Norm Coleman's Shame

Norm Coleman's Shame

In late October The Daily Outrage detailed the right-wing media's selective and misplaced reporting on the UN's handling of Iraq's oil-for-food (OFF) program. Joy Gordon followed-up recently in a Nation article which countered conservative claims regarding the extent of alleged corruption and showed that, far from giving Saddam a free hand, OFF actually required considerable monitoring. Now the Right's fury has reached a crescendo with a Wall Street Journal Op-ed by Republican Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota.

"It's time for U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to resign," Coleman begins, before overstating the amount of reported bribes, ignoring the effectiveness of UN sanctions in disarming Saddam Hussein, and accusing the relief plan of funding the Iraqi insurgency.

Coleman was far more charitable toward his own government last April, after Condeeleza Rice revealed that Bush had received a memo titled "Bin Laden determined to strike in US," a month before 9/11, Coleman defended Rice by saying: "We've got to get away from finger pointing and the blame game."

A month later, Coleman echoed GOP talking points by blaming the torture at Abu Ghraib on a "small group of soldiers." He called Donald Rumsfeld's Senate testimony "contrite, candid and thorough," and trusted Bush would properly hold high-ranking officers accountable. (Bush hasn't dismissed anyone over the scandal to date.) "This is not a time for critics," Coleman said. His subsequent silence on this issue has been deafening.

Coleman's OFF grandstanding seems part of his transition from moderate Democratic mayor of St. Paul to moderate Republican Senate candidate to reliably conservative lapdog. Now he's using Congressional OFF hearings to audition for the role of the next Jesse Helms, who famously withheld $1 billion in back dues from the UN.

Coleman earlier this year co-sponsored legislation mandating 10 percent US funding cuts for the UN next year and 20 percent for 2006 unless the world body hands over all OFF documents to Congress. Richard Lugar, the pragmatic Republican chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, blocked a hearing on the proposal. But Republicans plan to reintroduce the legislation in the next session.

Paul Volcker--the respected former chairman of the Federal Reserve--recently asked Coleman to lay low while he conducts his own investigation for Annan. Coleman quickly refused. The newest conservative demagogue apparently can't stay away from the spotlight.

McBush or McCain's reversal on spying, executive power

NYT front page reports on McCain's reversal on spying, executive power

On Wednesday, I documented John McCain's complete reversal of views -- in the last six months alone -- on FISA, warrantless eavesdropping and executive power. McCain's diametrically opposite views were contained in a questionnaire McCain completed for The Boston Globe last December (wherein he rejected many of the Bush/Cheney theories of presidential omnipotence and warrantless eavesdropping) and then a statement McCain issued this week to National Review (wherein he embraced those same theories in order to persuade the Right that he approves of and would continue Bush's lawless surveillance policies).

The reporter who circulated the spying/executive power questionnaire in December to all of the candidates for the Globe was Charlie Savage, one of the very few national reporters who has reported continuously and insightfully about Bush's executive power abuses over the past several years. Savage won the Pulitzer Prize for his work exposing Bush's radical use of signing statements to vest himself with the power to break the law.

In what might be one of the most significant and under-noted media developments of the year, it was announced last month that Savage was leaving the Globe and joining The New York Times. Already, that move has paid dividends, as the NYT today publishes a front-page story by Savage detailing McCain's reversal this week. The article begins this way:

A top adviser to Senator John McCain says Mr. McCain believes that President Bush’s program of wiretapping without warrants was lawful, a position that appears to bring him into closer alignment with the sweeping theories of executive authority pushed by the Bush administration legal team.

The article quotes my Wednesday column to make this point:

And Glenn Greenwald, a Salon columnist and critic of the Bush administration's legal claims, wrote that the statement was a "complete reversal" by Mr. McCain, accusing the candidate of seeking "to shore up the support of right-wing extremists."

An Obama spokesman was extremely critical of McCain's blatantly opportunistic switch: "anyone reading Mr. McCain's answers to The Globe and the more recent statement would be 'totally confused' about 'what Senator McCain thinks about what the Constitution means and what President Bush did.'"

The Bush Legacy Arming our own enemies in Iraq

Arming our own enemies in Iraq

In recent months, Gen. David Petraeus charged that Iran has supplied powerful rocket-propelled grenade launchers to Shiite militias in Iraq. But according to the U.S. government's own reports, there is no evidence to support that charge. In fact, the vast majority of RPGs in the hands of Shiite militants have come from either U.S.-purchased weapons intended for Iraq's new security forces, or from Saddam Hussein's old stockpiles, which the U.S. failed to secure when it took control of the country.

