Sour mood

47 million Americans lack health insurance, according to a new report by the Economic Policy Institute.

The number of Americans lacking health insurance rose by nearly 8.6 million to 47 million from 2000 to 2006, with children and workers from every income level losing coverage, a new report said on Thursday.
The increase was "driven primarily by the continued erosion in employer-provided health insurance," said the report by the Washington, D.C.-based Economic Policy Institute.
In 2006, 2.3 million fewer Americans received health benefits from their employers than in 2000, the report said, noting the decline does not take the population increase into account.
Nearly 60 percent of the nation's children are covered by the insurance provided by their parents' employers, but 3.4 million fewer children had benefits in 2006 compared with 2000.
"Public health insurance is no longer offsetting these losses," said the report by the nonpartisan think-tank.

Is it any wonder that people are so unhappy today? Pretty much since Bush took office, the national mood has been in a downward spiral. Why? The war, for one. It was supposed to last six months. You know, a cake walk, rose petals thrown at our feet, etc. All bullshit.
The surplus that Clinton left us? The promise of finally starting to chip away at our national debt that has been spiraling out of countrol since the Reagan years? All gone. Instead, we are spending hundreds of billions every year on the Iraqi boondoggle while Republicans, at the same time, insist that we can’t afford comparatively tiny increases in domestic spending back home.
It does not compute. You can’t continue to support spending hundreds of billions in Iraq year after never-ending year, while telling us that we can’t afford to fix problems at home and expect the nation’s mood to do anything but bottom out.

Happy Halloween!

Life is a Rock

I had this song on a Ronco record collection when I was a kid and I nearly had the lyrics memorized (or at least what I thought were the lyrics). Now someone has put together a custom video for the song that is truly hilarious.

Fox in the hen house

Here is a story that spells out more clearly than any other I’ve read in a while what is really wrong with the Bush administration and the core of the Republican Party today:

The nation’s top official for consumer product safety has asked Congress in recent days to reject legislation intended to strengthen the agency, which polices thousands of consumer goods, from toys to tools.

On the eve of an important Senate committee meeting to consider the legislation, Nancy A. Nord, the acting chairwoman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, has asked lawmakers in two letters not to approve the bulk of legislation that would increase the agency’s authority, double its budget and sharply increase its dwindling staff.

Ms. Nord opposes provisions that would increase the maximum penalties for safety violations and make it easier for the government to make public reports of faulty products, protect industry whistle-blowers and prosecute executives of companies that willfully violate laws.

The measure is an effort to buttress an agency that has been under siege because of a raft of tainted and dangerous products manufactured both domestically and abroad. In the last two months alone, more than 13 million toys have been recalled after tests indicated lead levels that sometimes reached almost 200 times the safety limit.

Ms. Nord’s opposition to important elements of the legislation is consistent with the broadly deregulatory approach of the Bush administration over the last seven years. In a variety of areas, from antitrust to trucking and worker safety, officials appointed by President Bush have sought to reduce the role of regulation and government in the marketplace.

Republicans are not interested in practicing good government. Their ideology precludes it, so rather than using the government to protect the interests of the people as it is supposed to do, they shut it down and attempt to undermine it at every point. Bush has filled our government with these kinds of ideological cronies such as Mrs. Nord who are looking out for the best interests of their former and probably future employers and not the interests of the people.
It is truly despicable.

Gurwitz hearts Rudy

Jonathan Gurwitz has a throwaway column today, which is fine and to be expected every once in awhile. He spends the better part of it quoting humorous comments from Stephen Colbert.
But he closes off the piece with a paen to his favorite presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani. He is overly excited about the following quote, as if it offers some kind of refreshing directness and steadfastness not found in the statements of other candidates. Here is the quote:

"If I come out here and I take a poll and I try to figure out what you all believe, and then I just repeat to you what you all believe, then I'm a follower. I may be a good actor if I do it well, but I'm a follower.

"What you're entitled to from me is what I really believe, the sum total of my intellect, my experience, my education, my conscience, my heart, my mind. And then you have a right to agree with that, disagree with it, partially agree, partially disagree and then figure out if I'm the right person for you to support.

"But for me to twist myself all up to try to figure out exactly what you want to hear and today say one thing and the next day another thing and a year from now — if you do that too long, you lose the sense of what leadership is all about."

