Bush and Schumer

/in , /by

David Kurtz reports that the Mukasey nomination will come down to the Senate Judiciary Committee vote (and TPM is tracking votes so far). I believe this sets up some really interesting tension between Bush and Chuck Schumer.

You see, events thus far have made it very important for Bush to get Mukasey approved. While David Addington may have thought it in Bush’s best interest to push Mukasey to adopt the party line, they’re now at the place where, if Mukasey is rejected, it will be because of Bush’s torture policy. (Frankly, this is unfortunate from a principled perspective, since it means that the Senators don’t care about the unitary executive more generally, but it works to our advantage politically.) The press has spun the rising tension to be entirely about the issue of torture, which makes it inconceivable that, if Mukasey is rejected, the narrative will be anything but torture. Which will shine a bright light on the torture policy itself, and some Soccer Moms who might otherwise be ignorant that men are being tortured in their names may just discover that their government is doing reprehensible things.

Which is why Bush is so pissy about the doubts about Mukasey’s appointment.

President Bush Read more →

Who Vetted Mukasey?

/in , /by

Here’s an interesting question from Dick Durbin to Mukasey. It addresses whom the Administration felt it needed to give buy-in before nominating Judge Mukasey:

11. According to the Washington Post, before you were confirmed you "spent part of the weekend meeting with leading figures in the conservative world, seeking to allay their concerns about [your] philosophy and suitability for running [the] Justice Department."

a. With whom did you meet?

ANSWER: Prior to the announcement of my nomination, I met with former Attorney General Edwin Meese III, Lee Casey, Leonard Leo, David Rivkin, Jay Sekulow, and Edward Whelan.

b. Who asked you to take these meetings?

ANSWER: Officials within the White House. I cannot remember the specific individuals.

So:

  • A former Attorney General implicated in Iran-Contra and additional corruption allegations.
  • Casey and Rivkin, a one-two team serving as the public intellectuals defending the unitary executive
  • Leo, the Executive VP of the Federalist Society alleged to have been involved in the Civil Rights Division politicization
  • Sekulow, the Chief Counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice, one of the brains behind the Terry Schiavo circus, and someone with his own ethical challenges
  • Ed Whelan, himself a bit of a public intellectual for the right, not to mention a former OLC Read more →

Razed

/in , /by

Okay, I mean this to be an honest question. The NYT has scary pictures up–courtesy of William Broad, who was glued to Judy’s hip on Mobile Bioweapons Lab stories in summer 2003–showing that the purported nuclear reactor the Israelis took out in Syria has been razed to the ground.

Weapons_6002

That offers proof, the accompanying article states, that the Syrians were up to no good, and that the bombed site was a nuclear reactor.

A mysterious Syrian military facility that was reportedly the target ofan attack by Israeli jets last month has been razed, according to a newsatellite image that shows only a vacant lot in the place where Syriawas recently constructing what some U.S. officials believe was anuclear reactor.

The new photograph, taken by a commercial satellite yesterday,suggests that Syrian officials moved quickly to remove evidence of theproject after it was damaged by Israeli bombs on Sept. 6, said DavidAlbright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a nonprofit research group.

"They are clearly trying to hide the evidence," Albright said in aninterview. "It is a trick that has been tried in the past and it hasn’tworked."

Here’s what I don’t get. The site was bombed. By Israelis. If you have doubts Read more →

Madame Secretary Finally Accepts an Invitation

/in , /by

Frankly, I’ve been holding my breath since I first saw this (tentatively) on Selise’s weekly hearing schedule. After all, Waxman has been trying to get Condi Rice to appear before the Oversight Committee since early spring. But they’ve now announced the hearing, so I’m breathing again.

The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform will hold a hearingentitled, “The State Department and the Iraq War” on Thursday morning,October 25, 2007, in 2154 Rayburn House Office Building.

