Today is not only the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, it is the day six years ago that Bush received the infamous “Bin Laden determined to strike in US” Presidential Daily Bulletin.  Carpetbagger has more, and there’s a blogswarm going on as well…

Sorry Dad Ronald Reagan had a famously rocky relationship with some of his children, but presumably they at least voted for him when election day rolled around. Not so for Rudy Giuliani. Slate reports that Caroline Giuliani is supporting.....Barack Obama.

Sellout Dems Cenk Uygur at Huffington Post:

Here we go again. I was going to write a nice, fun piece about Matt Damon on a lovely Sunday afternoon when the Democrats went and ruined everything, as usual. From time to time, I am told that I am too hard on the Democrats. It is not possible to be too hard on these vacillating, spineless, rudderless, clueless clowns.  Alright, there has to be an important distinction here. Most of the Democrats in the House voted the right way on the latest capitulation to the most unpopular president in history. And 28 Democratic Senators voted the right way. The rest are the biggest bunch of weaklings and half-wits I have ever seen. They are the soft underbelly of the Democratic Party.  (Read the rest of this story…)

Bear Any Burden, Bum Out Any Dictator  Another priceless moment in the GOP Iowa debate was the exchange about Sen. Obama's pledge to take military action within Pakistan if necessary to kill Osama bin Laden and other high-value al Qaeda leaders. As in other cases I noted below, it was another case of the candidates forced to tie themselves in pretzels because they're saddled with President Bush's legacy of a mix of rhetorical belligerence, strategic misadventure and unwillingness to actually strike at al Qaeda when given a chance.

Rudy Giuliani felt compelled to recant an earlier statement supporting Obama's point. And the consensus from him and the rest of the candidates appeared to be that of course the US would take such an opportunity to strike (even though President Bush hadn't) but that it was the height of naiveté to announce that we would do so. And that in any case, you shouldn't say such a thing because of the importance of maintaining ties with our friends and allies -- even ones who have our prime terrorist foes operating from on their soil.

Here you have again the perfect image of the inverted world of Bush loyalism. Any price to fight non-al Qaeda in Iraq. But don't go overboard against real al Qaeda in Pakistan. And especially don't get them upset by talking about it in public.

Your neocon media at play On “Hardball” today, Chris Matthews spoke with CNBC’s Jim Cramer about a new Wall Street Journal/NBC poll which showed a majority of Americans trust the Democrats over Republicans on economic issues such as balancing the budget, taxes and government spending. Tweety claims the only reason for this is because they’re mad at Republicans about the situation in Iraq — and it’s just so unfair to the poor Republicans. Cramer agrees with him and goes on to give us this comedy gold:   Download (731) | Play (760)  Download (342) | Play (429)

“It is nuts, and of course if it were not for the war - and you can’t asterisk a war, but we would have a balanced budget, we’d be able to spend more on social programs, but, you know frankly, the Democrats can’t be trusted any more than the Republicans on this. What I think does - I think we think both Congress and the President are very out of touch with what’s going on across the board. And look, anybody who bought a home in the last three years, Chris, is liable to be evicted. Do you hear either side talk about that?”

I’m not as economically savvy as Jim, but anyone with two brain cells to rub together knows that George Bush and the Republicans would have gutted as many social programs as they could get their hands on whether we invaded Iraq or not. As for government spending, the rubber stamp Republican-controlled Congress started their spending spree long before the invasion and as for nobody talking about rising mortgage foreclosures, I guess Mr. Cramer apparently missed the hearings held by the House Committee on Financial Services on Rising Mortgage Foreclosures this past April. Oh, and there is that pesky little fact that the last Democrat who lived in the White House not only balanced the budget, but left a surplus when he left office…  John Amato: Matthews must be looking for some of that Aqua Velva man love from the entire Republican Party.

Wisconsin's Congressman Steve Kagen sits down at TPMCafe's Table for One to explain why he doesn't have health care, and how every citizen can.

Campaign Email or Horror Flick Promo?  Just out from the Romney Campaign:  "One family, 99 counties … and a Winnebago. As the Ames Straw Poll rapidly approaches, join the Romneys as they trek across Iowa in the famous Mitt Mobile."