That’s fine and all, but he didn’t really say anything there, now did he? It’s not like he was clarifying or defending any of his social positions that conservatives might have concerns with. He just talked around them. But that somehow makes him less of a tailor and straddler, according to his fawning fan Mr. Gurwitz.

15 Laterals

I don't think the Marx Brothers could have come up with a game-ending play this crazy...

Modern Jacobinism

I nearly missed reading this op-ed in the Sunday NYTimes. It draws some rather sharp distinctions between the Bush/Cheney/Rove wing of the Republican Party today with the Jacobins who ruled France in the wake of the French Revolution.

The Jacobins shared a defining ideological feature. They divided the world between pro- and anti-Revolutionaries — the defenders of liberty versus its enemies. The French Revolution, as they understood it, was the great event that would determine whether liberty was to prevail on the planet or whether the world would fall back into tyranny and despotism.
The stakes could not be higher, and on these matters there could be no nuance or hesitation. One was either for the Revolution or for tyranny.
....
Confronted by a monarchical Europe united in opposition to revolutionary France — old Europe, they might have called it — the Jacobins rooted out domestic political dissent. It was the beginning of the period that would become infamous as the Terror.

Among the Jacobins’ greatest triumphs was their ability to appropriate the rhetoric of patriotism — Le Patriote Français was the title of Brissot’s newspaper — and to promote their political program through a tightly coordinated network of newspapers, political hacks, pamphleteers and political clubs.

Even the Jacobins’ dress distinguished “true patriots”: those who wore badges of patriotism like the liberty cap on their heads, or the cocarde tricolore (a red, white and blue rosette) on their hats or even on their lapels.

Insisting that their partisan views were identical to the national will, believing that only they could save France from apocalyptic destruction, Jacobins could not conceive of legitimate dissent. Political opponents were treasonous, stabbing France and the Revolution in the back.

To defend the nation from its enemies, Jacobins expanded the government’s police powers at the expense of civil liberties, endowing the state with the power to detain, interrogate and imprison suspects without due process. Policies like the mass warrantless searches undertaken in 1792 — “domicilary visits,” they were called — were justified, according to Georges Danton, the Jacobin leader, “when the homeland is in danger.”
....
If the French Terror had a slogan, it was that attributed to the great orator Louis de Saint-Just: “No liberty for the enemies of liberty.” Saint-Just’s pithy phrase (like President Bush’s variant, “We must not let foreign enemies use the forums of liberty to destroy liberty itself”) could serve as the very antithesis of the Western liberal tradition.

On this principle, the Terror demonized its political opponents, imprisoned suspected enemies without trial and eventually sent thousands to the guillotine. All of these actions emerged from the Jacobin worldview that the enemies of liberty deserved no rights.

No End In Sight

I’d love to see this movie at some point.

E-N diverts blame for SCHIP failure

The San Antonio Express-News has another editorial out today that is a piece of work.
It trys to make the case that the blame for Congress’ failure to pass an SCHIP extension should fall equally on both Republicans and Democrats.
Nonsense.
Nearly 80 percent of Americans support this legislation that a small minority of rightwing Republicans have been blocking. Democrats have already made many compromises in the legislation resulting in thousands of children being excluded from the program because their parents make too much money or because they are LEGAL immigrants. How many more children does the Express-News want to see kicked off of the program before they will concede that the Democrats have compromised enough?
When you read the editorial, they spend 90 percent of it talking about how Republicans have failed to compromise. And yet the headline of the piece is “Both sides to blame for SCHIP gridlock”. What do they chide Democrats about? Not rescheduling the vote because a few Republican congressmen were going to miss it. Would rescheduling the vote have made any difference? Would these Republicans have come back and changed their votes if the Democrats had put it off longer? Not likely. It made no difference ultimately because they were still short the votes necessary to override Bush’s promised second veto. But this slim reed of criticism was good enough for the editorial board to lay blame equally on both sides. They have to be “fair and balanced” after all.
What is really going on here is that while the editorial board nominally supports SCHIP, they are at heart a partisan Republican outfit that endorses Republican candidates almost exclusively across the board. So they are trying to bend over backwards to shield Republicans from the public’s justifiable anger on this issue and divert it unfairly onto the other side.

Importance of Social Security

Via Kevin Drum, I found this informative article on Social Security that is worth a careful read:

Social Security has never been more important to more Americans than it is now. Private pension plans continue to dwindle -- currently covering only about 20 percent of private-sector employees -- and the national rate of savings hovers around zero. We just can't afford to cut Social Security benefits further. There's no way to make up for the loss.

