Bush legacy: Setting a standard in fear-mongering

Richard A. Clarke is former head of counterterrorism at the National Security Council

When I left the Bush administration in 2003, it was clear to me that its strategy for defeating terrorism was leaving our nation more vulnerable and our people in a perilous place. Not only did its policies misappropriate resources, weaken the moral standing of America, and threaten long-standing legal and constitutional provisions, but the president also employed misleading and reckless rhetoric to perpetuate his agenda.

This week's State of the Union proved nothing has changed.

Besides overstating successes in Afghanistan, painting a rosy future for Iraq, and touting unfinished domestic objectives, he again used his favorite tactic - fear - as a tool to scare Congress and the American people. On one issue in particular - FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) - the president misconstrued the truth and manipulated the facts.

Michael Kinsley: Remembering Reagan

How Romney and McCain rewrite history.

Posted Saturday, Feb. 2, 2008, at 12:41 PM ET

In the past few weeks, the Democratic Party has suddenly turned on Bill Clinton with the ferocity of 16 years of pent-up resentments. He will not be cut any more slack, and neither will his wife. Meanwhile, the Republican primaries have turned into a Ronald Reagan Adoration Contest. Neither ex-president deserves what he is getting. Clinton is a victim of long memories; Reagan is a beneficiary of short ones.

In the Republican debate at the Reagan Library on Wednesday, Sen. John McCain repeated his story about how he and other prisoners of war used to discuss this exciting new governor of California using tap codes through the walls of a North Vietnamese prison. Like many of the great man's own treasured anecdotes, it might be true. Unlike Reagan, McCain is a genuine war hero, so if he has overpolished this story a bit (it comes out almost word-for-word each time), he is honoring the great man by imitation if nothing else. In the debate, McCain repeatedly called himself a "foot soldier in the Reagan revolution." He declared that Republicans have "betrayed Ronald Reagan's principles about tax cuts and restraint of spending."

Digby: The Long War

I'm taking a lot of criticism lately for fighting old wars and refusing to see that we are on the cusp of major change and that the Republicans are old news. I actually fervently hope that is correct. But if you want to know why I'm not so sanguine, and why I think progressives are just fighting one more bloody battle in a long political war, read Greenwald's post today.

All day long, in response to Mukasey's insistence that patent illegalities were legal, that Congress was basically powerless, and that the administration has no obligation to disclose anything to Congress (and will not), Senators would respond with impotent comments such as: "Well, I'd like to note my disagreement and ask you to re-consider" or "I'm disappointed with your answer and was hoping you would say something different" or "If that's your position, we'll be discussing this again at another point." They were supplicants pleading for some consideration, almost out of a sense of mercy, and both they and Mukasey knew it.

Even paranoids have news networks

By Rick Perlstein

January 31st, 2008 - 7:01pm ET

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One of the most fascinating phenomena for conservative watchers this year has been to observe how gracelessly our friends on the right have handled the disintegration of the conservative era. One example: right-wing congressmen are retiring in droves—as if the thought of actually participating in a deliberative body, not one as procedurally rigged as a politiburo, has become simply too awful to contemplate.

Another example: all the tell-all memoirs. Used to be, the Omerta was tighter than the mafia. But I've read two books spilling the beans just this year—one of them mediocre, the other quite excellent. The enablers have suddenly become conscience-stricken—now that their bosses are losing.

Digby: Bipartisanship Misdirection

February 1st, 2008 - 6:38am ET

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There has been a lot of discussion recently about the urgent need to stop the "partisan bickering" in Washington, with elder statesmen gathering in groups to demand bipartisan cabinets and pundits wringing their hankies about government not "getting anything done."

Glenn Greenwald wrote about the actual record of bipartisanship earlier this week and set forth a long list of recent legislative initiatives in which the Republicans voted as a bloc and Democrats crossed the aisle to pass legislation. It's quite impressive.

Digby: Boo Hoo

Now we're having some fun:

A defensive Rush Limbaugh, one of Senator McCain's biggest detractors, just delivered what he called a "non-concession speech" in response to Mr. McCain's win in Florida Tuesday. "Yeah, it looks like McCain's pretty far down the line now to having wrapped this up," he said on his popular conservative radio show today.

