should have made the bet

w00t! I knew he wouldn't let us down!

The genius' argument: there is nothing as patriotic as rebellion. Similarly, we did not commit treason when we declared independence from Britain.

Bobby Jindal: Screw Obama, trust us! After all, remember Katrina?

The relevant passage:

Today in Washington, some are promising that government will rescue us from the economic storms raging all around us.

Those of us who lived through Hurricane Katrina, we have our doubts.

Let me tell you a story.

During Katrina, I visited Sheriff Harry Lee, a Democrat and a good friend of mine. When I walked into his makeshift office I’d never seen him so angry. He was yelling into the phone: ‘Well, I’m the Sheriff and if you don’t like it you can come and arrest me!’ I asked him: ‘Sheriff, what’s got you so mad?’ He told me that he had put out a call for volunteers to come with their boats to rescue people who were trapped on their rooftops by the floodwaters. The boats were all lined up ready to go - when some bureaucrat showed up and told them they couldn’t go out on the water unless they had proof of insurance and registration. I told him, ‘Sheriff, that’s ridiculous.’ And before I knew it, he was yelling into the phone: ‘Congressman Jindal is here, and he says you can come and arrest him too!’ Harry just told the boaters to ignore the bureaucrats and start rescuing people.

There is a lesson in this experience: The strength of America is not found in our government. It is found in the compassionate hearts and enterprising spirit of our citizens.

Maddow nails this one: Republicans should never, ever bring up Katrina. Ever. But for a Republican to bring up Katrina to argue against government interventionism is absolute cock-eyed, deranged, cuckoo-for-Cocoa-Puffs madness. It almost forces me to consider the possibility that Bobby Jindal is a Democratic saboteur.

And that was before he mocked disaster planning explicitly.

David Brooks:

Combined with his laughably hypocritical grandstanding on the bailout money (as Matthews points out), Jindal is in for a deeply unpleasant week or two, and a couple of big dents in his presidential hopes. This was ugly.

...though, as an aside, I would also like to note that, when discussing the speech of an Indian American governor, I think it's deeply inappropriate to invoke the term "outsourcing." Just sayin'.

a story in pictures

Pretty stark.

Barney Frank on Republican fiscal hypocrisy

Yes, yes, yes.

questioning their patriotism

The Senate Republicans torpedoed a bailout for the American auto industry, exposing countless thousands and perhaps millions of workers to the specter of unemployment during a depression, at a time of unprecedented job losses, and did so specifically because the Democrats were unwilling to cut worker salaries enough. Not executive salaries, but worker salaries. And it's an open secret that many of these Senators did so with an eye toward the welfare of the foreign automakers who employ their constituents.

That's some shameful shit.

I want you to remember this next time some pseudo-Everyman southern Republican switches out his Confederate bars for the Stars and Stripes and impugns the patriotism of liberals or Democrats.

up is down, black is white

Leading conservative blogger John Hinderacker:

Obama thinks he is a good talker, but he is often undisciplined when he speaks. He needs to understand that as President, his words will be scrutinized and will have impact whether he intends it or not. In this regard, President Bush is an excellent model; Obama should take a lesson from his example. Bush never gets sloppy when he is speaking publicly. He chooses his words with care and precision, which is why his style sometimes seems halting. In the eight years he has been President, it is remarkable how few gaffes or verbal blunders he has committed. If Obama doesn't raise his standards, he will exceed Bush's total before he is inaugurated.

This is why I have no faith whatsoever in the judgment of the Republican remnant to know what they need to do to fix their party. They have completely lost touch with reality.

KY-Sen: the thief suing the victim

From the Louisville Courier-Journal:

GILBERTSVILLE, Ky. — A bizarre sequence of events after a debate in the U.S. Senate race led Republicans to file a criminal complaint today against Democrat Bruce Lunsford for snapping up a GOP staffer’s digital recording device as he left the podium.

According to Republicans, the contents of the device — hours of recordings — had been deleted before it was returned.
...
Bergmann said the recorder had been left on Lunsford’s podium before the debate.
He said the Lunsford campaign suspects the Republicans were trying to record things that Lunsford said under his breath during the debate.

