheney and Rumsfeld reflects the conquest of their conception of the executive. And Rove’s exploitative strategies subordinate a potential political solution in Iraq to the paramount importance of a political solution in the midterm elections. Call it the triumph of surrealpolitik.

See Bush BS these questions (better live if you can find it, 5-15min, 20:19-22:23!, 23:06-(23:44!), 25:22, 29:04), then see the text here

Q — (inaudible) — long-range missile? And what sort of penalties do you think are in order if they do so?

And to the Chancellor, if I might, where does the EU stand on possible penalties for such a test?

PRESIDENT BUSH: The North Koreans have made agreements with us in the past, and we expect them to keep their agreements. For example, agreements on test launches. We think it would be in the world’s interest to know what they’re testing, what they intend to do on their test. It should make people nervous when non-transparent regimes that have announced that they’ve got nuclear warheads fire missiles.

And so we’ve been working with our partners, particularly in that part of the world, to say to the North Koreans that this is not the way you conduct business in the world, this is not the way that peaceful nations conduct their affairs.

I was pleased to see that the Chinese spoke out to the North Korean government and suggested they not fire whatever it is on their missile. And we’ll see whether or not the North Koreans listen. One of our strategies in North Korea is to make sure we include other countries as a part of our consortium to deal with this non-transparent regime. And China is an integral part of what we’ve called the six-party talks, and I am pleased that they’re taking responsibility in dealing with the leader of North Korea. It’s a very positive sign.

I’ve talked to President Putin about this subject. I know that we’re reaching out to the Japanese, all aimed at saying to the North Koreans, this is not a — in order to be an accepted nation, a non-isolated nation, there are certain international norms that you must live by. And we expect them to live by those norms….

Q A question to President Barroso and President Bush. Do you actually share the view that Russia is using its energy resources to oppress other countries? And in what respect does your cooperation help you now to position yourselves against that?

Froomkin quotes another embarrasing Bush exchange. I summarize: Mr. President, most of the world thinks you’re the biggest danger to peace. Bush: “That’s absurd.” Mr. President, here are some statistics that most of the world thinks you’re more dangerous than Iran or North Korea. Bush: They clearly don’t know the lessons of September 11th. (I suppose he hasn’t read Suskind’s book yet).

White House Briefing — News on President George W Bush and the Bush Administration: “Absurd!

Bush fielded two particularly pointed questions today at his joint press conference in Austria. He swatted them away angrily.

Both were based on the latest Pew Global Attitudes Project survey found the following: ‘The war in Iraq is a continuing drag on opinions of the United States, not only in predominantly Muslim countries but in Europe and Asia as well. And despite growing concern over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the U.S. presence in Iraq is cited at least as often as Iran — and in many countries much more often — as a danger to world peace.’

And if I may, to President Bush, you’ve got Iran’s nuclear program, you’ve got North Korea, yet, most Europeans consider the United States the biggest threat to global stability. Do you have any regrets about that?

PRESIDENT BUSH: That’s absurd. The United States is — we’ll defend ourselves, but at the same time, we’re actively working with our partners to spread peace and democracy. So whoever says that is — it’s an absurd statement….

Q Chancellor Schüssel, the European public is deeply worried by these secret prisoners that the CIA has been transporting, is transporting through Europe. Did you get assurance today from the President that this is not going to happen anymore, that there won’t be anymore in the kidnapping of terror suspects in Europe, that this is a thing of the past?

And to the President, Mr. President, you said this is “absurd,” but you might be aware that in Europe the image of America is still falling, and dramatically in some areas. Let me give you some numbers. In Austria, in this country only 14 percent of the people believe that the United States, what they are doing is good for peace; 64 percent think that it is bad. In the United Kingdom, your ally, there are more citizens who believe that the United States policy under your leadership is helping to destabilize the world than Iran. So my question to you is, why do you think that you’ve failed so badly to convince Europeans, to win their heads and hearts and minds? Thank you.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Well, yes, I thought it was absurd for people to think that we’re more dangerous than Iran. It’s a — we’re a transparent democracy. People know exactly what’s on our mind. We debate things in the open. We’ve got a legislative process that’s active. Look, people didn’t agree with my decision on Iraq, and I understand that. For Europe, September the 11th was a moment; for us, it was a change of thinking. I vowed to the American people I would do everything to defend our people, and will. I fully understood that the longer we got away from September the 11th, more people would forget the lessons of September the 11th. But I’m not going to forget them. And, therefore, I will be steadfast and diligent and strong in defending our country.

I don’t govern by polls, you know. I just do what I think is right. And I understand some of the decisions I made are controversial. But I made them in the best interest of our country, and I think in the best interest of the world. I believe when you look back at this moment, people will say, it was right to encourage democracy in the Middle East. I understand some people think that it can’t work. I believe in the universality of freedom; some don’t. I’m going to act on my beliefs so long as I’m the President of the United States. Some people say, it’s okay to condemn people for — to tyranny. I don’t believe it’s okay to condemn people to tyranny, particularly those of us who live in the free societies.

And so I understand, and I’ll try to do my best to explain to the Europeans that, on the one hand, we’re tough when it comes to the war on terror; on the other hand, we’re providing more money than every before in the world’s history for HIV/AIDS on the continent of Africa. I’ll say, on the one hand, we’re going to be tough when it comes to terrorist regimes who harbor weapons. On the other hand, we’ll help feed the hungry. I declared Darfur to be a genocide because I care deeply about those who have been afflicted by these renegade bands of people who are raping and murdering.

And so I will do my best to explain our foreign policy. On the one hand, it’s tough when it needs to be; on the other hand, it’s compassionate. And we’ll let the polls figure out — people can say what they want to say. But leadership requires making hard choices based upon principle and standing — (President’s mike goes out) — and that’s how I’m going to continue to lead my country.

Thank you for your question.

US nixes direct talks with North Korea over missile - Yahoo! News:

“WASHINGTON, June 21, 2006 (AFP) - The United States said it would not be pressured into direct talks with
North Korea, despite Pyongyang’s apparent readiness to test an intercontinental ballistic missile.

‘This is not the way to do business in the world,’ US
President George W. Bush said while at an EU summit in Vienna.

‘The North Koreans have made agreements with us in the past and we expect them to keep their agreements, for example on test launches,’ Bush said.

He said the issue must be dealt with in six-party talks on North Korea and he was ‘pleased’ the Chinese government was speaking out against any test.”

Republicans hate facts, especially when they disagree with their pet theories. But then again, what do you expect from people who value “the economy” over people’s quality of life. Below is the outline of the talking points.

Talking Points Archive - American Progress Action Fund:

Raising the Minimum Wage

June 21, 2006

The buying power of the federal minimum wage is currently at its lowest level in 51 years. Eighty-three percent of Americans favor an increase in the minimum wage (nearly half “strongly support” it). Yet, the House conservative leadership hasn’t allowed a full floor vote on the minimum wage since the last increase went into effect, in 1997. In the years since, Congress has managed to give itself plenty of raises. The Senate votes today on an amendment offered by Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) to raise the federal minimum wage, in three gradual installments over two years, from $5.15 to $7.25 an hour. No doubt conservatives will try hard as they can to stop it.

• Conservatives are playing politics with millions of American’s livelihoods….

• It is a myth that increasing the minimum wage will hurt job growth.…
• It is a myth that increasing the minimum wage only helps teenagers and increases overall poverty.…

Very funny
DovBear: Thank you for calling the White House switchboard…:

“Thank you for calling the White House switchboard. Our new voice activated system will help direct you to the proper office.

“