But it's OK when the GOP breaks the law!  Via CREW:

Today, CREW filed a complaint with the Department of Justice asking that the Counterespionage Section of the National Security Division initiate an investigation into whether House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-OH) violated the law by leaking classified information. Our complaint can be found here.  In a July 31, 2007 interview with Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto, Rep. Boehner disclosed an aspect of a Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court’s decision regarding warrantless wiretapping:

There’s been a ruling, over the last four or five months, that prohibits the ability of our intelligence services and our counterintelligence people from listening in to two terrorists in other parts of the world where the communication could come through the United States.

By telling a reporter that a FISA court has restricted the U.S. intelligence community’s surveillance of suspected terrorists overseas, Rep. Boehner appears to have transmitted information relating to the national defense in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 793(d). Read more…

Saving soldiers' jobs  I am the daughter of a military brat.  My dad’s father was a career officer.  Respect for the military and the institutions surrounding it are in my blood.  And I am just so sickened by the empty rhetoric of “supporting our troops.”  I’m just so happy that my grandpop is no longer around to see how disgustingly this administration is treating those from whom they ask to sacrifice everything. Open Left:

An op-ed in yesterday’s Washington Post calls out the Pentagon for its role in hiding the illegal firings of reservists and national guardsmen by their civilian employers when they return from Iraq.  To give an example of the scale of the problem, between 2004 and 2006, there were 16,000 complaints filed by returning troops who are supposed to be protected under the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA)... When soldiers return, they are not being protected, and worse, the only place the journalists and the public can go to find out the accurate statistics on this became off-limits in 2005:

According to the GAO, the Pentagon’s annual Status of Forces Surveys provide the only accurate account of the number of reservists experiencing reemployment difficulties. These surveys ask reservists about their service, job loss and whether they are receiving the legal protections — occupational and otherwise — guaranteed to them under federal law.

Whoops! Where’d all those guns get to?

Obama and Edwards hit Clinton over lobbyists flap. That and other political news of the day in today's Election Central Happy Hour Roundup.

Should we pay attention?  Conservative apostate Bruce Bartlett explains how he got snookered by George Bush:

My own excuse for not predicting the disaster that Bush's presidency has been is that I simply didn't believe a word he said during the 2000 campaign. I assumed that every word out of his mouth had been put there by Karl Rove and it was all based on polling and focus groups. I knew that Bush is a bit of a dim bulb, so it never occurred to me that he actually had any ideas of his own.....My point is that it is very easy to get cynical about politics and think it is all a game. That was the mistake I made in 2000, along with lots of other people. If we don't want to make the same mistake again, all of us who comment on politics need to pay closer attention to what these guys are saying and make some allowance for the possibility that they actually believe it.

It's an interesting thought. What if we actually took presidential candidates at their word and quit playing the game of looking for ulterior motives in everything they do? (Polls, interest group pandering, desire to show toughness, looking forward to the general election, etc.) That would eliminate about 90% of all political punditry (and about 99% of it on TV), but I'm sure we'd all find something else to do with all that free time. It's so crazy it might work!

"We'll have to continue drinking it, because we don't have money to buy bottled water."  
     -- Jamil Hussein, in Baghdad, on contaminated water that gave his children diarrhea because 
         power outages halted the water purification stations during a 120-degree heat wave,   Link 

"We wait for the sunset to enjoy some coolness. The people are fed-up. 
  There is no water, no electricity, there is nothing, but death."  
      --Qassim Hussein, in Karbala,     Link

Follow the money The Huffington Post has introduced FundRace, a new online tool that discloses who is funding and influencing the 2008 presidential election. The feature allows users to easily find the names and addresses of contributors to presidential candidates.

Corruption watch The NY Times writes, “One part of the Justice Department mess that requires more scrutiny is the growing evidence that the department may have singled out people for criminal prosecution to help Republicans win elections.” One especially egregious case appears to be that of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, whose conviction is “disturbingly weak.”

Elections do matter “Declaring a new direction in energy policy, the House on Saturday approved $16 billion in taxes on oil companies, while providing billions of dollars in tax breaks and incentives for renewable energy and conservation efforts.”

Falsely blaming the ivory tower  I found Michael Ignatieff's reflective essay on getting things wrong about Iraq to be somehow pleasantly soothing. But then someone pointed out to me that the whole thing is founded on the absurd premise that his errors in judgment have something to do with the mindset of academia versus the mindset of practical politics.

This is, when you think about it, totally wrong. Academics in the field of Middle East studies were overwhelmingly opposed to the war. Similarly, international relations scholars opposed the war by a very large margin. The war's foci of intellectual support were in the institutions of the conservative movement, and in the DC think tanks and the punditocracy where the war had a lot of non-conservative support. People with relevant academic expertise -- notably people who weren't really on the left politically -- were massively opposed to the war. To imply the reverse is to substantially obscure one of the main lessons of the war, namely that we should pay more attention to what regional experts think and give substantially less credence to the idea that think tankers are really "independent" of political machinations.

