The Minnesota election court has just handed down a very important ruling that will determine the entire course of the rest of this trial -- and it's very bad news for Norm Coleman, cutting off multiple avenues he was pursuing in order to get more votes for himself thrown into the count.
Yesterday the court heard arguments regarding the campaigns' positions on 19 categories of rejected absentee ballot envelopes, and whether the voters should be cut sufficient slack as to allow the ballot in. The court has now handed down a ruling on 12 of those categories -- and it's an emphatic No.
Not too long ago, in the waning days of that "other" President, things were bad with Russia...and I mean, bad. Hell, we spent pretty much all of August shaking our fist helplessly at them as they invaded theGeorgian Republic.
And then our new Secretary of State Hillary Clinton added an interesting litle kicker. "Gee, of course, if we had help with the Iran-going-nuclear-problem, it'd make this whole missile shield thing go away even faster."
I'm sorry, but does Paul Krugman, esteemed Professor of Economics, Nobel Prize Winner, understand how the Constitution works?
Now, I'm not about to dismiss what Paul Krugman generally has to say. Let me acknowledge something that too many writers are afraid to: SOMEONE WHO IS NOT ME KNOWS MORE ABOUT THE FREAKIN' ECONOMY THAN I DO.
Wow. That wasn't hard.
At the same time, I'm not sure Dr. Krugman knows more about Politics than I do. That's what's been scaring me about his last few columns and blogposts.
Then again, he was a Hillary supporter.
(Sorry Hillary Supporters out there, but I've come to notice that some Hillary supporters out there in the Press and Blogosphere are quicker than most to slam the President when he miffs them for whatever reason. Steve Clemons is another example of this.)
Okay, back to Krugman.
He knows more about the Economy than I do. (Duh.)
He knows more about the Economy than you do. (Double Duh.)
He's right about the size of the Stimulus (hint: it's not big enough).
He's right that Obama got nothing for his outreach to Republicans (hint: they gave him nothing for trying to reach across the aisle).
But whether we like it or not, the Senate Republicans had a right to try and derail this thing.
They're going to fail, and fail miserably…but they had a right.
Would that Democrats had shown the same spine during the Patriot Act debate, or when they were hemming and hawing over Bush's Tax Cuts.
Note: Before we all go hand-in-hand into the insanity of repealing the filibuster, let us remember that one day we won't be in the majority, and that throwing away the minority's power isn't exactly thinking-ahead. Plus, how loud were we all --rightly-- howling when they wanted to take away the filibuster with the Nuclear Option not that long ago??
In his article: The Destructive Center, Paul Krugman doesn't spend two pages eviscerating brain-dead "moderates" like Ben Nelson (D-NE), Susan Collins (R-ME) and Olympia Snowe (R-ME) (the people who jammed this compromise down our throats). No instead, he spends his time eviscerating President Obama.
All in all, the centrists’ insistence on comforting the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted will, if reflected in the final bill, lead to substantially lower employment and substantially more suffering.
But how did this happen? I blame President Obama’s belief that he can transcend the partisan divide — a belief that warped his economic strategy.
After all, many people expected Mr. Obama to come out with a really strong stimulus plan, reflecting both the economy’s dire straits and his own electoral mandate.
Instead, however, he offered a plan that was clearly both too small and too heavily reliant on tax cuts. Why? Because he wanted the plan to have broad bipartisan support, and believed that it would. Not long ago administration strategists were talking about getting 80 or more votes in the Senate.
But wait! There's more:
So has Mr. Obama learned from this experience? Early indications aren’t good.
For rather than acknowledge the failure of his political strategy and the damage to his economic strategy, the president tried to put a postpartisan happy face on the whole thing. “Democrats and Republicans came together in the Senate and responded appropriately to the urgency this moment demands,” he declared on Saturday, and “the scale and scope of this plan is right.”
No, they didn’t, and no, it isn’t.
Your confidence is always appreciated, Professor Krugman.
Dr. Krugman does understand that Legislation originates in the Congress, right? I mean, as much as Obama can offer up suggestions, or even make demands, it's going to start in some poor schmuck Congressman's (or Congresswoman's) hands first, and then get exposed to the rotting open air of the Leglistative process, where we've gone from a few egos, to 535 of them.
But the egos aren't just on Capitol Hill. I think a lot of pundits seem to be suffering from some kind of left-wing variant of George Bush syndrome (also known as My-Way-Or-The-Highway Disease). Wherein everyone with a soapbox declares their economic plan as the only way out, and then follow it up by declaring if his (or her) plan "isn't passed exactly as I have written it, the economy will implode and it'll all be Obama's fault for not listening to me."
