BartBlog

Will Bunch, Attywood, January 31, 2008

He made more money with a flop than with a hit: Did Rudy pull a Max Bialystock on us?

For the last year, Rudy Giuliani has had the best job in America. In fact, winning the White House — and having to deal with those pesky Iranians and the $7 gas we’ll probably have by 2011 — would have been a royal pain-in-the-butt for the former New York mayor, who’ll never get to be president but spent a glorious year living like a king.

Check this out from last October:

Giuliani’s spending was elevated at least in part because he traveled in style. He often stayed in luxury hotels, spending $2,010 at the Greenbrier Hotel in West Virginia, $4,034 at La Costa Resort and Spa in Carlsbad, Calif., and $5,370 at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. He also spent more than $565,000 reimbursing various corporate supporters for private jet travel, and another $800,000 on charter jet travel.

Isolated incident? Whatever Giuliani did, he did it first-class, even when his rivals like John McCain, now the frontrunner, were criss-crossing the country in coach. Here’s Rudy in the lap of luxury again, in the Gulfstream IV belonging to casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, while check out this swank fundraiser that earned candidate Giuliani a fabulous trip to London….yes, THAT London. In the end, Giuliani spent a whopping $30-million-plus on what proved to be a most bizarre and quixotic quest for the White House, earning a mere two delegates. He capped it by spending a whole month in the dead of winter in relatively balmy Florida, while the rest of his rivals were freezing to death in New Hampshire, which unfortunately is what a poor candidate needed to do if he wanted to become viable.

Every true New Yorker is quite familiar with the plotline of “The Producers,” in which fictional producer Max Bialystock and his young accountant Leo Bloom realize they can make more money bilking investors to finance a flop than doing the actual work of staging a hit. Hey, you don’t think…

Read More Here

Robert Parry, Consortium News, January 31, 2008

Watching Attorney General Michael Mukasey evade the obvious fact that waterboarding is torture – and the reluctance of Democrats to press him – I was reminded of how the first President Bush got away with an earlier batch of national security crimes.

Indeed, one of the common questions I’ve been asked over the years is – if the evidence really does show that the Reagan-Bush crowd was guilty of illegal dealings with Iran, Iraq and the Nicaraguan contras – why didn’t the Democrats hold those Republicans to account?

For people who have posed that question, I would suggest that they watch the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Jan. 30 hearing with Mukasey. Everybody in the room knew what the unspoken reality was, but nobody dared say it: George W. Bush authorized torture, which is a crime under U.S. and international law.

However, if the Attorney General – the highest-ranking law-enforcement officer in the United States – recognized the obvious, he would have to either commence legal action against President Bush or send a referral to Congress for the initiation of impeachment proceedings.

If such a referral were sent to Congress, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would have little choice but to permit the start of impeachment hearings in the House Judiciary Committee. A wide range of Bush’s illegal actions would then begin spilling out, provoking a political crisis in the United States.

Read More Here

Robert D. Novak, The Houston Chronicle, January 31, 2008

As John McCain neared his momentous primary election victory in Florida after a ferocious campaign questioning his conservative credentials, right-wingers buzzed over word that he had privately suggested that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was too conservative. In response, Sen. McCain recalled saying no such thing and added Alito was a “magnificent” choice. In fact, multiple sources confirm his negative comments about Alito nine months ago.

McCain, as the “straight talk” candidate, says things off the cuff that he sometimes cannot remember exactly. Elements of the Republican Party’s right wing, uncomfortable with McCain as their prospective presidential nominee, surfaced the Alito comments long after the fact for two contrasting motives. One was a desperate effort to keep McCain from winning in Florida. The other was to get the party’s potential nominee on record about key issues before he is nominated.

The latter has no pretensions of changing McCain’s firmly held non-conservative positions on such issues as campaign finance reform and global warming. Rather, they want two assurances: first, that McCain would veto any tax increase passed by a Democratic Congress; second, that he would not emulate Gerald R. Ford and George H.W. Bush in naming liberal justices John Paul Stevens and David Souter.

