President’s response to 2nd impeachment

 

President Trump probably didn’t write out this whole document. My guess is that he ranted and snarled into some sort of recording device, probably banging the table every now and then to really make a point, and then some minions typed it all up and made sure everything was spell-checked and arranged into some coherent order.

A great deal of it re-litigates his first impeachment. Lots of details I take issue with, but this is an especially interesting one.

Fortunately, there was a transcript of the conversation taken, and you know from the transcript (which was immediately made available) that the paragraph in question was perfect.

Actually, it wasn’t a transcript that was made available. It was an informal summary. The documents that described the call to Ukraine President Zelensky were not made public. They were instead placed on a super-duper top secret server.

White House lawyers allegedly buried records of the call in a highly classified “super secret” server reserved for information regarding covert operations and other sensitive intelligence actions.

To my knowledge, the documents that were stored there have never been made public. The information that was released on the “perfect” call was 1. not released until after people were tipped off on the call by the whistleblower and 2. the summary was quite enough to caused shock and outrage across the country. I mean, why would someone who made a “perfect” call not wish to share all of the details with the world?

This is a big problem with the whole assertion that the President was innocent. The document asserts that Special Counsel Robert Mueller didn’t find any evidence, that the whole case against Trump was a matter of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Actually, Mueller found a great deal of Obstruction of Justice. Trump was very energetically hiding whatever he could. Again, not the action one would expect from an innocent man.

More due process was afforded to those accused in the Salem Witch Trials.

Nothing prevented the Trump Administration from publishing information on their own that would have exonerated them. When the Republican-led Senate refused to allow much in the way of testimony, the Trump Administration could have used a wide variety of forums in which they could have presented their case. It’s hardly the fault of the Democratic Party that Trump refused to do so.

A few claims by the off-going, one-term President:

7 million new jobs; the lowest-ever unemployment for African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Asian Americans

Yes, Barack Obama left the economy in good shape at the beginning of 2017.

more than 170 new federal judges and two Supreme Court Justices

Actually, it was three Justices, but this record has far more to do with the energetic Republican Senate. The President was pretty much just a bystander in that process.

the elimination of the individual mandate

Theoretically, this was supposed to cause the collapse of the ACA/Obamacare. The ACA has survived quite nicely, thank you very much.

the first decline in prescription drug prices in half a century

Which had to do with the ACA. Actions taken by the Trump Administration had nothing to do with that decline.

criminal justice reform

This had far more to do with the House and Senate than it did with the President. There’s little indication that he did much more than to sign the final document.

a defeated ISIS caliphate

This happened because the military insisted that the President needed to simply maintain the Obama policy and ISIS would be defeated. Trump did not change the policy and ISIS was eventually defeated.

the replacement of the disastrous NAFTA trade deal with the wonderful USMCA (Mexico and Canada)

Trump made a few minor changes to NAFTA and then proclaimed that the “all-new” policy was a success.

withdrawal from the terrible Iran Nuclear Deal

An extremely stupid and unproductive policy that has not produced any positive results. By increasing trade with China, Iran has made up quite a bit of their economic losses.

cancellation of the unfair and costly Paris Climate Accord

Again, an extremely stupid and short-sighted policy that has exacerbated climate change.

recognition of Israel’s capital, opening the American Embassy in Jerusalem

A stupid and short-sighted policy that has infuriated Palestinians and has put peace with them further out of reach.

a colossal reduction in illegal border crossings, the ending of Catch-and-Release, and the building of the Southern Border Wall

What most people will remember about the reduction of immigrants coming to the US from Mexico, Central and South America will be “kids in cages” and the degradation of international laws on asylum. No one will remember any positive impacts. They’ll just remember the horrible cruelty.

Is it true that “[The Democratic Party] simply cannot compete with our record” or is it that the Trump Administration built a very modest and forgettable record that will quickly be overtaken by the incoming Biden Administration?

Side note: The First Lady Melania Trump wrote a piece that had an extremely odd list in it:

Paragraph four: “Most recently, my heart goes out to: Air Force Veteran, Ashli Babbit, Benjamin Philips, Kevin Greeson, Rosanne Boyland, and Capitol Police Officers, Brian Sicknick and Howard Liebengood. I pray for their families comfort and strength during this difficult time.” Note that the woman who was shot by police as she was part of a violent group attempting to enter a secured area comes first on this list. Interesting choice there.

The Capitol Police Officers are listed last. This can’t be attributed to her lack of proficiency in English. Raises a question as to who Melania thought were the heroes in the violent invasion and occupation of the Capitol.

What happened?

 

In January 2017, the Republican Party had all three branches in their hands, the House, the Senate and the Presidency. Now, in January 2021, all three are now in the hands of the Democrats. Why? What happened?

One of the issues that propelled Barack Obama into office in 2008 and that people showed a great deal of concern about, was health care. About 15% of Americans couldn’t get health care insurance because of “preexisting conditions.” Ever since at least the Truman Administration, capitalist health care insurance couldn’t deal with clients who were sure to cost the insurance companies more money in payments than they’d get from the client in premiums.

Obama stopped trying to square the circle and just made the ACA/Obamacare a public system where insurance companies would still make a profit, but not as much as they would have preferred to make. How did the Republican Party handle this during the time when the had the “Trifecta?” According to the Senate Minority Leader in 2017:

Only 20% of Americans support Republican plans to repeal the Affordable Care Act without offering a replacement. The majority of Americans want to see the law implemented as is or improved.

After seven years to come up with a replacement for the ACA, the GOP came up with a plan that was worse than nothing.

"I do not support the new plan," Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, told reporters. "A better approach would be...to begin hearings focused on the problems in the ACA, and let’s try to get bipartisan support to fix those egregious flaws."

Not sure the flaws in the ACA were “egregious,” but Collins clearly advocated for a more sensible approach than to repeal the ACA and to install a pre-ACA type of health care system.

In October of 2020, President Trump tried to put out an executive order that would replace the ACA. Essentially, he listed a lot of fine, wonderful, desirable goals without saying how those goals would be reached.

So that whole issue was a complete bust for the GOP.

How did the party do on the immigration issue?

The Trump administration was more hostile to immigration and immigrants than any administration in decades, making it harder for people to visit, live or work in the United States and seeking to reduce the number illegally entering the country.

…

People were denied the opportunity to apply for asylum and returned to dangerous conditions at home. Children were traumatized by being separated from their families. Trump’s signature border wall went up in environmentally sensitive areas.

