Speaking of Arlen Specter, you may remember that last November, shortly after the election, Senator Spector (R-Pa.) warned Bush that he shouldn't mistake his narrow win for a mandate [insert "Jeffy" joke here]. Specter, who was up for the job as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, also said that in that capacity he would oppose the appointment of anti-reproduction rights judges.  

 

Naturally, a frenzied mob of "values voters" called for Specter's head on a plate. Specter had to fight for the Senate Judiciary chairmanship by promising to give Bush appointees "quick committee hearings and early committee votes." Specter eventually received the unanimous endorsement of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

 

Well, Arlen's pissed off the righties again. Dana Milbank wrote in today's Washington Post:

He said Bush should emulate an effort by Bill Clinton to compromise on judicial nominees, and he said Bush should balance "bring[ing] the country together" against "certain segments of the Republican Party" who disagree. "The Constitution does say that there should be advice from the Senate," he said.

And Specter questioned the effort to strip the minority Democrats of filibuster power -- a move known as the "nuclear option."

"If you were to flash ahead a hundred years from now, this controversy over judges . . . would not be a major matter in the life of the country," he said. "But minority rights are." ...

...Specter made no apologies for supporting a Democratic amendment to a recent bill restricting class-action lawsuits. On Social Security, he warned against "building up debt," as personal accounts would do. And he made clear that he is in no hurry to reconsider the appellate court nomination of William H. Pryor Jr. of Alabama, one of Bush's most controversial judicial choices.

Maura Reynolds writes in the Los Angeles Times:

[Specter] made it clear that on one of the Senate's key disputes — the fight over nominees to the federal bench — he is unwilling to embrace a controversial tactic being pushed by his party's conservative wing. ...

...Unbowed and combative, he vowed to cut his own swath through the tangle of issues on the committee's docket: confirming judges, enforcing court judgments against antiabortion protesters and creating a trust fund for asbestos victims.

On all those issues, Specter proposed what amounts to a radical idea in Washington these days: compromise.

In particular, he warned his Republican colleagues not to resort to the so-called "nuclear option" — a procedural move that would overturn precedent to deny Democrats the right to filibuster judicial nominees they oppose.

This takes guts. Jonathan Chait reminds us (also in today's LA Times) that the Bush White House has a way of making those who stand up to it offers they can't refuse. 

Enough apostate Bush loyalists have retracted their heretical views that certain recognizable tropes have emerged. First, the heretic's repudiation of his own deeds should obviously contradict his own principles. Take the first known example of the type, Rep. Charlie Norwood (R-Ga.). A former dentist, Norwood had grown infuriated at the callousness of health maintenance organizations and made a patient's bill of rights his crusade.

Bush sought to kill Norwood's bill by promoting a toothless, industry-friendly alternative. In the spring of 2001, Norwood blasted Bush's sham bill as worse than the status quo and vowed to "personally exhaust every effort to defeat" Bush's plan. Then Norwood was summoned to the White House. As one newspaper reported, he "emerged from the hourlong meeting looking haggard" and instantly announced his support for Bush's bill.

Another famous example is that of John DiIulio, the one-time Bush speechwriter who called the Bushies the "Mayberry Machiavellis." The White House intimidated DiIulio into issuing an apology.

Dana Milbank believes that Specter's frail health may give him some cover:

In recent years, the 75-year-old senator has survived a brain tumor, double-bypass surgery and, last year, a bitter primary fight for his seat. Now he is battling Hodgkins disease and the effects of chemotherapy....  it's hard to imagine his colleagues revoking his chairmanship while he's fighting cancer

Proving once again that freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose. But the Bush White House and its jack-booted minions are not people who let a little common decency get in their way. I can imagine them getting fairly nasty. 

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I live in PA. I emailed Arlen Specter, my only sane senate rep, and chairman of the US Senate Committee on the Judiciary, imploring him to investigate the Gannon/Guckert scandal. I received an automated reply stating "...help me respond to your concerns in a more prompt and efficient manner..." and instructions.

Following his instructions, I called his Washington office, who transferred me to his Judiciary Committee office. The woman who answered the phone, asked me what my email was about and when I told her she said:

"I haven't heard anything about this."

After re-gaining my composure, I asked how that was possible. She said, "Well I watch the news all the time. There's nothing on Fox about it."

I suggested politely that this wasn't surprising. She put me on hold. When she came back she asked me to explain the story to her again.

After almost re-re-gaining my composure, I badly paraphrased the last week or so. She put me on hold again. This time, I prepared. When she came back, I made her listen as I read a 5-day-old story from the Washington Post, quoting Brian Williams' NBC report. She became a little annoyed and said "well, I watch CNN too and haven't seen anything about it."