Social Security benefits are vital to nearly all recipients. About a third of the elderly rely on Social Security for 90 percent or more of their income; two-thirds count on it to supply at least half of their income. The program lifts 13 million elderly beneficiaries above poverty.

Without Social Security, 55 percent of the disabled -- and a million children -- would live in poverty. The program is particularly important to women and minorities. It provides 90 percent or more of the incomes of almost half of all unmarried women age 65 and older (including those who are widowed, are divorced or never married), and it is the sole source of income for 40 percent of elderly African Americans and Hispanic Americans.

Social Security is the nation's most effective anti-poverty program. But it's much more than that. For every worker it provides a solid base on which to try to build an adequate level of retirement income. To weaken that foundation would be grossly irresponsible.

Grossly irresponsible! That’s the Republican Party’s mantra these days. It’s George W.’s middle name. The radical right can’t tolerate effective government programs that do what they are supposed to do! It undermines their entire anti-government philosophy! That is why they want it privatized. Not that they think it will work better that way. They don’t really care one way or the other about that. They just can’t stand having it continue as a successful government program.

Amendment election

We have another Constitutional Amendment election coming up next week - Nov. 6.
I hate Constitutional Amendment elections. Most people are far too busy with their daily lives to take the time to study up on all these issues and make any kind of informed decisions. That is why we elect representatives to go to Austin in our stead. It’s their job to make these decisions for us. If we don’t like the decisions that they are making, then we pitch them out at the next election.
But this business of putting everything into an amendment and bringing it up for a statewide vote is ridiculous. The Texas Constitution needs to be chunked in the trash and written anew. The only problem is that I am scared to death of the kinds of people who would get in there and write the new Constitution. The chances of them making it worse than it is already is very high.
People like Cathie Adams of The Eagle Forum who made news today by coming out in opposition to a $3 billion bond proposal to support cancer research.

A well-known social conservative is urging Texans to oppose a $3 billion bond proposal for cancer research, warning the money could be used for controversial embryonic stem cell testing.
Cathie Adams, president of the Texas Eagle Forum, cautioned fellow Republicans in an email this week that the borrowed money — $300 million annually over 10 years — might not stay in Texas and could be used for research on human embryos.

Good Lord! This nutcase puts more value onto a collection of leftover cells in a petri dish sitting in a fridge at a fertility clinic than she does in the hundreds of thousands of people suffering from cancer who could potentially be saved or have their lives prolonged by this funding. It’s disgusting.

And yet, thousands of people will now vote against this proposition because this woman told them to.

Rightwing anger

One thing I learned during my time as the house liberal at ATC, is that anger seems to be a defining characteristic of many rightwingers today. They are almost always angry about something and their list of things they dislike and/or hate is long and extensive: Liberals; Democrats; Hollywood; Illegal Immigrants; Muslims (i.e. Islamofacists); enviromentalists; gays; atheists; criminals, poor people, etc.
I guess the reason I’m not a rightwinger is I have a hard time building up that kind of anger and sustaining it for any length of time. Somedays I get up and find that I’m really not that angry at anyone (which can hamper my blogging).
But rightwingers don’t seem to have this kind of difficulty. Not only are they clear on who or what they hate, but they are consistent with it. They won’t watch a movie if it has an actor or actress that they don’t like (and there are lots of those). They won’t listen to music if the singer has expressed an opinion they disagree with (ditto). They won’t read newspapers or watch TV shows that have expressed opinions in the past that they disagree with. They won’t send their kids to schools where they think they might be taught by people with opinions contrary to their own. They won’t shop at stores or eat at restaurants where they have found reason to be offended or upset.
Eventually, they can become very isolated and before long all their news of the world is being funneled to them through a very select group of heavily filtered outlets - talk radio; right-wing blogs; Fox News; Ann Coulter books...
This, of course, makes it very difficult to have any kind of fulfilling discussion with them since they deem any news sources outside of their little sphere (i.e. the MSM) as false, blasphemous and suspect.
I thought at one time that I could establish a dialogue by reaching out and presenting the other side with a real flesh and blood person whom they could interact with rather than just dealing all the time with caricatures spoon fed to them by rightwing manipulators and propagandists. But I think what I underestimated was this need that many on the right have for being angry all the time. No matter how I argued any point, whether aggressively or conciliatory, they always came back the next day more angry than before. Eventually, the whole framework collapsed and I found myself pitched out on my rear and banished from the site - my comments deleted.
So while I still hold out hope that there can be dialogue and productive debate between the two sides, I’m a little more cynical about how quickly this can happen.
But there are also some who believe that this intransigence is more of a political ploy than a natural condition. Digby calls it the The Art of the Hissy Fit
and notes how it has become a pattern for rightwingers to shift debate in their favor by throwing wall-eyed hissy-fits over nonsensical and trivial matters. I saw it happen a number of times at ATC where someone would raise a stink about something and then insist that all liberals must jump through a series of hoops to be cleansed or else be condemned and defamed in a sort of ritual humiliation. The hypocricy of these exercises was rank, but pointing this out only increased the other side’s anger, thus coming full circle.