Great snark!  In Esquire:  "The Politico, a brand-new political fanzine that combines the biting wit of a high school slam book with the nuanced policy analysis of Tiger Beat."

Will Bush repeat Katrina failures in Minneapolis?   In a visit to the collapsed bridge in Minneapolis yesterday, President Bush vowed to aid in reconstruction efforts. But the AP reports that “[n]early two years ago, with parts of New Orleans still under water after Hurricane Katrina, Bush made similar declarations in the French Quarter, promising that the government would ’stay as long as it takes to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives.’” New Orleans City Councilwoman Shelley Midura remarked: “I’m sorry, it takes more than a simple sentence.”

One-fourth of Americans ‘underinsured.’   “A new Consumer Reports study identifies the ‘underinsured’ — accounting for 24% of the U.S. population — living with skeletal health insurance that barely covers their medical needs and leaves them unprepared to pay for major medical expenses.” Sixteen percent of Americans have “no health plan at all,” according to the study. 

Bill Clinton: WSJ editorial page is ‘more right wing’ than Fox.   At a fundraiser in the Hamptons this weekend, former President Bill Clinton unleashed harsh criticism on the ideologues on the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page. “The editorial page of the Wall Street Journal is even more right wing and irrational than most of the commentators on Fox News,” said Clinton. “And completely predictable…it’s like Pavlov’s dogs.” 

Sadism in, garbage out   You owe itself to read Jane Meyer's brilliant exposé of the systematic use of torture and detention without trial by the US government in full, but here's some key excerpts:

Gonzales informed Pearl that the Justice Department was about to announce some good news: a terrorist in U.S. custody—Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Al Qaeda leader who was the primary architect of the September 11th attacks—had confessed to killing her husband. [...] There were no named witnesses to his initial confession, and no solid information about what form of interrogation might have prodded him to talk, although reports had been published, in the Times and elsewhere, suggesting that C.I.A. officers had tortured him. At a hearing held at Guantánamo, Mohammed said that his testimony was freely given, but he also indicated that he had been abused by the C.I.A. (The Pentagon had classified as “top secret” a statement he had written detailing the alleged mistreatment.) And although Mohammed said that there were photographs confirming his guilt, U.S. authorities had found none.

A surprising number of people close to the case are dubious of Mohammed’s confession. [...] Asra Nomani [,] Special Agent Randall Bennett, the head of security for the U.S. consulate in Karachi when Pearl was killed [,] And Judea Pearl, Daniel’s father[.]

“K.S.M. is the poster boy for using tough but legal tactics. He’s the reason these techniques exist. You can save lives with the kind of information he could give up.” Yet Mohammed’s confessions may also have muddled some key investigations. [...] Colonel Dwight Sullivan, the top defense lawyer at the Pentagon’s Office of Military Commissions, which is expected eventually to try Mohammed for war crimes, called his serial confessions “a textbook example of why we shouldn’t allow coercive methods.”

The Phoenix Program, from the Vietnam War. Critics, including military historians, have described it as a program of state-sanctioned torture and murder. A Pentagon-contract study found that, between 1970 and 1971, ninety-seven per cent of the Vietcong targeted by the Phoenix Program were of negligible importance. But, after September 11th, some C.I.A. officials viewed the program as a useful model.

One psychologist advising on the treatment of Zubaydah, James Mitchell [...] Steve Kleinman, a reserve Air Force colonel and an experienced interrogator who has known Mitchell professionally for years, said that “learned helplessness was his whole paradigm.” Mitchell, he said, “draws a diagram showing what he says is the whole cycle. It starts with isolation. Then they eliminate the prisoners’ ability to forecast the future—when their next meal is, when they can go to the bathroom. It creates dread and dependency. It was the K.G.B. model. But the K.G.B. used it to get people who had turned against the state to confess falsely. The K.G.B. wasn’t after intelligence.”

“At every stage, there was a rigid attention to detail. Procedure was adhered to almost to the letter. There was top-down quality control, and such a set routine that you get to the point where you know what each detainee is going to say, because you’ve heard it before. It was almost automated. People were utterly dehumanized. People fell apart. It was the intentional and systematic infliction of great suffering masquerading as a legal process. It is just chilling.”

