No Katrina Oil Spills?

Isn't it interesting how the Republicans can't seem to debate an issue without resorting to out and out lies on the topic?

Republicans have wanted to open up the rest of America's protected lands to business exploitation since the idea of protected lands was first proposed. Currently they're trying to get the States to agree to allow off-shore oil drilling, on the premise that it will affect oil prices. It wont.

One of their primary talking points in this argument is that technology has progressed to the point where drilling offshore is no longer a spill waiting to happen. In fact, they say that not even Katrina was able to make any of these off-shore drilling platforms spring a leak! They repeat this every time they are on the TV talking about energy.

It wont surprise you to find that this is not true:

The oil pollution in the wake of Hurricane Katrina could be among the worst recorded in North America, officials trying to coordinate the clean-up say. The US coastguard, which is responsible for the marine environment, said yesterday more than 6.5 million gallons of crude oil had been spilt in at least seven major incidents. The previous worst spill in US waters was the 11m gallons in Alaskan waters from the Exxon Valdez in 1989.

"This is a major event," said Lieutenant Colonel Glynn Smith of the coastguard in New Orleans. "Things are going well, but three-quarters of the oil from the spills has not yet been recovered."

The figure does not include petrol and oil spilt from up to 250,000 cars which have been submerged, or that spilt from hundreds of petrol stations. The coastguard says it has received almost 400 reports of spills, the vast majority of which have not been assessed.

So, once again we see that the Republicans understand that the perceived reasonableness of a statement is directly correlated to the number of people saying it on TV. The Truth be damned, they know how to win elections.

Obama's Foreign Policy Speech

This is pure brilliance. It's like he's in my head.

Here are The Five Goals of his foreign policy:

1. Ending the war in Iraq responsibly
   
2. Finishing the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban
   
3. Securing all nuclear weapons and materials from terrorists and rogue states
   
4. Achieving true energy security
   
5. Rebuilding our alliances to meet the challenges of the 21st century

Here's the meat:

The attacks of September 11 brought this new reality into a terrible and ominous focus. On that bright and beautiful day, the world of peace and prosperity that was the legacy of our Cold War victory seemed to suddenly vanish under rubble, and twisted steel, and clouds of smoke.

But the depth of this tragedy also drew out the decency and determination of our nation. At blood banks and vigils; in schools and in the United States Congress, Americans were united - more united, even, than we were at the dawn of the Cold War. The world, too, was united against the perpetrators of this evil act, as old allies, new friends, and even long-time adversaries stood by our side. It was time - once again - for America's might and moral suasion to be harnessed; it was time to once again shape a new security strategy for an ever-changing world.

Imagine, for a moment, what we could have done in those days, and months, and years after 9/11.

We could have deployed the full force of American power to hunt down and destroy Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, the Taliban, and all of the terrorists responsible for 9/11, while supporting real security in Afghanistan.

We could have secured loose nuclear materials around the world, and updated a 20th century non-proliferation framework to meet the challenges of the 21st.

We could have invested hundreds of billions of dollars in alternative sources of energy to grow our economy, save our planet, and end the tyranny of oil.

We could have strengthened old alliances, formed new partnerships, and renewed international institutions to advance peace and prosperity.

We could have called on a new generation to step into the strong currents of history, and to serve their country as troops and teachers, Peace Corps volunteers and police officers.

We could have secured our homeland--investing in sophisticated new protection for our ports, our trains and our power plants.

We could have rebuilt our roads and bridges, laid down new rail and broadband and electricity systems, and made college affordable for every American to strengthen our ability to compete.

We could have done that.

Instead, we have lost thousands of American lives, spent nearly a trillion dollars, alienated allies and neglected emerging threats - all in the cause of fighting a war for well over five years in a country that had absolutely nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.

Our men and women in uniform have accomplished every mission we have given them. What's missing in our debate about Iraq - what has been missing since before the war began - is a discussion of the strategic consequences of Iraq and its dominance of our foreign policy. This war distracts us from every threat that we face and so many opportunities we could seize. This war diminishes our security, our standing in the world, our military, our economy, and the resources that we need to confront the challenges of the 21st century. By any measure, our single-minded and open-ended focus on Iraq is not a sound strategy for keeping America safe.