Thehearing will examine unanswered questions regarding the performance ofthe State Department on several significant issues relating to the Iraqwar, including the impact of the activities of Blackwater USA andcorruption within the Iraqi ministries on the prospects of politicalreconciliation in Iraq. The Committee may also discuss with theSecretary allegations of wrongdoing associated with the construction ofthe new U.S. Embassy Compound in Baghdad, as well as other mattersunder investigation by the Committee.

WHO: The Honorable Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State

That said, I imagine Condi’s neatest piece of diplomacy since taking over as Secretary of State was this hearing (granted, the competition isn’t all that stiff). The Crypt reports that Condi will face a wide range of questions.

Condoleezza Rice is scheduled to appear before the House Oversight andGoverment Reform Committee Read more →

Lobbyist Logic

/in , /by

I know you have all been worried at my seeming recovery from my obsession with Ed Gillespie. But worry not–the dearth of Gillespie posts was mostly explained by my travel schedule (which gets really bad again this week, then gets better), and not any disinterest in the guy who took over after they fired Bush’s brain.

And this, I guess, is the kind of logic you get from the Lobbyist-in-Chief with which they replaced Bush’s brain, from this NYT article chronicling how glum Republicans are at their diminishing (political) fortunes.

At the White House, administration officials urged CongressionalRepublicans to try to remain positive and ride out the current turmoil.Ed Gillespie, a senior adviser to Mr. Bush, told the visitors,according to multiple accounts, that had Republicans sided withDemocrats on the health program, they would have opened themselves towithering criticism from conservatives and been in a worse positionthan they are now.

Let’s see… "had Republicans sided with Democrats" on the S-CHIP vote. I wonder how Representatives Tom Davis, Heather Wilson, and Don Young feel about that assertion, since they were among the 45 Republicans in the House who voted for S-CHIP? Perhaps it’s no accident that Tom Davis is one of the Republicans quoted as Read more →

The Cost of Doing Business

/in , /by

Walter Pincus analyzes one of the contracts that Henry Waxman is looking at to determine how much more Blackwater’s mercenaries are costing us than a law-abiding US soldier. Pincus notes that Petraeus makes roughly $493 a day. This doesn’t appear to include benefits; figuring benes make up 1/3 of someone’s compensation–which in the private sector is often about right, but in the military is probably too small–then Petraeus might cost us, the taxpayer, $750 a day. That’s for our top commander in Iraq, $750 a day.

And here’s how a Blackwater employee gets charged:

Average day-to-day personnel, $600/day salary paid by Blackwater
Blackwater bills Regency, $850/day for operators
Regency bills ESS an average of $1100/day for all types of employees
ESS charges Halliburton which charges the US based on a per-meal basis (I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that Halliburton has some profit worked into this)

A married Iraqi sergeant serving in Iraq makes about $170/day [updated for clarity].

No wonder Bush needs another $200 billion. He’s outsourcing the actual fighting of this war to forces that cost six times as much as it would if our military still did the fighting.

Counterproliferationinsurgency

/in , /by

I’ve got two small points to make about Sy Hersh’s latest, which has been covered generally just about everywhere.

What had been presented primarily as a counter-proliferation mission has been reconceived as counterterrorism.

The shift in targeting reflects three developments. First, thePresident and his senior advisers have concluded that their campaign toconvince the American public that Iran poses an imminent nuclear threathas failed (unlike a similar campaign before the Iraq war), and that asa result there is not enough popular support for a major bombingcampaign. The second development is that the White House has come toterms, in private, with the general consensus of the Americanintelligence community that Iran is at least five years away fromobtaining a bomb. And, finally, there has been a growing recognition inWashington and throughout the Middle East that Iran is emerging as thegeopolitical winner of the war in Iraq.

This, it seems to me, invites a logical approach to combating this idiocy. The Bushies are admitting, at least among themselves, that their "laptop of death" campaign (and other silliness) didn’t work. It didn’t work, of course, because it was manufactured bullshit. From the line, " the White House has come toterms, in private, with the general consensus of the Read more →

Who Owns the UN’s Computer Systems?

