Good news !! 2 + 2 = 5

NeoCon columnist Bill Kristol has notoriously been wrong on just about everything -- from championing WMD as a reason to invade Iraq to cheerleading for McCain to choose Sarah Palin.

Now we have his take on Sen. Specter's going over to the Democrats: He says it may be good news for the GOP.

Kristol's thinking goes like this (in the WashingtonPost):

With the likely seating of Al Franken from Minnesota, Democrats will have 60 seats in the Senate, giving Obama unambiguous governing majorities in both bodies. He’ll be responsible for everything. GOP obstructionism will go away as an issue, and Democratic defections will become the constant worry and story line. This will make it easier for GOP candidates in 2010 to ask to be elected to help restore some checks and balance in Washington -- and, meanwhile, Specter’s party change won’t likely have made much difference in getting key legislation passed or not. So, losing Specter may help produce greater GOP gains in November 2010, and a brighter Republican future.

Well, that's assuming that the voters won't like the results of the key legislation that gets passed. If they do -- and so far they seem to like what Obama is trying to do, despite Republican obstructionism -- then why would they want to give Republicans more power to obstruct it?

Kristol's saying it's good news for Republicans = it must really be good news for Democrats.

Or:

You can put lipstick on a pig, but . . . . it's still bad news for the GOP.

Ralph

Send in the clowns . . . again

Whenever the Republicans need to distract the public from something they'd rather hide from, they send in the clowns.

So Arlen Specter defected, and McConnell says it endangers the country.

That was clownish enough, but then the chief clownette had to weigh in with her special brand of nutty distraction.

Minnesota Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann, following Rush Limbaugh's cue, suggested on Tuesday that President Obama was to blame for the swine flu crisis. She went even further than the talk show host, implying that swine flu epidemics are a Democratic phenomenon that dates back to President Carter.

"I find it interesting that it was back in the 1970s that the swine flu broke out then under another Democrat president Jimmy Carter. And I'm not blaming this on President Obama, I just think it's an interesting coincidence."

Unfortunately, Bachmann's facts are a little off. As Glenn Thrush notes, Republican President Gerald Ford, not Carter, led the country during the last outbreak of the virus.

And wasn't it a Republican senator who insisted on removing funds from Obama's stimulus bill that would have prepared us to fight a pandemic, like the swine flu that is coming?

Michelle, Michelle . . . . you're a living, breathing SNL skit, and you don't even know it.

Ralph

News flash !!! Specter's endangering the country

From the Huffington Post:

Mitch McConnell, leader of a Republican minority that is now even smaller, suggested Tuesday that Sen. Arlen Specter's defection endangered not just the party, but the entire country.

"I think the threat to the country presented by this defection really relates to the issue of whether or not in the United States of America our people want the majority to have whatever it wants without restraint, without a check or a balance," McConnell said Tuesday.

"Obviously, we are not happy that Senator Specter has decided to become a Democrat," McConnell said. "If we are not successful in Minnesota ... Democrats, at least on paper, will have 60 votes. I think the danger of that for the country is that there won't automatically be an ability to restrain the excess that is typically associated with big majorities and single-party rule."

News for you Senator McConnell. The American people DO want the majority to be able to pass effective legislation without the obstructionism that's all the power your little party has left. That is why they elected Obama president and gave the Dems the majority in both houses.

Don't you get it?

Now quit stalling and allow Al Franken to take his rightful seat, and let us get on with solving the problems of this country.

Ralph

Specter's switch

Pennsylvania's Senator Arlen Specter is switching parties to run in 2010 as a Democrat. Facing strong opposition from a conservative in the Republican primary, he obviously thinks he will do better running as a Democrat -- and he's probably right.

Long one of the more moderate Republicans in the Senate, Specter was one of three who voted for the stimulus bill. He's also more moderate on stem cell research and a number of other issues.

Although he cautions not to assume he's an automatic vote with the Democrats on every issue, the fact is that it does add one caucus vote, and once Al Franken is finally seated that makes the magic number of 60.

And, although I'm sure Specter will continue to vote his own principles and that he will differ with the Democratic position on some things, there will likely be others where his being a member of the Democratic caucus, instead of the Republican caucus, may sway him a bit.

And most important of all, cloture votes -- which are mostly political because they come up when someone is trying to delay a bill they probably can't win otherwise -- have just moved one vote closer to becoming irrelevance.

It's good news.

Ralph

Oh, great . . . just what we needed

When Obama gave his speech on the economy to Congress in February, Bobby Jindal was the chosen Republican respondent. He made something of a laughing stock of himself at the time; and a few weeks later, when a volcano erupted in Alaska, his having ridiculed the inclusion of volcano monitoring in the stimulus plan came back to haunt him. Ridicule got bounced back to ridicule him.

