Christopher Hitchens followed up his long Slate column detailing the dangers of Sarah Palin's brand of populism with more harsh criticism on MSNBC's Morning Joe today.
[...]
Hitchens: Don't be too hard on her. She didn't write that piece and she probably hasn't read it. I doubt she could either read or write it. Everything she does is for effect, she's, and is always deniable. She could switch back in a minute. At the moment she thinks her tea party crowd wants to hear this kind of thing so she'll say that. She's been out to say, 'well, I don't know but I think the President ought to produce his birth certificate. I'm not saying it isn't a good question. Then later, cause she's got to go to the Gridiron dinner in Washington, and learn how to use a knife and fork and be taught by Fred Malek. She takes it back. She's a disgraceful opportunist and a real moral coward.
Congress should consider a wartime surtax to fund a troop surge in Afghanistan, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) said Wednesday.
Lieberman, a centrist who allies himself with Democrats but who often stakes out hawkish stances on defense issues, said lawmakers should examine a surtax.
"Generally speaking, if you feel that a war is worth fighting...then you've got to be willing to pay for it," Lieberman said during an appearance on MSNBC. "I wouldn't hold it up because of a failure to pay for it, but, to me, we have to be open to adopting some kind of taxes to pay for the additional expenditures for the effort the president announced last night in Afghanistan."
[...]
Lieberman said that any war surtax should be sensitive to the current economic difficulties facing the U.S., suggesting that a surtax may go into effect in the future, once the brunt of the recession has passed.
"The one caveat here...is when such taxes would go into effect," he explained. "We're obviously working our way slowly, anxiously out of a very deep recession."
Despite Cheney’s well-known and worn-out attacks on Obama, Politico’s Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei secured an interview with the former vice president in order to inform their readers today of the shocking revelation that Cheney thinks Obama is projecting “weakness” on Afghanistan. The paper’s top reporters sat down with Cheney for a 90-minute interview and transcribed Cheney’s attacks without challenge, criticism, or rebuttal.
[...]
Instead of playing Dick Cheney ghostwriters, perhaps Allen and VandeHei can take a lesson from McClatchy’s Jonathan Landay on how to fact check his baseless smears.
I would say Andrea Mitchell could take a lesson from them as well instead of hyping The Politico's "exclusive interview".
I think we should be taking the possibility of a Dick Cheney bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012 more seriously, for a run would be good for the Republicans and good for the country. (The sound you just heard in the background was liberal readers spitting out their lattes.)
Why? Because Cheney is a man of conviction, has a record on which he can be judged, and whatever the result, there could be no ambiguity about the will of the people. The best way to settle arguments is by having what we used to call full and frank exchanges about the issues, and then voting. A contest between Dick Cheney and Barack Obama would offer us a bracing referendum on competing visions. One of the problems with governance since the election of Bill Clinton has been the resolute refusal of the opposition party (the GOP from 1993 to 2001, the Democrats from 2001 to 2009, and now the GOP again in the Obama years) to concede that the president, by virtue of his victory, has a mandate to take the country in a given direction. A Cheney victory would mean that America preferred a vigorous unilateralism to President Obama's unapologetic multilateralism, and vice versa.
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There are so many things wrong with this panel discussion on the Chris Matthews Show, it's hard to decide where to begin, but for starters, Andrea Mitchell seems to be the only one that gets it that some happy talk on increasing our troop presence in Afghanistan is not going to satisfy the left. Chris Matthews seems to take absolute glee in the fact that escalating our presence there is going to piss off those of us who are anti-war and thinks that “the center” of this country is pro-war.
Joe Klein thinks that President Obama’s bigger problems are going to be from the screeching right that are not going to support him no matter what he does and that of course the left is going to have to suck it up if the President does something they don’t agree with. As John has said here repeatedly, the Villagers always think it’s a good thing if Obama alienates his base and that we should all sit quietly and STFU when we don't agree with his policies.
