Daily Archives: February 24, 2010

Wednesday Open Thread

Are we getting another mini-snowpocalypse? Who angered the weather goddess again? While we wait for more snow to come, let’s open this thread.

Ooooh, delicious – rightwing slap fight:

Wow. So, Glenn Beck’s CPAC keynote speech on Friday was apparently so powerful it united Jon Stewart, Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin…against him. I’m not sure what that says about Beck except that he really has managed to carve out a place all his own in the media landscape these last few months and he maybe is making some people nervous. Well not Jon Stewart per se (‘gold mine’ might be a better description), but it’s certainly interesting to hear Rush Limbaugh (ever so gently) push back at Beck. Sign of things to come? Is Beck on his way to becoming the Frankenstein of the right? The tone of both Levin and Limbaugh suggest they were less than thrilled at Beck’s conservative bashing/reality check (videos of all three below).

Said Rush:

I would not have said that the only people who can stop Obama should be excoriated for being just as bad…It would never occur to me to say that. I don’t know what the objective would be.

Levin’s tone was equally low key though his criticism had a sharper edge to it. He advised Beck to stop acting like a clown and to “be careful playing footsie with the mainstream media…they will promote so they can destroy you.” Levin also pushed back at Beck’s criticism of the right: “Stop dividing us…Republicans deserve reinforcements.”

Harry Reid seems to have found the vestiges of a spine:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has heard quite a few cries of late from Republicans about how truly awful it is to vote on legislation by majority rule. I get the feeling he’s tired of it.

Reid said reconciliation had been used 21 times since 1981, mostly by Republicans when they were in control of the Senate for the passage of items like the Bush tax cuts. Under reconciliation, Democrats would need a simple majority in the Senate to pass legislation, as opposed to the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster.

“They should stop crying about reconciliation as if it’s never been done before,” Reid said.

Following Senate Democrats’ weekly luncheon, Reid said “nothing is off the table” but that “realistically, they should stop crying about this. It’s been done 21 times before.”

Virtual March for Real Health Care Reform

If you are part of MoveOn.org, you may already know about this. Today starts a Virtual March to pressure Congress to enact real health care reform. It is a quick and easy process:

Go to the MoveOn March Page
Fill out the info to send Faxes to your Congressional Delegation (this is free and they’ll do it)
Then CALL Ted Kaufmann (202) 224-5042 and Tom Carper (202) 224-2441 to tell them to Pass the HCR Bill. (Balloon Juice has a primer on how to do it here.)

As you do these steps, MoveOn is keeping a count of the number of contacts made by Virtual Marchers today, which is really interesting. Since I sent my Fax and called this AM and now, they’ve added almost 100K new contacts and this is within 45 minutes or so.

So join in and get this done. I’m especially looking for our lurkers to jump in and make the calls and have MoveOn send a Fax for you. Call or email your friends and family and ask them to do this too. Tell us what your experience was calling their offices today.

This comes by way of Andrew Sullivan, who admires this work from Jake Lewis, who writes here, and who has other work up on his flickr stream here.

Cheney Lied About CIA Torture Effectiveness

In Cheney’s mind, he’s a courageous patriot who’s not afraid to get things done. Cheney thinks that terrorists will be scared of the U.S. if only we’d torture more and the only way to get info is to throw accused terrorists (some of whom may be actually innocent) into Guantanamo (which has special terrorist repellant powers) and torture them for information. In his mind, interrogation techniques that have worked for centuries actually don’t work and reading Miranda rights to terrorists puts our country in danger. In Cheney’s world, the Constitution is inconvenient.

Cheney was very confident in his assertions that torture worked and he had a classified memo to prove it. The memo has been declassified and it doesn’t support Cheney’s assertions. In fact, it appears that timelines were altered to make Cheney’s case:

But a just released report by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility into the lawyers who approved the CIA’s interrogation program could prove awkward for Cheney and his supporters. The report provides new information about the contents of one of the never released agency memos, concluding that it significantly misstated the timing of the capture of one Al Qaeda suspect in order to make a claim that seems to have been patently false.