Trump’s policy was marked by great cruelty. The Trump Administration tightened up asylum requirements.

The regulation raises additional obstacles to passing a preliminary screening at the border, eliminates multiple long-established grounds for granting asylum, and allows immigration judges to deny people their day in court by rejecting applications without a hearing. The regulation denies protection to nearly all who pass through more than one country on their way to the U.S.

The former First Lady, Michelle Obama, slammed the Trump Administration for, among other things, an awful immigration policy.

She said the last four years had been difficult to explain to America's children.

"They see our leaders labelling fellow citizens enemies of the state, while emboldening torch-bearing white supremacists.

"They watch in horror as children are torn from their families and thrown into cages, and pepper spray and rubber bullets are used on peaceful protests for a photo op."

Again, the last administration took on a policy that had escaped solution for a while, but its solutions were catastrophically worse than had they done nothing.

That last reference was to an event that will forever color views of the Trump Administration. Peaceful protesters were occupying Lafayette Square, right in front of the White House.

Last summer, peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters were met with rubber bullets and tear gas outside the White House to clear the way for President Donald Trump’s photo-op with military leaders and a Bible at a nearby church.

Basically, the President treated American protesters as though they were foreign enemies. Instead of simply sending a few people out to the square to clear the way and rope off a path to the St. John’s Episcopal Church, the President and his people strolled through after tear gas and massed police had violently cleared the way. It didn’t help that this occurred only a week after the brutal murder of George Floyd by four policemen in Minnesota.

Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, died May 25 after an encounter with Minneapolis Police in which former officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for nearly eight minutes as Floyd pleaded for air. Floyd's final moments were captured on video, and his death led to rioting and fires in the city as well as widespread protests against police brutality and racism.

What the church photo op showed was that the President wasn’t particularly concerned about Floyd or even the general issue of police brutality, one way or the other.

A big example of tone-deafness on Trump’s part was the awarding of a Medal of Freedom to the radio talker Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh is popular with right-wingers. With the general public? Ehh, not so much. Obama’s awards were to people like Bill and Melinda Gates and the comedian Ellen DeGeneres. Obama’s choices were perhaps not to everyone’s liking, but they weren’t as in-your-face partisan as Trump’s choices were.

So, I agree that I’ve highlighted some of the very worst policies of the Trump Administration, with the Republican House and Senate often just playing a supporting role, but I don’t think there’s much mystery as to why Democrats have successfully taken over three branches of our government.

The House under Speaker Nancy Pelosi passed a total of nearly 400 bills by November 2019 that were then largely ignored by the Senate and the President, meaning that there was a demand for legislation that the other two branches simply weren’t addressing.

Letter to the Editor 10 November

 

 

The letter-writer writes to the Philadelphia Inquirer to express her support for President Trump.

First, she learns from a relative of hers that the relative opposed Trump strictly due to his personality. I agree that this is a really stupid reason to oppose a politician. The younger George Bush was reputed to be a really cool guy to have a beer with. I have no doubt that he would be. Problem is, he ignored warnings about 9-11, launched the completely unnecessary Iraq War, left people stranded after Hurricane Katrina and opposed efforts to work against climate change. Does being a cool guy to have a beer with make up for any of that? Hardly.

She feels businesses are never over-budget. Erm, consumers and businesses both take out bank loans for cars, houses, equipment, paying employees when a business first starts up, etc. That’s exactly how deficit spending works. The government gives itself a loan by selling bonds and pays those bonds off. If she were really serious about how terrible deficit spending was, she would have opposed Trump’s 2017 tax cut that exploded the deficit!

Did he care and try hard to solve national problems? Hardly. A reporter noticed that he couldn’t specify what he had done about COVID-19 during the months of February and March. That’s because he spent that time pretty much just sitting around and twiddling his thumbs, playing golf, conducting rallies and firing people who had crossed him during his impeachment. Obama spent eight years playing 306 golf games. Trump has spent half that time playing, at this point, 297.

The hospital ship USNS Comfort (T-AH-20) was indeed sent to New York City on 30 March, long after it was clear that there was a worldwide pandemic that required a “All Hands on Deck” approach and as NYC was reaching its peak caseload.

Was President Trump informing us in the daily briefings or would actual scientists giving us detailed facts and figures have done a better job? Was it helpful for Trump to have speculated that for people to have injected themselves with bleach? Or would he have been better off actually attending the meetings of the scientists that happened before each briefing?

Will we “again, be the laughingstock of the world” when Biden takes over? Or did the laughing start under Trump?

Closing arguments against re-electing Donald Trump as President

PBS put out an episode of Frontline that’s a bit less than an hour on how Donald Trump has handled the COVID-19 pandemic. PBS is less partisan then the media I normally consume, so I recommend it for people who are more middle-of-the-road than I am. The episode blames President Obama for not leaving the US as prepared as he could have. I found all of their arguments on that score to be reasonable and well-documented.

They had a Rear Admiral who was in charge of the  FEMA Supply Chain Stabilization Task Force who was, wow, he sounded straight out of the Vietnam War "Five O'Clock Follies," and just kept repeating that everything was fine and everybody was well-supplied. The report makes it clear that neither assertion was true.

What particularly infuriated me was when the President had a "meeting" with regular doctors (Around the 30 minute mark in the episode). With Trump sitting down, everybody else standing and everyone facing the camera (Trump had to crane his neck back to talk to people), it was crystal clear that the "meeting" was intended to be nothing more than a quick photo-op. The President clearly had no interest in getting input from the field.

One of the weaknesses of the episode is that it nowhere mentions that the US shipped off large quantities of supplies that we urgently needed here at home. Nothing wrong with helping out other countries, as long as we have a fully-functioning supply chain that’s busy cranking out enough supplies for both US domestic needs and for what foreigners need. This Twitter thread details the large quantities of supplies that were sent off to other countries in March. Apparently, the Trump Administration ceased to do this at the end of March, but it’s just amazing that they had so little concern for what our own domestic needs were.

The result of all of these shortages of basic equipment and of the President slacking off on the wearing of masks is that we’re now heading for a third peak of infections! Every other country just had one. They might be headed for another wave of infections, but the US never stopped getting a high rate of infections, so our ”wave” just keeps getting higher and higher.

