Marginal Democratic candidates certainly benefit from moving to the left on national security issues, but serious candidates–candidates who want to have any realistic chance of prevailing in the general election–must not allow themselves to be pushed, shoved or even nudged away from a strong commitment to national security.
Consider, for example, the contentious and emotionally laden issue of the use of torture in securing preventive intelligence information about imminent acts of terrorism…
There are some who claim that torture is a nonissue because it never works–it only produces false information. This is simply not true, as evidenced by the many decent members of the French Resistance who, under Nazi torture, disclosed the locations of their closest friends and relatives.
You know, I was on the fence there about torture, until Dershowitz pointed out it really worked well for the Nazis! Color me convinced!
The Writers’ Strike Explained in Under Four Minutes
First, gotta share the best slogan I’ve heard from the picket lines so far: “We write, they wrong! We write, they wrong!”
Incidentally, since this video was made (apparently a couple of days ago), the WGA has already offered to withdraw the request for the share of DVD revenue promised almost 20 years ago.
My first thought when I read about the conservative authors who are suing Regnery for essentially giving their books away was that these people have lost sight of their place in the scheme of things. It seems to me that Regnery is a propaganda mill, not a publishing house as most people understand the term, and their job is to crank out the propaganda for Regnery to distribute as it sees fit. (Anyone in the publishing industry with a better understanding of the situation should feel free to shoot me an email.) Anyway it looks like Jane at Firedoglake had pretty much the same reaction:
Do these authors really not understand that it takes incredibly deep pockets to do what they’re accusing Regnery of doing, and that they are the beneficiaries of it? That when Regnery is basically giving away books for free it’s not making any money off them, and is doing so in order to get them on the New York Times’ bestseller lists, from whence so much of their publicity and further book sales are generated? That 30,000 people aren’t going to buy their crappy books at full price, and most authors would kill to have their works seeded out there at such great expense?
Regnery gave them an inch and now they’re suing because they think they’re entitled to be rulers.
Floods in Mexico: Not Exactly Over, and Here’s How to Help
The floods in Tabasco have left countless people homeless. Nobody knows how many yet. Although 60-70,000 people are in shelters so far.
Certainly hundreds of thousands of people are affected, their homes cut off by the water, flooded, partially destroyed, or simply washed away entirely.
Roughly 20,000 people wound up trapped on their roofs. (If that doesn’t bring back serious Katrina memories, I don’t know what can.)
Up to eighty percent of the entire state has been inundated. The total damage is already estimated at up to US$5 billion.
Obviously it’s one of the worst natural disasters in Mexico’s history. And it’s nowhere near over.
People began running out of food and water two days ago. Electricity is still down in much of the state. The rotting corpses of dogs, chickens, pigs, and other animals are floating in the water. Cholera is on deck. Massive spraying will be necessary to prevent dengue and malaria. And so on.
Some of this Televisa photo gallery is simply hard to believe. If you don’t speak any Spanish, just assume each caption says something “yes, it’s hard to believe life can suddenly suck this much.” Close enough.
If you’d like to help, you can donate to the Red Cross, UNICEF, Save the Children, or any other charity you prefer in a matter of seconds. The Mexican Embassy has also posted direct transfer bank information for relief-specific accounts accessible in the U.S. and Canada.
I’m posting this here, despite the fact that the rains began last week, because the tragedy is going to affect hundreds of thousands of people for months and even years to come. But the news cycle moves on relentlessly. I just checked Google News (10:50 am PST 11-7-07), and the floods are already completely gone from the front page.
Si hablan español, el gobierno del estado de Tabsaco tiene todos sus últimos avisos de la emergencia aqui, y Televisa pone sus noticias actualizadas con frequencia y muchos videos aqui, aunque Televisa sí misma ya está empezando a pasar a otras historias.
I hope you might want to toss in a few bucks yourself, before we all just forget and move on to the next tragic horror du jour.
Did you know a bipartisan group of six congressman have introduced a bill strengthening the 1973 War Powers Act? Neither did I. While this is perhaps the most important issue there is if you care about boring old things like democracy, it’s gotten embarrassingly little attention online and almost none in the regular media. The best, in fact, is an impressively honest column by George Will.
If you want to know more, I’ve stuck additional details about the bill over here.
William Greider explains how the Citibank catastrophe comes to us courtesy of our beloved former president. We must elect Hillary so we can experience even more massive financial disasters.