Obama campaigned on a promise to change Washington and reach across the aisle. Now suddenly, a lot of people on our side of the aisle seem to be saying "You really didn't mean that, did you?"
The President clearly reached across the aisle as promised. The Republicans slapped him in the face for it. Message received. Obama turned around and started firing back in the last couple of days, culminating in tonight's Presser and the Town Hall in Elkhart, Indiana (a safe McCain district rewarded for their loyalty with %15 Unemployment.)
Krugman's take is only valid if you do not accept what the President was doing was part of a larger strategy.
There is the Banking Strategy, Regulatory Reform, and Health Care Reform.
More importantly, there is Stimulus Parts 1 and 2.
The currently Stimulus Package may be too small for what needs to be accomplished, but ripping the President makes sense only if you assume that this is the only Stimulus package we need this year.
Back on January 5th, Richard Wolffe of Newsweek posited that very notion on Countdown with Keith Olbermann.
(Richard's part begins about 2:47 into the video, but his part about a second stimulus begins about 5:58 into the video).
But at the same time, believe it or not, there was a warning of the dangers of too much stimulus.
Under current conditions, however, it's much better to err on the side of doing too much than on the side of doing too little. The risk, if the stimulus plan turns out to be more than needed, is that the economy might overheat, leading to inflation…
Now, to be fair, he said more than that, and that certainly wasn't the crux of his argument. He was, and remains, afraid that any Stimulus Shortfall won't be made up by the Fed or anybody else.
Clearly, someone in the Obama Administration is also afraid of the Economy overheating, and leading to inflation (I am SO learning this on the fly), so why not break the Stimulus into two parts?
The overall strategy, I think, was to have a big, broad, bi-partisan bill come out early on, get signed; and then see what happens. With the size of the Stimulus Package we're talking now, the Economy would start to get a little better, but at the same time, not be totally on the road to recovery. Thus, Obama would turn to the Congress and say we need more, and while some bellicose Republicans would throw up their arms in the air (like they just don't care…'cause they don't), but by then they would have already invested too much in the Stimulus to let it fail.
Clearly, that's not going to happen now.
But it's going to be interesting. A second round of stimulus is clearly going to be a harder sell than the first. But there are tricks (of the dirty underhanded partisan kind) that can get around that. Attaching said Stimulus II to the Defense Appropriations Bill comes right to mind.
I'm not 100% sure how Banking Reform and Regulatory Reform fit within the Congress? Does Obama have to do to them, or is he going to make sweeping changes to the way they do business without them?
And then there's Health Care Reform. I really want to see what happens with that one. We've had the Republicans freaking out over the concept of Stimulus. I've long assumed that the Health Care debate was going to be one of the Senate's uglier chapters.
But if you see…night after night…day after day…of Republicans on the T.V., arguing against Health Care the way they've argued against the Stimulus Package?
(update on Bishop Richard Williamson) There were two finalists for "Scariest Audio Tape" this week: Christian Bale's f-bomb tirade against an unsuspecting DP, and Dick Cheney's frightening expostulations against the new administration, claiming an upcoming NUKULAR 9/11.
I'll forgive the former in lieu of the fact that Bale is a moron, a bad actor, and a general Hollywood "glitterati" squash-head type with not much credence or anything of impact/import to say. The winner then is old Darth Cheney who, it seems, is relentless in his brainwashing, fear-inducing tactics, even out of office. Unless this man accidentally shoots himself in the chest with buckshot during his next duck-hunting trip, he should be deemed irrelevant and no longer make the news.
The "Worst Parental Judgment" category also has two candidates: Nadya Suleman, whose 14 children still somehow manage to exacerbate the loneliness that lies deep in her heart, and the irresponsible, idiotic father who decided to post on YouTube a video of his drugged-up (from the dentist) 7-year-old son.
This one goes out to Ms. Suleyman, who--at 33 years of age--is still living with her mother and on welfare. The momo who thinks his son's drug-induced mutterings are worthy of humiliating him before millions, at least only has one life to potentially fuck up. Ms. Suleyman, on the other hand, has herself an entire roster to a basketball team.
And lastly, the "In Need of Racial Sensitivity Training" category is hotly contested by Miley Cyrus, Bishop Richard Williamson, and Florida Republican Carol Carter, who sent around an email questioning how "2,000,000 blacks get into Washington, D.C. in 1 day in sub zero temps when 200,000 couldn't get out of New Orleans in 85 degree temps with four days notice"?