That is the background of conservative John Fund’s Wall Street Journal online column the day before Florida voted. He wrote that McCain “has told conservatives he would be happy to appoint the likes of Chief Justice Roberts to the Supreme Court. But he indicated he might draw the line on a Samuel Alito because ‘he wore his conservatism on his sleeve.’ ” In a conference call with bloggers that day, McCain said, “I don’t recall a conversation where I would have said that.” He was “astonished” by the Alito quote, he said, and repeatedly tells town meetings, “We’re going to have justices like Roberts and Alito.”

Read More Here

Robert Parry, Consortium News, January 29, 2008

With one year to go in George W. Bush’s presidency, the national Democrats are on the verge of the same miscalculation that they made about his father after his defeat in Election 1992. Instead of doing the hard work to hold the Bushes accountable, the Democrats are “leaving it to the historians.”

In other words, the national Democrats seem ready to let the junior George Bush stroll off into the sunset with his legacy relatively intact, much as the senior George Bush was allowed to do.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other senior Democrats are turning a deaf ear to grassroots demands for at least impeachment hearings against George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney over their violations of criminal laws (e.g. the ban on torture and the need for court warrants authorizing wiretaps), their trampling on constitutional rights, and their deceptions that led the nation into the disastrous Iraq War.

Though Democrats control the House and the Senate, there doesn’t even appear to be a likelihood of comprehensive hearings on the lessons to be learned from Bush’s blunders in the “global war on terror.”

Democrats didn’t raise their voices after Bush’s State of the Union Address on Jan. 28 when he repeated one of his central falsehoods about Islamic extremists -that they are motivated by a hatred of American freedoms, rather than a resentment of U.S. government interference in the Muslim world.

Read More Here

I have been hearing that you democratics have become all upset because the republicanics have had all the ideas for the last few years.

“That’s not true!” whine your beloved leaders.

And historically the repubs are supposed to be the evil rich, in bed with the captains of industry, while the dems care for the poor and homeless, the working man, and the elderly. You people on this web log aren’t stupid. As a matter of fact, I was pleasantly surprised at all the brains that were actually on and humming. But the emphasis has been on attacking GW and his administration; pissing away time and effort that could otherwise be saying and doing good.

How to do good? (more…)

Andrew J. Bacevich, The Washington Post, January 28, 2008

As the fifth anniversary of Operation Iraqi Freedom nears, the fabulists are again trying to weave their own version of the war. The latest myth is that the “surge” is working.

In President Bush’s pithy formulation, the United States is now “kicking a–” in Iraq. The gallant Gen. David Petraeus, having been given the right tools, has performed miracles, redeeming a situation that once appeared hopeless. Sen. John McCain has gone so far as to declare that “we are winning in Iraq.” While few others express themselves quite so categorically, McCain’s remark captures the essence of the emerging story line: Events have (yet again) reached a turning point. There, at the far end of the tunnel, light flickers. Despite the hand-wringing of the defeatists and naysayers, victory beckons.

From the hallowed halls of the American Enterprise Institute waft facile assurances that all will come out well. AEI’s Reuel Marc Gerecht assures us that the moment to acknowledge “democracy’s success in Iraq” has arrived. To his colleague Michael Ledeen, the explanation for the turnaround couldn’t be clearer: “We were the stronger horse, and the Iraqis recognized it.” In an essay titled “Mission Accomplished” that is being touted by the AEI crowd, Bartle Bull, the foreign editor of the British magazine Prospect, instructs us that “Iraq’s biggest questions have been resolved.” Violence there “has ceased being political.” As a result, whatever mayhem still lingers is “no longer nearly as important as it was.” Meanwhile, Frederick W. Kagan, an AEI resident scholar and the arch-advocate of the surge, announces that the “credibility of the prophets of doom” has reached “a low ebb.”

Presumably Kagan and his comrades would have us believe that recent events vindicate the prophets who in 2002-03 were promoting preventive war as a key instrument of U.S. policy. By shifting the conversation to tactics, they seek to divert attention from flagrant failures of basic strategy. Yet what exactly has the surge wrought? In substantive terms, the answer is: Not much.

Read More Here

Paul Krugman, The New York Times, January 28, 2008

It’s starting to feel a bit like 1992 again. A Bush is in the White House, the economy is a mess, and there’s a candidate who, in the view of a number of observers, is running on a message of hope, of moving past partisan differences, that resembles Bill Clinton’s campaign 16 years ago.

