Minding Murtha

post from The Newshoggers on 19 March 2008 09:58:00 AM. © The Newshoggers

By Libby

Cernig and I are on the same wavelength today. I had the same immediate reaction when reading the about Murtha's endorsement of Hillary. It dredged up vague recollections of being burned by actions that belied his rhetoric. A quick check at sourcewatch.org refreshes the memory.

Murtha has delivered votes to help Republicans block a number of Democratic initiatives: "to investigate federal contracting fraud in Iraq, to reform lobbying laws, to increase financing for flood control, to add $150 million for veterans' health care and job training, and to exempt middle-class families from the alternative minimum tax." Those who vote with Murtha have been rewarded with a large supply of earmarks for their districts.[8]

In 1989 Murtha became chairman of the Defense Appropriation Subcommittee. There he imposed new rules and procedure that forced Defense appropriations bills to be decided behind closed doors. The practice has continued since Republicans took the majority in 1995.[9]

In 2006, When the Republican majority brought their ethics package, the Lobbying Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006, to the floor, Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) offered a motion to recommit with instructions to strike the text of the bill and replace it with the text of the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act, the Democrat's ethics bill. The motion to recommit failed by three votes, after Rep. Murtha led a group of four Democrats, himself and Reps. Rick Boucher (D-Va.), Martin Sabo (D-Minn.), and Michael Capuanoto (D-Mass.), to vote with the Republicans.

Before it's lost in the stampede to canonize the man, it might be good to remember that in the end he's just another professional politician who has built his career on earmarks.

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OBAMA THE COMMUNITARIAN.

post from Ezra Klein on 19 March 2008 09:52:00 AM. © Ezra Klein

The only writer who's been better at talking about Obama than Obama himself has been Mark Schmitt. Mark's explication of Obama's theory of change largely convinced me that there was something real there, particularly after Mark's language began showing[...]

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=obama_the_communitarian

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NRA Demonstrators Show Up In Washington As
Supreme Court Reviews D.C. Handgun Ban -- Verse-Case Scenario by Tony Peyser

post from BuzzFlash.org - Progressive News and Commentary with an Attitude | Fight Ignorance: Read BuzzFlash on 19 March 2008 09:49:52 AM. © BuzzFlash.org - Progressive News and Commentary with an Attitude | Fight Ignorance: Read BuzzFlash

The thing I've noticed about gun-loving protesters
From Salem to Salinas is
Bookmark/Search this post with: buzzflash | delicious | digg digg | technorati Technorati Tags: Tony Peyser NRA phallic symbol gun penis Supreme Court

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More Thread

post from Eschaton on 19 March 2008 09:48:00 AM. © Eschaton

Atrios must have slept in on this grey day. And honestly, can you blame him?

video details and more

--Molly I.

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Pollack: 30 years from now, Iraq war will be
‘worth it.’

post from Think Progress on 19 March 2008 09:45:00 AM. © Think Progress

pollack In a Washington Post interview today, long-time Iraq war advocate Kenneth Pollack admits that the “first four years” of the Iraq war “were about as disastrous as I could possibly imagine.” He adds, “I am hard-pressed to find a single major decision where the U.S. didn’t make the worst possible choice.” Yet he goes on to say the war was “worth it”:

Thirty years from now, when historians look back, where are they going to come out? If at the end of the day the U.S. screwed things up for four years and then in the end left Iraq a better place than they found it under Saddam, it may have still been worth it.

Pollack, who was one of the most outspoken supporters of last year’s troop escalation, fervently argued for the original U.S. invasion. In his 2002 book, “The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq,” Pollack pushed the United States to “launch a full-scale invasion, eradicate Saddam?s weapons of mass destruction, and rebuild Iraq as a prosperous and stable society — for the good of the United States.”

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Military on Clinton

post from Taylor Marsh on 19 March 2008 09:43:57 AM. © Taylor Marsh

Military on ClintonHillary Clinton as commander-in-chief, that’s what the video suggests. John Murtha knows what she’ll do. So do the retired flag officers in the video above. On leadership, there’s just no contest. On courage, too. [...]

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http://www.taylormarsh.com/archives_view.php?id=27259

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White House: Mum's the word on the US dollar

post from Reality Frame on 19 March 2008 09:43:00 AM. © Reality Frame

Believe it or not, Dana Perino, the bubble-headed bleach blonde who masquerades as the White House Press Secretary, let it be known that she is not allowed to talk about the shrinking dollar, under penalty of getting shitcanned.Maybe if we don't talk about it, the problem will go away.current-events

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Today's Must Read

post from TPMMuckraker on 19 March 2008 09:40:00 AM. © TPMMuckraker

I think everyone can agree that if you go to the trouble of organizing an Iraqi political reconciliation conference, it's generally a bad sign if a number of key players don't even show up.

The idea behind the conference pushed by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki was to have a national "dialogue."

The largest Sunni bloc, former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's party, and a prominent minority party of Shiites and Sunnis all boycotted the conference. No representatives of the insurgency (either Baathist or militia members) were there. Supporters of Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr walked out of the conference, as did a prominent Sunni tribal leader who's been key to the so-called "Anbar Awakening."