A baseball bet

I’m not one who normally gambles. In fact, I have a deep and personal dislike for certain types of gambling such as the state-run lotteries which I think are regressive forms of taxation that prey on the poor and the stupid.
Nevertheless, I recently made a wager with a friend over the outcome of the Baseball playoffs - winner buys lunch.
I figured that I had screwed up the bet because I picked the Yankees to go all the way and win the World Series, while my friend picked the Cleveland Indians. I even went so far as to concede the bet and offered to buy my friend lunch (an offer that has so far been ignored).
But now, looking back on our wager, I think I may have conceded too soon. While I blew my Yankees vs. Indians prediction, I correctly predicted that the Red Sox would beat the Angels in the first round of the playoffs. I also correctly picked the Diamondbacks to beat the Cubs in the first round of the National League playoffs, although I screwed up and picked the Phillies over the Rockies.
Meanwhile, my friend also picked the Red Sox in the American League first round, but he completely blew his National League predictions going with the Phillies and the Cubs. So by my estimation that comes to two correct picks each - a virtual tie.
We re-upped our predictions at the start of the second round of the playoffs and I went with the Red Sox and the Diamondbacks while he went with the Indians and the Rockies. So it looks like we are still tied. So since my initial concession has been rebuffed, I guess I will declare our wager a draw and leave it at that.

Hysteria on the right

Via Digby
I see that Newsweek columnist Fareed Zakaria is throwing cold water on the right-wing’s latest thrill fantasy about needing to launch a war with Iran.

The American discussion about Iran has lost all connection to reality. Norman Podhoretz, the neoconservative ideologist whom Bush has consulted on this topic, has written that Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is "like Hitler … a revolutionary whose objective is to overturn the going international system and to replace it in the fullness of time with a new order dominated by Iran and ruled by the religio-political culture of Islamofascism." For this staggering proposition Podhoretz provides not a scintilla of evidence.

Here is the reality. Iran has an economy the size of Finland's and an annual defense budget of around $4.8 billion. It has not invaded a country since the late 18th century. The United States has a GDP that is 68 times larger and defense expenditures that are 110 times greater. Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are quietly or actively allied against Iran. And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist order? What planet are we on?

Iran does pose some problems for us right now, but we really need to keep things in context and not allow neo-con whackjobs like Podhoretz to scare us into a frenzy. The fact that Podhoretz, who Glenn Greenwald rightly identifies as a psychopath, is now an advisor to the Giuliani campaign should tell us all we need to know about which direction he would take us.

Alleged terror financing case falls flat

The Bush Justice Departments big terror financing case just collapsed.