At times, the talk host still seemed to have some fight in him. At other times, he seemed ready to move on. "There's going to be another election in 2012," Mr. Limbaugh said at one point.

Daily Kos: Media notes on: "Third Way"

by Kagro X

Fri Feb 01, 2008 at 09:04:10 AM PST

In the non-existent wake of the non-existent excitement over the non-existent clamor for a Bloomberg candidacy comes this piece of news about the equally-deluded numbskulls at the too-hopefully-named "Third Way."
Truthout.org reports:

A think tank with close ties to the telecommunication industry has been working with a key Democrat in the Senate on a domestic surveillance bill that would provide telecommunications companies with retroactive immunity for possibly violating federal law by spying on American citizens at the behest of the Bush administration.

US drought 'man-made' says study

19:00 31 January 2008
NewScientist.com news service
Jim Giles

The water shortages gripping the western US are the result of global warming, not natural variations in climate, according to a bleak study by hydrologists. The results suggest that water disputes will plague the region in the future and damage economic growth unless action is taken now, warn researchers.

About 60% of the changes seen in river flow in the western US are due to warming caused by humans, their study suggests.

Stealing Our Future II: Democracy, Fear, and the War on the Middle Class

By Sara Robinson

January 31st, 2008 - 9:47am ET

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In one of the comments threads that discussed last week's first Stealing Our Future post, an astute commenter named Ohio Mom did a telling bit of class analysis:

I was reminded of the aphorism that the wealthy look to the past and the legacy they've inherited ("our family came over on the Mayflower"), the poor live in the present, but the middle class's orientation is the future, for which they work, scrimp and save. There may be a relationship between our giving up planning and our giving up on having a robust and large middle class. Just a thought...
Ohio Mom

It's a great thought, and one that deserves some further discussion.

The Verdict: It’s Broken

The case of the mismanaged American Indian trust funds is Dickensian both in length — now 11 years before the courts — and inequity. On Wednesday, Judge James Robertson of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that the Interior Department had “unreasonably delayed” its accounting for billions of dollars owed to American Indian landholders and that the agency “cannot remedy the breach.”

There is, of course, no full remedy — not for the historical wrongs or the cynical and shabby accounting or the years of frustration. And as Judge Robertson and others before him have noted, a meticulously accurate tally of what the American Indians are owed is almost certainly impossible. Yet that does not mean that a reasonable compromise cannot be reached or that the government should abandon efforts to find one. A study group set up by Gale Norton, the former interior secretary, in early 2001 was scrapped after less than two years. Simple justice requires a more sustained effort.

Paul Krugman: The Edwards Effect

So John Edwards has dropped out of the race for the presidency. By normal political standards, his campaign fell short.

But Mr. Edwards, far more than is usual in modern politics, ran a campaign based on ideas. And even as his personal quest for the White House faltered, his ideas triumphed: both candidates left standing are, to a large extent, running on the platform Mr. Edwards built.

To understand the extent of the Edwards effect, you have to think about what might have been.

Telecom Group Key Player in Immunity Battle

By Matt Renner
t r u t h o u t | Investigative Report
Thursday 31 January 2008

A think tank with close ties to the telecommunication industry has been working with a key Democrat in the Senate on a domestic surveillance bill that would provide telecommunications companies with retroactive immunity for possibly violating federal law by spying on American citizens at the behest of the Bush administration.

Third Way, a non-profit "progressive" think tank that is funded and controlled by hedge fund managers, corporate lawyers and business executives has advised Sen. Jay Rockefeller on a domestic surveillance bill that includes immunity for telecommunications companies with which Third Way board members have close ties.

Official: Bush's 2009 budget to be tight

By KEVIN FREKING, Associated Press Writer
Thu Jan 31, 6:35 PM ET

President Bush's 2009 budget will virtually freeze most domestic programs and seek nearly $200 billion in savings from federal health care programs, a senior administration official said Thursday.

Overall, the Bush budget will exceed $3 trillion, this official said. The deficit is expected to reach about $400 billion for this year and next.