Typical of Iraq, the boycotters don't even concur on their reason for boycotting. The New York Times focuses on pique by some blocs that they didn't get a proper invitation (Maliki's people say everybody got an official invitation). The AP reports that one Sunni bloc "said they would not participate in the conference until Shiite lawmakers address their political demands" -- so they won't talk reconciliation until their grievances are reconciled. And then there's a more direct explanation from that Anbar tribal leader, who's quoted in The Los Angeles Times (under the headline "A no-reconciliation conference"):

The organizer noted that Sunni tribes, which have revolted against Al Qaeda in Iraq, attended the conference. But one of their main leaders, Sheik Sulaiman, decided to lead his delegation out of the conference.
"I didn't stay any longer than it took me to smoke my cigarette. It was a total failure, because the Iraqi politicians are a failure," Sulaiman said.

This is why even Gen. David Petraeus says that "no one" in the U.S. and Iraqi governments "feels that there has been sufficient progress by any means in the area of national reconciliation."

Happy 5th Anniversary, everybody.

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The "Absence Of Evidence" Logic Trap

By Cernig

Did Dick Cheney ever do Logic 101 in college? He keeps banging the "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" drum over Iran's nuclear program.

Vice President Dick Cheney retained his tough stance against Iran on Wednesday and said the U.S. is uncertain if Tehran has restarted the nuclear weaponization program that a U.S. intelligence report says it halted in 2003.

..."What it (the NIE) says is that they have definitely had in the past a program to develop a nuclear warhead; that it would appear that they stopped that weaponization process in 2003. We don't know whether or not they've restarted," he said.

"What we do know is that they had then, and have now, a process by which they're trying to enrich uranium, which is the key obstacle they've got to overcome in order to have a nuclear weapon," he added. "They've been working at it for years."

It's also a key obstacle to having an indeginous nuclear power industry that the great powers can't turn off or on at will by controlling fuel supplies, Dick. Sometime a cigar is just a cigar.

Cheney must surely know by now - if he was paying any attention at all in the last five years of Iraqi invasion and occupation - that one cannot prove a negative. One can show it to be highly likely, sure, but there are still wingnuts who insist that Saddam sent all his WMD by FedEx to a postal box in Damascus and it's this little logical law that lets them do so. Cheney's probably one of them. And so he continues his push to waste yet more hundreds of thousands of lives, along with another $3 trillion and more, on yet another idiotic snark hunt.

Let's be clear - the "Cheney 1% Doctrine" is not logical or good foreign policy - it is paranoid sociopathy at its worse. In personal terms it's as if I decided to wade into my neighbour's house with gun blazing because he can't prove he has no anthrax and I've seen him using white powder (to make bread). My insanity plea in defense of murder charges would probably be accepted by the court.

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http://cernigsnewshog.blogspot.com/2008/03/by-cernig-did-dick-cheney-ever-do-logi
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Cheers and Jeers: Wednesday

From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE...

Bamboozled

On this, the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war (aka "The Great 1,827 Day And Counting War"), I cede this space to my friends from the Republican party, who are much smarter than any of us pansyass lefties. They must be taken seriously, for they are the fierce and mighty warrior class:

"Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof---the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud."
---George W. Bush, 10/7/02
-
"We will, in fact, be greeted as liberators."
---Dick Cheney, 3/16/03
-
"There's a certain amount of pop psychology in America that the Shia can't get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There's almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq's always been very secular."
---Bill Kristol, 4/1/03
-
It's amazing that more than two weeks into the liberation of Iraq---as residents in Basra are cheering British forces and Americans occupy Baghdad's airport and Saddam Hussein's main presidential palace---the antiwar crowd is still spinning a doomsday scenario. But it's getting harder and harder to take seriously the claim that freeing Iraq will make it harder to win the war on terrorism. Indeed, there's plenty of evidence to the contrary. [...] Who said war never solved anything?
---Brendan Miniter, The Wall Street Journal, 4/8/03
-
"The only people who think this wasn't a victory are Upper Westside liberals."
---Charles Krauthammer, 4/19/03
-
Ted Koppel: [Y]ou’re not suggesting that the rebuilding of Iraq is going to be done for $1.7 billion?
Andrew Natsios [Agency for International Development]: Well, in terms of the American taxpayer's contribution, I do. This is it for the U.S.
---4/23/03
-
[Liberals] can't deny that President Bush has won his two wars, and won them resoundingly.
---Paul Mirengoff, Powerline, 4/26/03
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"The three-week swing through Iraq has utterly shattered skeptics' complaints."
---Tony Snow, Fox News, 4/27/03

And from the man who claims his judgment qualifies him to be Commander-in-Chief:

"I believe that the success will be fairly easy." (9/24/02)
-
"We’re not going to have a bloodletting of trading American bodies for Iraqi bodies." (9/29/02)
-
"We will win this conflict. We will win it easily." (1/22/03)
-
"[T]here’s no doubt in my mind, once these people are gone, that we will be welcomed as liberators." (3/24/03)
---Senator John McCain

Meanwhile, liberals are shrill. And Cheers and Jeers starts in There's Moreville... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]