Word.

From McCain's Past

Republican Senator says McCain roughed up Sandinista:

One of John McCain's Republican colleagues says he saw the presumed GOP presidential nominee roughly grab an associate of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and lift him out of his chair during a diplomatic mission to the Central American nation in 1987.

Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., said he saw McCain, who has a reputation for being hot-tempered, rough up an Ortega associate during a trip to Nicaragua led by former Sen. Bob Dole, R-Kan.

"McCain was down at the end of the table and we were talking to the head of the guerrilla group here at this end of the table and I don't know what attracted my attention," Cochran said in an interview with the Sun Herald in Biloxi, Miss. "But I saw some kind of quick movement at the bottom of the table and I looked down there and John had reached over and grabbed this guy by the shirt collar and had snatched him up like he was throwing him up out of the chair to tell him what he thought about him or whatever ...

"I don't know what he was telling him but I thought, 'Good grief, everybody around here has got guns and we were there on a diplomatic mission.' I don't know what had happened to provoke John, but he obviously got mad at the guy ... and he just reached over there and snatched ... him."

Also, he apparently thinks rape is funny:

The blog Rum, Romanism and Rebellion pulls out a 1986 Tucson Citizen article recounting a joke about rape told by Sen. John McCain (R-AZ). Speaking to the National League of Cities and Towns in Washington, DC, McCain allegedly said:

Did you hear the one about the woman who is attacked on the street by a gorilla, beaten senseless, raped repeatedly and left to die? When she finally regains consciousness and tries to speak, her doctor leans over to hear her sigh contently and to feebly ask, “Where is that marvelous ape?”

McCain was swiftly criticized by women’s groups. A spokeswoman for NOW in Arizona said the organization’s members were “incensed by his cruel and sexist remark.” McCain said he did not “recall” telling the joke. More recently, the McCain campaign scheduled a fundraiser with a Texas oilman who compared rape to the weather while running for governor. “As long as it’s inevitable, you might as well lie back and enjoy it,” said Clayton Williams in 1990. After public outcry, the event was “postponed.”

Update: Huffington Post's Sam Stein spoke to reporter Norma Coile, who wrote the original article. Coile told Stein, "I'm not sure exactly what the wording was of the joke, but something was said. Some joke involving a rape and ape was said."

Good stuff, McCain. If only it was still the 20th Century, his century, and you could just deny you ever said such things.

Talking with our Enemies?

The latest on the appeasement front:

President Bush has authorized the most significant American diplomatic contact with Iran since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, sending the State Department's third-ranking official to Geneva for a meeting this weekend on Iran's nuclear program, administration officials said Tuesday.

....William J. Burns, the under secretary of state for political affairs, will attend a meeting on Saturday with the European Union's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, and Iran's nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, a senior administration official said, speaking on condition of anonymity ahead of an official announcement on Wednesday.

It has to be admitted that Obama is right on this issue. Our foreign policy successes (if you can call them that after the failures that precede them) have all come as a result of talking with out enemies. Our foreign policy failures have all come as a result of stubbornly refusing to talk to our enemies. For instance, during the period when we weren't talking to North Korea, they manufactured their first dozen nuclear bombs and developed enrichment technologies that they then spread around the world. Now that we are talking to them, they have suspended their program and destroyed their reprocessing facility.

Once again, the Bush Administration is doing things that McCain has called Obama "naive" for advocating.

McCain for Cutting Social Security Benefits

Excellent work from the Reality-Based Community:

Carly Fiorina says that McCain might raise taxes on rich folks as part of a Social Security deal.

Grover Norquist, speaking as the Anti-Tax Grand Inquisitor, more or less replies: "Bullsh*t! I wear McCain's balls on my keyring!"

Then comes the punchline:

A McCain campaign spokesman told ABC News Monday that McCain continues to oppose any tax increase as part of Social Security reform, notwithstanding Fiorina's comments.