I said "he was interviewed by Anderson Cooper on his show. You know, The Anderson Cooper Show?"

She suggested I fax my email to the office and after legal looked it over, it might warrant a memo to the senator in about a week.

Great. Thanks.

Here's my suggestion. *Everyone* that has any info on the Gannon/Guckert story fax *all* of it to:

202-224-9102
ATTN: Vianna

If they don't run out of fax paper, I'm going to be sorely disappointed in Ameriblog. Please, let's do this.

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The formal announcement Thursday that Canada will refuse any further participation in the controversial U.S. missile-defence shield was met with an immediate warning that Canada had given up its sovereignty.

Although Prime Minister Paul Martin said Canada would “insist” on maintaining control of its airspace, U.S. Ambassador Paul Cellucci warned that Washington would not be constrained.

“We will deploy. We will defend North America,” he said.

“We simply cannot understand why Canada would in effect give up its sovereignty – its seat at the table – to decide what to do about a missile that might be coming towards Canada.”

Oh, please ...

This other Canadian news source, Canoe, says

Despite how it's portrayed north of the border, Americans already view Canada as very much involved in the project. They're just astounded Canadians don't want to be there to launch a missile strike.

Yeah, we're gonna put some kegs on ice and grill up some steaks, and Larry's gonna set up his sound system hooked to his car battery, and then once it's good and dark we're gonna launch some missile strikes. Who'd wanna miss that? You Canucks are no fun any more.

Seriously, Canada, I'm mortified. Just don't close up the border before I get there, OK? 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

She is currently on trip with a few other Senators to Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

On Sunday, while in Iraq, she was asked on CBS’ Face The Nation, “Do you think we're coming to a situation where we will have permanent bases in Iraq?”

Her response:

No, but I think that we should take this sort of one step at a time...

...We are going to be negotiating with the new Iraqi government. The Iraqi government could turn around any time and say, “We want you to leave.”

I don't see any indication of that, but it could happen.

The Iraqi government could say, “We want you to be here with a certain kind of footprint.”

But until the Iraqi government is stood up and operating, I think it's a little premature for us to be talking about what they and we may decide to do together.

On one hand, she’s not coming out in favor of permanent bases.

But on the other, she’s covering for Bush by saying we’re not already on that path, when we clearly are.

Most importantly, she doesn’t make a clear distinction between the parties on this fundamental issue, leaving open the possibility that she would support them.

(Arguably, one might be hesitant to be partisan while on foreign soil, but LiberalOasis isn’t expecting any clarifications when she gets home.)

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North Korea's arms bazaar soon may boast an enticing new product -- a nuclear bomb that U.S. officials fear could be available to the highest bidder.

With the communist nation's decision this month to withdraw from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the pact aimed at curbing the spread of atomic weapons, U.S. defense officials and military analysts are worrying that North Korea might sell a nuclear bomb to a willing customer with a lot of cash.

They say North Korea, through its past arms sales, has shown a willingness to sell just about anything to anyone, and fear that potential customers for a nuclear bomb could include hostile countries or even groups such as al Qaeda.

"Look at what North Korea's doing with respect to the possible production of additional nuclear weapons," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told a briefing. "Here's the world's biggest proliferator of ballistic missile technology. If it ends up with additional nuclear weapons, it might very well be in the business of proliferating them to other countries." [Will Dunham, "U.S. Worries North Korea Will Sell Nuclear Bombs," Reuters, January 19, 2003]

Relations between the United States and North Korea, having edged right up to the brink of reconciliation and normalization in the last days of Bill Clinton's presidency, went into crisis with the advent of the Bush administration and have remained in a kind of eternal, roiling crisis ever since. ...

If North Korea seems more isolated than ever, however, the disarray among the other five partner countries is also plain, as are the deep, unresolved contradictions between Bush's Washington, already frustrated and limited in its policy options by its endless occupation and war in Iraq, and the Asian allies it would like to support its projected global order. The Japanese prime minister, the Bush administration's closest partner in Asia, has publicly pledged to normalize relations with Kim Jong Il's North Korea and has begged the President to meet one-on-one with Kim; China stated after the last round of talks in Beijing that American policy towards the North was the "main problem we are facing"; and South Korea's president believes North Korea is "not without cause" in its nuclear weapon program, encourages multifaceted cooperation across the well fortified Demilitarized Zone that still separates the two countries, and has invited President Bush to join him on a visit to the new joint South-North industrial development zone just north of the old Korean war dividing line that was once so impermeable.