Bush on Monday will present his proposed budget for the new fiscal year to Congress, where it's unlikely to gain much traction in the midst of a presidential campaign. The president has promised a plan that would erase the budget deficit by 2012 if his policies are followed.

America Betrayed: Will Progressives Take the Fall?

By Joe Brewer and Scott Parkinson, AlterNet
Posted on February 1, 2008, Printed on February 1, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/75646/

The story of Iraq will be told as a story of betrayal. But which version of that story prevails -- who is cast as the betrayer -- will have profound and lasting consequences for the future of our country.

As we enter this crucial election year, progressives need to be wary that our greatest strength, our longstanding opposition to the debacle in Iraq, could become our greatest weakness. A trap has been set to clamp down on progressives when the apparent progress from the "surge" inevitably unravels into a new round of intense violence.

Employment Drops in a Pink Slip Blizzard

Friday February 1, 4:45 pm ET
By Jeannine Aversa, AP Economics Writer

Employment Falls for the First Time in More Than 4 Years, a Fresh Sign of Possible Recession

WASHINGTON (AP) -- In a shower of pink slips, U.S. employers cut jobs last month for the first time in more than four years, the starkest signal yet that the economy is grinding to a halt if it hasn't already toppled into recession.

Conditions are deteriorating, according to the latest employment snapshot by the Labor Department, which showed nervous employers slicing payrolls by 17,000. The country hadn't seen such a nationwide job loss since 2003, when employers were still struggling to recover from the last previous recession.

The GOP: From Big Tent to Three-Ring Circus

Florida is where circus people from all over the country go to spend the winter. And, watching the primary results from that state come in tonight, I'm struck that it also seems to be the place where the GOP's famous Big Tent has finally turned into a three-ring circus in its own right.

It's an apt metaphor. The genius of the conservative emergence during the 1970s was in the way it reached out to three large, deeply discontented tribes, and brought them all together under Lee Atwater's "big tent" -- which quickly turned into a red-striped big top full of the most bizarre acts anyone had ever seen. In its 20-year heyday, the whole dazzling circus was a blur of non-stop noise and glitter bouncing and glinting across three rings, three different shows -- and three sets of supporters each contributing something essential to the success of the Greatest Show in Politics.

Tomgram: Michael Klare, Barreling into Recession

The latest economic news is striking. The U.S. economy has come to a "virtual standstill." The bubble has burst and, with anxious global markets registering the shock, other bubble economies worldwide continue to shudder at the possibility that American consumers might be forced to rein in their decade-long buying spree of imported goods.

Though any reader of newspaper business pages has surely noticed that oil news, oil deals, and oil prices have been front and center, the role of oil in our new economic moment has been underemphasized of late. It's hard even to remember -- now that the price of a barrel of crude oil has hit the $100 mark and still hovers around $91 -- that, in the week after September 11, 2001, oil was still under $20 a barrel. Think of this as another modest accomplishment of the Bush administration, helped along by its rash war in Iraq, which actually took oil off the market. In a mere six years, we've gone from the era of cheap oil to the era of pricy petroleum or "tough oil", with a new spike at the gas pump expected as early as this spring. The results are now there for all to see -- in growing misery at home as well as stunning global financial and power shifts.

Digby: Pillaging Every Last Penny

The president must have dropped a page or two of his speech tonight because he didn't mention this at all:

While thousands of Mississippians who lost their homes to Hurricane Katrina remain in FEMA trailers, the federal government on Friday approved a state plan to spend $600 million in grants earmarked for housing on a major expansion of the state-owned port — a project that could eventually include casino and resort facilities.

[...]

The money in question is part of $5.5 billion in HUD Community Development Block Grants (CDBG) that Congress authorized for Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina struck on Aug. 29, 2005. Administered by the Mississippi Development Authority, about $3.4 billion was allocated to replace and repair some of the nearly 170,000 owner-occupied homes destroyed or damaged by the storm. Another $600 million was set aside for programs to replace public housing, help small landlords fix their units and foster construction of new low- and moderate-income housing.

