For the first time, Bush revealed a personal way in which he has tried to acknowledge the sacrifice of soldiers and their families.
“I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf,” he said. “I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.”
Bush said he made that decision after the August 2003 bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, which killed Sergio Vieira de Mello, the top U.N. official in Iraq and the organization’s high commissioner for human rights.
“I remember when de Mello, who was at the U.N., got killed in Baghdad as a result of these murderers taking this good man’s life,” he said. “I was playing golf — I think I was in central Texas — and they pulled me off the golf course and I said, ‘It’s just not worth it anymore to do.’”
It is so touching to see how Dubya appreciates the importance of sacrifice like that.
Marietta tavern owner Mike Norman says the T-shirts he’s peddling, featuring cartoon chimp Curious George peeling a banana, with “Obama in ‘08″ scrolled underneath, are “cute.” But to a coalition of critics, the shirts are an insulting exploitation of racial stereotypes from generations past.
(…)
Just down the street from Marietta’s famous Big Chicken, Mulligan’s has carved a provocative niche in an increasingly multicultural area, thanks to its owner’s ultra-conservative political views. If you live in Marietta, it’s impossible not to know what’s on Norman’s mind, as he posts his views on signs in front of Mulligan’s.
Among his recent musings: “I wish Hillary had married OJ,” “No habla espanol — and never will” and the standard “I.N.S. Agents eat free.”
“I’m saying out loud what everyone in this town whispers,” Norman said in an interview before Tuesday’s protest.
Whatever residents think of the signs, organized opposition to his blunt commentaries — ongoing for 16 years — had been nonexistent. No longer, says Pellegrino, who, though familiar with Norman’s politics, said he was still surprised by the stark imagery of the Obama T-shirts.
“There’s a lot of people hurt by this,” he said.
Norman said those offended are “hunting for a reason to be mad” and insisted he is “not a racist.”
Norman said he sees nothing wrong with depicting Obama as Curious George. “Look at him . . . the hairline, the ears, he looks just like Curious George,” Norman said. He said he did not design the shirts himself but bought them through a Web site.
He said he views it as just coincidence that the character on the T-shirt is a monkey. Norman also said proceeds raised from sales will be donated to the Muscular Dystrophy Association.
Oh yeah, that totally looks like Obama, nothing racist about that at all, nope. Plus the proceeds are going to fight muscular dystrophy, which makes Norman a total humanitarian, and the protesters hateful, horrible people who want everyone with muscular dystrophy to just die.
As he introduced Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama on Monday night in Louisville, U.S. Rep. Ben Chandler of Versailles jabbed at likely GOP nominee John McCain, even giving him a nickname.
Chandler, addressing the crowd of about 8,000 Obama supporters, called McCain what at first sounded like “John insane.”
Chandler, however, said Tuesday that he was referring to McCain as “John McSame” to make his point that McCain would be a continuation of President Bush’s policies. He said he would never call someone “insane” in such a setting.
Well, since I already did a post on Richard Burton’s rugby reminiscences, I think it’s only fair that Peter O’Toole should get a post as well. (Hey, if the LAT can write about the candidates’ handwriting, I can write about Peter O’Toole reattaching his own finger.) I was perhaps most surprised to realized that he was 75 - every time I’ve seen him in the past few years, I thought he was much older. Maybe it was all that drinking.
This was a man who travelled the world yet never wore a watch or carried a wallet. Nor, on leaving his house, did he ever take his keys with him.
“I just hope some bastard’s in,” he’d say.
More than once, when someone was not in, O’Toole found himself having to explain to the police why he was breaking into his own property.
(…)
The neighbourhood where O’Toole grew up was rough, and three of his playmates were later hanged for murder. “I’m not from the working class,” O’Toole liked to say. “I’m from the criminal class.”
Although it was his mother, Connie, who instilled in O’Toole a strong sense of literature, by far the biggest influence in his young life was his father, Patrick, a bookie who was often drunk.
One day, Patrick stood his young son up on the mantelpiece and said: “Jump, boy. I’ll catch you. Trust me.”
When O’Toole jumped, his father withdrew his arms, leaving the boy splattered on the hard stone floor. The lesson, said his father, was “never trust any bastard”.
(…)
In 1959, O’Toole was cast as a Cockney sergeant in the play The Long And The Short And The Tall at the Royal Court Theatre.
His understudy was a young Michael Caine, and one Saturday night after the show O’Toole invited him to a restaurant he knew.
Eating a plate of egg and chips was the last thing Caine remembered, until he woke up in broad daylight in a strange flat.
“What time is it?” he inquired. “Never mind what time it is,” said O’Toole. “What f***ing day is it?”
It turned out that it was five o’clock in the afternoon two days later. Curtain-up was at eight.