And the winners are...ALL THREE OF THEM, the lousy cockroaches. What better cast of characters to have than this lot of idiots: a teenage queen-entertainer, a preacher, and a politician. Sounds like the making of a great joke, no? And it is.
Even though the new President has bent over backwards to be bipartisan, even at the risk of pissing off his own base, he's done so...and you've slapped him in the face for it.
If Stimulus goes down, what incentive is there for the Obama Administration not to declare all out war on the Bush Administration? What's to stop the Justice Department? More importantly (and constitutionally, since its their Stimulus Bill you're pissing on) what's to stop the House?
It's the old Washington saying, the enemy isn't the other party, it's the Senate.
If I were my Republican friends, I'd think long and hard about this.
President Barack Obama's choice to head the CIA said on Thursday he would support "limited" prosecution of any agents who deliberately violated the law in interrogating terrorism suspects.
Former White House chief of staff Leon Panetta, in Senate confirmation hearings on his nomination, broke with outgoing CIA Director Michael Hayden to support a congressional inquiry into the agency's detention and interrogation program launched after the September 11 attacks.
He said the Senate Intelligence Committee would be an appropriate place for an inquiry "to learn lessons from what happened" in the program, and said he would do everything he could to cooperate.
Ahhh, wonderful to hear.
But wait a minute Reuters is European. (Damn you, old Europe!!) Time Magazine, a fine American publication, on the other hand, has a different take entirely called: Panetta: Don't Punish Waterboarding.
CIA Director nominee Leon Panetta says the CIA interrogators who used waterboarding or other harsh techniques against prisoners on the authority of the White House should not be prosecuted.
Panetta told a Senate panel on Thursday that those individuals should not be prosecuted or investigated if they acted pursuant to the law as presented by the attorney general.
See, America the trick is...you gotta keep reading, because Time Magazine eventually says the same thing, despite its headline; which as you know is written by someone else.
However, Panetta says that if interrogators went beyond the methods that they were told were legal, they should be investigated and prosecuted.
The Bush White House approved CIA waterboarding of three prisoners in 2002 and 2003. The CIA banned the practice internally in 2006.
President Barack Obama has prohibited harsh interrogation techniques.
For the record, that's whole Time article.
But before we go cheering Reuters, they loop back as well:
Panetta said he considered "waterboarding" to be torture, but did not support prosecuting agents who relied on high-level legal guidance allowing such techniques.
But at the same time...
However, "if there were those who deliberately violated the law, and deliberately took actions which were above and beyond the standards presented to them, then obviously in those limited cases there should be prosecution," he said.
This is all good, but the truth of what's going to happen probably lies somewhere in between Reuters and Time. I bet Panetta wouldn't mind prosecuting some of his guys, if for no other reason than to get them to squeal on the big fish: Rummy, Cheney and the unemployable Gonzalez. But remember, he's not a prosecutor. He also doesn't want to start a rebellion on his first day at Langley.
The best strategy is to punt the thing to Congress, and let them do the dirty (and constitutionally mandated) work.
But if there's one thing to bear in mind, that did put me in a bit of a cold sweat, it's this paragraph from the Reuters article:
Panetta said he would if necessary ask Obama to allow harsher interrogations than those covered by the Army Field Manual, which the president last month set as the government standard. The manual bans techniques such as waterboarding.
"I would not hesitate," to seek broader interrogation authority, Panetta said, adding "I think that this president would do nothing that would violate the laws that are in place."
He promised to tell Congress if Obama were to authorize a departure from standards the president imposed last month.
So...the President might go back to torture, but he'll warn us first?
I don't see how that stands with "this president would do nothing that would violate the laws that are in place." Methinks (mehopes) this is a way to placate the Republicans on the panel.
The Powers-that-Be at SEI have entrusted me with the mission of formally welcoming the newest members of the team: Jasper Palmer and admiralmpj. Suckers! But they've signed all the contracts and have agreed to the minimal stipend amount, so they're bound for life.
Hailing from intriguing and exotic Prince George's County, Maryland (rumoured to be in the greater Washington D.C. area) both men bring refreshing voices of progressive dissent and unique perspectives.
That sounded good, didn't it? Truth is, I haven't seen or spoken to these two since the mid 80s when we all attended the same high school so, whatever. Remember: we provide nothing but the best here at S.E.I., so...trust me. Yea. Seriously.
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