…

The CIA memo, called the Effectiveness Memo, was especially important because it was relied on by Steven G. Bradbury, then the Justice Department’s acting chief of the Office of Legal Counsel, to write memos in 2005 and 2007 giving the agency additional legal approvals to continue its program of “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques.” The memo reviewed the results of the use of EITs – which included waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and forced nudity – mainly against two suspects” Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the report states. One key claim in the agency memo was that the use of the CIA’s enhanced interrogations of Zubaydah led to the capture of suspected “dirty bomb’ plotter Jose Padilla. “Abu Zubaydah provided significant information on two operatives, Jose Padilla and Binyam Mohammed, who planned to build and detonate a ‘dirty bomb’ in the Washington DC area,” the CIA memo stated, according to the OPR report. “Zubaydah’s reporting led to the arrest of Padilla on his arrival in Chicago in May 2003 [sic].”

But as the Justice report points out, this was wrong. “In fact, Padilla was arrested in May 2002, not 2003 … The information ‘[leading] to the arrest of Padilla’ could not have been obtained through the authorized use of EITs.” (The use of enhanced interrogations was not authorized until Aug. 1, 2002 and Zubaydah was not waterboarded until later that month.) “ Yet Bradbury relied upon this plainly inaccurate information” in two OLC memos that contained direct citations from the CIA Effectiveness Memo about the interrogations of Zubaydah, the Justice report states.

The report also left out that much false information had been gathered through torture. But the main bit of evidence that Cheney offered to prove his case is absolutely wrong. Padilla was captured from information obtained by conventional interrogation techniques. Meanwhile, the Obama administration has captured more Taliban leaders in 1 month than Bush/Cheney captured in 6 years.

Impressions on Coons

Our illustrious founder, Jason330, was at the meet and greet with Chris Coons last night, and he passes on his impressions:

Well I don’t know if Coons can beat Mike Castle, but listening to him candidly lay out his campaign’s strengths and weakness on his way to winning over an audience of Delaware4Obama grassroots activists, I
know he can give him a hell of a scare.

Here were the take aways for me:

1) This will be a tough fought campaign that will not descend into New Jersey style attack ads calling out Castle directly on his advanced age or other possible “low road” bullet points. Rather, Coons plans
to consistently point out that Mike Castle is a Republican. For Democrats that have crossed party lines to vote for Castle in the past, the message seem to be that it is okay to have voted for Mike
Castle. Mike Castle is a nice guy. But the Republican party has forced him into more and more Conservative votes. He is a nice guy, but he does not seem to have the courage to stand up to Mitch
McConnell and the horrible Republican party. Mike Castle’s recent record is clear. He works for the Republican Party in DC now – not for Delaware.

2) There is going to be a lot of help from the White House. Coons spoke with the President yesterday in the Oval office. The President and David Plouffe are very interested in this race and they think Chris Coons can win it. They do not intend to repeat the mistakes of Massachusetts and stay on the sidelines. Having the President or First Lady in Delaware will be huge.

3) Coons, while probably outspent by Castle, thinks that he can out grass roots organize the incumbent by tapping into Obama and Markell activist who are spoiling for a fight. There are a large number of Delawareans who were passionate about getting Obama elected. They are equally passionate about seeing that the President is successful. They view it as their duty to see that Delaware’s seat stays in
Democratic hands.

4) I was a little surprised by this one: Coons’ campaign manager thinks that Christine O’Donnell will ramp up her primary campaign since Biden has dropped out. The campaign is pretty sure that O’Donnell will try to tap into simmering teabag anger and will be a factor bleeding off (possibly) 10% of Castle’s support. I don’t see any signs that O’Donnell has a campaign, so I’m not optimistic about that. Besides, O’Donnell telling everyone that Castle is a liberal doesn’t really help Coons with his message that Castle is a Party Line
republican.

That’s my take on the meeting.

The Slavery Apology

Some new pretty big developments:

Gov. Jack Markell on Tuesday embraced a call for the Delaware General Assembly to apologize for the state’s role in slavery. […] “The governor … would certainly be inclined to sign it if the Legislature moved forward on it and puts it on his desk,” said Brian Selander, a Markell spokesman.

Well, let me stop right there. “Embracing a call” is not “yeah, he will sign it if it just so happens to get to his desk.” I blame the News Journal for a little overindulgence there. Markell did not personally hold a news conference calling on the General Assembly to pass the measure. Brian Selander just said the Governor would sign it. Big difference there. Ok, digression over…

But in Legislative Hall, a majority of lawmakers interviewed were reluctant to take a stand. Dover City Council, heeding a call from its Human Relations Commission, voted 5-3 Monday to urge the state Legislature to apologize for “the state’s practice of slavery and for the historic wrongs committed against all persons who suffered discrimination and injustice under this dehumanizing system.”