Back at the theatre, the stage manager was waiting for them with the news that the restaurant owner had been in and banned them from his establishment for life.
Caine was about to ask what they’d done when O’Toole whispered: “Never ask what you did. It’s better not to know.”
Most evenings after the show, O’Toole would enjoy a long walk around Covent Garden. Sometimes if he was in the mood, he’d scale the wall of Lloyds bank.
The first time he took his future wife, the actress Sian Phillips, on one of these nocturnal jaunts, she was startled when he began his ascent of the north face of the building.
But after a few nights she came to accept that, by O’Toole’s standards anyway, it was quite normal.
(…)
At one after-show party O’Toole held court on stage sitting on a throne, sustained by two pedal bins on either side of him, one full of beer, the other containing hard liquor into which he would alternately scoop two pint mugs.
(…)
Lawrence Of Arabia occupied O’Toole for two years, filming in seven different countries.
By the end of it, he’d lost 2st, received third-degree burns, sprained both ankles, torn ligaments in both his hip and thigh, dislocated his spine, broken his thumb, sprained his neck and been concussed twice.
But his extraordinary performance made him a star. Lawrence Of Arabia was a world-wide smash when it opened in 1962 and was hailed as one of cinema’s true masterpieces.
“I woke up one morning to find I was famous,” he said. “I bought a white Rolls-Royce and drove down Sunset Boulevard, wearing dark specs and a white suit, waving like the Queen Mum.
“Nobody took any f***ing notice, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.”
(…)
The filming of the 1968 historical drama The Lion In Winter, in which O’Toole starred with Katharine Hepburn, was notable for a series of bizarre incidents.
Shooting a scene on a lake one day, O’Toole trapped his finger between two boats. “Bloody agony it was,” he said. “Took the top right off.”
O’Toole carried the tip of his finger back to shore, dipped it into a glass of brandy to sterilise it and then pushed it back on, wrapping it in a poultice.
Three weeks later he unwrapped it and there it was, all crooked and bent.
“I’d put it back the wrong way, probably because of the brandy, which I drank,” explained O’Toole.
Another time, he awoke at 4am to discover that his bed was on fire.
“At first I tried to put the thing out myself, but I couldn’t read the small print on the fire extinguisher,” he said.
“By the time the first fireman arrived, I was so glad to see him I kissed him.”
O’Toole didn’t have much luck with fires. During a cottage holiday in Wales with Sian, he had decided to cook, although she had never seen him do so before.
“I can make the best French toast,” he told her. Minutes later the stove exploded into flames.
They tried to extinguish the fire, but it was impossible, and they were driven out into the garden, where they watched in the rain as the kitchen burnt down.
Awesome. If even half this stuff is true, he’s a complete madman.
Now that the presidential contest is looking ever more like a two-man race, the country can’t help but marvel: John McCain, once a longshot, wouldn’t lie down. Barack Obama, the new kid, charmed voters. And Hillary Rodham Clinton, an early favorite, has yet to surrender.
But Arlyn J. Imberman would say clues to the nomination fight were in plain sight, every time a candidate wrote a thank-you note, inscribed a memoir or autographed a pair of boxing gloves.
“Obama is very much his writing — fluid, graceful. McCain’s is angular and intense; he’s a pit bull. And look at the perfectionism in Hillary’s — straight up, precise. She is persistent and is not going to give up until she absolutely has to,” said Imberman, a court-certified graphologist based in New York.
Presidential signatures are trademarks that grace everything from historic documents to the souvenir M&M’s boxes handed out on Air Force One. And history suggests penmanship can reflect personality.
Abraham Lincoln set 3 million slaves free with a signature that was as modest and unadorned as he was. Ronald Reagan — the “great communicator” — penned rounded letters that radiated warmth. Jimmy Carter etched an autograph that was aloof and cerebral. And Richard Nixon, who entered the White House with a big, bold R and N, left in deflated disgrace, his signature collapsing as well.
Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart’s 1984 campaign suffered when it was revealed that he had changed his signature several times over the years. “Who is Gary Hart?” his rivals demanded.
“Our handwriting is uniquely ours; an imprint as singular as a fingerprint,” Imberman asserted in a book she recently co-wrote, “Signature for Success” (in which, by the way, she concluded that Bill and Hillary Clinton have a gender role reversal going).
(…)
Despite vast policy differences, McCain and Obama have something in common signature-wise — illegibility, which suggests a need for privacy or an aversion to transparency.
In McCain’s case, that desire can be seen further in his H, which is not a loop, but an upward stroke overlapped by a downward one. “There is a lot about John McCain he doesn’t wish to share openly,” said Roger Rubin, a New York graphologist with three decades of experience.
“When you cover a stroke, it means you are hiding something,” Rubin said.