According to sources familiar with interrogation techniques, the hanging position is designed, in part, to prevent detainees from being able to sleep. [...] An American Bar Association report, published in 1930, which was cited in a later U.S. Supreme Court decision, said, “It has been known since 1500 at least that deprivation of sleep is the most effective torture and certain to produce any confession desired.”

“Waterboarding works,” the former officer said. “Drowning is a baseline fear. So is falling. People dream about it. It’s human nature. Suffocation is a very scary thing. When you’re waterboarded, you’re inverted, so it exacerbates the fear. It’s not painful, but it scares the shit out of you.” (The former officer was waterboarded himself in a training course.) Mohammed, he claimed, “didn’t resist. He sang right away. He cracked real quick.” He said, “A lot of them want to talk. Their egos are unimaginable. K.S.M. was just a little doughboy. He couldn’t stand toe to toe and fight it out.”

Ultimately, however, Mohammed claimed responsibility for so many crimes that his testimony became to seem inherently dubious. In addition to confessing to the Pearl murder, he said that he had hatched plans to assassinate President Clinton, President Carter, and Pope John Paul II. [...] [E]ven supporters, such as John Brennan, acknowledge that much of the information that coercion produces is unreliable. As he put it, “All these methods produced useful information, but there was also a lot that was bogus.” When pressed, one former top agency official estimated that “ninety per cent of the information was unreliable.

So in summary, what they've hit upon is a protocol based on the best practices developed by Soviet and medieval torturers alike to accomplish torture's traditional goal -- the extraction of false confessions -- and seem to have wound up with a bunch of false confessions. Which, of course, is precisely what you'd expect to wind up with if you thought for a minute about why governments have, historically, resorted to the systemic deployment of torture.

GOP in Idle  Yesterday evening I watched a recording of Sunday's Republican debate in Iowa, which ran on ABC's This Week show. All the current candidates were there, with the exception of Fred Thompson, who of course isn't even in the race.

I learned a few things.

The first is that beside being a monumental phoney and most canned politician in history, Mitt Romney can be quite articulate and appears to be fairly knowledgeable on domestic policy questions like health care and taxation. You learn something new every day.

The second is that Rudy Giuliani seems to know next to nothing about virtually every national policy issue -- ironically, given his campaign presentation, though not so odd if you consider his actual career in office, he knows more about domestic policy than foreign policy.

The third is just how weak this field really is -- something I knew but hadn't seen yet quite so up close. I can't imagine that a sentient Republican could have watched that 90 minutes and not been at least quietly aghast. McCain, who is the only person on the stage with real national stature, comes off as a crushed man, almost pained. But the issue isn't so much that most of them don't seem up to the challenge of being president. It is more that the political climate and the state of the Republican party in general makes their answers to most questions either off-balance, awkward or completely incoherent.

The discussion of Iraq was the case in point. Only two guys on the stage had anything remotely coherent to say on the subject -- McCain and Paul. Brownback was better than the rest, but not by that much. There was actually a relatively lengthy statement on the topic by Tommy Thompson ... that had to be one of the most nonsensical and factually-challenged things I've heard on the subject to date -- the highlight was how Iraq has already been divided into 18 separate states so partition into three states is unworkable.

I'm not saying they're stupid. But watching these forums, you can see that George Bush has left the ideological and policy furniture of the GOP in such a shambles that these guys can't even find a place to stand or pivot on to an issue of choice.

Then there was the exchange on the nation's infrastructure and how to get money to repair bridges before they fall into various lakes, rivers and bays. Giuliani, trying to prove his national conservative credentials, claimed that the best way to raise money to repair the nation's bridges was to cut taxes. This is, I dare say, a caricature of supply-side economics, which admittedly was always something of a caricature in itself.

Romney's moments of articulateness came in moments when he was pulling the dialog back from digressions into utter fantasy.

Mine is of course an interested view of Republican party politics. But I think I have some basic read on its relative vitality at different points in time. And this struck me as about as ragged and threadbare as I've seen. Watching Sunday morning's Republican debate was like watching a car struggling to get out of idle, with each of the contenders carting out one of more cliches but unable to do much with them. Only McCain and Paul are willing to say anything about Iraq. When Giuliani gets asked about Iraq he carts out these complete non-sequiturs about how the Democrats refuse to use the phrase 'Islamic terrorism'.

A kind of must read of must reads -- The New Yorker's look inside the CIA's "black sites."