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Up to and during Bush's visit, a force of 10,000 police officers staged one of the biggest postwar security operations in Germany. Frogmen searched the Rhine River for explosives, 1,300 manhole covers were welded shut and thousands of residents were displaced.

For Bush's eight-hour stay there was also a strict ban on air traffic within a 60-kilometer radius of Mainz, barges on the river were halted and motorways in the region closed. Factories, businesses and schools were shut.

Bush's visit contrasted with that of his father to Mainz in 1989 when large crowds cheered Bush senior for his calls for the Berlin Wall to be torn down. Other US presidents have also been given a hero's welcome in Germany.

"When John F. Kennedy came to Germany he drove through cheering crowds," Mark Reichelt, 20, a student, told Reuters. "Now Bush is here and will drive through empty streets."

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Some on the right believe that the United States should explicitly oppose Europe's new effort to have a common foreign and defense policy, as antithetical to American interests, and want to actively contain Europe.

Others applaud Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's effort to divide the "new' Europe of former Soviet satellites from the "old" Europe of major states that have been our most steadfast allies except on Bush's dubious Iraq policy. (This divide-and-conquer tactic won't work. It's the new European nations that look most closely to Brussels rather than to Washington.) ...

And here's what really hurts:

Europe developed its own social institutions -- universal healthcare, generous retirement systems, free or subsidized child care for working parents, less commercialized and more robust elections, far less extremes of wealth and poverty, less militarism. And much of the world sees this as a more attractive model than the one the Bush administration is promoting. America, statistically, is slightly richer on average than western Europe, but more than 80 percent of western Europeans live better than their US counterparts because our wealth is so concentrated at the top. [emphasis added]

This is what the extremists in power in America don't want us peons to know. That's because the rich and powerful people at the top need our ignorance and our compliance to stay rich and powerful.

No wonder they're terrified of Europe.

Now, on to Janet Daley. She says that Europe has a pathological fear and loathing of America.

I have written before on this page that European hatred of the United States has a great deal to do with jealousy of American self-belief.

My understanding is that, before Bush, Europeans mostly found us Yanks to be at least tolerable. Since Bush became president they have a whole lot of reasons to dislike us that have nothing to do with jealousy.

Daley argues that Europe no longer values liberty. "[Europe] no longer has a belief in real democracy of the kind that Americans recognise - government of the people, by the people and for the people - at its heart," she writes.

The fact is, Americans don't believe in government of, by, and for the people any more. Ronald Reagan's“Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem,” was the obituary of government of, by, and for the people. If government is not a solution, not a means for the people to better their lives, then it is no longer of, by, and for the people. It has been surrendered to corporations and special interests. Reagan's words were a signal to the people: Don't expect government to do anything for you. 

You'll like this part:

Better to make your cynical peace with the worst aspects of human nature than to pretend that free men will always choose good over evil. Much better to make a mutually profitable trade-off behind the scenes than to expose political decisions to the popular will.

On the same day these words appeared in the Telegraph, we read in the Washington Post (via Corrente):

Bush was originally scheduled to hold a town-hall meeting with regular German citizens today in Mainz. But when the German government couldn't guarantee friendly questions, that became a small, carefully-screened roundtable discussion with young Germans who have visited the U.S. on exchange programs.

And only part of it was even made public.

Somewhat ironically, according to the transcript of the public part, the first question was about free speech -- in Russia.

What did those Germans expect? Bush doesn't think he has to answer to anybody, not even American citizens, much less Germans. "Much better to make a mutually profitable trade-off behind the scenes than to expose political decisions to the popular will" could be the Bush family motto. We should have it translated into Latin and engrave it on a shield under a rampant blood-sucking vampire bat.

I could go on, but ... you get the drift.

 

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... "President Bush said Tuesday that concern about possible U.S. military action against Iran 'is simply ridiculous.'"

Wow, a strongly worded statement if ever there was one. But then Bush immediately added: "all options are on the table" in dealing with suspected Iranian attempts to acquire nuclear weapons. Uh, "all options" means exactly that -- everything up to invasion is possible, Mr. President, so if you say it's under consideration, and your staff has been beating the drums of war ever since the election (with Condi and Rummy and burst-of-sunshine Cheney all speaking about Iran in dire terms not heard since, oh, we got ready to invade Iraq), then why oh why is it "ridiculous" for Europe to be concerned?

Iran is not Iraq Bush told Europe. Well, that's progress. Awhile back he figured out that Sweden is not Switzerland. What's next, I wonder? An acknowledgment that Antarctica is not Antigua? It's those pesky first syllables that seem to confuse him.

 

As Robert Kuttner explains in today's Boston Globe, however, the dissenting voice on Iran is coming from American neocons.