Both men’s signatures also reflect a desire to distance themselves from their fathers, the experts said.
The LA Times couldn’t find anything else to write about? Really?
This is just brilliant, and if I don’t post it tonight, I’ll forget about it. The Datastorm is the only high-speed data transfer device you will ever need. It runs on “electricity”.
Other than the sound levels, this is absolutely brilliant.
On CNN’s American Morning earlier today, Kyra Phillips reported that during a recent trip to Baghdad“dozens of Iraqi soldiers and dozens of students at Baghdad university” told her that they “don’t want to see a Republican president.” “Out of every single one that I talked to, one person said they supported John McCain,” said Phillips.
Asked to respond, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), who is an ardent supporter of McCain, dismissed what the Iraqis told Phillips as an “unscientific poll.” He claimed that on all the visits he’s made to Iraq, “the Iraqi people on the street, the Iraqi military, the Iraqi government that I’ve talked to, don’t want us to just pick up and leave.”
Lieberman then noted that the Iraqis don’t want the U.S. “to stay there forever,” which he claimed was consistent with McCain’s position on Iraq.
The Iraqi people on the street, the Iraqi military, the Iraqi government that I’ve talked to, don’t want us to just pick up and leave, which is what Sen. Obama, Sen. Clinton have been advocating. They want us, obviously, not to stay there forever. Sen. McCain wants the war to stop and to have us pull back into bases and be on a path, a reasonable path of withdrawal.
As Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D-CA) told ThinkProgress last year, congressional trips like Lieberman’s are shrouded in a “Green Zone fog” that makes it hard to get a real sense of the reality on the ground. But, as Phillips noted during her March report from Baghdad, she didn’t have a public affairs official present when she interviewed the soldiers and students, which she says allowed for an “uncensored” and “candid” two-hour discussion.
Additionally, in making the claim that like the Iraqis, McCain doesn’t want us “to stay there forever,” Lieberman completely ignores the fact that McCain has said it is “fine” with him for the U.S. to stay in Iraq for 100 years, which would essentially be forever. Also, while the Iraqi people have rejected permanent U.S. bases in the country, McCain has said they may be “necessary.”
Lieberman isn’t even on the same planet as reality. Hell, even Ellen Tauscher says he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, THE REAL NEWS NETWORK:…John McCain has been assembling his team, and in his foreign policy team are some very interesting figures. First and foremost, James Woolsey, former head of the CIA. And then a man named Randy Schoenberg, who with Woolsey helped constitute something called the Committee on the Present Danger, co-chaired by Senators Kyl and Lieberman, who pushed the resolution declaring the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as terrorist. And the Committee on the Present Danger is quite dedicated to regime change in Iran and Syria, and the fundamental thesis of the Project for a New American Century document, which is the projection of American military might to reshape the world.
[FORMER REPUBLICAN AND MORE-OR-LESS SANE PERSON] ERIC MARGOLIS, ANALYST, THE REAL NEWS NETWORK: Well, I’ve met Woolsey on a number of occasions, been on TV programs with him in Washington, and I would be very nervous to have this man anywhere in a high-level government position. The reason is that he’s one of the point men for the extreme right wing of the Republican Party. They’re almost so far right wing you can hear goose-stepping. They want a very militaristic foreign policy. They want to use American power to destroy all of Israel’s perceived enemies.
JAY: Eric, in that respect, let me show you a piece of video. This is a clip of James Woolsey speaking during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and this is Woolsey calling for what he thinks should be the American approach at that moment towards Syria.
[COMPLETELY BATSHIT INSANE REPUBLICAN] JIM WOOLSEY, FORMER CIA DIRECTOR: …I think Iran is the puppet master, and Syria and Hezbollah and Hamas to varying degrees are the puppets. This is really about Iran versus the US, and Israel is in the way.
INTERVIEWER: Woolsey, are you saying that we should be hitting Syria, we should be hitting the airport, we should be hitting Bashar Assad’s office?
WOOLSEY: Yes. The last thing we ought to do now, I think—.
INTERVIEWER: Well, you mean we the United States, not Israel.
WOOLSEY: Yes. Yes. I think the last thing we ought to do now is to start talking about ceasefires. This is a very serious challenge from Iran, and we need to weaken them badly, and undermining the Syrian government with air strikes would help weaken them badly.
INTERVIEWER: If undermining Syria, if taking Syria down a peg or two by actually hitting them with air strikes would be effective, why not hit something in Iran?
WOOLSEY: Well, you know, one has to take things to some degree by steps.
Alrighty then. Bomb Syria first, then work your way up to Iran. Very sensible, very Serious. I’m sure there couldn’t possibly be any kind of unintended consequences whatsoever. Do you really want this bloodthirsty nutjob whispering in the ear of the President Of The United States? Do you really want a president who makes Dubya look reasonable and moderate?