Digby: The Plan

I have no idea if Bloomberg will get into the race, but it's quite obvious that he is seriously considering it. This article in this week's NY magazine is a fascinating profile of his top aide and the plans that are being laid if he decides to make the jump:

Sheekey was miserable during the first term, adrift without a real role, until Bloomberg put him in charge of the city’s end of the 2004 Republican convention. One fringe benefit was getting to know Mark McKinnon, the Democrat turned Republican political consultant who helped make George W. Bush president...

Digby: Silly Voters

Regardless of whether you like Clinton or Obama, does anyone think it's a good idea for MSNBC to be rude, snide and dismissive about more than a million and a half Democratic voters in Florida (more than double the turnout from 2004)? Isn't there a little unpleasant history of votes not counting down there?

Now I realize that there are no delegates being awarded and maybe there won't be at the convention either. There are people talking about holding a new caucus later in the process so they do a mulligan in the state. And I also know that many people think Clinton is running some sort of scam and that she'll unfairly try to seat her delegates and that it's inappropriate for her to have a rally in Florida to celebrate "winning" etc, etc. Fine. That's all party politics and it's not what I'm talking about. It will be worked out one way or the other.

Digby: Laying Landmines

Dday wrote about Bush pulling out his trusty pen earlier today and issuing yet another signing statement, this time saying the congress has no right to tell the president he can't build permanent bases in Iraq. A reader reminded me that Bush was a busy unitary boy today. He was also issuing executive orders about what the congress is and isn't allowed to appropriate money for:

As legislators and federal officials prepared to leave town for the Christmas recess last month, Congress hurriedly passed a massive 3,400-page spending bill to keep the government running for the next fiscal year. Tucked inside the report language of the omnibus bill, and not technically bound by the force of law, were nearly 9,000 congressional earmarks worth an estimated $7.5 billion.

Digby: It Depends On What The Definition Of Conscience Is

Remember this?

Whether they voted for Mukasey or not, Democrats widely want him to examine the interrogation tactic designed to make the subject think he is drowning, and answer definitively: Is it illegal torture?

"I do believe he will be a truly nonpolitical, nonpartisan attorney general; that he will make his views very clear; and that, once he has the opportunity to do the evaluation he believes he needs on waterboarding, he will be willing to come before the Judiciary Committee and express his views comprehensively and definitively," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, one of the six who voted with the majority for confirmation.

House Approves Economic Stimulus Plan

By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

WASHINGTON — The House voted on Tuesday to approve a $146 billion fiscal stimulus package, hoping to seal a fast-paced deal with President Bush on tax rebates and business incentives intended to jolt the economy with new spending.

But the deal, which would be the most striking show of bipartisan cooperation since Democrats won control of Congress in 2006, was at risk as Senate Democrats forged ahead with their own, more expensive plan and jockeyed over what to include in it.

The Fine Print

With President Bush, you always have to read the footnotes.

Just before Monday night’s State of the Union speech, in which Mr. Bush extolled bipartisanship, railed against government excesses and promised to bring the troops home as soon as it’s safe to withdraw, the White House undermined all of those sentiments with the latest of the president’s infamous signing statements.

The signing statements are documents that earlier presidents generally used to trumpet their pleasure at signing a law, or to explain how it would be enforced. More than any of his predecessors, the current chief executive has used the pronouncements in a passive-aggressive way to undermine the power of Congress.

US funds madrassas in Afghanistan

By Jon Boone in Khost

Published: January 29 2008 22:12 | Last updated: January 29 2008 22:12

The US military is funding the construction of Islamic schools, or madrassas, in the east of Afghanistan in an attempt to stem the tide of young people going to radical religious schools in Pakistan.

Such schools spawned the Taliban movement, which harboured Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader behind the September 11 terror attacks on the US, before it was swept from power in 2001.