Gerard Baker, writing in the current Weekly Standard, criticizes the administration's olive branch and warns that Europe is seeking to become a counterweight to the United States in world affairs. The real European goal, writes Baker, is to undermine NATO, America's greatest source of trans-Atlantic influence, and to initiate policies of its own that are less bellicose than Washington's.

A prime example is the joint German-British-French initiative on Iraq, which would offer economic incentives in exchange for Iran's agreement to dismantle nuclear weapons capabilities.

American conservatives have relentlessly disparaged the Iran initiative as naive or opportunistic.

In fact, the initiative is actually making some headway and may spare us a military confrontation. British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who provided crucial cover for President Bush's effort to portray the Iraq invasion as the work of a broad coalition, is with the Germans and French this time.

The neocons, known for their congenital inability to learn from mistakes, for years badmouthed the 1994 Agreed Framework negotiated by Jimmy Carter with North Korea. They did so even though the framework successfully achieved its goals, which were (1) to stop North Korea from processing plutonium to make nuclear weapons, and (2) to get IAEA inspectors re-admitted to North Korea. Done, and done.

 

(Note: If you try to explain to righties that the Agreed Framework was a success, they'll be guffawing before you can finish the first sentence. The alleged failure of the Agreed Framework is part of their mythos. However, it didn't fail.) 

 

The neocons, and then the Bush Administration, were certain the Clinton-Carter approach to North Korea was naive, even if it worked. The way to deal with North Korea, the neocons said, was not to pay them with heating oil to not process plutonium. You just had to get tough.

 

But the rest of the world was not listening. In particular, Japan and South Korea were working hard to pry North Korea open to capitalist enterprises. This was bad from the neocons' perspective, even if it reduced tensions and made the world safer from Kim Jong Il. It was bad because if North Korea's economy improved it would be more difficult to get tough with them.

 

So, in October 2002, the Bushies created a phony crisis about North Korea's uranium processing. This not only kneecapped years of diplomatic effort; it also gave Bush an excuse to stop the oil shipments and the Republicans an issue to bash Democrats with on the eve of the 2002 elections. (Win/win!)

 

Then, Condi Rice made the rounds on the political bobblehead television shows and explained that the Bush Administration would use North Korea's poverty to make it behave.

North Korea's collapsed economy gives the United States and its allies the diplomatic leverage to convince the communist regime to abandon its nuclear ambitions, [Condoleezza] Rice said.

"North Korea has been signaling and saying that it wants to break out of its economic isolation," Rice told CNN's "Late Edition With Wolf Blitzer." "It has to break out of its economic isolation."  [Kelly Wallace, CNN, October 21, 2002] 

As you probably remember, in December 2002 the IAEA inspectors were pitched out of North Korea, and Kim Jong Il announced that plutonium processing would resume. And now, more than two years later, North Korea says it has lots of nuclear weapons ready to use on somebody, like maybe Oregon.

 

In neocon world, the Clinton/Carter approach was naive, because it wasn't tough. Whether it worked or not is irrelevant. On the other hand, the neocon/Bush approach is smart, because it is tough, even though it doesn't work. Got that? (Related reading.)

 

I bring this up because the neocons are pulling a North Korea on Iran. They are badmouthing European economic initiatives aimed at discouraging Iran from making nuclear weapons.

 

Iran is building a heavy-water nuclear reactor, meaning a reactor that provides a way to extract weapons-grade fuel. It's thought Iran is about four years away from having a working reactor. Recently, the IAEA said it was making good progress with nuclear inspections in Iran.

 

Now, it is true that Iran is not Iraq, although given the shifting political winds in Iraq, that could change someday. However, it's certain that Iran is not North Korea (Iran starts with an "I," for example). What worked in North Korea (the Agreed Framework) might not work in Iran. But I suspect that what didn't work in North Korea (getting tough) probably won't work in Iran, either.

 

Next: Iceland and Ireland--does Bush know the difference?

 

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Mr. Goldwater carried only six states and 36 percent of the popular vote in 1964. After the election, most analysts and commentators concluded that the Republican Party was hopelessly divided, and that Mr. Goldwater and his conservative philosophy were all but politically dead.  

 

In fact, he had wrested control of the GOP from the Eastern liberal wing that had dominated it for years. By 1980, he was acknowledged as the founder of a conservative movement that had become a vital element in mainstream Republican thinking and a major ingredient in Reagan's political ascendancy. It was a 1964 speech delivered on behalf of Mr. Goldwater that brought Reagan to national prominence and helped launch his political career.

During his 1964 presidential campaign, Mr. Goldwater was attacked by Democrats