As Americans focused on the Jenna Bush - Henry Hager wedding in Crawford this weekend, many began to realize just how much they had fallen in love with the First Family’s beautiful and fun loving twin daughter.
They thought about how unpretentious she is. That she doesn’t take herself too seriously, as when she impishly stuck her tongue out at the White House press corps. That she is industrious, getting her education and writing a book while still in her twenties. And that she has a heart, that the subject of her book was another young lady in need.
The Bushes will soon be passing into private life after the White House, But the memories of this weekend will linger and they will be happy ones of a White House kid who made it good, married well and came through the tough years in the public fish bowl just fine.
If it weren’t for the White House references, I would think this was a completely different Jenna Bush. Maybe it’s just a completely different America…
The sad thing is, this will be the highlight of Dubya’s presidency. “Yeah, I may have destroyed everything I touched, but at least I got one of my daughters married off to a rich Republican guy, and none of the guests exploded or burst into flames or got shot by the Vice President. Life is good.”
Sounds like the Democratic establishment is starting to get a wee bit antsy about Hillary continuing to bash Obama, especially now that it’s obvious to everyone but her that she’s lost the primary:
“What Hillary does in the next month is important,” Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), a one-time senior adviser to former President Bill Clinton, warned last week in Manhattan.
(…)
[T]he man known affectionately by his colleagues as “Rahmbo” for his electoral prowess is clearly worried about an unbound Clinton, who so far has shown little desire to turn down the volume on Obama.
“If she spends her time contrasting with Sen. McCain, drawing distinctions that help the Democratic Party, that’s productive,” he said. “If it’s done in another way, that’s not productive.”
Translation: Clinton can help bring the party together, or she can drive deeper the wedge that is dividing the Clinton and Obama camps.
It’s not just about votes. It’s about money.
The Democrats have run laps around Republicans in the money race. At the end of March, Obama had $51 million in cash on hand, compared with $11.6 million for McCain.
But while McCain has been saving his pennies, Obama has continued to pour money into costly primary contests.
At the same time, the Republican National Committee has raked in the dough - it reported $31 million in cash on hand at the end of March. And last week, the committee raised $7million in its best night ever, thanks to a joint account established with McCain.
By contrast, the Democratic National Committee reported only $5 million in cash on hand in March, and it has no joint fund-raising account because Obama and Clinton are still focused on beating each other.
The situation is serious enough that Clinton has summoned her top fund-raisers to a meeting at her Washington home on Wednesday to talk about the road ahead.
At least one invitee says he hopes to serve up a heaping portion of reality.
Richard Schiffrin, a national finance co-chairman for Clinton, told the Los Angeles Times last week that he plans to tell her, “Let’s look at the situation as it exists and think about whether there’s a credible path to the nomination, and if there isn’t, what’s Plan B?”
What is Plan B, indeed. Plan B should be to very publicly and sincerely endorse Obama as the nominee, and to campaign for him and against McCain without reservation. Anything less will signal to her followers that Obama is as unworthy and unelectable as she’s been saying throughout the primaries, and to everyone else that she’s hoping for a disastrous one-term McCain presidency so she can run again in 2012.
…[O]nce [the nomination] is resolved, I think it is absolutely imperative that our entire party close ranks. That we become unified. I will do everything to make sure that the people who supported me support our nominee. I will go anywhere in the country to make the case.
And I know that Barack feels the same way because both of us have spent 15 months traveling our country. I have seen the damage of the Bush years. I’ve seen the extraordinary pain that people have suffered from because of the failed policies. You know, those who have held my hands who’ve lost sons or daughters in Iraq. And those who have lost sons or daughters because they didn’t have health insurance.
And so, regardless of the differences there may be between us, and there are differences, they pale in comparison to the differences between us and Senator McCain. So, we will certainly do whatever is necessary to make sure that a Democrat is in the White House next January.
Just when you thought the Bush administration couldn’t respect the troops any less…
Since 2001, the U.S. military has cremated the remains of approximately 200 service members at Friends Forever Pet Cremation Service, a Delaware facility that primarily cremates pets. The practice was stopped yesterday, as the Washington Post reports:
The revelation came to light when an Army officer who works at the Pentagon traveled to Delaware on Thursday to attend the cremation of a military comrade. Offended to discover that the facility was labeled as a pet crematory, the officer sent an e-mail late Thursday night to superiors at the Pentagon that included a photograph of the signage.
The Friends Forever manager said that service members usually dropped off remains and returned the next day to pick them up. The practice is “contrary to the normal procedure,” in which the military is supposed to provide “an escort for all service members killed overseas during transport to the United States, and again after ‘medical processing’ at the Dover mortuary as the deceased returns home for interment.”