Bush Thumbs Nose at Congress

By Dan Froomkin

Special to washingtonpost.com
Wednesday, January 30, 2008; 1:02 PM

It's about as basic as it gets: Congress has the power of the purse. And Section 1222 of the massive defense appropriation bill enacted this week asserts that power. It reads, in its entirety:

"No funds appropriated pursuant to an authorization of appropriations in this Act may be obligated or expended for a purpose as follows:

Frank Rich: On The Democrats

Such was the low estate of the Bush administration in American public opinion that the Democrats did even better than expected in the midterm elections of 2006, especially in their narrow takeover of the Senate. The most revealing upset came in Virginia, where Jim Webb, a much-decorated Vietnam veteran, fierce Iraq war critic, and former secretary of the navy in the Reagan administration, beat the incumbent Republican senator, George Allen. Many Republican insiders had long envisioned Allen as the party's next presidential standard-bearer. Like George W. Bush, he was an unalloyed conservative with a talent for hiding his hard ideological edges behind a jocular good-old-boy persona. But a campaign incident widely disseminated on the video Web site YouTube, in which Allen addressed an Indian-American campaign worker for Webb with a racial slur ("macaca"), ripped off the mask, cost him his Senate seat and, in all likelihood, his political career.

The Man Who Learned Too Little

In his final State of the Union, Bush makes more empty promises.

By Fred Kaplan
Posted Monday, Jan. 28, 2008, at 11:54 PM ET

The sad thing about President George W. Bush's final State of the Union address is that he seems to have learned so little about the crises in which he's immersed his nation so deeply.

His first words on foreign policy in tonight's address reprised the theme of previous addresses: "We trust that people, when given the chance, will choose a future of freedom and peace." He cited, as "stirring" examples of this principle, the "images" of citizens demanding independence in Ukraine and Lebanon, of Afghans emerging from the Taliban's tyranny, of "jubilant Iraqis holding up ink-stained fingers" to celebrate free elections.

More Hitting Cost Limit on Health Benefits

Consumers Forced To Explore Options

By Christopher Lee
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 27, 2008; A03

A small but growing number of American families beset by major medical problems are learning the hard way that simply having health insurance is sometimes not enough.

Those who need organ transplants or who have hemophilia, Gaucher disease or other costly chronic illnesses can easily rack up medical bills that blow through the lifetime benefits cap of $1 million or more that is a standard part of many insurance policies.

Digby: Creative Conservatism

Created 01/25/2008 - 7:19pm

Dave Roberts of Grist takes a look [1] at Newt Gingrich's innovative new environmental proposals which, unsurprisingly, looks like another fantastic opportunity for rich people to bleed the taxpayers:

[W]hat Gingrich recommends is, in Sean's phrasing [2], pro-business, not pro-market. He wants to ladle out public money to favored corporations while shielding them from any regulations....This is what passes for conservative in today's party of economic royalists, but it is not conservative in the original sense.

It leaves Gingrich with very little to offer beyond media-friendly rhetoric. Look at the answer he offers Sierra Magazine [3] (in a roundtable well worth reading) on what the next president and Congress should do first:

Former Indonesian Dictator, U.S. Ally & Mass Murderer, Suharto, 86, Dies

Today a Democracy Now! special – an in-depth look at Suharto’s brutal thirty-year reign and the role of the United States in shoring him up. Suharto rose to power in 1965, killing up to a million Indonesians. Hundreds of thousands of more people died during the U.S.-supported Indonesian invasion and occupation of East Timor. Tens of thousands also died in West Papua and Aceh. On Sunday, Cameron Hume, U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia, said “Though there may be some controversy over his legacy, President Suharto was a historic figure who left a lasting imprint on Indonesia and the region of Southeast Asia.”

Neo-cons shaken, but not deterred

Neo-cons shaken, but not deterred
By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON - Almost exactly five years after it reached its zenith with the invasion of Iraq, the influence of neo-conservatives has waned sharply in Washington, as their nemeses, the "realists" in the national security bureaucracy, have increasingly asserted control over US foreign policy.

While battered, however, neo-conservatives have not yet been forced from the field. And while their hopes that President George W Bush would "take out" Iran's nuclear program before leaving office appear to have diminished substantially, their hawkish voice is still heard loud and clear both in the White House - courtesy of Vice President Dick Cheney's office and Deputy National Security adviser Elliott Abrams - and in this year's Republican presidential race, where neo-conservative favorites include former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, Senator John McCain, and, until earlier last week, Fred Thompson.