House Appropriations Committee Chairman Obey won’t say whether they’ll fund bunker busters for Iran
The Bush administration recently sent Congress a request for $196 billion in “emergency” funding for Iraq and Afghanistan. Last week ABC reported that it includes one line asking for $88 million to upgrade stealth bombers to carry the 30,000-pound “massive ordnance penetrator”:
So where would the military use a stealth bomber armed with a 30,000-pound bomb like this? Defense analysts say the most likely target for this bomb would be Iran’s flagship nuclear facility in Natanz, which is both heavily fortified and deeply buried.
“You’d use it on Natanz,” said John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org. “And you’d use it on a stealth bomber because you want it to be a surprise. And you put in an emergency funding request because you want to bomb quickly.”
Today David Obey, the Democratic Chairman of the Appropriations Committee, appeared at the National Press Club. You can see the footage via C-Span.
At 42:10, Obey is asked whether he plans to fund the bunker busters. He speaks for over three minutes, beginning by saying “Our Iran policy has been spectacularly stupid for 50 years,” and asks, “Wouldn’t we have been better off if we left Mossadegh in place?” Yet he never answers the question.
When Obey finally winds down, at 45:30, the moderator asks again: “Will you fund the bunker busters?” Obey replies:
Well, I don’t have the power to determine whether we will or will not do anything. I certainly think that the bunker busters raise very serious questions about what the Administration’s intentions are and I’m very skeptical that we ought to proceed but that’s going to have to be a collective decision.
What does this mean? Probably that he, Pelosi, etc. haven’t even discussed this, and are hoping they won’t be asked about it again. Obey most certainly has the power to stop it if he wants to badly enough. But given the behavior of the Democratic Congress to date, it seems unlikely they’ll refuse to fund it. Some of them want to bomb Iran. And the ones who don’t will be scared to cut the funding. If they do it and the bombing goes ahead anyway with non-Stealth bombers that got shot down, you can imagine the ensuing weeks-long cable TV screamfest.
Ron Paul’s supporters are “moneybombing” his campaign today bringing in $2.5 million so far which brings him closer to Fred Thompson territory. Now that he’s bringing in the cash, his next big obstacle is trying to find Republicans who want to vote for him. They love the war, Ron Paul doesn’t. A grassroots fundraising stunt isn’t going to change that.
Speaking of Ron Paul, I’m getting really tired of the way his self-serving definition of the word “freedom”. Nevermind the fact that the very word “freedom” has evolved since the founding of this country, in Ron Paul world, if you vote for another candidate then you hate freedom. This is the same sort of Orwellian wordplay that I despise about the Bush Administration.
Finally, shame on the New York Times for helping the Ron Paul campaign play their semantic games by printing this letter to the editor from Bruce Fein chastising Hillary Clinton and every other presidential candidate besides Ron Paul for not signing the “American Freedom Pledge”. All of the Democratic candidates have signed on to a virtually identical (and Ron Paul supported) “American Freedom Pledge”, which kinda contradicts the letter’s implicit claim that Democrats don’t oppose torture, restoring habeas corpus, etc. More importantly, the Times failed to note that the letter’s author, Bruce Fein, is a member of Ron Paul’s campaign. You’d think that would merit a mention.
I’ve been plowed under with work for about a month now (and if I owe you an email, sorry about that, be patient). One of the projects I’ve been working on was for Working Assets, which is branching out into cellular service under the name Credo. I created a series of cartoon panels with blank word balloons, to be projected onto various buildings in San Francisco and Seattle as part of the promotional effort for the new service, the idea being that passers-by would text in their own messages to fill in the balloons. I don’t have any info on specific times or locations or I’d happily share it, but the first one was over the weekend, and this great shot of one of the panels being projected onto the side of San Francisco’s landmark Castro Theatre was sitting in my inbox this morning …
(In this one, I wrote Bush’s setup line — “What do you think we should do next, Mister Cheney?” — and Cheney’s balloon was left blank to be filled in by passers-by.)
James Webb sent his letter stating “We wish to emphasize that no congressional authority exists for unilateral military action against Iran” to the White House today. 30 senators total signed on; none were Republicans. Charles Davis has the full text and the list of signatories, noting:
…neither Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) nor Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) signed on, despite their criticism of Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) for voting for the provocative Kyl-Lieberman resolution calling for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard to be listed as a “terrorist organization.” In contrast to both Biden and Obama, and in a sign that she has felt the heat over her vote on the Kyl-Lieberman resolution, Clinton signed on to the letter.