I’ll wait to hear what the President has to say on Tuesday rather than second guess him as the media has, but playing the middle and sending more troops rather than getting our military out of Afghanistan is not going to satisfy any of us who don’t think we belonged there in the first place. The people who attacked us on 9-11 were from Saudi Arabia, not Afghanistan, but we didn’t invade and occupy that country.
Matthews: And finally the President said he will say how much it’s going to cost. Anne it’s amazing. I’ve never heard of going to war but saying how much is it going to cost. It’s like that old saying if you have to ask, you can’t afford it.
Kornblut: Well, the White House would say the opposite, that we haven’t asked until now and they have to finally start taking it into account. They’ve actually broken down the numbers to figure out how many per soldier it would be. You know half a million dollars a year to have them there, so at this point they’re taking it into account and they’re measuring it against the other important priorities, like health care, like the other domestic achievements they want to get done.
Matthews: Andrea isn’t it odd we’re talking about the cost of this war and we’re already in it?
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After playing part of old "Five Deferments" Dick Cheney's radio interview with right wing radio host Scott Hennen, Andrea Mitchall asks if President Obama is "acting more like Hamlet than the Commander in Chief". This from the supposed "liberal" network, MSNBC.
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You've got to love watching these guys trying to put a good spin on Sarah Palin's potential return to politics. Michael Steele gets stopped in his tracks by Andrea Mitchell while calling Palin a "successful governor" when Mitchell points out that she quit half way through her term. Of course Steele plays the victim card for Palin and blames her quitting on the media making it impossible for her to do her job. Steele also claims that we've never seen this level of disrespect shown for a female political candidate.
I'd like to see Steele tell Hillary Clinton that to her face if he thinks no other female politician has ever been treated disrespectfully. I'd also like to ask Steele how President Obama is managing to concentrate on doing his job with amount of constant attacks being leveled at him by the media, primarily Fox and the right wing talk show hate machine?
How long will it take before the right wing blogs are trying to spin Mrs. Greenspan as an evil "librul" picking on poor old Sarah for this interview?
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These tough guys sure do have a lot of fear about trusting the United States court system, don't they? During an interview with Andrea Mitchell today Sen. Christopher "Kit" Bond joined the long list of Republicans carping about the Obama administration moving the trial of 9/11 suspects to New York.
Bond: Well I think it’s an insult to the memory of those who were brutally murdered on Sept. 11th to have the leaders behind these cowardly acts of terrorism sit in a courtroom blocks away from ground zero and reap the full benefits and protections of the U.S. Constitution.
I'd love to know how giving these men a fair trial so that the victims of 9/11 can finally have their day in court is insulting them. I would think the opposite is true and that they would be happy to finally have some closure to the whole ordeal. Bond throws this stink bomb out there a bit later in the interview.
Bond: And there is no reason whatsoever to try this person in an open courtroom in the United States with all of the powers that defendants, that American defendants have to get information and expose all of the things that they want to talk about and try to recruit more people like Maj. Hasan who just shown us that Americans can be propagandized and turned into deadly terrorists if they get the word from the leaders who wish to bring death and terror to the United States. I think it’s a disaster.
Yeah, let's wrap this into the tragic shooting at Fort Hood and pretend the two issues have anything to do with each other. Maj. Hasan didn't go on a shooting rampage because he saw terrorist suspects going to trial in the United States. Maybe if we quit dropping bombs on poor people's heads that are not a threat to our country the terrorists out there would have a few less recruiting tools at their disposal.
Bond's real problem with these trials is that they will expose what's been done in our name with this ridiculous "war on terror" that is nothing more than excuse to feed the military industrial complex that Bond and his ilk love so much, and that Dwight Eisenhower so rightfully warned us about.
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Seems WATB Orrin Hatch is not taking to kindly to having his office protested by MoveOn.org for being in the pocket of the health care industry. I've got to wonder, how would the Republicans react if a Democratic member of the Senate went on television and said they'd like to kick those Tea Bag protesters in the teeth?