Paul Krugman: Who Gets Stimulated

Fast work by the people at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, who figure out who gets what from tax plans. They now have distribution tables for the stimulus proposal announced yesterday, and they more or less match my expectations.

$100 Billion and Counting: How Wall Street Blew Itself up

By Pam Martens, CounterPunch
Posted on January 27, 2008, Printed on January 29, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/74510/

The massive losses by big Wall Street firms, now topping those of the Great Depression in relative terms, have yet to be adequately explained. Wall Street power players are obfuscating and Congress is too embarrassed or frightened to ask, preferring to just throw money at the problem and hope it goes away. But as job losses and foreclosures mount and pensions and 401(k)s shrink, public policy measures to address the economic stresses require a full set of unembellished facts.

The proof that Wall Street is giving mainstream media a stage-managed version of what went wrong begins with a strange revelation by Gary Crittenden, CFO of Citigroup, on the November 5, 2007 conference call where he discusses what have now become the largest losses in the firm's 196-year history. Mr. Crittenden is asked by an analyst why the firm didn't hedge its risk.

The Road To Hyperinflation

Fed helpless in its own crisis
By Henry C K Liu

After months of denial to soothe a nervous market, the Federal Reserve, the US central bank, finally started to take increasingly desperate steps to try to inject more liquidity into distressed financial institutions to revive and stabilize credit markets that have been roiled by turmoil since August 2007 and to prevent the home mortgage credit crisis from infesting the whole economy.

Yet more liquidity appears to be a counterproductive response to a credit crisis that has been caused by years of excess liquidity. A liquidity crisis is merely a symptom of the current financial malaise. The real disease is mounting insolvency resulting from excessive debt for which adding liquidity can only postpone the day of reckoning towards a bigger problem but cannot cure. Further, the market is stalled by a liquidity crunch, but the economy is plagued with excess liquidity. What the Fed appears to be doing is to try to save the market at the expense of the economy by adding more liquidity.

Bad news for coastal ocean: less fish out, means more nitrogen in

The study, the first to examine the world's 58 coatal regions, shows how failing to maintain ecosystems in a sustainable manner has wide-ranging consequences. Using data provided by the United Nations, the researchers found that commercial fishing has played an important, yet declining, role in removing man-made nitrogen from coastal waters.

Digby: Rudy No Go

I've seen some spectacular political flameouts in my day, but this is one for the books:

Ex-New York mayor Rudy Giuliani took a further hit on Sunday, when a poll showed he dropped to fourth place ahead of Florida's Republican primary, which looked set to be a tight race between John McCain and Mitt Romney.

And, just days ahead of Tuesday's voting, McCain got a major boost with the endorsement of Florida Governor Charlie Crist, who enjoys popularity levels of around 70 percent in the state.

Digby: Stepping Up

Firedoglake reports that both Senator Clinton and Senator Obama are going to be in the Senate tomorrow to vote no on cloture on the FISA bill. Ari Melber at The Nation explains what's going on:

President Bush is now daring Congress to defy his demand for more unchecked power to spy on Americans without warrants, vowing to veto temporary surveillance legislation and politicize his last State of the Union address for an attack on Democrats.

The End of Privacy

By Elliot Cohen

Amid the controversy brewing in the Senate over Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) reform, the Bush administration appears to have changed its strategy and is devising a bold new plan that would strip away FISA protections in favor of a system of wholesale government monitoring of every American’s Internet activities. Now the national director of intelligence is predicting a disastrous cyber-terrorist attack on the U.S. if this scheme isn’t instituted.

It is no secret that the Bush administration has already been spying on the e-mail, voice-over-IP, and other Internet exchanges between American citizens since as early as and possibly earlier than Sept. 11, 2001. The National Security Agency has set up shop in the hubs of major telecom corporations, notably AT&T, installing equipment that makes copies of the contents of all Internet traffic, routing it to a government database and then using natural language parsing technology to sift through and analyze the data using undisclosed search criteria. It has done this without judicial oversight and obviously without the consent of the millions of Americans under surveillance. Given any rational interpretation of the Fourth Amendment, its mass spying operation is illegal and unconstitutional.