The President admitted on October 15th that he owes around $400 million. This is extremely serious. When agencies investigate people for security clearances, one of the first things they look at is whether the person is financially secure. If they’re not, they’re open to being blackmailed! This, in light of the fact that the President has tried extremely hard, throughout his presidency, to keep his income tax returns a secret. CNBC:

Since entering the White House, Mr. Trump has broken with tradition set by his predecessors by not only refusing to release his tax returns but by waging a legal battle to keep them hidden.

What else is he hiding, even after the NY Times revealed many years worth of tax returns? Point 3 in the CNBC report says that Trump has lost $315 million on his golf courses since 2000. The United States has an extreme security risk in that the President owes so much money and that the US still doesn’t have a complete picture of his finances.  

Amazingly, there are still people who are skeptical that Russia interfered in the 2016 election. The Republican-led Select Committee on Intelligence concluded that Russia intervened from 2014 to 2017. Is Russia still meddling? Well, if the Trump Administration is trying to show that Russia isn’t meddling, it’s taking actions that increase Democratic suspicions rather than to disprove them.

A blog reports that: “The Presidency of the United States Has Been Penetrated By Russian Intelligence: The US Intelligence Community Determined That Rudy Giuliani Was the Target of a Russian Intelligence To Use Him To Influence The President & the President Was Informed of That Finding In December 2019!”

How has the President been on dealing with three foreign countries? Sure, Europeans may disdain him and think he’s uncouth and disloyal to NATO, but hey, he’s been effectively dealing with Venezuela, Iran and North Korea, right?

Trump has been trying to conduct a “regime change” in Venezuela for quite a while now.  Juan Guaido – president of the National Assembly who is recognized as Venezuela’s legitimate leader by more than 50 countries, has been trying to overthrow Venezuela’s de facto president, Nicolas Maduro since January 2019. The latest attempt was in early May. Venezuela is undergoing a massive humanitarian crisis with a 94% poverty rate, but Hollywood fantasies expressed in initiatives like Operation Gedeon give the government legitimacy and encourage Venezuelans to “rally ‘round the flag” in opposition to the imperialist US.

The “Maximum Pressure” campaign against Iran has been similarly unsuccessful.

While many ordinary Iranians are suffering, the economy is not in total free fall, as many in Washington hoped for. Instead, the country has shown signs of economic recovery, with domestic production and employment increasing. According to Iran’s Central Bank chief Abdolnaser Hemmati, Iran’s nonoil gross domestic product grew by 1.1 percent last year. Prominent Iranian economist Saeed Laylaz also contends that Iran’s economy can weather the coronavirus pandemic and may experience growth this year despite the virus.

For years, the Trump Administration has taken the view that Iran was about to collapse and surrender any day. Clearly, that’s not going to happen.

How has the US been doing with North Korea? It’s hardly Trump’s fault that North Korea threatens the US with nuclear weapons. They’ve been doing that under many leaders for many years. ArmsControl.org refers many time to “denuclearization.” But has North Korea agreed to a definition of the term? It’s impossible to engage in any serious negotiations unless both parties agree to terms that are critical to the issue that’s under discussion. Apparently, according to NK, that term means that everybody in the entire world must decommission their nuclear arms all at once. The US is, of course, highly unlikely to ever agree to this. In July of this year, North Korea declared that denuclearization “is not possible at this point in time.” So, despite President Trump making many cheerful declarations, diplomacy with NK isn’t any further advanced than it was when Trump entered office.

There are many other issues we could discuss, including the President’s apparent belief that he’s free to discuss wacky theories like what QAnon brings up as though he’s just some private citizen that no one takes seriously, but he is taken seriously by many millions of people as they, quite reasonably, believe that he has access to the best and most current information.

My view is that he’s accomplished nothing of note in the last 3-plus years and that his record simply does not justify giving him another term.  

Update: The former star of Cheers, Kirstie Alley, weighs in on the election:

Kirstie Alley

@kirstiealley

· 9h

I’m voting for @realDonaldTrump because he’s NOT a politician. I voted for him 4 years ago for this reason and shall vote for him again for this reason. He gets things done quickly and he will turn the economy around quickly. There you have it folks there you have it

1. Agree. Trump is an utterly incompetent politician. 2. "He gets things done..." Erm, ah, no. No, he doesn't. He can't get things done at all. See the above essay. 3. "he will turn the economy around..." For the same reason he can't apply "Law 'N' Order," no, he can't turn the economy around because he's responsible for the horrible shape that it's in today. Nothing is going to change after a successful election.

Why I prefer the unvarnished language of the blogs

When I was in college (78-82), I saw the Bertolt Brecht play Galileo and was powerfully impressed by one line in particular (quote is according to memory) "There are scholars who insinuate in Latin. I prefer to speak in plain German." 
Today: "The sub-headline for a New York Times article on the Vindman controversy announced that Trump's move represented, 'one sign of how determined the president is to even the scales after his impeachment.'"
The blogger who quoted this went on to express amazement. "Even the scales, what?? That suggests the 'scales' were ever tipped against him. The Nation's Joan Walsh suggested a more accurate headline for the Times story: 'Trump's reign of lawlessness enters new stage.'"
That's why I prefer the language of the blogs. They call thieves and criminals what they are without engaging in overly polite, euphemistic language.

Response to an LTE

Interesting LTE in the Philadelphia Inquirer on June 5th. Yes, I believe the writer meant “underlying” belief as opposed to “underlining,” but yes, I sort of halfway agree that the election of this President was a “disastrous abnormality.”

Has the election of Donald Trump been a disaster? Absolutely! The separation of children from parents at the border with Mexico puts us in a moral league with Nazis and the KKK, with the lowest of the low. The US did not sink to such a low moral level during World War II when citizens of Japanese descent were placed in internment camps. George Takei, who played “Sulu” in the “Star Trek” of the 60s, describes his experience as a child when he was in such a camp and he makes it clear that there was no separation of families at that time.

As former VP Joe Biden once said: “Don't tell me what you value, show me your budget, and I'll tell you what you value.” How does the Trump budget look? As a pundit in The Hill put it:

President Trump’s budget proposal is an affront to decency, economics and, at a basic level, math. It is full of both broken and false promises. It forces those who have the least to suffer the most and those who have the most to contribute the least. It is, in a word, unconscionable.

How are Trump’s people on foreign policy? On May 21st, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gave a lengthy speech to a friendly audience on policy towards Iran. “Over 26 minutes, Pompeo articulated a strategy that can best be summarized as, ‘Do everything we say, or we will crush you.’" The speech did not present any rational objection to Obama’s Iran policy, despite the President having objected to it for a number of years and having criticized it in the bitterest of terms.