Hatch: Now by the way MoveOn.org is a scurrilous organization. It's funded by George Soros. He's about as left wing as you can find in this country. And they're up to just one thing, and that is to smear good people. And frankly, they're not gonna smear me without getting kicked in the teeth by me.
Stay classy there Hatch. While MoveOn has received $1.46 million from George Soros as Wikipedia notes:
MoveOn's primary source of funding is its members. MoveOn.org raised nearly 60 million dollars in 2004 from its members alone, with an average donation of $50.
So...Hatch says he gets donations from all sorts of people -- "including liberal people" -- but as for that supposed left-winger George Soros and that "scurrilous" liberal group MoveOn.org -- they've got a kick in the teeth coming.
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The Villagers on the Chris Matthews panel all agree on a couple of points. The dirty f-ing hippies on the left have no right to demand anything of President Obama and were silly to think he’d live up to his campaign promise to reform our health care system. And two, any bill, whether it’s terrible or not that the President signs will be “transformational” and “historic”.
It doesn’t matter to them if it’s a crap sandwich which ends up being nothing but a giveaway to the insurance industry. What matters is that it passes. Andrea Mitchell seems positively giddy at the idea that it will be “criticized from all sides”. That’s a good thing Andrea?
While I agree with them on Afghanistan and that the President did not promise to get us out of there, President Obama did promise some real reform on health care and he also talked about cleaning the lobbyists and their influence out of Washington. This is hardly what’s going on now with Max Baucus and his lobbyists writing the health care bill in the Senate Finance Committee.
And Clarence Page conflates going between single-payer and the public option to the compromises being talked about now. Note to Clarence Page. Going from the public option to a trigger—or no public option at all—is not the same as hedging between single payer and the public option. One is an already bad compromise that might lead to reform. The other is just loading up the pockets of the insurance industry by forcing everyone into the system with no price controls.
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Chris Matthews is getting all hot and bothered because liberals in Congress and from the netroots are pushing hard to get a public option included in health care reform. That's called legislating, Chris. It's a long, hard process sometimes.
The Village really gets upset when dirty f*&king hippies get uppity and speak out on issues that matter. Villagers don't care that America voted in Obama with a mandate on health-care reform. Villagers don't care that America rejected conservatism, which practically caused the world to almost spin off its axis. It's getting to the point that Tweety is pulling stuff out of his pie hole because he hates us so much. And apparently Tweety forgot that "the left" was elected in droves in 2008. "The Left" is not a fringe teabagger, tax evading group, it dominates the House of Representatives. Here he is on Andrea Mitchell talking about Obama and Afghanistan and see where Tweety goes with it all.
Matthews: Everybody is doing their politics here. She represents San Francisco and she represents, I know the Speaker's role. you have to respond to the nosiest elements in your caucus, and the most passionate and apparently, I assume just knowing the Democratic House, the voices she's hearing from every single day are the left who want out. Now this president never promised to get out of Afghanistan. And he's not gonna...
He never promised to pull out, that was the good war, the necessary war. Oh, by the way he never ran on the public option. Somebody's got to tell these people on the left and the netroots and some of our colleagues, yeah, he might like the idea of a public option, he may prefer it. He didn't run on it. He didn't get elected for it. So this idea that he somehow betrayed a left wing mandate is nonsense.
Where to begin. Why is it OK to attack Nancy Pelosi for representing San Francisco? What did they ever do to Bill O'Reilly and Tweety? Aren't they part of the US of A too? That she is from the Bay Area somehow minimizes the fact that she's the Speaker. On Afghanistan, he's right. President Obama did not promises to withdraw from there. That's why we on the left have to put pressure on the administration or we could be there for decades.
But President Obama did campaign on the public option., It was part of his health-care plan that he unveiled in the primaries. I asked Ezra Klein to verify it for me and he did.