Paul Krugman: Lessons of 1992

It’s starting to feel a bit like 1992 again. A Bush is in the White House, the economy is a mess, and there’s a candidate who, in the view of a number of observers, is running on a message of hope, of moving past partisan differences, that resembles Bill Clinton’s campaign 16 years ago.

Now, I’m not sure that’s a fair characterization of the 1992 Clinton campaign, which had a strong streak of populism, beginning with a speech in which Mr. Clinton described the 1980s as a “gilded age of greed.” Still, to the extent that Barack Obama 2008 does sound like Bill Clinton 1992, here’s my question: Has everyone forgotten what happened after the 1992 election?

Let’s review the sad tale, starting with the politics.

3 US workers face investigation over Obama e-mail

By Bryan Bender, Globe Staff | January 26, 2008

WASHINGTON - Three federal employees are being investigated for unlawful political activities after they allegedly sent an e-mail falsely accusing Barack Obama of being a "radical Muslim," the Globe has learned.

The US Office of Special Counsel - the independent federal agency responsible for enforcing a law banning civil service workers from engaging in political activism while performing their official duties - has launched investigations of two employees at one agency and one employee at another agency. All three are believed to have forwarded the erroneous chain e-mail about Obama from their government e-mail accounts.

Digby: The New Field Frontier

One of the most interesting things about this primary race is something that nobody's talking about, but it's hugely important and may make the difference come November.

Matt Stoller wrote about it in The Nation this week:

About twice as many Democrats voted in Iowa as Republicans. "We'd better be careful as a party," Mike Huckabee warned his fellow Republicans in the wake of the Iowa caucuses, "because if we don't give people something to be for, and only something to be against, we're going to lose that next election, and there are some fundamental issues that we lose with it." Mike Podhorzer, deputy political director of the AFL-CIO, puts it this way: "You have dead turnout on the Republican side and insane turnout on the Democratic side."

Digby: White Flag

clammyc over at Dkos discusses this mindblowing article in today's Boston Globe about what's going on in Afghanistan and Pakistan. As he wryly observes, it's not as exciting as watching Tweety and Blitzer slobber and squeal over every nuance of the candidates' canned talking points, but it is actually important. The article says:

Sometime in mid-December, as the winter winds howled across the snow-dusted hills of Pakistan's inhospitable border regions, 40 men representing Taliban groups all across Pakistan's northwest frontier came together to unify under a single banner and to choose a leader.

The banner was Tehrik-e- Taliban Pakistan, or the Taliban Movement of Pakistan, with a fighting force estimated at up to 40,000. And the leader was Baitullah Mehsud, the man Pakistan accuses of assassinating former prime minister Benazir Bhutto.

Taliban factions unite to battle Pakistan

Warlord reports aid from Al Qaeda

By Kathy Gannon, Associated Press | January 27, 2008

PESHAWAR, Pakistan - Sometime in mid-December, as the winter winds howled across the snow-dusted hills of Pakistan's inhospitable border regions, 40 men representing Taliban groups all across Pakistan's northwest frontier came together to unify under a single banner and to choose a leader.

The banner was Tehrik-e- Taliban Pakistan, or the Taliban Movement of Pakistan, with a fighting force estimated at up to 40,000. And the leader was Baitullah Mehsud, the man Pakistan accuses of assassinating former prime minister Benazir Bhutto.

Waving Goodbye to Hegemony

By PARAG KHANNA

Turn on the TV today, and you could be forgiven for thinking it’s 1999. Democrats and Republicans are bickering about where and how to intervene, whether to do it alone or with allies and what kind of world America should lead. Democrats believe they can hit a reset button, and Republicans believe muscular moralism is the way to go. It’s as if the first decade of the 21st century didn’t happen — and almost as if history itself doesn’t happen. But the distribution of power in the world has fundamentally altered over the two presidential terms of George W. Bush, both because of his policies and, more significant, despite them. Maybe the best way to understand how quickly history happens is to look just a bit ahead.