Was the election of Trump an “abnormality?” That’s much harder case to make. Al Jazeera said back in May that the issue of white supremacy applies from South Africa to Gaza to the Trump Administration and their supporters. “...apartheid in South Africa was just one of many expressions of a worldwide race-based system of domination and privilege that to this day feeds wealth and prosperity to the selected few whites at the top.”

The President’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., clearly reads and occasionally responds to people like “Vox Day,” a pseudonym for a white supremacist and anti-gay science fiction writer. Here’s a “cute” quote from Vox:

On the education of women: “Ironically, in light of the strong correlation between female education and demographic decline, a purely empirical perspective on Malala Yousafzai, the poster girl for global female education, may indicate that the Taliban’s attempt to silence her was perfectly rational and scientifically justifiable.”

The theory of Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) during the campaign of 2016 was that Americans were primarily concerned about the economy. A lo of his supporters were, but it appears that racial resentment played a big role, too.  

Was the Trump Administration “planned by an outside source using the magic deception of the web?” Well, Chris Matthews of MSNBC thinks the Mueller investigation is driving the President absolutely crazy. Trump’s claim that he can pardon himself (It isn’t against the Constitution for a president to pardon himself, but it’s a fundamental precept of English common law that “no-one should be a judge in his own case”) and various co-defendants are facing great pressure to cooperate in the investigation, which strongly suggests that there’s lot of substance behind charges that the Russians interfered in the election of 2016.

The letter-writer goes on to list the positive accomplishments of the Trump Administration

1. “historic low unemployment.” True. CNN-Money reports that unemployment is very low., but that was in October of last year, at the end of a “85-month” expansion where unemployment steadily dropped. In the included chart, there’s no obvious change in the trend line when the Obama presidency dropped off and the Trump presidency began.

2. “destruction of ISIS.” Again, true. From the New Yorker: “Operation Inherent Resolve is the U.S.-led coalition of sixty-nine nations and four partner organizations that has orchestrated the military campaign against ISIS and provided air power in both Syria and Iraq. Since 2014, its lone goal has been to end the caliphate...” What this quote makes clear is that Trump didn’t begin anything new. He just continued what was already in progress.

3. “nuclear breakthrough negotiations with North Korea.” Is the Trump Administration carrying out any sort of long-range plan to do this? Uh, no. “...the American president has refused to do substantive work ahead of the scheduled negotiations. As one senior administration official, put it, ‘He doesn’t think he needs to’ prepare.” Was there any substantive work on the President’s part prior to this? A review of the past year and a half doesn’t show anything impressive. There are certainly signs of diplomacy taking place and we certainly don’t know everything that’s going on behind the scenes, but National Security Adviser John Bolton’s statement that North Korea should follow the Libya model for denuclearizing was certainly not helpful and in fact, was cited by North Koreans as a reason to cancel the planned summit. This stumble makes me doubt that anything else behind the scenes is any more sophisticated or informed.

So, no. I’m not terribly impressed by President Trump’s performance. Out of the three items cited here, two of them were simply continuations of Obama’s policies and the third appears to be due more to factors outside Trump’s control than by anything he’s planned.

Pulling the wool over the President's eyes

I thought this statement was kind of fascinating. A reporter asks “Representative Chris Collins (R-NY) to give her just one example of Trump trying to work with Democrats.”

Collins: [President Trump] has had Democrat senators into the White House time and again, early on, talking about health care, attempting –

Tur: In what way did he reach out? Give me one way he reached out on healthcare other than a conversation?

Collins: It starts with conversation, and he was shut down immediately by Senator Schumer and the others, in saying that they weren't going to support anything called a repeal of Obamacare. They worked to put more money into the individual marketplace, but that was it. At which point he had no choice, but to turn to the Republicans, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan. We in the House sent a pretty darn good repeal and replace that didn't get through the Senate, but it takes two people and Senator Schumer –

So Trump “had no choice” but to work with McConnell and Ryan, who agreed with him that the ACA/Obamacare was hopelessly broken and needed to be torn down entirely and replaced wholesale. It wasn't that the Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was stubborn, it was that Schumer didn't agree on the scope or the shape of the problem. Schumer felt that the problems with the ACA were small and fixable. Trump went with the far more dire and apocolyptic view pressed by the Republican Senate and House leaders. How did those two views end up being substantiated? Here's the view presented by Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway in late July, after Trumpcare failed to win passage in the Senate:

CONWAY: The president will not accept those who said it's, quote, time to move on. He wants to help the millions of Americans who have suffered with no coverage. They were lied to by the last president. They couldn't keep the doctor. They couldn't keep their plan.

We’ve met with the ObamaCare victims at the White House several times now. They’re real people, they’re suffering.

Okay so first off, yes, Trumpcare had crashed and burned with unanimous Democratic “No” votes and three rock-solid Republican “No” votes in the Senate, so yes it was and still is “time to move on.”

Second, it's kind of interesting that Conway doesn't cite any problems that require tearing down health care coverage for 20-plus million people. All of the CBO estimates for all of the Republican replacement plans in both the House and Senate called for removing at least 20 million people from their ACA health care plans. Trump apparently just wanted to extend coverage to even more people.

Were the American people lied to by President Obama? Well, that “they couldn't keep their plans” was pretty obvious to anyone who was seriously following the debate over the ACA in the first place. If you had crummy, inadequate individual coverage that had really high deductivles and lots of rules you had to follow in order to make a successful claim, then yes, such plans couldn't be kept. The ACA insisted that plans had to be comprehensive and had to cover a variety of health conditions and deductions were lmited by regulations. The prior individual coverage was good if you were young and healthy and were unlikely to ever make a claim and only really cared about the price you were paying.

Very interesting that Conway feels the need to assert that “Obamacare victims” were “real people.” Apparently, they had to search for people who weren't covered and their numbers appear to have been so small that Conway feels the need to assert that there were indeed such meetings.

Okay, so what about people on the other side of the question, people who urged a “No” vote on ACA repeal? How did ordinary citizens react to the failure of Trumpcare? Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) was one of the three Republican “No” votes and her return to Maine was described in a local paper:

Friday morning, as she wearily walked off her plane at Bangor International Airport, Collins stepped out into a terminal gate packed with passengers waiting to board their outbound flight.

She recognized no one. But several of them recognized her and began to applaud.

Within seconds, the whole terminal was clapping, many people rising to their feet as their sleep-deprived senator passed.