Now, I’m not sure that’s a fair characterization of the 1992 Clinton campaign, which had a strong streak of populism, beginning with a speech in which Mr. Clinton described the 1980s as a “gilded age of greed.” Still, to the extent that Barack Obama 2008 does sound like Bill Clinton 1992, here’s my question: Has everyone forgotten what happened after the 1992 election?

Let’s review the sad tale, starting with the politics.

Whatever hopes people might have had that Mr. Clinton would usher in a new era of national unity were quickly dashed. Within just a few months the country was wracked by the bitter partisanship Mr. Obama has decried.

This bitter partisanship wasn’t the result of anything the Clintons did. Instead, from Day 1 they faced an all-out assault from conservatives determined to use any means at hand to discredit a Democratic president.

Read More Here

Mark Morford, The San Francisco Gate, January 25, 2008

Happiness knows no particular order, and neither does this list:

1) We may very well, within a year’s time, have a black president. We may have a female president. We may, unfortunately, also have a bizarre robotic nutball Mormon president. No matter how it turns out, it will be very strange and unnerving and different and a bit startling and therefore at least remotely interesting to watch. Which, you have to admit, is far better than how it’s been for the past seven years, which is utterly humiliating, repellant, cancerous.

2) Here is this ingenious new alarm clock. It has an Internet connection that hooks directly into your bank account. If you oversleep, it begins to withdraw funds from your account. And donate them. To groups you really, really despise. Ten minute oversnooze? Fifty bucks goes to the GOP. Oversleep a half an hour? There goes $100 to the NRA, the Heritage Foundation, the Bush Presidential Library (for all the crayons). Sleep till noon? Five hundred bucks to the Aryan Nation or National Right to Life or the Lindsay Lohan Cocaine Fund. Because nothing is more motivating than abject hate. Except, of course, abject love. But that’s a completely different gizmo.

3) You’re not imagining it. Your intuition was completely correct. Tom Cruise really is insane. Also, it is a safe bet that Tom and Jerry O’Connell will not be working together anytime soon.

4) Women and minorities appear to be galvanized by Hillary Clinton’s presidential run. Youth and college-educated voters appear to be galvanized by Barack Obama’s. No one at all is truly, deeply galvanized by Mitt Romney or John McCain or crazy little Mike Huckabee, and everyone is generally repulsed by the fetid little tyrant that is Rudy Giuliani. All of this, remarkably, seems just about exactly as it should be.

Read More Here

Robert Reich, Newsweek, January 23, 2008

Think the last few days have been bad for Wall Street and the rest of the world’s markets? Hang on, things are probably going to get worse, says Robert Reich, President Clinton’s former secretary of Labor and author of the recent book “Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy and Everyday Life.” According to Reich, who currently teaches public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, the United States might even be headed toward a depression.

Newsweek’s Arlyn Tobias Gajilan talked to Reich about the Fed’s surprise rate cut Wednesday, the “D word,” the growing criticism of Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke and whether a stimulus package will include $500 check for each American. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: Many investors had hoped for an interest-rate cut, but this cut’s size and timing took people by surprise. Were you taken aback by the Fed’s three-quarter basis-point cut, the largest single-day reduction in the Fed’s history? And do you think it’s necessary?

REICH: Yes and yes. The Fed is clearly becoming aware of the serious potential of an economic meltdown. The size of the cut is larger than anyone expected because the Fed usually moves in [increments of] .25 or .50 percentage points. But the danger of a cut this size is that it may panic the investors. They may conclude that the Fed has determined that the economy is even worse than assumed and that there is still a way to go before we hit bottom. Yet the Fed has to [cut]. Credit markets are still uncomfortably frozen, and the housing slump continues to worsen.

Read More Here

Frank Rich, The New York Times, January 27, 2008

In the wake of George W. Bush, even a miracle might not be enough for the Republicans to hold on to the White House in 2008. But what about two miracles? The new year’s twin resurrections of Bill Clinton and John McCain, should they not evaporate, at last give the G.O.P. a highly plausible route to victory.