The Bush administration has long sought to create the impression that Iran has been playing a major military role in Iraq by supplying arms to Shiite militias, including the cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's powerful Mahdi army. But to date, U.S. military officials have offered scant or even dubious evidence of Iranian military involvement in Iraq -- and Petraeus' allegation about the RPGs is a clear-cut case of unsubstantiated charges.

Last October, and again in late December, Petraeus stated emphatically there was "absolutely no question" that Iran provided RPG-29s, a sophisticated anti-tank weapon, to Iraqi Shiite militiamen. He even called the RPG-29 an Iranian "signature weapon."

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What Petraeus failed to mention, however, is that RPG-29s are manufactured by Russia, not Iran, and those that have shown up in Iraq apparently came from Syria. The Syrian government bought large numbers of RPG-29s from Russia in 1999 and 2000, many of which ended up being used by Hezbollah in the war against Israel in 2006, according to Israeli and Lebanese media reports. Even some U.S. military officials were quoted in the media in May 2006 as saying that they believed RPG-29s had been smuggled into Iraq from Syria.

Moreover, as Air Force Col. Scott Maw of the Multi-National Force Iraq (MNF-I) Strategic Communications Office told me in a telephone interview last week, "very few" RPG-29s have actually been found in Iraq. An examination of U.S. military press releases on weapons caches found in Shiite areas reveals no mention of RPG-29s. Additionally, the U.S. military has never displayed a captured one to reporters.

In a highly publicized February 2007 slide show, U.S. military briefers did include a picture of what was identified as a round to be fired by an Iranian-made RPG-7AT-1 launcher, a less advanced weapon than the RPG-29, although it did not depict the launcher itself. But the U.S. military has found no evidence of an Iranian pipeline of RPG-7s to Iraqi Shiite militants, either.

In more than two dozen MNF-I news releases on Iraqi Shiite weapons since early 2007, more than 200 RPGs are listed. Not a single one was identified as Iranian-made. That was not because of a lack of effort by the U.S. military, however, to determine whether captured weapons were of Iranian origin. Lt. Col. Steve Stover, the spokesman for the 4th Infantry Division, which is deployed in and around Baghdad, confirmed that explosives experts examine the findings at each cache site to determine the origin of the weapons. "Normally we say whether they are Iranian-manufactured or not," Stover said in a telephone interview.

Col. Maw said that the number of these weapons found in militants' possession is rising rapidly -- now more than 400 -- due to many discoveries being made by Iraqi Security Forces in recent months. "Very few of them are of recent manufacture," he said, suggesting that they came from Saddam Hussein's old stockpiles.

The U.S. command is so eager to highlight any weapons that can be linked to Iran that one MNF-I press release from last September singled out the discovery of four Iranian hand grenades. But that find hardly supported the Iranian-weapons narrative, because the grenades were found in an area frequented by Sunni militants associated with al-Qaida. (There is no reason to believe that Iran would arm extremist Sunni fighters, who consider both Iran and the Shiites as their arch enemies.)

In the early stages of the war, when the Bush administration was being criticized for its failure to prevent the looting of the Saddam Hussein regime's arms depots, Bush officials downplayed the importance of the weapons that disappeared. In October 2004, an unnamed senior administration official was quoted by CNN as saying that the weapons were "stuff you can buy anywhere."

Among the pilfered Iraqi weapons were thousands of RPG-7s, which soon turned up on Iraq's thriving black market. Malcolm Nance, an Arabic-speaking 20-year veteran of military and civilian U.S. intelligence, recalls being offered more than 20 RPG-7 rocket launchers and dozens of RPG rounds in a single trip to an arms bazaar in Sadr City in September 2003. According to Nance, RPG-7s were also on sale in black markets at another location in Baghdad and in at least seven other Iraqi cities.

In a telephone interview, Nance, who is now a counterterrorism consultant to Homeland Security and the Army's Special Operations Command, among other government agencies, recalled that the Iraqi RPG-7s were "so ubiquitous" that they were selling for a mere $50 each for the launcher and $5 each for an RPG missile.

Sunni fighters got large numbers of Saddam's RPG-7 stocks, as discovered by U.S. troops who were frequently attacked by them in the early stages of the insurgency. But the Mahdi army has also been able to purchase them easily over the past four years.

Equally troubling is the near certainty that Soviet-made RPGs purchased by the Pentagon in 2004 and turned over to Iraq's Ministry of Interior have fallen into the hands of the Mahdi army. Beginning in 2004, the Pentagon sent at least 7,500 Soviet-made RPG-7s and 4,500 Soviet-made under-barrel grenade launchers to Baghdad to be distributed to Iraqi Security Forces, along with hundreds of thousands of sidearms, according to a September 2007 report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. U.S. authorities hired civilian contractors to distribute the U.S.-purchased weapons, but had no system to account for them once they left U.S.-controlled warehouses in Iraq. As the New York Times reported last November, the Iraqi businessman contracted to distribute Pentagon-funded weapons from one depot was widely known to be stealing them from the warehouse by the truckload.