Never before, throughout her two decades and 6,300 votes in the Senate, had Collins received such a spontaneous welcome home.

“It was absolutely extraordinary,” she said. “It was just so affirming of what happens when you do the right thing.”

So yeah, sounds to me as though Trump was given bum information by the Republican House and Senate leaders. Had the amateur president any real knowledge of the situation or the ability to separate BS from real facts, he might have gone with Schumer and the Democrats to achieving a real solution to a real problem. 

Conservative comedy

Good piece in The Atlantic about conservative humor and how conservatives can't seem to produce any popular comedians. One example of conservative attempts at humor kind of jumped out at me as I remembered a liberal comedian commenting on this general viewpoint just a short while ago.

“What’s the deal with Harry Reid?” [The host of The Flipside, Michael Loftus] asked in a recent episode. “You either hate him or you hate him, am I right? The man is in the business of telling people how greedy they are, and how they don’t pay their fair share, and he lives in the Ritz Carlton … This guy is literally Mr. Burns from The Simpsons.”

I immediately recalled an observation from the liberal comedian Russell Brand:

Some people say I'm a hypocrite because I've got money now. When I was poor and I complained about inequality people said I was bitter, now I'm rich and I complain about inequality they say I'm a hypocrite. I'm beginning to think they just don't want inequality on the agenda because it is a real problem that needs to be addressed.

Which means that conservatives like Loftus set up a “Heads I win, tails you lose” kind of situation for critics of income inequality with this “observation” on “hypocrisy.” Combine that with the comment on the former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (Republicans now have the Senate Majority, so Reid is now the Minority Leader), that “You either hate him or you hate him...” and we have a very sour, mean-spirited “joke” that you have to be a really, really hard-core conservative to appreciate.

On a further note, I don't recall any particular hypocrisies from Mr. Burns. I always saw Mr. Burns as just an greedy elitist who wants to rip everyone off. There may very well have been hypocrisies on his part, but I don't recall any.


Update: Rush Limbaugh gives us a marvelous example of real, genuine hypocrisy. During the time when Democrats controlled the Senate and were considering filibuster reform, Limbaugh though such a thing would be an example of evil, unmitigated tyranny. Now that the GOP is in charge of the Senate, filibuster reform is just a good, All-American thing to do.  

The “New” Media Matters

Media Matters For America (MMFA) announced that right-wingers Ben Shapiro and David Horowitz were collaborating on a right-wing competitor to MMFA. MMFA cheerfully reproduced Shapiro's comments to his fellow right-wingers as Shaprio explained to his buddies that MMFA was an extraordinarily powerful and competent foe that they'd do well to copy.

I took a look at one of the pieces on Shapiro's site. I took a screenshot and highlighted two of the sentences.

 

The sentence that says: “Maddow smirked, reviled the Senator's reasoning, then employed the most trusted tactic amidst the left's arsenal – dismantle a law's merits by employing one fringe case as the rule, not the exception.”

I took the screenshot to emphasize how this assertion was immediately followed by Rachel Maddow's own description of the case: “Two years after the bill became law, the Nebraska state supreme court issued their first verdict under the parental consent law.” [emphases added]

Yeah, that's kind of a problem. How can “the left” be “employing one fringe case” when there's only one case to examine?!?!?

One interesting question comes up. “The girl at the center of the case is now more than 4 months pregnant and she was only ten weeks pregnant when the state of Nebraska first denied her permission to have an abortion." Maddow discusses how the girls birth parents are no longer around to give their permission for an abortion.

But, the blogger points out, “Maddow did not mention ... the girl's foster parents...” Well, okay, but the blogger clearly has no information as to how the girl's foster parents are related to the case. There might be a legal reason as to why the girl's foster parents don't figure into the case. My own suspicion is that the court decided that, for whatever reason, the foster parents didn't have a say or didn't want to have a say in the case. The court then decided to protect their privacy by leaving them out of the case entirely.

The blogger is stretching well beyond the available evidence to make any assertions about how the foster parents fit into the case. Obviously, the blogger simply doesn't know.

A look at the comments shows lots of people clucking their disapproval of the fact that a 16-year old girl was engaging in sex to begin with. Maddow states that “A Nebraska court dissolved their parental right because they physically abused and neglected their daughter.” Sounds an awful lot to me as though the girl became pregnant as a result of incest, but again, the privacy of various people is clearly being protected here. My presumption is that, again, there are sound legal reasons for this.

The most obvious conclusion that I draw here is that there are very good reasons why the State of Nebraska shouldn't be meddling in pregnancy/abortion decisions to begin with. The case is obviously beyond their competence and it clearly should be left to those who are immediately concerned with it. Also, Shapiro's “TruthRevolt” site doesn't appear to be very competent at this whole media criticism thing as neither the blogger nor the editor seems to have any idea as to what they're doing.

Hypothetically returning fire during the Aurora massacre

I read an interview with Ted Nugent wishing that someone in the theater during the Aurora massacre had a gun so that he or she could have returned fire and saved a lot of lives.  In response to one of Nugents' comments, I thought back to the 1980s when I was researching a paper on Star Wars/SDI/Missile Defense back when President Reagan was focusing on stopping Soviet ICBMs from reaching the US. Some pro-SDI people had opined that the technology needed to make the moon landing a success was similar enough to what would be needed to stop ICBMs that the task would be a pretty simple one. The critics (that I very much agreed with) pointed out that the moon wasn't disguising itself, wasn't taking evasive action and wasn't shooting back. None of those conditions would hold true while trying to stop ICBMs. I thought of that as I read Nugent's statement:

Last week my wife Shemane and I were filming a segment for our Spirit of the Wild show and we were shooting at watermelons surrounded by human silhouette targets just as kind of a competition and from 20 feet and from 20 yards and we were shooting from every imaginable angle, under cover, from sitting, from squatting, from prone position, from behind cover and from in the open, and we never hit an innocent and we never missed the watermelon. And I'm just a guitar player. If a guitar player can neutralize a watermelon from 20 feet -- and this is with live fire, by the way.

To which my reaction was "Okay, you and your wife were in a perfectly safe, leisurely situation, in broad daylight with no distractions, all the time in the world and absolutely no danger. So what does your situation have to do with anything?" Keep in mind that the alleged attacker James Holmes was wearing body armor, came in by surprise and started shooting, the dark theater was immediately filled with screaming people scrambling wildly, trying desperately to get out of the way.

In other words, Nugent's situation of neutralizing watermelons in a leisurely, unhurried manner had absolutely nothing in common with the situation faced by the people in Aurora, Colorado.