Amazingly, neither party seems to fully recognize the contours of the road map. In the Democrats’ case, the full-throttle emergence of Billary, the joint Clinton candidacy, is measured mainly within the narrow confines of the short-term horse race: Do Bill Clinton’s red-faced eruptions and fact-challenged rants enhance or diminish his wife as a woman and a candidate?

Absent from this debate is any sober recognition that a Hillary Clinton nomination, if it happens, will send the Democrats into the general election with a new and huge peril that may well dwarf the current wars over race, gender and who said what about Ronald Reagan.

What has gone unspoken is this: Up until this moment, Hillary has successfully deflected rough questions about Bill by saying, “I’m running on my own” or, as she snapped at Barack Obama in the last debate, “Well, I’m here; he’s not.” This sleight of hand became officially inoperative once her husband became a co-candidate, even to the point of taking over entirely when she vacated South Carolina last week. With “two for the price of one” back as the unabashed modus operandi, both Clintons are in play.

Read More Here

Dan T., January 26, 2008

Once again the democrats have impaled themselves on Bush’s dick. This, most stupid of economic stimulus plans, should convince everyone that Nancy Pelosi is in a job that is over her head. She is either unable or unwilling to stand up to Bush. Pelosi is acting like Bush’s pet monkey and every democrat should be filled with revulsion at her for becoming Bush’s latest Tony Blair. This so called stimulus legislation throws a few peanuts to the peons and is a massive giveaway for business. It is a huge Reagan style trickle down plan and everyone already knows the only thing that tricked down from Reagan came from his weak bladder.

I won’t pretend to have a great grasp of economic principles but, like the run-up to the Iraq war, I know bullshit when I see it. First of all, the stock market is NOT the economy. It can be an economic indicator but, historically, the market likes a repressed, unemployed labor market, because what’s bad for the worker is good for the nouveaux robber barons. The stock market is just a very large betting parlor that is unrelated to the actual value of the company. The corporations are, for the most part, worth a fraction of their market ‘value’. When the recession is in full swing you will see the market begin a correction.

If you want to see a real indicator of the economy, look at value of the US dollar on the international scene. I mean, we are heading for parity with the peso and you know what? Giving more money to the Exxon/Arab cabal is not going to help. (Unless you are a member of the Bush crime family, which derives a large percentage of it’s largess from their cozy relations with the Saudi scumbags.) When Bush traveled to Saudi Arabia and got a big hug from the prince, you could see the bulge in his pants. Don’t worry, it was probably just a big wad of cash. I’ll go off on a tangent here to point out that Saudi Arabia is probably the most vile, disgusting, brutal, repressive and undemocratic government in the world. Plus, most of the worlds terrorism, including 911, was financed directly with Saudi dollars, yet they were protected by Bush. The best way to stop worldwide terrorism would be to incinerate the Saudis. The Saudis are a bunch of evil, religious fanatics and every act of terrorism that can be traced back to their money should earn them a cruise missile. Thanks for listening.

The economy is going in the toilet because Exxon, et al, is vacuuming up the spending money of all of the American middle class. A $600 tax rebate will cover my energy costs for nearly a month. Yippee! Of course the rich are not effected by the price of gasoline so the Bush supporters think the economy is booming. They can pocket the barely taxed profits of their market gambling and then redirect it to the latest offshore investment. If you drive into the wealthier neighborhoods you will see one house after another being remodeled and expanded. You sure don’t see that in my neighborhood. In my neighborhood we are sitting in living rooms that are much cooler than we’d like so we can afford to buy some groceries after paying the heating bill. The people in my neighborhood are invisible to the Bush administration. In Bush world, your value as a human is determined by your wealth. Fascism is less concerned with racism than with classism but they are happy to use racism to rally some people into voting against their own best interests.

The real economy is driven by small businesses and by leaving the middle class with a few bucks left over after the monthly bills so we can buy a new car, take a trip, get some new furniture or go to a strip club. Those things all fuel the economy far more than when one of Dick Cheney’s friends goes to Portugal to take delivery of his new yacht. Yet those yacht buyers are the people who are going to profit from Pelosi’s legislation.

If you are looking for Barack, Hillary or John to rescue you, forget it. They have not uttered a word against Pelosi’s Bush nuzzling. Welcome to fascism.