So to recap, the Republican candidate has a staffer slip a tape recorder under a notebook on the Democrat's podium to catch what he says under his breath. The Democrat finds the tape recorder, takes it, and erases what it recorded. The Republican, instead of apologizing or denying it, accuses the Democrat of stealing his tape recorder!

That Republican, by the way: Mitch McConnell, Senate Minority Leader. These guys are class acts, eh?

the Obamafication of Republican foreign policy: the Sully edition

Andrew Sullivan sees it, too:

On one of the most critical decisions of the war, Obama staked out a position a while back that the Bush camp and neocons assailed as naive, disastrous, and revealing of his unfitness to be president. But like almost everything else Obama has said about the war, he was right and Bush was wrong. Obama was ahead of Bush in proposing to shift troops to Afghanistan, ahead of Bush in suggesting a timetable for Iraq withdrawal (subsequently embraced by Maliki), ahead of Bush in arguing we should talk directly to Iran, and, of course, right about not fighting the war in the first place.

The Bush administration - when guided by the saner forces within it such as Gates and Rice - eventually follows Obama's advice. In that sense, Obama has been president for quite a while already. And proving he could be a shrewd, pragmatic and prescient one.

In case you don't know Sully very well, he's a very famous pundit. A famously conservative pundit.

And here's Radley Balko from Reason, a libertarian rag:

Last year, Barack Obama had the right smirking with glee when he made the sensible suggestion that if the U.S. gets intelligence that there are Al Qaeda cells operating in Pakistan, we should go in and get them, with or without permission of the Pakistani government. If Pakistan won't root out Al Qaeda, Obama said, his administration would. I never quite understood the controversy in that statement, which by the way, is the position of many in the U.S. military.

Nevertheless, Obama was roundly ridiculed. John McCain said the statement showed Obama's naivete. Mitt Romney called him "Dr. Strangelove." Conservative blogs mischaracterized his position as wanting to "invade" or "bomb" Pakistan. Obama's critics at the time apparently believed that it's fine to invade an occupy a country whose government had virtually no ties to Al Qaeda, but suggesting we cross the border into a country whose government may be actively or passively harboring large numbers of Al Qaeda and Taliban forces is foolish.

It looks like the Bush administration didn't find Obama's position all that naive, because they've adopted it to the letter...

He later argues that Obama should be pressing this point hard, and he's obviously right. Then again, this did only come out yesterday, so I'm sure he will (or even better, Joe Biden will!).

the Obamafication of Republican foreign policy, part 3

From the New York Times:

WASHINGTON — President Bush secretly approved orders in July that for the first time allow American Special Operations forces to carry out ground assaults inside Pakistan without the prior approval of the Pakistani government, according to senior American officials.

The classified orders signal a watershed for the Bush administration after nearly seven years of trying to work with Pakistan to combat the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and after months of high-level stalemate about how to challenge the militants’ increasingly secure base in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

Barack Obama, August 1, 2007 (via Reuters):

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama said on Wednesday the United States must be willing to strike al Qaeda targets inside Pakistan, adopting a tough tone after a chief rival accused him of naivete in foreign policy.

Obama's stance comes amid debate in Washington over what to do about a resurgent al Qaeda and Taliban in areas of northwest Pakistan that President Pervez Musharraf has been unable to control, and concerns that new recruits are being trained there for a September 11-style attack against the United States.

Obama said if elected in November 2008 he would be willing to attack inside Pakistan with or without approval from the Pakistani government, a move that would likely cause anxiety in the already troubled region.

"If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will," Obama said.

John McCain thought Obama's idea was "naive" at the time. Wonder what he thinks now?

For those of you keeping score, the Bush Administration is already quietly adopting Obama's foreign policy positions on Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran, and McCain has himself adopted Obama's position on Afghanistan after chiding him for it. This, then, makes the fifth time the Republicans have mocked Obama's foreign policy only to appropriate it as their own later. Or, as it was expressed 4 years ago, being against it before they were for it.

It's not a flip flop, however, because John McCain was a POW.

Hookers and blow, indeed

Ladies and gentlemen: the latest in a long, long line of Bush Administration scandals. From the New York Times:

WASHINGTON — As Congress prepares to debate expansion of drilling in taxpayer-owned coastal waters, the Interior Department agency that collects oil and gas royalties has been caught up in a wide-ranging ethics scandal — including allegations of financial self-dealing, accepting gifts from energy companies, cocaine use and sexual misconduct.