And by the way, Nugent tries to present the AR-15 rifle as a mere sporting implement, but as one can see by this picture thread, that particular model of gun was a weapon of war that soldiers used back during the Vietnam War. The AR-15 was not a toy and wasn't merely a hunting rifle.

Bachmann's got nothing

Representative Michele Bachmann (R-MN) made accusations against both Huma Abedin, the Deputy Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Congressman Keith Ellison (D-MN). Ellison writes a very civilized letter to her basically saying she's got nothing of any serious substance to back up anything she says. What I found truly shocking was that Frank Gaffney, her main source, has not only been described by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as “the anti-Muslim movement’s most paranoid propagandist,” but it also turns out that Gaffney has accused "New Jersey Governor Chris Christie of 'treason' for appointing a Muslim judge." Now personally, I'd accuse Governor Christie of many things, but being an overly-tolerant liberal is most certainly not one of them. 
Folks might remember that a woman who was unknown to Bachmann spoke to the Congresswoman at a campaign event and told her that the vaccine against the HPV (human papillomavirus) was dangerous. Bachmann immediately ignored the scientific consensus that the vaccine was entirely safe and badly needed and that she was needlessly fearmongering. Never mind, some anonymous woman with no obvious expertise, but who obviously believed in what she was saying, was more credible to Bachmann than the consensus of actual scientists.
I find it shocking that such a person, with absolutely no idea of what distinguishes a credible source from your run-of-the-mill crank, sits on the House Intelligence Committee.

Update: Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee concedes that Bachmann is making crazy accusations.

Further update:

The Muslim Brotherhood responds to charge that they employ Huma Abedin as an agent:

But in Egypt, the birthplace of the Brotherhood, the organization’s leaders were either perplexed by the accusations or simply hadn’t heard them. Nor had they heard of Huma Abedin.

“The Muslim Brotherhood can’t even penetrate the Egyptian government,” said a Brotherhood leader in Egypt’s Daqheleya province, Ibrahim Ali Iraqi, in response to the accusations his group had infiltrated top US agencies.

Emphasis added. Oh, here's a link by which you can ask that the Intelligence committee drop Rep. Bachmann.

Round-up on the news 19Nov2011

Very pleased to note that Democrats hung tough on the latest vote on the Balanced Budget Amendment.

In 1995, 72 of the 202 Democrats who voted crossed over and voted for the BBA. That’s quite a few, and it means that it wasn’t just conservative and Blue Dog Democrats; quite a few mainstream or even liberal Dems thought it was worth supporting for substantive or political reasons. Today, however, only 25 Democrats crossed lines to support the amendment, while four Republicans voted against it.

Yes, Democrats have previously gotten all wobbly-kneed, caved in and voted for packages that they considered insane, but lately, they're definitely learning and toughening up.

Bwah-hah-hah!!!! Michele Bachmann insists "I haven't had a gaffe." Uh, gee, some random, unknown person in a receiving line tells Bachmann that a vaccine causes mental retardation, so Bachmann insisted that this random person knew what she was talking about. Erm, slight problem, the claim is complete and utter poppycock. Rush Limbaugh even came to the defense of the vaccine, and when Limbaugh tells you you've "jumped the shark," you've really gone overboard! Oh, and her plan to run the government without taxing anybody was a good one! Bachmann's gaffes have been quite frequent.

Speaking of Limbaugh, the fellow got very confused and claimed that the former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky was gay. No, gays, straights and lesbians all fall into the category of adults who make love to adults on a consensual basis. Rapists and pedophiles fall into a different category, that of people who abuse victims and who really couldn't care less what the gender of their victims are.

Thankfully, the Super-Committee/Cat Food Commission II seems to be headed for complete failure. The likely result is sequestration in 2013. Given that Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) have declared, in response to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta's claim that sequestration would result in a "substantial risk of not being able to meet our defense needs" that

"We are staunchly opposed to this draconian action. This is not an outcome that we can live with, and it is certainly not one that we should impose on ourselves. The sequester is a threat to the national security interests of the United States, and it should not be allowed to occur.”

In other words, sequestration is not a serious threat as these Republican Senators will clearly not allow it to gut their preferred programs. Unfortunately this is, by the count of the FireDogLake blogger, President Obama's fourth attempt at a "Grand Bargain." Sure would be nice if it were to be the last.

It's difficult to keep from sympathizing with Occupy protesters when law enforcement authorities get so completely out of control that they use pepper spray directly onto the faces of Occupiers who are just sitting there peacefully. Of course, pepper spray is torture and should never be used unless police officers are in extreme peril, a condition that very obviously did not apply in this case. Great picture from the same blog, by the way. What's the ultimate goal of the neoliberals who are the opposition to #OWS? Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam and the US have been negotiating, behind closed doors naturally, for a Trans-Pacific Partnership that would lock in many of the worst aspects of NAFTA, but in the Pacific instead of Central America.

And lastly, former Senator from Pennsylvania Rick Santorum, gets all philosophical and declares that, when contemplating the vast number of Americans who are getting food stamps as opposed to being able to work at jobs, that hey, well “suffering is part of life and it’s not a bad thing, it is an essential thing in life.” Um, yeah, considering that Santorum’s estimated net worth is between $880,000 and $1.9 million, this is a real generous, Christian attitude.

Oh, good grief!

This has gotta take the cake for the most moronic exchange I've seen in a while. MMFA wrote a piece detailing how Dinesh D'Souza flagrantly and obviously lied in his book "The Roots of Obama's Rage" (Obama has to be the least "enraged" person on the national scene. In his 2008 debates with McCain, Obama was the very essence of cool), going so far as to claim that "when the story regarding Rev. Jeremiah Wright's inflammatory sermons broke, 'the networks and major newspapers pretended not to notice.' " Erm, I seem to remember that when the Rev. Wright made a single inflammatory sermon (Obama claimed he wasn't present for that particular one, no one could prove he was there), that resulted in an absolute firestorm that spread all over the media landscape. Obama quickly denounced Wright and has yet to settle on another church. Many other lies and distortions are detailed in the piece.

So we get a comment:

by follow_me_on_twitter@[deleted] (October 05, 2010 1:27 am ET)

Why is it when someone doesn't agree with the POTUS, they're labeled as an RACIST?

by bintx (October 05, 2010 8:16 am ET)

This has nothing to do with "agreeing" with the POTUS. This has to do with MAKING STUFF UP to attack the president. Much of the MADE UP STUFF has a racist tone to it.