Only 499 of the 2,389 Soviet-made RPGs that were provided to the new Iraqi security forces could actually be accounted for through serial numbers, according to a report by the Defense Department Inspector General's Office in November -- and that was because they were still in the warehouse. No one knows how many of the other 1,900 RPGs entered the Iraqi arms market. Inspector General Claude Kicklighter told the Senate Appropriations Committee in March that there is an ongoing investigation into "pilferage of storage facilities" for the arms in Baghdad.

Michelle Obama "fundamental belief and pride in this country and what it stands for"

Michelle Obama explains pride remark

Michelle Obama says she’s always been proud of her country, but for the first time she’s “seeing people rolling up their sleeves in a way that I haven’t seen.”

She had told an audience in Milwaukee that, “For the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country. Not just because Barack is doing well, but I think people are hungry for change.”

[ ]...When asked Wednesday if she would like to clarify her comment, Obama replied that she has been struck by the number of people going to rallies and watching debates, as well as record voter turnouts.

“What I was clearly talking about was that I’m proud in how Americans are engaging in the political process,” she said.

“For the first time in my lifetime, I’m seeing people rolling up their sleeves in a way that I haven’t seen and really trying to figure this out — and that’s the source of pride that I was talking about,” she added.

When asked if she had always been proud of her country, she replied “absolutely.” “Barack and I, our stories wouldn’t be possible, if it weren’t for fundamental belief and pride in this country and what it stands for.”

Her husband came to her defense. ‘‘Statements like this are made and people try to take it out of context and make a great big deal out of it, and that isn’t at all what she meant,’’ he said.

Michelle Obama’s latest comments came during a visit to Rhode Island ahead of its March 4 primary. She was to attend a rally with her brother, Craig Robinson, Brown University men’s basketball coach.

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"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."
— Bush praising Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the morning after he revealed (in a network television interview) that he did not know about the thousands of people stranded at New Orleans' convention center until a day after extensive media reports on the situation. (Washington Post, "FEMA Director Singled Out by Response Critics", Spencer S. Hsu and Susan B. Glasser, Sept. 6, 2005.)

"See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda."
—Bush confronted by political opposition, Bush explains his strategy on promoting Social Security reform. (Washington Post, "The Ostrich Approach," Dan Froomkin, May 25, 2005)

Conservatives claim dictatorial powers for Bush and McCain

Newest McCain official: President has "near dictatorial powers"

Bill Kristol today proudly announces that one of his Weekly Standard staff members, Michael Goldfarb, was just named the Deputy Communications Director of the McCain campaign. Last April, this newest McCain official participated in a conference call with former Senator George Mitchell, during which Mitchell advocated a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. Afterwards, this is what Goldfarb wrote about what he thinks are the powers the President possesses in our country:

Mitchell's less than persuasive answer [to whether withdrawal timetables "somehow infringe on the president's powers as commander in chief?"]: "Congress is a coequal branch of government...the framers did not want to have one branch in charge of the government."

True enough, but they sought an energetic executive with near dictatorial power in pursuing foreign policy and war. So no, the Constitution does not put Congress on an equal footing with the executive in matters of national security.

And the very idea that the Founders -- whose principal concern was how to avoid consolidated power in any one person -- sought to vest "near dictatorial power" in the President is too perverse for words. But that's been the core "principle" driving the destructive radicalism of the last seven years, and it's an extremist view that is obviously welcomed at the highest levels of the McCain campaign.

Paypal - Internet Pimps

Paypal sucks. Paypal is a company that exists solely as a middle-man so you can give other people money. You can tell they have close to a monopoly being internet pimps by the low regard to which they treat the customers that are forced by circumstances to use the. Everyone loves them until the day something goes wrong and you complain. At which point you can kiss your money goodbye unless you start yet another class action suit against them.

John McCain's Top 10 Misstatements and Outright Deceptions

John McCain's Top 10 Misstatements and Outright Deceptions

1. McCain doesn't even know who is in charge in Iran.

2. Iraq/Iran, Sunni/Shia: McCain doesn't know the difference.

3. McCain still thinks Czechoslovakia (which split into two countries in 1993) exists.

4. McCain wrongly claimed that Baghdad was mostly normal.

5. McCain called Baghdad market safe.

6. McCain can't even remember how little he knows about the economy.

....rest at link.