Arguments between national security advocates and personal privacy proponents have stalled the passage of a new FISA bill for months. One of the main sticking points has been proposed immunity for telecoms as endorsed by the Bush administration. Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey has the details of how Bush may have “blinked first” on the immunity question so a compromise may be in the offing.
Bush seems willintg to accept a bit of a bloody nose on this in order to reinstate the necessary FISA reforms. If Pelosi still doesn’t budge, then the White House needs to start taking this to the people, working around the Democrats in the same manner they did last year when they stalled FISA reform for most of the session.
Will the compromise be enough to convince Nancy Pelosi to bring the question to a vote on the House floor? Read the entire report here.
For those who may have missed it, President Bush has enraged much of the nation of India, by appearing to blame its growing middle class for rising food prices.
In addition to a series of articles on this subject, WORLDMEETS.US just posted this tongue-in-cheek warning to President Bush, about the growing demand for pet food among new members of India’s middle class.
U.S. President George W Bush should be a worried man. Not only are Indians eating more and better and driving up food prices, their dogs and cats are eating better, too … Read the rest of this entry »
Republicans might be interested to know that there are some people in the world, in this case in Brazil, who already assume that John McCain will beat either of his Democratic challengers.
Hearts aching for millions of Americans in danger of losing their homes, the Senate has been working hard on the Foreclosure Prevention Act, which will provide billions of dollars in tax breaks for airlines, automakers, alternative energy producers and home builders.
As they always do, lobbyists have been hijacking the bill that has bipartisan support in an economic crisis to lard it with help for their clients, everybody but homeowners…
Late last week, Newt Gingrich delivered a curious, under-reported speech at the American Enterprise Institute. He called it, “Answering the Obama Challenge”, and it was framed as a response to Barack Obama’s historic speech about race. (Video and transcript available here. My emphasis.)
Segregation was a horrible institution imposed by force by the state. It ruined the lives of people, it crippled their futures, it was a terrible injustice, and it is totally authentic to be angry about it. As Senator Obama notes,
the legalized discrimination—where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments—meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations.
Anyone who thinks that there was not this destructive impact is simply not in touch with the reality of American history for African-Americans.
It’s been a very long time since I’ve heard a high-level conservative discuss America’s social and economic disasters in terms other than condemnation for the people suffering them. Unfortunately, it’s really hard to reconcile this Newt Gingrich with the one who, 9 days before, called Obama’s speech “infuriating”.
Is there anything that President Bush - or any policy maker - can do to address the economic crisis that the United States and the world now confronts? More to the point, perhaps, how many people believe there is anything he can do? William Waack, World Affairs columnist for Brazil’s O Globo, writes, ‘If the economic consequences, as mentioned above, are difficult to foresee, the political consequences seem reasonably clear - especially for American politics … Change benefits the Democrats - and runs counter to the general perception of a government that (once again) is trying to use words to cover up reality.’
By William Waack
Translated By Brandi Miller
March 17, 2008
Brazil - O Globo - Original Article (Portuguese)
In Washington this Monday (3/17), St. Patrick’s Day should have been a day of celebration. It has become popular in the United States to enjoy (in general, with a lot of beer) this day of Ireland’s patron saint. But George W. Bush cancelled the party to talk about an issue that he claims isn’t that serious: the global financial crisis.
It’s obvious to any market novice that Bush (or any other head of state of a major economy) couldn’t have said anything other Read the rest of this entry »
It was the weekend before the 1960 election and my mother and I were patiently waiting in front of the tiny passenger terminal at the airport outside of Wilmington, Delaware. It didn’t matter that the candidate was over an hour late when the Caroline, his powder-puff blue and white campaign plane, finally dropped out of the sky and taxied toward the chain-link fence that stood between 2,000 or so people and the next president of the United States.
The moment that John F. Kennedy walked toward the crowd and held out his hand to me is indelible: His steely yet warm gaze, those incredible greenish-gray eyes, every hair on his head catching and reflecting the sun just right. Gleaming teeth. The kind of smile you would save for an old friend.
I wondered why he was alone. Where was Jackie? But the thought quickly passed as he grasped my hand and squeezed it ever so slightly. I expected his hand to feel rough and calloused, but in the instant we touched before he moved on down the fence line, it seemed soft and warm.
A generation gap is dividing GOP members of Congress over the classic conflict between doing good for the country and doing well for the voters who sent them there.
According to Washington insiders’ bible, The Hill, “earmarking funds back home is becoming the most divisive issue facing congressional Republicans.