Learn to read.

by Floyd (October 05, 2010 8:41 am ET)

Like what? What makes this guy a racist according to you liberal

by Floyd (October 05, 2010 9:07 am ET)

[HTML code] crickets [code]

by CoolSlaw (October 05, 2010 11:35 am ET)

The crickets don't work unless you give responders more then a few minutes to respond, as the times denoted between your posts indicate.
...

by Floyd (October 05, 2010 10:13 pm ET)

Cool-- The crickets don't work unless you give responders more then a few minutes to respond, as the times denoted between your posts indicate.

Yeah, I kinda figured that. But, I had to go to work and didn't want to wait until tomorrow to get it in. Gotta have some fun sometimes ;)
...

It's pretty hard to overstate how completely and utterly moronic Floyd is being here. He quite obviously makes the (completely unwarranted) assumption that his question is so blindingly good and so awesomely intelligent and unanswerable that we liberals will be staggered and flummoxed and speechless in response.

Yeah, right, whatevuh.

Open letter to a columnist

Re: "Enough Afghan debate" by David Broder WaPo Nov 15

In going over the various options for Afghanistan, David Broder claims that President Obama has "stretched the internal debate to the breaking point." What? What is Broder talking about? What exactly is threatening to "break?" America has a bunch of crazy warmongers who want action NOW and the majority of the population that sees no point in staying any longer and feels that we should leave Afghanistan to those who live there.

"Given that reality, the urgent necessity is to make a decision -- whether or not it is right." This is a completely insane idea, that we need to approach life and death decisions in any sort of hurry or that there's any urgency to the decision. The Taliban are native to Afghanistan and represent a substantial portion of the population there. Al Qaeda is neither here nor there in this debate as the Taliban are angry with al Qaeda, blaming al Qaeda for the Taliban's loss of power in the first place.

Broder claims US allies are "waiting impatiently." Sorry to hear that, but there's still no obvious reason as to why the US needs to rush pell-mell into a decision. After the many, many years that the US has had troops in Afghanistan without any clear strategy or direction, one would think that our allies could cool their jets a bit and help US official figure out just what we can reasonably hope to accomplish there.

Broder has no effective answer to Karl Eikenberry's very sensible and obviously-accurate objection to delving deeper into Afghanistan, that Hamid Karzai is "too weak and corrupt to govern the country effectively." Broder doesn't even try to come up with any real answer to the objection of progressives, that General McChrystal can't suggest any way to really end the war in Afghanistan other than by simply leaving.

As the "dithering" talking point was clearly taken directly from the poisoned pen of Karl Rove, Broder should at least credit his source for his article and admit that the "dead-enders" of the failed neoconservative movement are the people behind this column.

A good leader is not someone who simply stays the course because that's the course he's on. A truly good leader is someone who takes a thoughtful approach to problems and who thinks "Do we really need to do it this way?" I am 100% in favor of Obama's more careful, thoughtful approach and urge that Broder's advice be rejected entirely.

What is the purpose of the CforC program?

An especially hilarious set of sentences concerning the successful "Cash for Clunkers" program, courtesy of the NY Times:

...dealers must destroy the old engines of cars being turned in before the government will reimburse them for the $3,500 or $4,500 discount...

The Times’s Katharine Q. Seelye has captured the “laborious and potentially dangerous” car-crushing process on video.

Furthermore, some critics have noted that the requirement to demolish old engines could reduce their availability at junkyards, which could prevent people who cannot afford any kind of new car, rebate or not, from fixing up old vehicles. That has bolstered criticism from the right that the program was intended for “limousine liberals.” [emphases added]

Sigh! Okay, what is the purpose of the program?!?!? Clearly, one purpose of the program is to act as an economic stimulus, encouraging people to go out and buy new autos. Cool! Wonderful! That's exactly the sort of thing that America needs right now. But the other purpose is to get polluting old cars off the road. It's to exchange the old polluting cars for cleaner-burning ones that don't pollute as much.

Obviously, if old engines are simply re-sold, that would defeat the secondary purpose of the program. Dunno why the authors of the piece didn't make this clear as opposed to just regurgitating Republican propaganda on the program.

Commenters in the Inky on the program bring up a good point, that the CforC program rewards past bad behavior.

Posted by Bobphxville 02:21 PM, 08/01/2009

I agree with rbpeeple. I have two old cars that I am limping by with - a Cavalier and a Prism. Both with over 100k miles. Because I made smart choices years ago, and by purchasing cars with decent gas mileage (which lessened the negative impact on the environment over the past 10 years) - I can get NOTHING by this program. This program benefits those that made stupid choices, bought gas guzzlers, and hurt the environment during the past 10 years. I am waiting for one of these government programs to help me - while I am trying to pay $5000 a month for 10 months to a college (Bucknell) that decides that I make too much money to get a penny of finacial aid.

I can't disagree with this, Bobphxville makes a valid point. Ya just can't please everyone. To allow responsible citizens to get the same deal that those who made foolish choices did would again, defeat the purpose of the program.

Iraq withdrawal & Franken wins!!!

I'm very pleased to say that the suspicions I expressed in early March have turned out to be unfounded, at least for now. The first phase of US troop withdrawal from Iraq, the removal of troops from the cities and the ceasing of regular patrols there, occurred on schedule.

Not to worry, though. Presidential spokesperson Robert Gibbs assures us that there will be no "Mission Accomplished" sign.

"I will keep the banner printers from doing anything crazy."

Finally, eight long months of Norm Coleman dragging his feet have come to an end and newly-minted Senator Al Franken (D-MN) is on his way to being sworn in. As Democrats will now have 60 Senators, that means that the Republican ability to frustrate and hamstring the Democratic agenda are pretty much finished. Republicans simply no longer have the numbers to effectively filibuster anything/

An explanation as to just why health insurance companies fear government-run health insurance

Anti-Casino activists protest downtown

ScotusBlog explains why the Supreme Court disagreed with Judge Sonia Sotomayor on the Ricci case

And hoo-boy! The conservative media-criticism blog Newsbusters makes a comment that Media Matters has to explain to them. They have to explain that the scandal concerning the SC Governor Mark Sanford is NOT like the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. They need to type slowly, so Newsbusters gets it.