In three reports delivered to Congress on Wednesday, the department’s inspector general, Earl E. Devaney, found wrongdoing by a dozen current and former employees of the Minerals Management Service, which collects about $10 billion in royalties annually and is one of the government’s largest sources of revenue other than taxes.

“A culture of ethical failure” besets the agency, Mr. Devaney wrote in a cover memo.

The reports portray a dysfunctional organization that has been riddled with conflicts of interest, unprofessional behavior and a free-for-all atmosphere for much of the Bush administration’s watch.

When we said the Bush Administration is in bed with the oil companies, that's not quite what we meant.

But it's pretty close.

he's his own man

How do you know when your narrative has penetrated the country's consciousness?

Answer: When one of the other guy's top picks for VP says this:

Ladies and gentlemen, Tom Ridge!

hypocrisy now

When Jon Stewart's on, he's really on.

The Obamafication of the Republican Party, part 2

Josh Marshall notes the trend of the Bush Administration and the McCain campaign both quietly adopting Barack Obama's positions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran:

Let's run the list.

McCain and now the White House (via the DOD) are moving toward more US troops in Afghanistan -- a position they've each long opposed and which Obama has been on record in support of for at least a year.

Bush and McCain have each also in different ways tried to nudge closer to Obama's position on withdrawing troops from Iraq. The key shoe falling today is President Bush's embrace of a "time horizon" for withdrawing troops from Iraq. Meanwhile, McCain's declaration of military victory in Iraq seems very much like an effort to get people thinking the troops are coming home soon within the conceptual architecture of his professed goals in Iraq.

And finally Iran. I'm not certain what McCain himself has said about Iran in recent days. But over recent months a key line of attack from the president and John McCain has been that Obama is a latter-day Neville Chamberlain for saying we should negotiate with Iran. And now over recent days we've learned that the White House is sending one of its top diplomats to negotiate directly with Iran's nuclear negotiator. And there are growing signs the White House is poised to open a diplomatic interests section (an unofficial diplomatic outpost) in Tehran.

It may all just be an attempt to build some last-minute bragging rights while taking Iraq off the table in the election, but at the end of the day this is still John McCain and George W. Bush tacitly conceding that Barack is right about getting out of Iraq and negotiating with Ahmadinejad, and they were wrong.

One hell of a story, if you can find someone to report it.

the Straight Talk Express

Just so we're clear, John McCain wasn't just a supporter of privatizing Social Security, he went out and campaigned with George W. Bush to win support for the idea. And now that the idea is universally unpopular, he's lying about it.

Straight Talk Express

It's a funny aspect of the Clinton/Bush era Republican party that the very things they highlight most about themselves frequently turn out to be the most false. Republicans obsessed with family values turn out to be the most sexually deviant ones, while the warhawks tend overwhelmingly to be the same guys who were ducking the draft 40 years ago. Ronald Reagan, dubbed by modern conservatives the "Great Communicator," would freely tell the most comically absurd and demonstrable lies as long as he thought they would have a powerful effect and that no one would dare call him on it, such as that the Russian language has no word for "freedom," or that he personally liberated Nazi death camps, and that's not even counting the big (read: Iran-Contra) whoppers.

So it's strangely fitting that John McCain, to whom Atrios refers as "the Patron Saint of Maverick Straight Talk," turns out to be a positively Reaganesque liar.

the Huckabee files

Here is an article on the problems with Mike Huckabee by an Arkansas journalist. It's mainly small stuff, but there's enough of it, and enough big stuff, that you see certain patterns emerge, particularly 1. a willingness to play the moderate when he's really a hardcore Dobson-style Christian rightist, 2. a certain "moral flexibility" when it comes to other people's money, and 3. an inability to accept responsibility for mistakes.

benchmarks

Ever wondered what those benchmarks are that the president and congress keep talking about? Luckily someone did the work of finding them, which rather interestingly was a significant amount of work:

(A) The United States strategy in Iraq, hereafter, shall be conditioned on the Iraqi government meeting benchmarks, as told to members of Congress by the President, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and reflected in the Iraqi Government's commitments to the United States, and to the international community, including:

(i) Forming a Constitutional Review Committee and then completing the constitutional review.