“The fight largely pits junior conservatives–arguing that the failure of Republicans to aggressively fight earmarking is preventing the GOP from reclaiming the mantle of fiscal responsibility–against party veterans, who say that it is their prerogative to choose funding priorities…”
Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina and Alaska’s Ted (Bridge-to-Nowhere) Stevens, who is trying to remove him as chairman of the conservative Steering Committee, are the leading antagonists…
Between George Carlin’s State Prison Farms (video below) and my Americanaland we can fix the criminal and illegal immigration issues in a jiffy. And be entertained and make truckloads of good ol’ American dollars in the process. C’mon presidential candidates! Let’s get crackin’ on two REAL solutions!
Residents of a county that calls itself the American Riviera will start drinking sewage today. Recycled, refined and filtered through aquifers, but still…
The Orange County Water District in southern California will turn on the world’s largest plant devoted to purifying sewer water. The process, called by proponents “indirect potable water reuse” and “toilet to tap” by the dubious, will be getting close scrutiny from authorities elsewhere.
Water shortages have been making news this year, not only in California, but Florida, Georgia and across the country. The federal government projects that at least 36 states will face shortfalls within five years from a combination of rising temperatures, drought, population growth, urban sprawl and waste.
The problem is universal. A UN report has predicted that more than half of humanity will be living with water shortages, depleted fisheries and polluted coastlines within 50 years.
New technology may ease the problem, but awareness and conservation will be required, even more so than with global warming, where changes in public behavior can do only so much to help. (For a start, we could re-think excessive lawn-watering, car-washing, etc. with tap water that might be used for drinking rather than environmentally damaging bottled water.)
“The need to reduce water waste and inefficiency is greater now than ever before,” says Benjamin Grumbles of the Environmental Protection Agency. “Water efficiency is the wave of the future.”
In 1948, Harry Truman got to the White House by railing against a Republican “do-nothing” Congress, and George W. Bush is using the tactic in an effort to stay “relevant” as he prepares to leave the Oval Office.
“Congress has little to show for all the time that has gone by,” he complained at his last press conference, a bizarre charge for a President who has vetoed Iraq appropriations bills, S-CHIP health insurance and this week is threatening to send back a water projects bill with enough bipartisan support to override his veto.
There is a kind of spoiled-rich-kid intransigence to the new Bush that is consistent with his behavior for six years when Republicans controlled both Houses and rubber-stamped whatever he wanted. Now, in the face of opposition, he is stamping his feet and threatening to hold his breath if he doesn’t get his way.
“He may decide that all he wants to do is veto and stop progress,” says Rep. Rahm Emanuel, head of the House Democratic Caucus. “But everybody will know who wants to change things, and who wants to keep them just the way they are.”
But if Congressional Democrats are confident that voters will make that distinction next year, they should look closely at their approval ratings, which are lower than the President’s.
To dramatize his claims about a do-nothing Congress, Harry Truman had called a special session on what was known as “Turnip Planting Day” in Missouri. His opponents obliged with inaction and made his point.
If today’s Democrats want to avoid looking like turnips in ‘08, they had better start moving now.
Gays, pro-choicers and the liberal elite can relax. The Republicans have found their domestic target for ‘08 and, from all indications in New Hampshire, it is now illegal immigrants who are threatening the very fabric of American society.
“It’s becoming a litmus test of how conservative you are,” according to a professor of political science quoted by the McClatchy newspapers. “Absolutely an important issue,” confirms the director of the University of New Hampshire’s Granite State Poll.
Following the Karl Rove playbook, GOP contenders are reaching a consensus on this election’s objects of fear and loathing for their Base. Rudy Giuliani, Mr. 9/11, has the franchise on external threats–terrorists and, coming up strong on the outside rail, Iran.
But fear-mongering the domestic dangers is up for grabs. Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson want to withhold federal money from cities and states that don’t report illegal aliens, toughen border security and speed up the process of deporting them. Duncan Hunter wants to double the fence to keep them out, and Tom Tancredo may soon up the ante with a proposal to nuke them.
Even Mike Huckabee has swerved from his Golden Rule approach to take swipes at the target. “We need to make it clear,” he told the Values Voters, “that we will say no to amnesty, and no to sanctuary cities, and no to the idea that there can be some complete ignoring of the fact that our laws have been broken.”
Only John McCain, who made the mistake of straight talk on the issue, is not benefiting from the wave of Lou Dobbsian outrage over the threat from people who mow America’s lawns and wash dishes in restaurants.
Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of such strangers?
The news from bloody Philadelphia just gets more and more horrifying.
I note that the city’s TV newscasts are cast in the “If It Bleeds It Leads” mold, but the mayhem one day this week was so bad that it soaked up 18 minutes of the 30-minute evening newscast on one station, barely leaving any time for really important stuff like the weather and sports.
The mayhem included incidents in which police Officer Charles Cassidy was shot in the head outside a previously robbed Dunkin’ Donuts by a perp who then stole his service revolver, another incident in which four people were wounded, including another officer, by an ex-con who drowned trying to escape his dragnet, and a lock-down at one of the city’s largest high schools.