Fascinating other side to the story

We in the progressive community have long been very, very sour on the idea of the Bush Administration following up the occupation of Iraq by invading Iran. Very shortly after the fall of Baghdad, a Bush official boasted "Anyone can go to Baghdad. Real men go to Tehran." He was expressing a view that had deep roots. Both Israel and the US have been eager to take out Iran since the 1978 Iranian Revolution that had overthrown the Shah and that put the Ayatollah Khomeini in power. In early 2006,

Nearly three years after the Iraqi invasion, the real men are still stuck in Baghdad. Yes, there has been a great deal of talk about attacking Iran: plans in place for air strikes on Iran's revolutionary guards, on its nuclear installations and other WMD sites, and even talk of a ground invasion. There have been reports of spy flights over Iran and operations by special forces inside Iran. Israel too has been goading the US to strike, and if the US shrinks from this duty, threatening to go solo.

The author details the many obstacles that have held back that invasion. A very primary reason it has never taken place is that the US Army in Iraq is essentially hostage to an Iranian counter-strike. Iran is right over the border and has had a healthy cross-border trade with Iraq for as long as both countries have existed. Iran has much more internal cohesion than Iraq and is a great deal stronger. The US Army, not wanting a draft (Which would energize the peace movement back home in any event) and being stretched to the max, would very quickly find itself in severe trouble if Iran were to launch guerrilla attacks in Iraq on US troops.

Time Magazine noted in mid-2004 that

...despite the enthusiasm of those who most aggressively championed the Iraq war for taking on Iran, the results of the Iraq war may, paradoxically, have actually strengthened the position of the Mullahs in Tehran, by making their cooperation essential to achieving U.S. objectives.

Time Magazine also took note of the Colin Powell camps' lack of enthusiasm for an invasion of Iran and their preference for a negotiated solution. Even so, as late as mid-2008, VP Cheney's daughter, undoubtedly speaking for her father as well as many other frustrated neo-cons, declared to Iran:

"[D]espite what you may be hearing from Congress, despite what you may be hearing from others in the administration who might be saying force isn't on the table... we're serious." Asked about an Israeli strike on Iran, she said: "I certainly don't think that we should do anything but support them."

Fortunately, the Obama Administration has made it quite clear that force is indeed "off the table."

Very interestingly, it now appears that the lack of enthusiasm for invading Iran was one that many other countries shared. Bush Administration official David Wurmser describes the reaction he got in European capitals when he brought up the subject of a US attack on Iran:

“Every time in this period I landed in a European capital at [U.N. Ambassador] John Bolton’s request to discuss Iran, the first thing I got was: ‘What is your end game here; are you going to use the information to pull another Iraq? Tell us where you are going with this before we tell you how much we will admit Iran is going down the path to a bomb in the U.N.’ When I failed to give them a guarantee that we will not strike Iran, they stalled on moving ahead with acknowledging or using the evidence in public which in private they accepted.” [emphasis added]

As Iran is much closer to Europe than it is to the States, it may very well be that Europe was primarily interested in self-preservation, but I find it very highly interesting that Europe prevented the US from making what could have been a very costly mistake, a mistake that could very well have ranked with the utterly disastrous Athenian attack on Syracuse of 415-413 BC.

After the election?

I have to agree that this is about the dumbest idea I've heard all week:

Last, I believe this [that Obama will pursue a centrist strategy] is likely because Obama understands that to succeed, he must make peace with John McCain just as he has done with Hillary Clinton. When this historic election concludes, I expect the two to sit down, without precondition, and negotiate an agenda of reform.

The problem here, is that if Republicans had any serious ideas for how to run the country better, they would already have been talking about those ideas. Instead, Karl Rove's "big idea" is for them to have started attacking Barack Obama's relationship with Palestinian-American Professor Rashid Kahlidi last spring instead of waiting until the week before the election. To attack Professor Kahlidi is racist to the core as:

[Kahlidi] is a distinguished scholar, and the only objectionable thing about him from a rightwing point of view is that he is a Palestinian. There are about 9 million Palestinians in the world (a million or so are Israeli citizens; 3.7 million are stateless and without rights under Israeli control in the West Bank and Gaza; and 4 million are refugees or exiled in the diaspora; there are about 200,000 Palestinian-Americans, and several million Arab-Americans, many living in swing vote states). Khalidi was not, as the schlock rightwing press charges, a spokesman for the Palestine Liberation Organization. He was an adviser at the Madrid peace talks, but would that not have been, like, a good thing?

John McCain has attacked Professor Kahlidi as a "neo-Nazi" and of course, Matt "the GOP-friendly Internetist" Drudge has splashed the story onto his home page, and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin has been pushing the story as only a Vice-Presidential candidate can. The Obama campaign's very appropriate answer is that the whole controversy is:

...another recycled, manufactured controversy from the McCain campaign to distract voters' attention from John McCain's lockstep support for George Bush's economic policies.

And this was a good one:

At an event Wednesday in Raleigh, North Carolina, Obama said McCain has spent the last few days calling him "every name in the book."

"I don't know what's next. By the end of the week, he'll be accusing me of being a secret communist because I shared my toys in kindergarten. I shared my peanut butter and jelly sandwich," Obama said.

Governor Palin then went on for a few paragraphs about achieving "energy independence" from Mideast oil, but didn't once mention alternative energy. Simply drilling for more oil runs into the "Peak Oil" problem (A few decades ago, the US had already pumped more than half the oil it will ever pump and the rest of the world is now at or very near that same stage). Nuclear energy has a lot of advantages, but storing the nuclear waste is a problem that hasn't been solved yet.

...the DOE acknowledges much progress in addressing the waste problems of the industry, and successful remediation of some contaminated sites, yet also major uncertainties and sometimes complications and setbacks in handling the issue properly, cost effectively, and in the projected time frame.

So, while "energy independence" is most certainly a valuable and worthwhile thing to do, it's far from clear that the McCain-Palin campaign has any seriously meaningful ideas for actually achieving such a thing.

How about in other areas? How's the War on Terror going? Well...er...not so hot, actually. It's really cool for:

...defense contractors, lobbyists, think-tankers, ambitious military officers, the hosts of Sunday morning talk shows, and the Douglas Feith-like creatures who maneuver to become players in the ultimate power game

but, as for the rest of America, it's

a fiction, a gimmicky phrase employed to lend an appearance of cohesion to a panoply of activities that, in reality, are contradictory, counterproductive, or at the very least beside the point.

Sorry, but the idea that Obama and McCain can sit down after the election and talk productively with each other about the future direction of this country is, well, a pretty stupid one. I simply can't see McCain having anything serious to propose.