(ii) Enacting and implementing legislation on de-Baathification.

(iii) Enacting and implementing legislation to ensure the equitable distribution of hydrocarbon resources of the people of Iraq without regard to the sect or ethnicity of recipients, and enacting and implementing legislation to ensure that the energy resources of Iraq benefit Sunni Arabs, Shia Arabs, Kurds, and other Iraqi citizens in an equitable manner.

(iv) Enacting and implementing legislation on procedures to form semi-autonomous regions.

(v) Enacting and implementing legislation establishing an Independent High Electoral Commission, provincial elections law, provincial council authorities, and a date for provincial elections.

(vi) Enacting and implementing legislation addressing amnesty.

(vii) Enacting and implementing legislation establishing a strong militia disarmament program to ensure that such security forces are accountable only to the central government and loyal to the Constitution of Iraq.

(viii) Establishing supporting political, media, economic, and services committees in support of the Baghdad Security Plan.

(ix) Providing three trained and ready Iraqi brigades to support Baghdad operations.

(x) Providing Iraqi commanders with all authorities to execute this plan and to make tactical and operational decisions, in consultation with U.S commanders, without political intervention, to include the authority to pursue all extremists, including Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias.

(xi) Ensuring that the Iraqi Security Forces are providing even handed enforcement of the law.

(xii) Ensuring that, according to President Bush, Prime Minister Maliki said `the Baghdad security plan will not provide a safe haven for any outlaws, regardless of [their] sectarian or political affiliation'.

(xiii) Reducing the level of sectarian violence in Iraq and eliminating militia control of local security.

(xiv) Establishing all of the planned joint security stations in neighborhoods across Baghdad.

(xv) Increasing the number of Iraqi security forces units capable of operating independently.

(xvi) Ensuring that the rights of minority political parties in the Iraqi legislature are protected.

(xvii) Allocating and spending $10 billion in Iraqi revenues for reconstruction projects, including delivery of essential services, on an equitable basis.

(xviii) Ensuring that Iraq's political authorities are not undermining or making false accusations against members of the Iraqi Security Forces.

Apparently the White House submitted a report to Congress (.pdf) yesterday outlining their progress on these goals. It's worth having a look. They claimed "satisfactory" progress on 8 of the 18 back in July, and now 9 today.

The secret: "satisfactory" progress is defined on p. 10 of the report as whether or not there is a "positive trajectory" from January. That is, the Bush Administration is counting any improvement of any kind whatsoever as "satisfactory progress," no matter how insignificant.

Daily Show on Petraeus Report

My God. It really is the best news source we have.

Petraeus calls for status quo

From Yahoo! News:

Gen. David Petraeus told Congress on Monday he envisions the withdrawal of roughly 30,000 U.S. troops from Iraq by next summer, beginning with a Marine contingent later this month.
...
Petraeus said that a unit of about 2,000 Marines will depart Iraq later this month, beginning a drawdown that would be followed in mid-December with the departure of an Army brigade numbering 3,500 to 4,000 soldiers.

After that, another four brigades would be withdrawn by July 2008, he said. That would leave the United States with about 130,000 troops in Iraq, roughly the number last winter when President Bush decided to dispatch additional forces. [emphasis mine]

This is all theater. We're getting played.

hehe, he, I never said they was Eyerackees, hehehe

What an ass. Dan Froomkin:

More than four years after declaring " Mission Accomplished" in Iraq, Bush still can't make an announced visit to the war-wracked country.

But his supposed "visit to Anbar Province" was in some ways even more cynical -- and accepted even more gullibly by the media -- than his June 2006 visit to Baghdad. There, at least, he actually set foot on Iraqi soil.

This time, Bush visited Al-Asad Air Base -- an enormous, heavily fortified American outpost for 10,000 troops that while technically in Anbar Province in fact has a 13-mile perimeter keeping Iraq -- and Iraqis -- at bay. Bush never left the confines of the base, known as " Camp Cupcake," for its relatively luxurious facilities, but nevertheless announced: "When you stand on the ground here in Anbar and hear from the people who live here, you can see what the future of Iraq can look like."

Lemme guess, "it depends on your definition of 'here?'"