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Grand Slam "No way,no how,no John McCain" The Hillary Factor and why Excellent Choice Nuance v Steadfast Start the real campaign Glad to be back Vacation bound....Destination...Chicago Do negative ads work? Will be vice presidential choice influence your vote? October 07 November 07 December 07 January 08 February 08 March 08 April 08 May 08 June 08 July 08 August 08 John Edwards & Barack Obama went straight for the jugular in going after Hillary. They attacked the vote on calling the Iranian Revolutionary Council a terrorist organization. Saying it will give this president the excuse he needs to go to war with Iran. Hillary’s inconsistent answers were exposed on social security and at the end of the debate she agreed with New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer's controversial plan to give driver's licenses to illegal immigrants but then a minute later started backtracking. Now Bill Clinton was a master at being evasive but her facial expressions and demeanor showed she is no Bill Clinton. Will this debate change the numbers? I don’t know. I think what was really exposed last night was status quo positions of the front runner. How can my party complain about the secrecy in the Bush Administration if Hillary does not turn over all her documents? I understand it gives the other candidates an unfair advantage, because she will be the only candidate required to do this. But if this lack of transparency is going to stop, someone has to take the lead. The other is lobbyist money; Hillary has out raised all the candidates of both parties in lobbyist money from Wall Street, defense department, and insurance and drug companies. Some might see it as success but really it business as usual. Somehow we must have a leader to take us to public financing because these lobbyist have too much influence. I am getting suspicious as to why the Bush Administration is getting their way on the latest NSA spying bill. Did the telecommunication lobbyist have something to do with it? I don’t know. This may sound like a slam on Hillary but it really isn’t, it just exposes some of her weakness in a primary. Great leaders learn form mistakes and they don’t usually repeat them. Constructive criticism will only make a person stronger. 
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The Supreme Court recently ruled that the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay can have the opportunity to challenge the accusations in a court of law. The court restored the centuries-old habeas corpus. The court did not say that United States could not hold the prisoners indefinitely. This ruling angered the president, John McCain and several other conservatives. In fact John McCain and Lindsey Graham are going to introduce legislation to establish a national security court, because they are afraid of the justice system we have in place. Newt Gingrich said we will lose an American city because of the ruling. John McCain's anger at the decision does not make any sense, because he wants to close Guantánamo Bay. I know the administration does not want the tortured prisoners to tell their story. They should just kill them rather than make a mockery out of the justice system. Some of the prisoners have plead guilty and asked for the death penalty. We also know that a few the prisoners were found to be innocent. The court also ruled that American citizens have the right to habeas corpus,when they are in government detention, no matter where they are detained, and how they are labeled. This overturned the president's “international authority” as a way to deny habeas corpus to American citizens abroad. On military matters, I usually give John McCain the benefit of the doubt, because he is a true American hero, and I would never question his support for the troops. He has tested my beliefs, recently. When the senator was asked if he had an estimate for when the US troops might leave Iraq he said “No, that's not too important” he went onto say "what's important is casualties in Iraq.” Giving McCain the benefit of the doubt still does not explain why, third or forth tours are not that important. It is to the troops and their families. That comparison to South Korea and Germany is not resonating with me. This is the Middle East or the sandbox as the soldiers call it,is not a place where a soldier can roam Baghdad unharmed. Religion does not play a big role, when there is violence in South Korea or Germany. Ten casualties this month this month, with four to be identified, and when we withdraw is not important? Perhaps Senator McCain is not being up front with us by giving us the larger picture. Are the troops in full force, because we are planning to attack Iran, if Obama wins the November election? Are they pulling out all stops to preserve the Bush -McCain legacy? Is it to man the proposed 60 new bases? McCain said we ought to wait until July, when General Petraeus’s report comes out to see where we go from there. I don’t see a political reconciliation in one month. It will be a carbon copy of the others. Give us six more months. He keeps saying the surge is working, but we always knew if we send more troops and got more Iraqi troops trained, and in the field the violence would go down. It’s that second part, political reconciliation that we need to get to. The military victories have not taken the Sunni and Shia to the table. McCain continues to say Obama is waving the flag of surrender, by wanting to start the responsible withdrawal when he gets into office. If victory is really just around the corner; I'm sure any president would allow that to happen. McCain predicts gloom and doom him if we choose a timetable for withdraw, but he is also the one that predicted that we would be greeted as liberators, and it would be a short successful war. Only thing we know for sure is that there is no is no truth certain either way. The Senate intelligence committee found Iraq intelligence exaggerations. I have been waiting for this report for three years. Nothing new to me in these findings, but it should take all the talking points used to justify this war of choice; off the table. Will this report make much difference? I doubt it. People will be more interested in social or economic issues. John McCain's experience did not see the contradictory evidence for going to war; he supported it from the very start and vows to continue it. We all know the Republicans will sweep it under the rug, and a few Democrats that voted for a resolution to go to war, will try to do the same. At the very least we should all read the findings and be a little more skeptical. the next time an administration wants to go to war. Especially now, since only less than one half of 1% are doing the actual fighting. Will these findings ever make it to page 1 of the New York Times or the lead story on the evening news? We shall see. This is what really gets my goat,instead of saying "no comment" they continue to make excuses or blame someone else...No accountability. From today's news conference: In today’s press briefing, White House Press Secretary Dana Perino was dismissive of the report, explaining that President Bush made false statements before the Iraq war simply because he was kept in the dark:
