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May 19, 2015 06:42 AM UTC

Tuesday Open Thread

  • 28 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

“The world perishes not from bandits and fires, but from hatred, hostility, and all these petty squabbles.”

–Anton Chekhov

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28 thoughts on “Tuesday Open Thread”

  1. Now Russ Feingold was, and will be again, a great example of what you can do as a Democrat in the U.S. Senate.

    If there was one race that indicated that the 2010 midterm GOP sweep was a sign of the end times, it was the fact that Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold had been unseated by a Tea Partying cretin by the name of Ron Johnson. The plastics manufacturer bought himself the seat with nearly 9 million dollars of his own fortune and many millions in outside PAC money. …

    Five years later the state is drowning in regret, with Johnson mired in less than 40% approval , his constituents embarrassed and ashamed.

    And they want Russ Feingold back! He is leading Johnson in every poll that’s been done this year, the most recent a PPP Poll that puts him up 9 points. He’s up 14 points among Independents and even manages to get Republicans in the double digits. Let’s just say that Wisconsin knows they made a mistake.

    Was it easy? No. Did he have to stick to his principles? Yes. Do Wisconsin voters know what they're getting with Russ? Hell, yes.

    But the more the merrier………..and he's against TPP, too!

  2. Trade insider says criticisms of TPP are legit:

    The public criticisms of the TPP have been vague. That’s by design—anyone who has read the text of the agreement could be jailed for disclosing its contents. I’ve actually read the TPP text provided to the government’s own advisors, and I’ve given the president an earful about how this trade deal will damage this nation. But I can’t share my criticisms with you.

    I can tell you that Elizabeth Warren is right about her criticism of the trade deal. We should be very concerned about what's hidden in this trade deal—and particularly how the Obama administration is keeping information secret even from those of us who are supposed to provide advice.

    So-called “cleared advisors” like me are prohibited from sharing publicly the criticisms we’ve lodged about specific proposals and approaches. The government has created a perfect Catch 22: The law prohibits us from talking about the specifics of what we’ve seen, allowing the president to criticize us for not being specific. Instead of simply admitting that he disagrees with me—and with many other cleared advisors—about the merits of the TPP, the president instead pretends that our specific, pointed criticisms don’t exist.

    What I can tell you is that the administration is being unfair to those who are raising proper questions about the harms the TPP would do. To the administration, everyone who questions their approach is branded as a protectionist—or worse—dishonest. They broadly criticize organized labor, despite the fact that unions have been the primary force in America pushing for strong rules to promote opportunity and jobs. And they dismiss individuals like me who believe that, first and foremost, a trade agreement should promote the interests of domestic producers and their employees.[emphasis added]

    Those silly unions………dreamers, idealists, sheesh! Against this deal like Bernie, Warren, Sherrod Brown, Robert Reich and many others, some who wonder why Obama wants a deal that goes against his stated principles.

     

  3. Ironic that the GOP Congress spends years and millions of dollars investigating Benghazi, when they have been actively ignoring the greatest crime of this century:

    The Bush administration’s strategy from the outset has been to hide behind this failure of intelligence. In 2004, Republicans in Congress insisted that an investigatory panel could only delve into the ways in which the intelligence community failed, and not how the White House manipulated intelligence. “Republicans have used their political control over both houses of Congress to focus inquiries by the Senate and House Intelligence Committees almost solely on the judgments reached by intelligence agencies rather than on the public statements issued by the White House or the administration itself,”reported the New York Times in February, 2004. 

    http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/05/was-the-iraq-war-a-crime-or-a-mistake-yes.html

    And it continues to this very day…

    The Iraq war at its heart was not an intelligence failure. Bush, Cheney, and their comrades were hell-bent on invading Iraq—not because of inaccurate intelligence, but because of their own assumptions and desires. The war did not happen because of bad intel. Consequently, asking whether the invasion should have happenedknowing what is now known is an irrelevant exercise. For the Bush-Cheney gang, it truly did not  matter what the intelligence said. They were not victims. They were the perps.

    http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/05/jeb-bush-marco-rubio-iraq-war-intelligence

    1. Cheney brought extreme pressure to bear to get the intel community to give him something, anything they could possibly twist into back up for the invasion they'd been itching for since long before 9/11. Even so, voices from that community and other experts continued to oppose the "facts" presented by the administration. These voices were all over cable TV. No honest mistakes were involved. Just lies to sell the war, political cowardice on the part of many Dems, especially those with presidential aspirations, and misplaced loyalty on the part of Colin Powell who surely knew better.

      In spite of the tireless misinformation effort, a majority of Democrats in Congress and even a few Republicans were not fooled and refused to go along to get along. They voted no on the war resolution based on what they, and we, knew then. The rest were not innocent victims of bad intel. They were either neocon or neocon allied hawks hot to install a friendly client regime for Big Oil in Iraq or responding out of what they saw as political self interest. The latter probably rationalized their cowardly choice by telling themselves it would all be over in a week or two with little harm done but they certainly were not making an honest mistake and the Cheney sponsored intel was far from the only intel out there.

      1. "A man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest."

                                                                                                           Paul Simon

         

                                                 

  4. Even some Republicans (mostly those with experience from the '70's and '80's) now acknowledge that maybe Fox News has gotten a little out of hand, and might not be providing a useful service to the commonweal:

    Fox News is hurting the Republican Party,according to a study conducted by a top official in the first Bush administration.

     

    Citing a host of other studies, Bartlett found that Fox News viewers tended to have misguided beliefs about the Iraq War, the Affordable Care Act and other major issues. He also noted that Fox's audience tended to hold a bias against Muslims.

    "It appears that right-wing bias, including inaccurate reporting, became commonplace on Fox," Bartlett said.