"The lesson of history is that too many specifics at this point polarize the debate, that is the argument Carly was trying to make," Taylor Griffin said. "However, John McCain does believe that we can fix Social Security without raising taxes. As president, John McCain will call on Congress to develop a bi-partisan solution to Social Security — and if they won't, he will."

Three points here:

1. "Too many specifics at this point polarize the debate" translates into English as "If we told the retirees how completely we plan to shaft them, they might not vote for us."

2. The McCain camp seems to have invented a new idea: unilateral bipartisanship. If Congress doesn't come up with a bi-partisan plan, McCain will single-handedly come up with his own bi-partisan plan.

3. Since McCain has now committed to "fixing" the Social Security "problem" without raising taxes, and since the only two ways of getting projected revenues to match projected benefits is to increase revenues or reduce benefits, it follows that McCain is committed to cutting Social Security benefits. And that's before he has to reduce them again to accommodate the diversion of new money into private accounts.

So not only does McCain think that Social Security is "an absolute disgrace," he knows what he wants to do about it: he'll reduce pensions but not increase taxes on the wealthy.

This seems to me like Christmas in July.

Yup. This is an 80-20 issue, and especially so amongst the most dedicated voters - the older generations.

The 9/11 Timeline

If it had been a Democrat that was President on 9/11, this would be all we'd hear about until impeachment:

• Jan 20, 2001: Bush Inaugurated
• Jan 25, 2001: Richard Clarke sends Condi Rice memo, warning about al Qaeda. Rice does nothing.
• August 6, 2001: Bush gets memo titled "Bin Laden Determined to strike in US." Bush responds by telling the briefer, "All right. You've covered your ass, now." Then does nothing.
• September 11, 2001: Bin Laden strikes in US.

(h/t Atrios)

McCain calls War Opponents Traitors

This is more like the Republican rhetoric I'm used to! I'm sure McCain is doing this just to make us Democrats feel at home! Being called a traitor just makes me nostalgic for the days when I was being right about the upcoming Iraq War, and when all the chest-thumping patriots were being so very, so stupidly wrong.

The new accusation was unveiled on a McCain campaign conference call [this morning], with top McCain surrogates making this charge in tandem.

Sen. Lindsey Graham said that a “turning point” was when Harry Reid declared the war “lost” over a year ago, and brought up an old quote from Chuck Schumer predicting that discontent with the war would lead to further Democratic gains. “The Democratic Party built a political strategy around us losing the war in Iraq,” Graham said.

McCain adviser Randy Scheunemann joined in: “Senator Obama seems to think losing a war will help him win an election.”

It might not be the actual word "treason," but the intent is clear. So much for the civil and respectful campaign.

Of course, it's doubly ironic that the Republicans are saying the Democrats want to see US Troops killed and lose on the battlefield. It was the Republicans, after all, that demanded we go to war with a country that posed no threat to us, delivering that country into the waiting arms of the Iranians, and getting hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians killed in the process. Then there is the little matter of the 4000+ US dead. These military men and women deserved better than to be used so cynically.

And let us remember that it is the Republicans who have said that terrorist attacks on US soil would help them electorally! After an OBL tape released during the 2004 election, McCain said, “Bin Laden may have just given us a little boost. Amazing, huh?”

One might say that "Senator McCain seems to think having US citizens killed by terrorists in America will help him win an election." Fair, huh?

Oped: Obama on Iraq

Obama wrote an Op-Ed for the NYTimes today:

In the 18 months since President Bush announced the surge, our troops have performed heroically in bringing down the level of violence. New tactics have protected the Iraqi population, and the Sunni tribes have rejected Al Qaeda — greatly weakening its effectiveness.

But the same factors that led me to oppose the surge still hold true. The strain on our military has grown, the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated and we’ve spent nearly $200 billion more in Iraq than we had budgeted. Iraq’s leaders have failed to invest tens of billions of dollars in oil revenues in rebuilding their own country, and they have not reached the political accommodation that was the stated purpose of the surge.

The good news is that Iraq’s leaders want to take responsibility for their country by negotiating a timetable for the removal of American troops. Meanwhile, Lt. Gen. James Dubik, the American officer in charge of training Iraq’s security forces, estimates that the Iraqi Army and police will be ready to assume responsibility for security in 2009.