Berkeley's Jacob Hacker, who was the first to persuasively articulate it; to the Economic Policy Institute, which fleshed out the specifics; and to the Campaign for America's Future, which took the lead in selling it to advocacy groups and the presidential campaigns. John Edwards picked it up and made it central to his proposal, and the other candidates followed suit to protect their left flanks.
The idea of letting individuals buy insurance from a government-run plan was introduced in 2007 by Jacob Hacker of Yale, was picked up by John Edwards during the Democratic primary, and became part of the original Obama health care plan.
Tweety needs to apologize to President Obama, the netroots and the liberals in Congress who he just smeared in this clip. We are fighting for real health-care reform in America and not some mythical-bipartisan Beltway compromise bill that is completely useless to all the real working families that the Villagers like to pretend they speak for all the time.
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Congressman Pete Hoekstra on MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell Reports talking about our options with Iran now that the Obama administration has called them our for their underground nuclear facilities.
"I think the interesting thing here was the decision that the Obama administration made, perhaps weeks or months ago, that they wanted to enter into these talks with Iran, probably being fully aware that this secret facility existed, and they were willing to move forward unconditionally," said Hoekstra, the ranking member on the House's Permanent Select Intelligence Committee.
"Now ... they're locked in; they have to go on Thursday, so let's see what comes out of that," Hoekstra added.
[....]
"I think that if you put tough economic sanctions on Iran, what a regime like this will do ... is they will make sure it is the Iranian people that will be hurting," he said. "That will then give them the opportunity to go on international television and ... [show the United States] is hurting the Iranian people, and is really not stopping or changing their strategic direction."
But, Hoekstra added, "I'm not sure there are any good options at this point in time."
I wonder how long it will take the neocons to start attacking Pete Hoekstra for saying this?
Last night two of the blogosphere's brightest lights posted on the difficulties Obama is facing when it comes to turning around U.S. Afghanistan policy. Digby, who recounted a 1964 conversation between McGeorge Bundy and President Lyndon Johnson about the futility of American policies in Vietnam, seemed aghast that "Democratic strategist" Donna Brazile was on CNN yesterday seemingly reading some leftover talking points from Karen Hughes about the need to stay in Afghanistan and "get the job done." Then last night Daily Kos' most prescient Afghanistan blogger, Meteor Blades, highlighted the controversy over Andrea Mitchell's report on the 500,000 troops needed to do the job in Afghanistan.
But as Rep. Eric Massa (D-NY), our No Means No guest today, asked me this morning, "What is the job?"
Blue America's friendship with Eric Massa goes back to the very beginning of our PAC and he was one of the first candidates we ever supported. Ultimately it was his character that moved us to endorse him, although his championing of issues impacting the real lives of working families (like "fair trade" over so-called "free trade"), his dogged support of single-payer health care, and his spot-on analysis of the war in Iraq based on experience as a Naval officer are what first drew us to him. He came close in 2006 and he triumphed in 2008-- in one of the only districts in New York that Obama didn't win! Obama tool 48% in NY-29 while Massa scooped up 51% against a multimillionaire incumbent and Bush tool.
In June, Eric was one of only 32 Democrats to vote against the supplemental war budget -- of the 90 who had pledged to vote no. It was an incredibly courageous political act, particularly in a district with a daunting R+5.48 PVI (one of the most Republican districts in the country represented by a progressive Democrat). This morning Eric told me in no uncertain terms that he would "continue to vote against any supplemental."
We're not going to fund any wars in a way that no one knows about. The Republicans gave the wealthiest Americans the largest tax cut in history and then launched two wars without any idea of how to pay for them. It was the most fiscally irresponsible action they could take-- and they took it.
Eric is fired up and full of fight, as always. He loves his job and told me he's absolutely committed to it. "I'm in the right place in my life doing the right job for the right congressional district. And I'm just getting started." Right now, you hear the lifelong military man in him when he says he's very supportive of what he calls "the president's strategic pause to formulate whatever strategy his administration will implement (in Afghanistan)."