Well, now there's another one. It turns out that one of the demands that Sen. Susan Collins required for her support was eliminating the funding for planning and fighting a pandemic.

Now we are facing the real possibility of a swine flu pandemic.

Republican short-sightedness knows no bounds.

Ralph

Tell me lies . . . please !!

I thought I was through with the torture debates, but here's a new twist that may be important, especially as reason to prosecute higher ups.

Here's the new twist. Many who challenge the use of torture say that what it does produce is FALSE information. The torturee will say anything you want to hear to get you to stop. That's what everyone was telling Cheney, et al in 2002, but they kept demanding more. So, maybe that's what they wanted -- false information.

Remember the Downing Street memo from the head of British intelligence to Tony Blair, saying that the Bush administration was determined to go to war in Iraq and that "the intelligence and facts are being fixed around the policy." A week later Bybee produced the torture guidelines.

As soon as the Bybee memo "legalized" torture, Abu Zabaydah was waterboarded at least 83 times in August 2002. As reported in the just released Senate Armed Services Report, an Army psychiatrist involved in the interrogation, Maj. Paul Burney, said that much of it was focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and that they were under increasing pressure to produce that intelligence.

In Sunday's New York Times, Frank Rick points out that there was a ticking bomb, but it was the Bush administration's determination to get Congress to pass a war resolution before the mid-term elections in November.

Instead of saving us from "another 9/11," torture was a tool in the campaign to falsify and exploit 9/11 so that fearful Americans would be bamboozled into a mission that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda. The lying about Iraq remains the original sin from which flows much of the Bush White House's illegality.

It turns out that Zabaydah had nothing to tell them about links with Al Qaeda because they didn't exist. But Cheney had been told by his psychopathic buddy Chalabi that they did, so he was determined to get "proof" of it from this detainee. So did they finally break Zabaydah with waterboarding and get what they wanted to hear?

On September 8, 2002 Cheney told Meet the Press that there were "numerous contacts" between Al Qaeda and Iraq. And polls around that time showed a majority of American people believed that there was a connection between Iraq and 9/11. We now know there was none. It was all lies.

I think that by then Cheney didn't care whether the links were true or not. The WMB justification wasn't working out; he had to have something to use as the "smoking gun" to sell the war.

In fact, what he really wanted by then was false information. And torture is very good at getting false information, exactly what you want to hear, because that's what they will tell you to get the torture to stop.

I doubt that can be proved; but if it could, that seems to me to be grounds for criminal prosecution -- torturing prisoners to get false information for political purposes and for selling an unnecessary war to a frightened and gullible American public.

Ralph

Lighter fare for a spring morning

Rudy Giuliani is reportedly gearing up to run for governor of New York.

He must have taken a page from Newt Gingrich's guide book, the one where Newt got religion and had himself blessed by Pat Robertson so he could go after the family values crowd -- just in case he hears the call to run for president.

So what course is thrice married Rudy taking? He's crowing about the blunder he believes current governor David Paterson has made in introducing a bill to legalize same-sex marriage in New York. Rudy claims it will be the downfall of the Democratic Party in New York, because it will spark a grassroots movement.

In New York??? Come on, Iowa has same-sex marriage. Does he really think New Yorkers will let a corn belt state out-liberal them?

Now here's the jokey part of this. When Rudy's second wife kicked him out of the governor's mansion -- or rather when he moved out after she refused to allow him to bring his mistress to formal affairs in the mansion, the mistress who is now Mrs. Giuliani and would be the First Lady -- he moved in, and lived for some weeks, with a committed gay male couple that were his long time friends.

And -- get this -- it was widely reported in the press that Rudy had told them that if it ever became legal for them to marry, he would perform the ceremony. As mayor he could have done that. Now Rudy is being quoted as saying:

"Marriage, both traditionally and legally, has always been between a man and a woman and should remain between a man and woman."

Ah, politics and hypocrisy !! Especially Republican politics and hypocrisy !!!

Here's a suggestion, Rudy. Why don't you dress up in your drag outfit, the one you wore in the video clip of you and Donald Trump smooching for charity -- well, actually The Donald kissed you on the neck and you hit him with your handbag, while teetering in your high heels and your very lady-like dress. Yes, that outfit. It did wonders for you, especially the blond wig. Wear that, and go out on the campaign trail and preach about the "gathering storm" of gay marriage that is making everyone afraid, very afraid.

It should be a hoot. But I doubt you'll get elected.

Ralph