Only by redeploying our troops can we press the Iraqis to reach comprehensive political accommodation and achieve a successful transition to Iraqis’ taking responsibility for the security and stability of their country. Instead of seizing the moment and encouraging Iraqis to step up, the Bush administration and Senator McCain are refusing to embrace this transition — despite their previous commitments to respect the will of Iraq’s sovereign government. They call any timetable for the removal of American troops “surrender,” even though we would be turning Iraq over to a sovereign Iraqi government.

But this is not a strategy for success — it is a strategy for staying that runs contrary to the will of the Iraqi people, the American people and the security interests of the United States. That is why, on my first day in office, I would give the military a new mission: ending this war.

Sounds like me. :)

No SOFA

Looks like the Iraqis are holding firm to their demands for a withdrawal timetable before any agreement is reached concerning the United States' legal right to occupy the country.

There will be no Status of Forces Agreement with the Bush White House. Sovereignty is a bitch, huh?

Torture Verified

This is very illuminating. Greenwald always does an excellent job of making legal issues understandable and compelling:

According to the New York Times and Washington Post, both of which received an advanced copy, Mayer's book reports the following:

• "Red Cross investigators concluded last year in a secret report that the Central Intelligence Agency's interrogation methods for high-level Qaeda prisoners constituted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes."
• "A CIA analyst warned the Bush administration in 2002 that up to a third of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay may have been imprisoned by mistake, but White House officials ignored the finding and insisted that all were 'enemy combatants' subject to indefinite incarceration."
• "[A] top aide to Vice President Cheney shrugged off the report and squashed proposals for a quick review of the detainees' cases . . .

  'There will be no review,' the book quotes Cheney staff director David Addington as saying. 'The president has determined that they are ALL enemy combatants. We are not going to revisit it.'"

• "[T]he [CIA] analyst estimated that a full third of the camp's detainees were there by mistake. When told of those findings, the top military commander at Guantanamo at the time, Major Gen. Michael Dunlavey, not only agreed with the assessment but suggested that an even higher percentage of detentions -- up to half -- were in error. Later, an academic study by Seton Hall University Law School concluded that 55 percent of detainees had never engaged in hostile acts against the United States, and only 8 percent had any association with al-Qaeda."
• [T]he International Committee of the Red Cross declared in the report, given to the C.I.A. last year, that the methods used on Abu Zubaydah, the first major Qaeda figure the United States captured, were 'categorically' torture, which is illegal under both American and international law".
• "[T]he Red Cross document 'warned that the abuse constituted war crimes, placing the highest officials in the U.S. government in jeopardy of being prosecuted.'"

This is what a country becomes when it decides that it will not live under the rule of law, when it communicates to its political leaders that they are free to do whatever they want -- including breaking our laws -- and there will be no consequences. There are two choices and only two choices for every country -- live under the rule of law or live under the rule of men. We've collectively decided that our most powerful political leaders are not bound by our laws -- that when they break the law, there will be no consequences. We've thus become a country which lives under the proverbial "rule of men" -- that is literally true, with no hyperbole needed -- and Mayer's revelations are nothing more than the inevitable by-product of that choice.

That's why this ongoing, well-intentioned debate that Andrew Sullivan is having with himself and his readers over whether "torture is worse than illegal, warrantless eavesdropping" is so misplaced, and it's also why those who are dismissing as "an overblown distraction" the anger generated by last week's Congressional protection of surveillance lawbreakers are so deeply misguided. Things like "torture" and "illegal eavesdropping" can't be compared as though they're separate, competing policies. They are rooted in the same framework of lawlessness. The same rationale that justifies one is what justifies the other. Endorsing one is to endorse all of it.

In fact, none of the scandals of radicalism and criminality which we've learned about over the last seven years -- including the creation of this illegal torture regime -- can be viewed in isolation. They're all by-products of the country that we've become in the post-9/11 era, primarily as a result of our collective decision to exempt our Government leaders from the rule of law; to acquiesce to the manipulative claim that we can only be Safe if we allow our Leaders to be free from consequences when they commit crimes; and to demonize advocates of the rule of law as -- to use Larry Lessig's mindless, reactionary clichés -- shrill, Leftist "hysterics" who need to "get off [their] high horse(s)".