I want to say something bitterly snarky, but I just can’t. It’s too horrible. They really do treat the troops like dogs.
Frank Rich has an interesting perspective on this year’s election, and why it looks promising for Obama:
This is not 1968, when the country was so divided over race and war that cities and campuses exploded in violence….
This is not 1988, when a Democratic liberal from Massachusetts of modest political skills could be easily clobbered by racist ads and an incumbent vice president running for the Gipper’s third term. This is not the 1998 midterms, when the Teflon Clintons triumphed over impeachment. This is not 2004, when another Democrat from Massachusetts did for windsurfing what the previous model did for tanks.
Almost every wrong prediction about this election cycle has come from those trying to force the round peg of this year’s campaign into the square holes of past political wars. That’s why race keeps being portrayed as dooming Mr. Obama — surely Jeremiah Wright = Willie Horton! — no matter what the voters say to the contrary. It’s why the Beltway took on faith the Clinton machine’s strategic, organization and fund-raising invincibility. It’s why some prognosticators still imagine that John McCain can spin the Iraq fiasco to his political advantage as Richard Nixon miraculously did Vietnam.
The year 2008 is far more complex — and exhilarating — than the old templates would have us believe. Of course we’re in pain. More voters think the country is on the wrong track (81 percent) than at any time in the history of New York Times/CBS News polling on that question. George W. Bush is the most unpopular president that any living American has known.
And yet, paradoxically, there is a heartening undertow: we know the page will turn. For all the anger and angst over the war and the economy, for all the campaign’s acrimony, the anticipation of ending the Bush era is palpable, countering the defeatist mood. The repressed sliver of joy beneath the national gloom can be seen in the record registration numbers of new voters and the over-the-top turnout in Democratic primaries.
Mr. Obama hardly created this moment, with its potent brew of Bush loathing and sweeping generational change. He simply had the vision to tap into it. Running in 2008 rather than waiting four more years was the single smartest political decision he’s made (and, yes, he’s made dumb ones too). The second smartest was to understand and emphasize that subterranean, nearly universal anticipation of change rather than settle for the narrower band of partisan, dyspeptic Bush-bashing. We don’t know yet if he’s the man who can make the moment — and won’t know unless he gets to the White House — but there’s no question that the moment has helped make the man.
For five years boomers have been asking, “Why are the kids not in the streets screaming about the war the way we were?” The simple answer: no draft. But as Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais show in “Millennial Makeover,” their book about the post-1982 American generation, that energy has been plowed into quieter social activism and grand-scale social networking, often linked on the same Web page. The millennials’ bottom-up digital superstructure was there to be mined, for an amalgam of political organizing, fund-raising and fun, and Mr. Obama’s camp knew how to work it. The part of the press that can’t tell the difference between Facebook and, say, AOL, was too busy salivating over the Clintons’ vintage 1990s roster of fat-cat donors to hear the major earthquake rumbling underground.
The demographic reshaping of the electoral map, though more widely noted, still isn’t fully understood. From Rust Belt Ohio through Tuesday’s primaries, cable bloviators have been fixated on the older, white, working-class vote. Their unspoken (and truly condescending) assumption, lately embraced by Mrs. Clinton, is that these voters are Reagan Democrats, cryogenically frozen since 1980, who come in two flavors: rubes who will be duped by a politician backing a gas-tax pander or racists who are out of Mr. Obama’s reach.
Guess what: there are racists in America and, yes, the occasional rubes (even among Obama voters). Some of them may reside in Indiana, which hasn’t voted for a national Democratic ticket since 1964. But there are many more white working-class voters, both Clinton and Obama supporters, who prefer Democratic policies after seven years of G.O.P. failure. And there is little evidence to suggest that there are enough racists of any class in America, let alone in swing states, to determine the results come fall.
(…)
[T]his isn’t 2004, and the fixation on that one demographic in the Clinton-Obama contest has obscured the big picture. The rise in black voters and young voters of all races in Democratic primaries is re-weighting the electorate. Look, for instance, at Ohio, the crucial swing state that Mr. Kerry lost by 119,000 votes four years ago. This year black voters accounted for 18 percent of the state’s Democratic primary voters, up from 14 percent in 2004, an increase of some 230,000 voters out of an overall turnout leap of roughly a million. Voters under 30 (up by some 245,000 voters) accounted for 16 percent, up from 9 in 2004. Those younger Ohio voters even showed up in larger numbers than the perennially reliable over-65 crowd.
Good as this demographic shift is for a Democratic ticket led by Mr. Obama, it’s even better news that so many pundits and Republicans bitterly cling to the delusion that the Karl Rove playbook of Swift-boating and race-baiting can work as it did four and eight years ago. You can’t surf to a right-wing blog or Fox News without someone beating up on Mr. Wright or the other predictable conservative piñata, Michelle Obama.