Playing the game  Yesterday I suggested that the Democratic leadership got badly outplayed in last week's FISA fiasco. They were lulled into thinking that negotiations over the FISA amendment were all going fine, and then at the last minute got blindsided with new demands they weren't prepared for. With no backup strategy in place, they caved. Publius, however, disagrees:

Was it all planned? If so, that's some pretty impressive chess playing. And that's the problem with this theory. It's hard to believe that the same bunch that loses nearly 200,000 AK-47s and pistols in Iraq is capable of this sort of Kasparov-esque foresight.....Bottom line — I think some went awry inside the White House. Some wires got crossed. Either that, or they are chess geniuses acting in extremely bad faith. Frankly, it seems obnoxious even for them to purposely go through the motions of reaching an agreement with the House Dems with the knowledge that they would never honor it. As OCSteve said in the comments yesterday: "We don't have to attribute to evil what pure [incompetence] can accomplish."

Given the choice, I generally choose incompetence over evil myself, but for two reasons I'm not sure I do in this case. First: although the Bush White House is famously incompetent in carrying out actual policy, they've long been pretty sharp when it comes to political maneuvering. This kind of ploy is Negotiation 101, and Cheney, Rove, and Addington are almost certainly pretty well versed in it. They aren't naifs.

Second, and more important: These negotiations had been going on for months, not just a few days, and Mike McConnell, who led the talks, was no junior lawyer. He's a vice admiral, a former director of the NSA, current Director of National Intelligence, broadly respected in both parties, and very plainly the person who knows the most about the technical requirements of the NSA's eavesdropping program. There's no way that he simply "misunderstood" the White House's requirements here.

What's more, the last-minute changes weren't trivial. They were big changes, the language implementing them was subtle and obviously well thought out, and the demand came literally on the last day before adjournment. If this was a screwup, it was helluva smooth looking screwup.

In any case, Publius is definitely correct in his conclusion:

That said, there was an agreement and it was broken in a particularly bad faith manner. From a policy perspective (and for game theory reasons), this sort of conduct undermines future negotiations on virtually any other issue and poisons the air. Accordingly, I fully expect to see David Ignatius, Anne-Marie Slaughter, David Broder, and others up in arms about this affront to bipartisan cooperation and common decency in the days ahead.

Um, sure, me too. I won't be waiting up nights for it, though.

GOP state legislator: Fear of Black Man Made Me Pay for Blowjob!  You remember a little while back we brought you the story of Florida McCain campaign co-chair, Rep. Bob Allen (R). Right on the heels of Giuliani Southern Regional Chairman David Vitter's exposure as a serial user of prostitutes, Allen got caught in a Titusville park restroom offering to pay an undercover police officer to allow him to perform oral sex on him.

Now it turns out that Allen revealed the true reason for the alleged park-john-offer in a tape recorded statement he made just after his arrest.

"This was a pretty stocky black guy, and there was nothing but other black guys around in the park," said Allen, according to this article in the Orlando Sentinel. Allen went on to say he was afraid of becoming a "statistic."

I guess this raises the question of whether if you thought you were about to get mugged by a group of stocky black guys, your first plan of escape would be to try to give one of them a blowjob. But I guess maybe you had to be there.

In any case, we now have this further account of the negotiation from the police report ...

In a written statement released Thursday, Titusville Officer Danny Kavanaugh recalled entering the restroom twice and said he was drying his hands in a stall when Allen peered over the stall door.

After peering over the stall a second time, Allen pushed open the door and joined Kavanaugh inside, the officer wrote. Allen muttered " 'hi,' " and then said, " 'this is kind of a public place, isn't it,' " the report said.

The officer said he asked Allen about going somewhere else and that the legislator suggested going "across the bridge, it's quieter over there."

"Well look, man, I'm trying to make some money; you think you can hook me up with 20 bucks?" Kavanaugh asked Allen.

The officer said Allen responded, "Sure, I can do that, but this place is too public."

Then Kavanaugh said he told Allen, "I wanna know what I gotta do for 20 bucks before we leave.' " He said Allen replied: "I don't know what you're into."

According to Kavanaugh's statement, the officer said, "do you want just [oral sex]?" and Allen replied, "I was thinking you would want one."

The officer said he then asked Allen, "but you'll still give me the 20 bucks for that . . . and that the legislator said, "yeah, I wouldn't argue with that."

As Allen turned and motioned for the officer to follow him to his car, Kavanaugh identified himself as a police officer by raising his shirt and exposing his badge.