That is the mentality that has allowed the Bush administration to engage in this profound assault on our national character, to violate our laws at will. Our political and media elite have acquiesced to all of this when they weren't cheering it all on. Those who object to it, who argue that these abuses of political power are dangerous in the extreme and that we cannot tolerate deliberate government lawbreaking, are dismissed as shrill Leftist hysterics.

Read the whole thing. It's not too much longer.

Iraq and Leaving

I have long feared that something even stronger than the Lieberman Electoral Strategy will be used against Barack Obama. Joe Lieberman based his "independent" campaign around his heartfelt and very sincere desire to see the troops come home from Iraq. "No one wants to bring the troops home more than I do," was his oft-repeated formulation. Of course, it was never true, but by repeating it enough times it sure ended up sounding true. The people of Connecticut, overwhelmingly against the Iraq War and for bringing home our troops starting immediately, voted into office one of the most dedicated war supporters in the Senate.

In the presidential election it might be even more powerful, since the current President has significant power to bolster the rhetoric. We've always known that the Surge would be temporary, and that as the brigades withdrew we would be treated to victory rhetoric from the President. That's come to pass nicely. The wild card is whether the Bush Administration starts further draw downs before the election. It's my fear that they'll say, "Well, McCain's Surge worked so well that we're going to start drawing down to 100,000 troops" in the month before the election. Once again, there will be a clear choice between "continue the war" and "end the war," but the waters will be muddied by the Administration and by McCain's constant insistence that he "wants to bring the troops home too."

The real strategic goal of the war supporters appears to be nothing more than staying in Iraq. Lieberman perhaps wanted American troops between Israel and Iran to help protect Jewish lands. President Bush might want to stay in Iraq because his advisers told him it would remake the Middle East and bring freedom for millions. Many people, however, want to stay in Iraq so that we can have 150,000 US troops over the second largest deposit of oil in the world. Serious (Republican) people like Alan Greenspan and James Baker have said securing access to oil is the real strategic objective of the war. Of course, anyone suggesting such a thing before the war was regarded as a left-wing nut, smearing our President and our troops. It was called treason.

We were told by the President (who knew it was untrue) that Iraq was an imminent threat to our security, and we had to invade to deal with it. When we learned that it was untrue we were told that leaving would be a threat to our security because violence was high. With violence being low, we were told that leaving would be a threat to our security. Now we're told that even Obama's plan, which has us leaving by 2011, is a threat to our security! Eight years is not enough.

It really begins to look like the plan for Iraq all along was just not to leave.

Obama's Abortion Problem?

Really? This is your latest attack, Hannity? You're now claiming that Obama's flip-flopping on reproductive rights? This is weak sauce, man.

Obama said what Democrats have been saying for over a decade - that we oppose late term abortion, and that we would support laws against it if there was a strict exemption for taking into account the life of the mother. This health exemption is seen as gray by the right, though, and they worry that a mother will cry: "but I don't want to have this baby! It's causing me mental anguish and that affects my health! I am exempt from the prohibition!" Obama just explains that that doesn't cut it. There is a strong record of Obama using personal responsibility rhetoric, and that's all this represents. After all, you can hardly claim that a 3rd trimester pregnancy snuck up on you! You have a responsibility, as a woman, to make your choice before that viability threshold is crossed. It is only your own fault if you choose to wait until the last minute.

Strang: Based on emails we received, another issue of deep importance to our readers is a candidate’s stance on abortion. We largely know your platform, but there seems to be some real confusion about your position on third-trimester and partial-birth abortions. Can you clarify your stance for us?

Obama: I absolutely can, so please don’t believe the emails. I have repeatedly said that I think it’s entirely appropriate for states to restrict or even prohibit late-term abortions as long as there is a strict, well-defined exception for the health of the mother. Now, I don’t think that “mental distress” qualifies as the health of the mother. I think it has to be a serious physical issue that arises in pregnancy, where there are real, significant problems to the mother carrying that child to term. Otherwise, as long as there is such a medical exception in place, I think we can prohibit late-term abortions.