This may help rally the anti-Obama vote. But that contingent will be more than offset in November by mobilized young voters, blacks and women, among them many Clinton-supporting Democrats (and independents and Republicans) unlikely to entertain a G.O.P. candidate with a perfect record of voting against abortion rights. Even a safe Republican Congressional seat in Louisiana fell to a Democrat last weekend, despite a campaign by his opponent that invoked Mr. Obama as a bogeyman.
…[E]ven if Mr. McCain keeps his word and stops trying to portray Mr. Obama as the man from Hamas, he can’t disown the Limbaugh axis of right-wing race-mongering. That’s what’s left of his party’s base.
Now that the Obama-Clinton race is over, the new Beltway narrative has it that Mr. McCain, a likable “maverick” (who supported Mr. Bush in 95 percent of his votes last year, according to Congressional Quarterly), might override the war, the economy, Bush-loathing and the bankrupt Republican brand to be competitive with Mr. Obama. Anything can happen in politics, including real potential game changers, from Mr. McCain’s still-unreleased health records to new excavations of Mr. Obama’s history in Chicago. But as long as the likely Democratic nominee keeps partying like it’s 2008 while everyone else refights the battles of yesteryear, he will continue to be underestimated every step of the way.
Rich is more optimistic than I am about the diminished impact of smear campaigns - I think they will always be effective unless countered decisively and authoritatively (indeed, Kerry’s passive reaction to the Swift Boaters might have been more damaging than the smears themselves).
But overall, I think he’s onto something important: America hates Bush like they’ve never hated any president before. Nixon might have come close, but he was already two years out of office by Election Day. Dubya will still be there, and he’ll still be trying to throw his weight around to prove how relevant he is. If Obama can effectively tie McCain to Dubya and his most unpopular policies, he should win in a landslide.
The good news is that McCain has given Obama plenty of ammunition; the bad news is that the corporate media will be doing all they can to debunk and “fact-check” him at every turn. My hope is that the media overplay their hand and end up discrediting themselves instead of Obama - because without the media, the Republicans have nothing.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., faces enormous pressure from social conservatives to ignore his repeated commitment to change the GOP’s platform on abortion.
“If he were to change the party platform,” to account for exceptions such as rape, incest or risk to the mother’s life, “I think that would be political suicide,” said Tony Perkins, the president of the conservative Family Research Council, to ABC News. “I think he would be aborting his own campaign because that is such a critical issue to so many Republican voters and the Republican brand is already in trouble.”
A senior Republican close to McCain told ABC News that building a more inclusive GOP is a top priority for the Arizona senator.
But this adviser does not see changing the party platform to include exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother as necessary for achieving that vision.
The problem for McCain, however, is that he excoriated then-Gov. George W. Bush during a 2000 debate for not being willing to make this change to the platform, and Democrats are salivating at the prospect of arguing, in the words of one strategist, “that another four years of Bush begins with another four years of Bush’s platform.”
While leaving the platform untouched would please many in the GOP’s socially conservative base, it could alienate some of the more moderate voters that McCain hopes to woo.
“If he doesn’t change the platform, then he’s being the same kind of hypocrite that he accused Bush of being in 2000,” said Jennifer Blei Stockman, the co-chairwoman of Republican Majority for Choice. “To not accept abortion in cases of rape and incest, give me a break. That’s sick. That’s inhumane.”
“And the life of the mother?” she added. “These are things that we can’t even put our arms around because they are so inhumane.”
(…)
Stockman said that McCain’s team is ignoring his previous commitments on this issue and is intentionally downplaying his clout.
“If McCain chooses not to revise the platform, I think he will say it’s ‘the system’ and he will try to distance himself from it,” said Stockman. “But he absolutely has the power to change it.”
“Many people think of him as a moderate,” she said. “But when it comes out that he doesn’t want to change this extreme, right-wing Republican platform, the word ‘moderate’ is going to disappear from any description of McCain.”
It’s hard to say for sure just what position McCain is going to take, if any. But it’s incredible that the religious right/social conservative wing of the GOP is so totally adamant about allowing exceptions for rape, incest, or the life of the mother. And far from being on the fringes of the party, that stance is the official GOP platform on abortion.
So if you get raped, the GOP says, Tough shit, you still have to have the baby - even if the rapist is your own father. If the pregnancy or the birth will KILL YOU, the GOP says, Hey, sucks for you - but isn’t Life a wonderful thing?
I thought the Republicans were supposed to be the party that keeps Americans safe, but I guess that only applies to men.
