BartBlog

Greg Mitchell, Pressing Issues, February 1, 2008

We know the far right is upset with McCain as nominee but this is really going too far: Ann Coulter asserting that if he gets the nomination she would not only “vote for” Hillary, she would “campaign for her if it’s McCain.” She tells Sean Hannity that Clinton “is more conservative than he is” and adds that in that scenario “she will be our girl.” As president she would be “stronger in the war on terrorism” and would not pull the troops out of Iraq, pointing out that she jumped to her feet at the State of Union speech when Bush said the surge was working. Hannity says: “McCain did support the war.” She points out: “So did Hillary.”

Alan Colmes says Hillary would say “no” to the campaign offer. But Coulter goes on: “Hillary is absolutely more conservative” and moreover “she lies less than John McCain. And she’s smarter than John McCain so when she lies she knows it….John McCain is not only bad for Republicans he is also bad for the country.” Hannity doesn’t agree.

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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…

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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.

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