The other email rumor that’s been floating around is that somehow I’m unwilling to see doctors offer life-saving care to children who were born as a result of an induced abortion. That’s just false. There was a bill that came up in Illinois that was called the “Born Alive” bill that purported to require life-saving treatment to such infants. And I did vote against that bill. The reason was that there was already a law in place in Illinois that said that you always have to supply life-saving treatment to any infant under any circumstances, and this bill actually was designed to overturn Roe v. Wade, so I didn’t think it was going to pass constitutional muster.

Ever since that time, emails have been sent out suggesting that, somehow, I would be in favor of letting an infant die in a hospital because of this particular vote. That’s not a fair characterization, and that’s not an honest characterization. It defies common sense to think that a hospital wouldn't provide life-saving treatment to an infant that was alive and had a chance of survival.

Imminently reasonable, don't you think?

What a ridiculous charge of flip-floppery. And yet, once again, we're subjected to a deluge of stories uncritically repeating the McCain line.

McCain Abandons Global Warming

Larry Kudlow has noticed something in McCain's Economic Plan:

I went back last evening and carefully read [John McCain's] 15-page policy pamphlet called "Jobs for America." Here's what I found: There is no mention of cap-and-trade. None. Nada.

....So I picked up the phone and dialed a senior McCain official to make sure these old eyes hadn't missed it. Sure enough, on deep background, this senior McCain advisor told me I was correct: no cap-and-trade. In other words, this central-planning, regulatory, tax-and-spend disaster, which did not appear in Mac's two recent speeches, has been eradicated entirely — even from the detailed policy document that hardly anybody will ever read.

First McCain forgot about the Cap in his Cap-and-Trade program, and now the program is just gone entirely. As of now has no plan to address Global Warming, becoming like Bush in one more way.

Some Maverick. Poor McCain 2000. He's so far gone.

Obama's NotFlops

The Corner, putting together a list of Obama's Notflops:

How about taking a position on terrorist wiretapping that is the opposite of a position he articulated (and voted on) earlier? Or saying he agreed with the Supreme Court striking down a gun law he had earlier said he thought was constitutional? Or saying one thing about trade now and another during the primaries? Or “refining” (the term his own campaign chose to use) his view on Iraq to bring it closer into line with McCain’s?

"Thin gruel," as Andrew Sullivan - former republican blogger - says. Let's take them one by one.

• FISA: the conference bill was significantly different than the original Senate version. Importantly, it restored Constitutional Rule to our nation's eavesdropping practices - protecting the rights of Americans against warrantless search. He didn't want the good to be the enemy of the perfect over civil Telecom Immunity.
  
• Gun Rights: He has always said that he supported an individual right to bear arms - the most important question answered by the court. He supported the DC ban, but that is not necessarily inconsistent with the individual right since it wasn't a universal ban. The court decided it was unconstitutional, so he agreed, because the central question was one of rights.
  
• Trade: Saying that he'll unilaterally opt-out of NAFTA, then later saying that he would use the threat of an opt-out as negotiating leverage is not a change.
  
• Iraq: Not even remotely a flip-flop. It's a notflop.
  

Why not have an election based on reality for once, instead of manufactured distractions from the Republican Party?

Unified Theory of Forgetfulness?

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has been looking for a Grand Unified Theory of McCain's Crumbiness.

McCain doesn't understand his own policies. Hilzoy said it perfectly:

There's a pattern to this. McCain seems to have a few ideas about economics. Spending is out of control, and if we just restrain it, things will be OK. (Moreover, none of the spending he proposes -- e.g., the spending required to add 200,000 troops to the armed forces -- actually counts.) People should have the right to put their own tax money into their own Social Security accounts. Cutting taxes raises revenue. And that seems to be about it.

Since he doesn't actually understand what he's talking about, he periodically says something ill-advised -- that he supports privatizing Social Security, that he'll balance the budget in four years, and so forth. Then his advisors walk him back -- as they have already done with his promise to balance the budget by the end of his first term, and as I expect they'll do shortly on Social Security.