Senate Majority Leader Patricia Blevins, D-Elsmere, said she would gladly entertain a debate on the floor of the Senate. “I can’t imagine who would vote against something like that,” Blevins said. “I guess the question is if people want to take time to debate it.”

Well, I can imagine some teabagger conservatives who long for the good ole days of slavery, or at the very least the Jim Crow era, would vote against it. And their opposition almost makes me ardently support an apology, for I hate it when racists win anything. And then there is this sentiment….

Rep. Donald A. Blakey, R-Woodside, who is black, noted that slavery was in the country’s distant past but recognized that “what took place in those days has an effect on what goes on today.”

Well, yes, what happened before does have an affect on what is now. We fought a civil war to end slavery and hundreds of thousands died in that effort. The civil rights movement 100 years later ended overt state discrimination and began the process of ending discrimination in our hearts and minds. And 60 years after that we have elected ourselves our first black President. That is progress. Sure, racism and discrimination still exist and where we find it we should and must end it, but I tend to think righting the wrong is an inherent apology in and of itself. Further, I am a progressive, so I tend to look forward in working to make the country better, rather than backward to what we were before. So that makes me naturally against pursuing something that reopens old wounds, especially when it is clear and obvious to all but the teabagging racists that slavery is and was wrong, and especially when there is just so much other work to do, not only in this state but in this country, and not a lot of time to do it in. An Apology to me is a unnecessary distraction.

I expect this to be a minority opinion on Delaware Liberal, so feel free to lambast me.

That’s Our Castle

Flip Flopperman Mike Castle says that if he were a Senator now, he would have joined Scott Brown, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins in voting to end debate on a 15 billion-dollar jobs bill. But when Mike Castle had the chance to vote yes on the House’s job creation measure last December, he decided that Republican obstructionism was the way to go, Delawareans be damned.

And now Mike Castle has flipped flopped on Republican obstructionism too. Now he says he is not a fan of the Senate filibuster anyway. That is a shocking announcement. I now expect Mike Castle to condemn his fellow Republicans in the Senate, who he hopes to join next year, for their unprecedented record breaking abuse of the filibuster. I expect Mike Castle, should be be horribly unfortunate enough to suffer through his election in November, to never filibuster any piece of legislation ever. I expect him, given his statement, to immediately call on Mitch McConnell and the other Republican obstructionists in the Senate, ordering them to lay down their arms immediately on all of the President’s nominees, and on all legislation.

A leader would do that. A leader would stand up for his principles. And apparently, opposition to the filibuster is now one of Mike Castle’s principles.

And of course we know Mike Castle will do nothing of the kind, for he is not a leader, and he has not principles. Indeed, the flip flop on that statement is coming within the hour.

Maverick

John McCain is facing a competitive Republican primary for his U.S. Senate seat. He’s facing wingnut former Rep. J.D. Hayworth and even wingnuttier Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Some of McCain’s previous votes are getting him in trouble so he’s trying to Castle. His latest move is to pretend he didn’t really vote for bank bailouts.

McCain sat down recently with the Arizona Republic editorial board. Reports the paper:

[T]he four-term senator says he was misled by then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. McCain said the pair assured him that the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program would focus on what was seen as the cause of the financial crisis, the housing meltdown.

“Obviously, that didn’t happen,” McCain said … “They decided to stabilize the Wall Street institutions, bail out (insurance giant) AIG, bail out Chrysler, bail out General Motors … What they figured was that if they stabilized Wall Street — I guess it was trickle-down economics — that therefore Main Street would be fine.”

We all remember that McCain “froze” his campaign to go to Washington to deal with this crisis. Of course, McCain’s attempt to rewrite history is running up against actual history.

Here’s how McCain explained the bailout plan in a September 22, 2008 interview: “‘We’re going to take over these bad loans. And we’re going to have the taxpayer help you out. But when the time comes and the economy recovers, then anything that’s gained back is going to go to the taxpayers first.” As the Chicago Sun-Times explained in reporting McCain’s comments: “The plan would dole out huge sums of money to financial firms to purchase bad mortgage-backed securities so the firms can resume normal lending operations.”

In a speech the following day about improvements he was seeking to what became the TARP legislation, McCain made clear that he knew the measure was targeted at Wall Street, declaring: “No Wall Street executives should profit from taxpayer dollars … The senior leaders of any firm that is bailed out should not be making more than the highest paid government official.”

Has there ever been a bigger fiction story than McCain the independent maverick?