Al Kamen provides some perspective on just how imbalanced the courts are right now, and how much worse SCOTUS could be four years from now if McCain becomes president:
The next president will find the federal bench solidly controlled by the GOP, with about 100 Republicans in appeals court seats, compared with approximately 66 Democrats. Republicans have a 56 percent majority at the trial court level.
At least for the first couple of years, [the next president] would probably find the number of Republican retirees far outnumbering Democrats. Forty-six of the 53 longest-serving appeals judges are GOP appointees. [A Democratic president] would have a golden opportunity to replace them with liberal court-abusers. McCain, at least for a chunk of his first term, would only be treading water.
(…)
But there would be a huge silver lining for President McCain. He might have the chance to solidify GOP control of the big prize, the Supreme Court, for many years to come. The senior liberal, Justice John Paul Stevens, just turned 88, although he’s still golfing and, we hear, maybe playing a little tennis.
A second liberal opening might come from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who is 75. McCain also might be able to replace conservative justices Antonin Scalia, 72, and Anthony Kennedy, 71, with younger Republicans. If everything worked out, McCain could create a court with a seven-member conservative majority whose oldest member would be Clarence Thomas, who turns 60 next month.
Every Democrat and progressive should be scared to death by this possibility. Even if McCain were held to a single term, followed by the Democrats hammerlocking the White House and the Congress for the next 30 years, they could still be overruled at every turn by an unabashedly right-wing Supreme Court, with absolutely no recourse. Roe v. Wade: gone. Affirmative action: gone. Employee protections against discrimination, abuse, injury and death: gone.
Any questions on campaign finance, voting rights, or electronic voting machines would be decided in favor of the GOP. But torture would be okay, just so long as the victims haven’t been convicted of anything.
And that’s just what IWANAL (I Who Am Not A Lawyer) can think of off the top of my head. I’m sure I haven’t even scratched the surface of what kind of havoc an all-wingnut Supreme Court could wreak.
But if, God forbid, John McCain does become president, I have two specific requests to make of Senate Democrats that might hopefully reduce the damage a little bit:
1) Please remember that judgeships are lifetime appointments, so don’t worry about comity or deference to presidential prerogative. If you screw up, we all have to live with it for the next 30 or 40 years. (I feel obliged to point out that life expectancy is quite a bit longer now than it was when the Constitution was written…)
2) Place more weight on the nominee’s judicial history and less weight on their evasive-at-best-dishonest-at-worst responses to your questions. If they’ve been a right-wing judge all their life, that’s not going to change when they get a promotion.
Yeah, we’d still have a conservative judiciary, but at least some of those judges would choose the law over ideology every once in a while.
On Wednesday afternoon, the House had just voted, 412 to 0, to pass H. Res. 1113, “Celebrating the role of mothers in the United States and supporting the goals and ideals of Mother’s Day,” when Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.), rose in protest.
“Mr. Speaker, I move to reconsider the vote,” he announced.
Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.), who has two young daughters, moved to table Tiahrt’s request, setting up a revote. This time, 178 Republicans cast their votes against mothers.
It has long been the custom to compare a popular piece of legislation to motherhood and apple pie. Evidently, that is no longer the standard. Worse, Republicans are now confronted with a John Kerry-esque predicament: They actually voted for motherhood before they voted against it.
Republicans, unhappy with the Democratic majority, have been using such procedural tactics as this all week to bring the House to a standstill, but the assault on mothers may have gone too far. House Minority Leader John Boehner, asked yesterday to explain why he and 177 of his colleagues switched their votes, answered: “Oh, we just wanted to make sure that everyone was on record in support of Mother’s Day.”
Umm… What the hell? I would be interested in hearing what supposed conservative principle was on display here to vote against a bill to celebrate Mother’s Day. And what makes Mother’s Day so much less worthy of legislative support than Christmas? Is Mother’s Day, like, a pagan holiday or something?
A small group of fiscally conservative Blue Dog Democrats is threatening to block the emergency war spending bill over a program for veterans’ benefits not offset with tax hikes or spending cuts.
Because of that problem, and the efforts by House Republicans to stall floor action with procedural motions, the vote on the carefully crafted supplemental measure could be delayed until Friday or next week.
“Some of us oppose creating a new entitlement program in an emergency spending bill, whether it’s butchers, bakers or candlestick-makers,” said Rep. John Tanner (D-Tenn.), a founding member of the Blue Dog Coalition who serves on the House leadership team as a deputy whip.
The so-called GI Bill of Rights, authored by Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.), would give veterans money for college and cost $720 million in its first two years. But critics say that could grow to billions in future years.
House Democratic leaders attached it to the supplemental spending bill figuring Bush wouldn’t dare veto veterans’ benefits. If he did, Republicans would pay a steep political cost.