But it's not just on economics that this happens. Recall his advisors taking back his promise to kick Russia out of the G-8, the way he has needed to be corrected about whether Iran is training al Qaeda, or whether al Qaeda is Shi'a, or how many troops we have in Iraq, and so forth. And remember that he doesn't seem to know what a cap and trade system is, despite having co-sponsored cap and trade legislation in Congress, and having a cap and trade system as a central part of his energy policy.

He has a few ideas lodged in his head, without anything like the background he'd need in order to question or assess them, and without any discernible interest in learning more. He doesn't keep basic, basic facts straight, or know really elementary aspects of his own policies.

I never thought I'd end up covering John McCain like this. I expected, after eight years of Bush, to be able to argue about genuine philosophical and policy differences, rather than going on about the most basic matters of competence. But McCain's performance so far is just frightening. We've had eight years of a clueless President who governs on the basis of his gut plus a few stray ideas that wafted in on the breeze and somehow stuck. We do not need four more.

That's a scary thought.

McCain Forgetful about Balanced Budget?

Early in the morning McCain says he'll balance budget in four years, largely with the magic of "winning" in Iraq.

Then, six hours later, his senior economic advisor says it's eight years, not four:

"The senator has always pledged to balance the budget by the end of his second term."

Thereby making it appear that he hadn't fliped and flopped back and forth on the timeline. Which is it? Who knows! That's Strategic Ambiguity at its best! No one can get angry at you for breaking your word, because you never gave a clear word on the subject. Brilliant.

Either that, or McCain knew that it was supposed to be eight years, and forgot on the way to the podium.

White House Lies about Censoring EPA

The White House had said it had no part in the content of a "controversial" EPA report regarding Global Warming.

It turns out that Cheney's office was heavily involved in censoring the conclusions of the report.

What a surprise.

Coverage of Obama on Iraqa

I am so ticked off about the coverage of this Iraq Not-Flop. Seriously. I'm as angry as I was while I watched the Swift Boat Vets get fawning press coverage by the "liberal media" as they lied about John Kerry's combat commendations.

If the McCain campaign says it, it must be true, and it dominates the discourse for the week. It is infuriating.

Michelle Obama Loves America JUST like McCain

McCain hates Youtube.



From his own mouth: McCain didn't love America until he was a POW. So don't talk to me about Mrs. Obama not being "really proud" of her country until now.

"We're Winning in Iraq"

We've been hearing a lot lately that we are now "winning in Iraq," because the McCain campaign has declared it to be true. When asked for specifics, McCain supporters primarily say that "Violence is down." This is true. Instead of 4 deadly car bombings in Baghdad a week, there's closer to 2.

They also say that political reconciliation is going gangbusters. But what about that? Specifically, what reconciliation has there been? Answer: there's been some progress on provincial elections, but there are still issues to be resolved that have stalled the election. Significantly, there's been no agreement on Oil Revenue Sharing. There still isn't satisfactory electricity of water - even to the capital! Reconstruction projects remain as stalled as they ever have been. And most grievously, there still hasn't been that run-through of the constitution that the Sunnis were promised so that they would vote for the damned thing! Don't those things seem important?

As for the successes we've had, those are largely credited to our policy of paying our enemies not to fight us. That is known as arming your short-term friends, something that has come back to bite us before (see Iraq, Afghanistan). And you don't have to believe me on this, my favorite non-partisan research group, the GAO, said so.

This "We are Winning" garbage is the old Bush-party line! They've been telling us the same thing for years now! In fact, I could have said the same exact thing last summer. "We're making progress, and getting closer to being able to pull out, but it's not there yet." Well I say 4000+ dead and 2 trillion dollars and 7 years is enough of a commitment for America. Our combat troops have done their jobs with honor, and it's time to bring them home. It's time to start spending our treasure in our own country to get off Oil. Either that, or we can spend another 4 years being told that we're just 6-9 months from "turning the corner."

Also, by the way, violence is always down in the summer. It's hot as hell. You can't go jihading in the oven, gringo.