For instance, is this about fighting the Taliban or fighting al-Qaeda -- two distinctly different groups -- or is it about creating a democracy, or is it about protecting the Afghan people? These are very different missions that require very different resources. And until we know what we're doing, we cannot begin to get it done. The first thing a military officer asks is 'What is the mission?' And as of right now, that is a very legitimate question."
As progressives and men and women of common sense, we should demand a strategy that turns the destiny of Afghanistan over to the Afghans so we can get out of there as soon as possible. If the condition of our departure is creating a Jeffersonian democracy, then we are on a fool's errand.
Eric is joining us now (in the comments section) as part of our ongoing series on Afghanistan policy at Crooks and Liars. As MoveOn mentioned in the mailing this morning, "U.S. policy in Afghanistan has reached a pivotal moment. President Obama is poised to make a critical decision about the Afghanistan war in the next few weeks. And there's a big debate happening right now about what to do. Pro-war advocates both inside and outside the administration -- including John McCain and Joe Lieberman -- are calling for a big escalation. The general in charge of Afghanistan is expected to request tens of thousands more troops, and that may just be the beginning. They're cranking up the pressure for an immediate surge."
Eric Massa is in a unique position to help us figure out a progressive strategy for dealing with this dilemma. He's adamant that if the President asks for more funds for the war, he do it through a normal budgetary process that includes a "clearly articulated strategy with an end game. The Republicans say they're all about fiscal responsibility? Then they should agree we should apply those concepts to wars."
Please take a look at Blue America's No Means No! page and consider donating to Eric and any or all of the 32 other Democrats who have already done the right thing by voting no on the supplemental budget 3 months ago and who we will be counting on to help end the occupation of Afghanistan in the coming months.
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Max Baucus finally unveiled his new/old bill from the Senate Finance committee today and as has been expected the bill is all about bowing down to the minority party that has no intentions of supporting any type of health care reform. He's chucked aside America just to try and land one Republican vote in the Senate... errrr... I mean, the House of Lords.
Sen. Rockefeller has been very outspoken about his opposition to the Baucus Dogs bill and says as much while many other Democrats are not pleased either.
On Andrea Mitchell, Sen. Kent Conrad came on at the end of the show and read off a list of things that Republicans should be so happy to support in the bill. It was as if Baucus and Conrad wrote a bill that caters to the Republicans and his Gang of Six committee. It was disgusting watching him gush when he said there was no public option in the bill because Republicans didn't want it. He then read off more and more things that Grassley wants in the bill and it's as if he really thinks there's a chance in hell that they will vote for his bill.
Actually, it's a bill nobody but self-eviscerating Dems will vote for.
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Michael Steele seems to have a problem recognizing racism. Steele does the apples to oranges game and tries to compare what was done to President Bush when those silly lefties were calling him names for dropping bombs on a bunch of people's heads that were never a threat to the United States and lying to the country about that non-existent threat, to what's going on now with President Obama.
Steele says that the "adults in the room need to step up, and I think the adults are myself and President Obama, two African American men at the top of the political structure of this country who can say with some degree of experience and clarity that this is not the context in which we need to have a debate on health care or any issue facing America".
Michael Steele knows full well that President Obama cannot say what Jimmy Carter just said because if he did, the wingnuts would go into full attack mode just as they are right now with President Carter. And of course this is not the context that we need to be having a debate on health care. It is the context the GOP wants us to be having a debate on to "blacken" up President Obama or they wouldn't have put someone with a track record like Joe Wilson up to his stunt on the House floor during President Obama's address to Congress.
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Andrea Mitchell ask Barney Frank if he will support a bill that will as Mitch McConnell claims, but Medicare by nearly half a trillion dollars and without a public option. Frank rejects McConnell's accessment and says Obama's mistake was trying to get any bipartisan support. He then states something that should be said over and over again.
Frank: Let's just put it this way. If we hadn't waged that foolish, expensive, devastating war in Iraq we could have paid for health care two times over, so I reject the notion that there's no other way to find the funds for health care.