/in , /by

Via ThinkProgress, USA Today reports that the cheat sheet for Bush’s speech got placed on the UN website today.

Apparently, a marked-up draft of the president’s speech popped up onthe U.N.’s website as President Bush delivered his remarks this morningbefore the General Assembly, USA TODAY’s David Jackson reports. Thedraft included phonetic spellings of some names and countries, and thecellphone numbers for Bush speechwriters.

Press secretary Dana Perino downplayed the incident, and saidphonetic spellings are used to help interpreters. Asked if thepresident has trouble pronouncing some country’s names, Perino deemedit "an offensive question."

"There was an error made," Perino said, noting it was not a final draft.

"It was taken down and there’s nothing more to say about it."

Apparently, Bush spent his time with Sarkozy in Maine drunk or something, because the French President’s name is one of the ones included in Bush’s pronunciation guide.

  • Kyrgyzstan [KEYR-geez-stan]
  • Mauritania [moor-EH-tain-ee-a]
  • Harare [hah-RAR-ray]
  • Mugabe [moo-GAH-bee]
  • Sarkozy [sar-KO-zee]
  • Caracas [kah-RAH-kus]

Now, Dana Peroxide says it was a mistake. But I’m reminded of another little technical gaffe that Bush had once at the UN. In September 2002, after Powell and Blair (on one side) and Cheney and Rummy (on the other) had been arguing for a month over whether Bush should call for a UN resolution on Iraq or whether the US should just bypass the UN process altogether. In the end, Bush agreed to include a call for a new resolution. But mysteriously, when Bush read the speech from the teleprompter, that line had been removed. From Woodward’s Plan of Attack:

Chuck Grassley Agrees with the Netroots

/in , /by

Like many of us, Grassley argues that if you bring an issue that has widespread support among the electorate up for a vote often enough, you will eventually convince intransigent Republicans to vote for it.

Grassley said if he were the Democrats, he would send the SCHIPexpansion to a vote every three months, along with campaignadvertisements accusing Republicans of abandoning children. That way,pressure would mount either on Bush to sign the bill or on HouseRepublicans to override the veto.

Of course, Grassley is referring to SCHIP and not the Iraq War. But the comment–and the article more generally–is worthwhile nonetheless. For Grassley states clearly that the Bush Administration is willing to sustain awful policy outcomes to make an ideological point.

Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) and White Houseaides agreed that Bush’s opposition to the legislation stems not fromits price tag but from far larger health policy issues. The White Housewants to use the issue of uninsured children to resurrect thepresident’s long-dormant proposals to change the federal tax code tohelp the uninsured, adults and children alike, Grassley said, callingthat a laudable goal but unrealistic politically.

[snip]

Asked if Bush was holding the children’s health bill hostage, Grassley said, "Yes."

The reporter should have posed that last question Read more →

The Real Reason

/in , , /by

I’ve got a different interpretation of the news–via ThinkProgress–that Bush is advising Democrats to keep their options open to sustain the permanent war in Iraq.

Bush has “been urging candidates: ‘Don’t get yourself too locked inwhere you stand right now. If you end up sitting where I sit, thingscould change dramatically.’ ”

Bolten said Bush wants enoughcontinuity in his Iraq policy that “even a Democratic president wouldbe in a position to sustain a legitimate presence there.”

“Especiallyif it’s a Democrat,” the chief of staff told The Examiner in his WestWing office. “He wants to create the conditions where a Democrat notonly will have the leeway, but the obligation to see it out.”

Rather than some Rovian gimmick to gain advantage in the presidential election, I think this just suggests that Bush believes that when a Democrat becomes President in 2009 (and I do think this suggests he thinks it highly likely), she will review intelligence and get advice and realize that the US must stay in Iraq. Here’s the logic Bush offers.