It is 2016, and the Hillary Clinton or John McCain or Barack Obama administration is nearing the end of its second term. America has pulled out of Iraq but has about 20,000 troops in the independent state of Kurdistan, as well as warships anchored at Bahrain and an Air Force presence in Qatar. Afghanistan is stable; Iran is nuclear. China has absorbed Taiwan and is steadily increasing its naval presence around the Pacific Rim and, from the Pakistani port of Gwadar, on the Arabian Sea. The European Union has expanded to well over 30 members and has secure oil and gas flows from North Africa, Russia and the Caspian Sea, as well as substantial nuclear energy. America’s standing in the world remains in steady decline.

Disgraced and vilified, Suharto dies aged 86

By Anthony Deutsch, AP
Sunday, 27 January 2008

Indonesia's former dictator Suharto, an army general who crushed Indonesia's communist movement and pushed aside the country's founding father to usher in 32 years of tough rule that saw up to a million political opponents killed, died today. He was 86.

"He has died," Dr Christian Johannes said that he died at 1.10pm local time.

Finally toppled by mass street protests in 1998, the US Cold War ally's departure opened the way for democracy in this predominantly Muslim nation of 235 million people and he withdrew from public life, rarely venturing from his comfortable villa on a leafy lane in the capital.

Bush to urge economic stimulus, wiretapping powers in State of the Union address

Warren P. Strobel | McClatchy Newspapers

last updated: January 25, 2008 06:48:01 PM

WASHINGTON — President Bush gets what may be his final chance to steer the public debate Monday night in his last State of the Union address.

With his aides privately acknowledging that the moments when Bush can be relevant are dwindling fast, the president is expected to press for a shortened list of proposals. With his legacy in mind, he'll urge Congress to extend some key initiatives of his tenure: tax cuts, the No Child Left Behind law, the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq.

Bush will be speaking under circumstances very different than before, however, with economic fears roiling the country and the war in Iraq and terrorism concerns in the background, at least temporarily.

AGU revises position on climate change

WASHINGTON – A statement released on January 24 by the world’s largest scientific society of Earth and space scientists—the American Geophysical Union, or AGU—updates the organization’s position on climate change: the evidence for it, potential consequences from it, and how to respond to it.

The statement is the first revision since 2003 of the climate-change position of the AGU, which has a membership of 50,000 researchers, teachers, and students in 137 countries. The society adopted the statement at a meeting of AGU’s leadership body, the AGU Council, in San Francisco, California, on 14 December 2007. AGU position statements expire in four years, unless extended by the Council.

Union Rates Increase in 2007

January 25, 2008

By Ben Zipperer and John Schmitt

For the first time in the past quarter of a century, in 2007 U.S. unions increased their share of membership among workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) annual union membership report released today. Unions added about 310,000 members last year, raising the unionized share of the workforce to 12.1 percent from 12.0 percent in 2006.

The increase is small, and may well reflect statistical variation rather than an actual increase in the union membership share, but the uptick is striking because it is the first time since the BLS began collecting annual union membership rates in 1983 that the union share has increased.

Frank Rich: The Billary Road to Republican Victory

IN the wake of George W. Bush, even a miracle might not be enough for the Republicans to hold on to the White House in 2008. But what about two miracles? The new year’s twin resurrections of Bill Clinton and John McCain, should they not evaporate, at last give the G.O.P. a highly plausible route to victory.

Amazingly, neither party seems to fully recognize the contours of the road map. In the Democrats’ case, the full-throttle emergence of Billary, the joint Clinton candidacy, is measured mainly within the narrow confines of the short-term horse race: Do Bill Clinton’s red-faced eruptions and fact-challenged rants enhance or diminish his wife as a woman and a candidate?

Tip-off thwarted nuclear spy ring probe

AN investigation into the illicit sale of American nuclear secrets was compromised by a senior official in the State Department, a former FBI employee has claimed.

The official is said to have tipped off a foreign contact about a bogus CIA company used to investigate the sale of nuclear secrets.

The firm, Brewster Jennings & Associates, was a front for Valerie Plame, the former CIA agent. Her public outing two years later in 2003 by White House officials became a cause célèbre.