    This is especially problematic, he said, because "many conservatives now refuse to even listen to any news or opinion not vetted through Fox, and to believe whatever appears on it as the gospel truth."

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/19/fox-news-republicans_n_7320180.html?utm_hp_ref=politics&ir=Politics

    Gee, really, Captain Obvious?

    1. The good news?  While slightly younger than the dying Rush demo, the Fox demo is aging out too.  Father Time and The Grim Reaper are siding with Dems.

    2. Bartlett I believe has been on the outs with the GOP for a while now. It's good that he has "Republican" credentials for a story like this, but, hey – a third of the posters on this blog boast "Republican" credentials. Those credentials have been revoked by the party and/or were voluntarily relinquished because we saw Bad Things in the way the party has been headed.

  5. Some wonder why Dick Cheney is so urgent and persistent in his defense of Iraq WMD threats, the Iraq invasion, and all its gory, costly aftermath. 

    And for any analysts unclear on what the administration wanted to hear, Vice President Dick Cheney, whom several Bush officials told me was not as smart as the president, made sure they got the message on August 26, 2002, when he delivered a public speech that had not been vetted by the White House or cleared by Bush. “There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,’’ he said. “There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us.”

    The clear message to the worker bees at the CIA: The White House knew Saddam had the weapons. Disagree at peril to your career.

    It's obviously because he is guilty, along with Donald Rumsfeld, of conspiring to hinder intelligence and mislead Doofus Bush into that disastrous series of wars intended to free up the mideast's oil reserves for his friends and associates:

    Even the British knew Bush had been isolated from strategic and intelligence information by members of his own administration. Based on records from a meeting during the buildup to the invasion, Britain’s Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, the chief of the defense staff, told then-Prime Minister Tony Blair that certain members of the American administration were compartmentalizing information on Iraq, at times keeping Bush and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice out of the loop.

    “Only [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld and a few others know what’s being planned,” Boyce said to Blair, the records show. “You may speak to Bush or Rice, but do they really know what’s going on?”

    Documents from inside Blair’s government show that while the prime minister believed Saddam possessed WMDs—a conclusion based in part on that bogus American intelligence—he and his staff thought that an invasion could prove to be a monumental disaster and that the U.S. strategy was based on wishful thinking and driven by incompetence. However, Blair decided to side with the Americans, both to provide a counterbalance of reason and caution to Cheney’s empty-headed warmongering and because he was unwilling to turn against the United States in what he told aides would be “the biggest shift in foreign policy in 50 years.”

     

    1. Not as smart as Bush? Good God. Talk about the blind leading the blind. The fact that they're all criminals because of the torture so clearly and explicitly illegal under US military, civilian (100 years of precedent for successful prosecutions of the crime of water torture, identical to water boarding, of both American soldiers, civilians and enemy soldiers) and international law might make him extra insistent that everything they did was perfectly justified, legal and above board.

      I wouldn't worry too much about that. There is no political will for prosecuting them. All he has to do is stay out of those countries where he's a wanted criminal. And stay away from stakes and silver bullets. And mirrors. Wouldn't want anybody to notice there's no reflection.

      1. You know, BC, most of us focus on Bush/Cheney, but there are other names that should be pursued for war crimes…Rumsfelt, Rice, Wolfowitz, Pearle, Wallace…  just to name a few. The entire ruling cabal of the Bush white house and their nefarious horde of advisors and staff should be charged with capital murder…they were lying.. they ALL knew it and are ALL just as guilty as Darth Cheney and the Shrub.

        A wink and a nod makes you just as guilty as the perp….

            1. A name that should be remembered in the Annals of War Criminals:

              John Choon Yoo (born July 10, 1967)[4] is a Korean-American attorney, law professor, and author. He served as a political appointee, the Deputy Assistant U.S. Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel, Department of Justice (OLC), during the George W. Bush administration. He is best known for his opinions concerning the Geneva Conventionsthat legitimized the War on Terror by the United States. He also authored the so-called Torture Memos, which concerned the use of what the Central Intelligence Agency called enhanced interrogation techniques including waterboarding.

               

              http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Yoo

              1. And while we're finally winnowing the real culprits and criminals — the POS lawyers — let's take a moment to include Alberto Salazar, huh?

            2. 2 minutes with google turns up 100 years worth of legal precedent for water torture/boarding as a crime under US military and civilian law for which both American and foreign military and an American Sheriff in the 70s were successfully prosecuted, convicted and punished. You don't even have to be a college graduate, much less a lawyer, to find the inconvenient truth pretty much instantly.

              Water boarding and other forms of torture euphemistically referred to as enhanced interrogation techniques are criminal acts. Period. Under any circumstances. They would be illegal even if they worked but they are, in fact, the least reliable means of obtaining accurate intel. Once used, the victim can never be tried because all evidence obtained via these means is inadmissible in any civilized court of law. So you're pretty much stuck with killing them, keeping them locked up forever or letting them loose.

              Naturally the ones let loose aren't going to be kindly disposed towards us, even if they were just pulled in because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time or somebody wanted the bounty. This is another nice fix we have the Bush/Cheney administration criminals to thank for.  Oh, and many of them are the people "moderate" Jeb, the "different" kind of Bush, picked to be his foreign policy advisers. 

      1. I've been hoping to embarrass El Paso voters with my blogging about Chaps'  high financial malfeasance, defrauding charities and the IRS, as well as his demonic homophobic rants….no sign of embarrassment, or that anyone cares if he's robbing his paranoid followers blind. And then, they probably don't read Pols.

        It's the end of the school year, and a crazy time, but I'll probably start diarying (is that a verb?) again soon. Quite a few in the queue…

        2. It is not possible to embarrass most El Paso County voters. That ship sailed when they sent Charlie Duke and Maryanne Tebedo to the state capitol.

           

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