But that calculation is now causing heartburn for Blue Dogs, the same members who have generally supported war funding. The fiscally conservative coalition is split. Some members are willing to block the bill because “pay-as-you-go” budgetary rules — offsetting new spending with spending cuts or increased taxes — have been ignored one too many times….
Got that? They’re perfectly fine with spending $200 billion to continue the disastrous Iraqupation, but a few billion more to do right by the troops would be fiscally irresponsible. What a bunch of loathsome tools.
This is not exactly a news flash, but the Bush administration has politicized the classification process in the same way that it has politicized the Justice Department, the EPA, the FEC, the FCC, and, well, pretty much every other government agency you can think of.
Instead of performing its intended function of protecting the well-being of America, classification is used simply to protect the political interests of the Bush administration and the Republican party.
It’s a given in our democracy that laws should be a matter of public record. But the law in this country includes not just statutes and regulations, which the public can readily access. It also includes binding legal interpretations made by courts and the executive branch. These interpretations are increasingly being withheld from the public and Congress.
Perhaps the most notorious example is the recently released 2003 Justice Department memorandum on torture written by John Yoo. The memorandum was, for a nine-month period in 2003, the law that the administration followed when it came to matters of torture. And that law was essentially a declaration that the administration could ignore the laws passed by Congress.
The content of the memo was deeply troubling, but just as troubling was the fact that this legal opinion was classified and its content kept secret for years. As we now know, the memo should never have been classified because it contains no information that could compromise national security if released. In a Senate hearing that I chaired April 30, the top official in charge of classification policy from 2002 to 2007 testified that classification of this memo showed “either profound ignorance of or deep contempt for” the standards for classification.
The memos on torture policy that have been released or leaked hint at a much bigger body of law about which we know virtually nothing. The Yoo memo was filled with references to other Justice Department memos that have yet to see the light of day, on subjects including the government’s ability to detain U.S. citizens without congressional authorization and the government’s ability to bypass the 4th Amendment in domestic military operations.
…[W]ith changes in technology and with this administration’s efforts to expand its surveillance powers, the [FISA] court today is doing more than just reviewing warrant applications. It is issuing important interpretations of FISA that have effectively made new law.
These interpretations deeply affect Americans’ privacy rights, and yet Americans don’t know about them because they are not allowed to see them. Very few members of Congress have been allowed to see them either. When the Senate recently approved some broad and controversial changes to FISA, almost none of the senators voting on the bill could know what the law currently is.
The code of secrecy also extends to yet another body of law: changes to executive orders. The administration takes the position that a president can “waive” or “modify” a published executive order without any public notice — simply by not following it. It’s every president’s prerogative to change an executive order, but doing so without public notice works a secret change in the law. And, because the published order stays on the books, Congress and the public have no idea that it’s no longer in effect. We don’t know how many of these covert changes have been made by this administration or, for that matter, by past administrations.
No one questions the need for the government to protect information about intelligence sources and methods, troop movements or weapons systems. But there’s a big difference between withholding information about military or intelligence operations from the public and withholding the law that governs the executive branch. Keeping the law secret doesn’t enhance national security, but it does give the government free rein to operate without oversight or accountability. Even the congressional intelligence committees, which are supposed to oversee the intelligence community, have been denied access to some of these legal opinions.
Congress should pass legislation to require the administration to alert Congress when the law created by Justice Department opinions ignores or even violates the laws passed by Congress, and to require public notice when it is waiving or modifying a published executive order. Congress and the public shouldn’t have to wonder whether the executive branch is following the laws that are on the books or some other, secret law.
Tell me again why Russ Feingold shouldn’t be president?
After all the histrionic punditfying throughout the campaign, after all the trivial media distractions over surrogates who blurt out mean things, after all the phony guilt-by-association attacks, the public unity around a progressive vision remains: an economy that works for everyone, health care for all, a clean energy future, affordable education and the end of the Iraq occupation.
(…)
The Democratic primary race produced no division within the party over the big issues, and no rift with self-described moderate independent voters who want the same things. The unity over substance extends beyond party lines. That means the Democratic nominee, widely presumed to be Sen. Barack Obama at this point, does not need to overhaul his message and platform to appeal to swing voters in the general election.
The Republican primary race, on the other hand, was wracked with internal division, still not fully resolved, as the party grapples with how to deal with seven years of complete conservative failure in Washington. On the issues, the conservative base of the party is completely out of sync with swing voters….
(…)
The public is united on issues. The mandate for progressive change is being built. Conservative dead-enders are increasingly marginalized. Pity the poor candidate that can’t deal with that reality.
Every Democrat and progressive should be scared to death by this possibility. Even if McCain were held to a single term, followed by the Democrats hammerlocking the White House and the Congress for the next 30 years, they could still be overruled at every turn by an unabashedly right-wing Supreme Court, with 