Officer Cassidy, a 25-year veteran, has died. He was the fourth Philadelphia police officer shot this year, the third this week, and the second in just 12 hours in a city that is chronically poor, undereducated and violent — and shows no sign of coming to come to grips with its demons.
Mayor John Street led the Greek chorus that chimed in on cue after these latest war-zone convulsions in calling for stronger gun laws in a state where local jurisdictions are at the mercy of an adamantly pro-gun majority in the Legislature.
“Unless we can get control over the proliferation of illegal guns, then the people who are most at risk are, of course, the members of the Police Department,” Street said with practiced angst.
Police Commissioner Sylvester Johnson belabored the obvious in saying that his officers are being “basically assassinated” by armed and violent criminals.
“The availability of weapons in our city . . . the availability of guns are really completely out of hand here in the city of Philadelphia,” he said. “Legislators have to realize that we have a gun problem.”
That “problem” has resulted in 325 murders in the first 10 months of the year, the highest big-city homicide rate per capita in the U.S., although the pace recently has slowed slightly from the 2006 rate, which resulted in 406 murders.
Meanwhile, New York City, with five times Philadelphia’s population and once America’s murder mecca, has had “only” 220 murders. Chicago and Los Angeles also lag far behind.
Our family regularly enjoys the CBS crime-drama Numb3rs. No, it’s not the greatest TV ever made, but it’s just quirky enough to hold our attention. That, plus it feeds a certain wishful thought of mine, that life would be so much easier if everything could be boiled down to mathematics. Of course, it can’t be, but a little math here and there can shed remarkably clear light on a wide range of topics, including political hypocrisy.
Yes. I’m a flip-flopper. Of the first degree. Item #225 on the very long list of reasons I could never run for public office.
The latest example: The proposed (and languishing, but not yet dead) expansion of the S-CHIP program. First, I was generally in favor of it. Then, I was soundly against it. And then … the factors that prompted me to change my position were challenged by certain astute TMV readers in the back-and-forth comments attached to the October 12 “Center of Attention” feature.
So I decided to stop the lazy approach to forming an opinion on this subject (i.e., reading and borrowing the opinions of others) and do a little original homework of my own. Specifically, I decided to seek the input of Republicans who originally supported the expansion and still do, despite the President’s veto. I wanted these Republicans’ views on the matter because I thought they’d have the biggest stake in defending their position against the White House’s talking points.
… the son of the late Wes Roberts, Chairman of the Republican National Committee under President Dwight Eisenhower … He joined the staff of Kansas’ U.S. Senator Frank Carlson [R] in 1967. In 1969, Roberts became Administrative Assistant to First District U.S. Congressman Keith Sebelius [R]. Roberts was elected to Congress in 1980, succeeding Sebelius upon his retirement. He was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1996 following the retirement of Senator Nancy Kassebaum [R] … and won re-election in 2002.
Of course, Roberts wasn’t the only source that eventually led me back into the fold as a supporter of the bill: Another was my own Republican Senator, Missouri’s Kit Bond; yet another was this NYT story from last week, published the day before the veto-override attempt in the House. But, as I note at Central Sanity, I think Roberts’ voice deserves special attention, given that he is not only a Republican but a member of the Senate Finance Committee that helped birth the disputed legislation.
What good does all of this do? I don’t know. But I do hope Roberts’ Republican counterparts in the House (13 of them, at least) will take note of the Senator from Kansas’s arguments, and reconsider their own positions when Speaker Pelosi and crew make another run at stiff-arming the President’s obstinance.
In the losing fight to override Bush’s veto, Democrats may have put the spotlight on the wrong victims. Instead of pushing forward 12-year-old brain injured Graeme Frost and two-year-old Bethany Wilkerson with her heart problem, they might have converted more Republicans by emphasizing the other sufferers from unaffordable health care–America’s small business owners.
“The future of SCHIP,†according to a recent article in Forbes, no bleeding-heart liberal journal, “is particularly significant to small business. Of the 6.6 million children up to age 19 that receive health insurance through SCHIP, 37 percent belong to parents who work for businesses with fewer than 100 employees, estimates the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan tax research organization.â€
In July, the President made one of his photo-op I-talk-you-listen visits to a group of small business owners. His host, Clifton Broumand, according to the Washington Post, “could barely get a word in as Bush opined on children’s health insurance and other health topics.â€
Private insurers, Gourmand would have told him if he could, “are like the Godfather–they make you an offer you can’t refuse. When my insurance goes up 73 percent in four years, that’s a tax…All these things are hidden taxes.
“When you don’t cover children, what ends up happening is that when kids are sick, which happens in my office, parents aren’t productive. They have to go home.”