A cut & paste from today's New York Times 6/05/08 WASHINGTON — In a report long delayed by partisan squabbling, the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday accused President Bush and Vice President Cheney of taking the country to war in Iraq by exaggerating evidence of links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda in the emotional aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Skip to next paragraph“The president and his advisers undertook a relentless public campaign in the aftermath of the attacks to use the war against Al Qaeda as a justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein,” Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV, the committee’s Democratic chairman, said in a statement accompanying the 171-page report. The committee’s report cited some instances in which public statements by senior administration officials were not supported by the intelligence available at the time, such as suggestions that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda were operating in a kind of partnership, that the Baghdad regime had provided the terrorist network with weapons training, and that one of the Sept. 11 hijackers had met an Iraqi intelligence operative in Prague in 2001. But the report found that on several key issues, including Iraq’s alleged nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs, public statements from Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and other top officials before the war were generally “substantiated” by the best estimates of the intelligence agencies, though the statements did not always reflect the agencies’ uncertainty about the evidence. All the weapons claims were disproved after invading troops found no unconventional arsenal and little effort to build one. Republicans on the committee sharply dissented from some of its findings and attached a detailed minority report that listed pre-war statements by Mr. Rockefeller and other Democrats describing the threat posed by Iraq. “The report released today was a waste of committee time and resources that should have been spent overseeing the intelligence community,” said the minority report, signed by Sen. Christopher S. Bond of Missouri, the committee’s top Republican, and three Republican colleagues. A second committee report, also made public on Thursday, detailed a series of clandestine meetings between Pentagon officials and Iranian dissidents in Rome and Paris in 2001 and 2003. It accused Steven Hadley, now the national security advisor, and Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy defense secretary, of failing to properly inform the intelligence agencies and the State Department about the meetings. The two reports are the final parts of the committee’s so-called “phase two” investigation of pre-war intelligence on Iraq and related issues. The first phase of the inquiry, completed in July 2004, identified grave faults in the intelligence agencies’ collection and analysis of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. In order to complete that initial 2004 report, committee members agreed to put off several of the more politically volatile topics. Sen. Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who was then chairman, nonetheless declared nearly four years ago that the phase two effort was “a priority. I made my commitment and it will get done.” But a lengthy standoff ensued. Democrats accused Republicans of dodging their demands to complete the inquiry in order to protect the Bush administration from damaging revelations. Republicans insisted that they were not dragging their feet and asserted that the findings might well turn out to embarrass Congressional Democrats. In September 2006, the committee issued reports on two parts of the phase two study, one on how pre-war assessments of Iraq’s weapons programs and links to terrorism compared with post-war findings and another on the intelligence agencies’ use of information from the Iraqi National Congress, the controversial opposition group to Saddam Hussein. In May 2007, the committee, now led by Democrats, put out a third part of the phase two review, this one examining pre-war predictions by the intelligence agencies about post-war Iraq. But it would take another year to complete the most delicate part of the planned inquiry, the look at pre-war public statements by executive branch officials. In the end, the Republicans chose to issue their own dissenting report, aimed at showing that some Democrats who have been eager to attack the administration had themselves made bellicose comments about Saddam Hussein and the threat he posed. The Senate Intelligence Committee, once seen as a relative refuge from the political maneuvering and brawling that characterizes many other committees, has been mired in partisan dispute for most of the last five years. Thursday’s reports and the polarized comments accompanying them are unlikely to improve relations between Mr. Rockefeller and Mr. Bond and their party colleagues on the committee
Last night's Scott McClellan's interview with Bill O'Reilly had to be the worst ever. It was more of a hit job, or a stern lecture from Bill O'Reilly, than it was an interview. O'Reilly seemed more concerned with George W. Bush's reputation, and Scott giving information to the dreaded NBC and the Bush haters, as he called them. Scott McClellan went toe to toe with the mighty mouth, because O'Reilly did not know the facts. Bill used that "everyone knew he had WMD line" but that talking point was debunked several years ago, because contrary evidence was ignored. O'Reilly tried to clobber Scott for saying Karl Rowe leaked the identity of Valerie Plame. Karl Rove did leak Valerie's name twice; once to Bob Novak, and then to a Newsweek reporter. The fact that Richard Armitage was the first leaker does not let Rove off the hook, because he leaked the name to other sources. Evidently Karl Rowe lied to the president, and Congress wants to hear more. Later OReilly summoned blogger Mary Katharine Ham and Juan Williams to back up his talking points. The showed ended with the body language expert, praising Scott McClellan for standing up to the mighty one, Bill O'Reilly…..LOL To my surprise, Jon Stewart got more out of Scott McClellan than Keith Olbermann, Bill O'Reilly, and Anderson Cooper. Jon Stewart separated a well intended talking point from an outright lie. John said if the president said he wanted to let the people decide, but intentionally left out contrary points of view, then that was an error of omission and an outright lie. I still see Scott McClellan as a weasel for giving the press propaganda on a serious topic like Iraq. I do see the premise of his book. Scott is trying to make amends and deliver an important message. Scott is taking a strong stand against the politics of a permanent campaign. Whoever wins in November should reach across party lines and compromise on the serious problems of the immediate future. Scott only made $75,000 in advance for writing this book (paltry by today's standards) and he has promised to give some of the proceeds to the families of the fallen veterans of The Iraq war. He debunked the ghost writer conspiracy by backing up every statement in the book.
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