Small businesses, USA Todayreports, “are driven crazy by soaring employee health costs, an expense that surveys show has become the biggest headache and obstacle to growth.â€
In the next round, Democrats should try pushing forward restaurateurs, realtors and owners of small construction firms instead the tots of people who work for them.
In the President’s favorite movie, the righteous hero stands alone and guns down the bad guys. Bush has played Gary Cooper in the showdowns over Iraq, and now he is facing down the villains in the S-CHIP fight.
But Bush has modeled himself on the wrong 1950s western. True to Washington and Hollywood, “High Noon†is more about pride and calculation than humanity. Those who care about people rather than power have always preferred “Shane.â€
At the end of “High Noon,†the hero, after gunning down the bad guys, converting his Quaker wife to killing and showing his contempt for everyone else, rides off with Grace Kelly to some Olympus denied other mortals, all as a reward for his concept of manhood.
In “Shane,†a retired gunfighter reluctantly takes up arms again to protect a family he loves and their hard-working community against ruthless power. His reward is to ride off to die, alone.
That’s a concept that the man who the former President of Mexico calls a “windshield cowboy†fails to understand. (In his memoirs, Vicente Fox recounts Bush’s skittishness about getting on a horse, preferring to drive a pickup truck instead.)
This time Bush is playing cowboy with the health and lives of millions of children. Senate Democrats are trying to round up enough Republicans to override his veto in tomorrow’s vote, but the First Moviegoer is sticking to his guns.
It may be too late to stop Bush’s acting out of old oaters, but those who have to belly up to the ballot box next year should think hard about the consequences of the shootout.
October 16th, 2007 by DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, TMV Columnist
There’s a timeless American Rorschach, a set of ideas meant to have symmetry. They’re called Civil Liberties: originally meaning that we be subject only to laws established for the good of the community… and… and that our individual rights be protected by law from unjust government. Too often an balancing act made to go awry in our times, for certain.
But there is a group of people who surely deserve to be protected from unjust standards in weighing their alleged crimes and sentencings: The mentally unstable, the severely addicted, and those defendants who have ‘retardation.’
Often, the best way to keep justice just is to just question justice:
1. Should defendants suffering from mental illness be treated the same as any other mentally competent defendant in court? Or should there be a special court for defendants suffering from mental disorders that appear to possibly have driven them to their offenses?
2. Is it legal lunacy or legal sanity to arraign and try, via usual court procedures, any individual on, say, misdemeanor charges, when he or she also displays significant signs of inordinate obsession, or compulsion, disorganized thoughts, inability to suppress aggressive impulses, inability to comprehend or follow procedures, delirium tremens, etc., because she or he is, severely mentally unable?
3. Should defendants professionally evaluated as suffering from a significant mental disorder be released on bond and be expected to not re-offend…?
4. …and to also show up for their trial date? Should such defendants be punished by the same standards as those who willfully re-offend and willfully commit another actionable offenses by not showing up for trial?
5. Is it reasoned to release an adjudicated mentally ill defendant on bond and without mental health intervention, and thereby potentially put others and the defendant themselves at risk for more mayhem or injury?
6. Is it legal logic or legal illogic to release a mentally disordered defendant convicted of a crime back out onto the streets after jail or on probation, yet with no intervention or help for their afflictions and addictions which cause continued mind disorganization and disintegration?
The answers more and more jurisdictions are coming to are causing them to create ‘mental health court’ for defendants who suffer from untreated medical and mental disorders.
This unusual step creates ‘a special court aside from usual court’ wherein a defendant’s case is heard… but also the stricken person is given medical and psychological diagnoses, treatments, medicine, education and job assistance…with the idea that this decreases re-offending by giving/ offering some intervention in disabling disorders, increases public safety, and is far more efficient with municipal resources.
There was a brief moment in the debate over expanding the S-CHIP program when the clouds parted and something of a consensus emerged that the crisis in American health care has brought to ground not just the poor but middle-class families like that of Halsey and Bonnie Frost. Then the swiftboating of their 12-year-old son began.
Well, the right-wing blowhards who pulled the rug out from under the people who opposed expanding S-CHIP for legitimate if arguable reasons finally are retreating back into their caves to prepare for the next attack on A Hapless Soul to Be Named Later, unaware of or not caring about the damage they inflicted on their cause by framing the debate in Roman Coliseum blood sport terms.
No matter, the need for health-care reform in America has become so urgent and so difficult to ignore that in 2008 — or perhaps the following year after the probable coronation of a Democratic president — the people who have blocked reform year in and year out will be confronted with having to get on board or get trampled.
Who might those people be?
In order of importance, Republicans, private health insurers, for-profit hospital corporations and pharmaceutical companies.
In order of influence, private health insurers, for-profit hospital corporations, pharmaceutical companies and Republicans.
The one certainty is that whatever steps are taken, they will be relatively modest and a far cry from what Hillary Rodham Clinton tried to ram through 14 years ago.
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