The U.S. Justice Department suffered a major setback in another high-profile terrorist prosecution Monday when its criminal case against five former officials of a now-defunct Islamic charity collapsed into a tangle of legal confusion.
U.S. District Judge A. Joe Fish declared a mistrial, but not before it became clear that the government's landmark terrorism finance case -- and one of its most-costly post-9/11 prosecutions -- was in serious trouble.
His decision came after jury verdicts were read to a packed courtroom indicating that none of the defendants had been found guilty on any of the 200 combined counts against them. Jurors had acquitted defendants on some counts and were deadlocked on charges ranging from tax violations to providing material support for terrorists.
However, during routine polling of the jurors to determine that their votes were accurately reflected in the findings, two said they were not. When efforts to reconcile the surprise conflict failed, Fish declared the mistrial.
The case presented to a Texas jury of eight women and four men relied heavily on Israeli intelligence and involved disputed documents and electronic surveillance gathered by federal agents over a span of nearly 15 years. Fish's order ended a two-month trial and 19 days of jury deliberations over allegations that Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development and five of its former leaders provided financial aid to the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.
President Bush announced in December 2001 that the Texas-based charity's assets were being seized, and in a Rose Garden news conference accused the organization of financing terrorism. Monday's outcome, however, raised serious questions about those allegations as well.
"I think it is a huge defeat for the government," said David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor specializing in 1st Amendment cases and terrorism prosecutions.
"They spent almost 15 years investigating this group, seized all their records and had extensive wiretapping and yet could not obtain a single conviction on charges of supporting a terrorist organization."
According to one juror interviewed Monday afternoon, the panel was evenly split on most of the disputed charges and not close to convicting anyone.
Juror William Neal, 33, who said his father worked in military intelligence, said that the government's case had "so many gaps" that he regarded the prosecution as "a waste of time."
It was unclear Monday whether the government would seek to retry all five defendants, but supporters viewed the outcome as vindication.
"My father was singled out for feeding, clothing and educating the children of Palestine," said Noor Elashi, the 21-year-old daughter of defendant Ghassan Elashi, Holy Land's former chairman. "I am the daughter of an American hero," she said.

This is a story that will be viewed differently depending on whether you are wearing right-tinted or left-tinted goggles. Rightwingers will see a travesty in which terrorists are being allowed to go free and they will blame the U.S. Justice system and claim that it just proves how we can’t fight terrorism in the courts.

Those on the left will also see a travesty, but one in which an innocent and peaceful charity organization was persecuted and villified by a reactionary Bush Justice Department desperately looking for a scapegoat’s scalp to hang on its belt.

Bush destroying conservatism

Gary Kamiya at Salon.com asks the very salient question What is up with conservatives these days? Are they just stoooopid or what?

The real question is: After seven years of George W. Bush, why would any genuine conservative still support his party?
Bush's presidency has made a shambles of real conservatism. Let's leave aside the issues on which liberals and conservatives can be expected to disagree, like his tax cuts for the rich, expansion of Medicare or his position on immigration, and focus solely on ones that should be above partisan rancor -- ones involving the Constitution and all-American values. On issue after Mom-and-apple-pie issue, from authorizing torture to approving illegal wiretapping to launching a self-destructive war, Bush has done incalculable damage to conservative principles -- far more, in fact, than any recent Democratic president. And he has been supported every step of the way by Republicans in Congress, who have voted in lockstep for his radical policies. None of the major Republican candidates running for office have repudiated any of Bush's policies. They simply promise to execute them better.

There is very little that is “conservative” about the Bush administration. They are most certainly not fiscally conservative with the way they have allowed the federal budget deficit to explode. They are most certainly not prudent or cautious in their handling of U.S. foreign policy. They have little to no respect for tradition or established principles.

As I’ve said many times before, they are not “conservatives”, they are right-wing radicals. They want to make radical changes to our governmental institutions that would have the primary effect of further enriching their small cadre of political supporters at the expense of everyone else in the nation.

A lot of old school conservatives like William F. Buckley abandoned Bush a long time ago. But the majority of self-described Republicans remain stubbornly in lockstep marching toward the cliff. Many will see their political fortunes go splat after the next election.

What a mess

It’s hard to believe that Mr. 25 percent Approval Rating expects us to cough up another $46 billion to finance his boondoggle in Iraq.

New reports out today confirm that the Bush administration is far too incompetent to keep track of the money it has recieved so far.

The U.S. State Department is unable to account for most of $1.2 billion in funding that it gave to DynCorp International to train Iraqi police, a government report said Tuesday.
"The bottom line is that State can't account for where it went," said Glenn D. Furbish, who was involved in putting together the 20-page report for the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction (SIGIR).
The Department of State's Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) "did not have the information needed to identify what DynCorp provided under the contract or how funds were spent," the report said.

And it’s not just this one contractor that’s the problem, according to the NYTimes:

A pair of new reports have delivered sharply critical judgments about the State Department’s performance in overseeing work done by the private companies that the government relies on increasingly in Iraq and Afghanistan to carry out delicate security work and other missions.

A State Department review of its own security practices in Iraq assails the department for poor coordination, communication, oversight and accountability involving armed security companies like Blackwater USA, according to people who have been briefed on the report. In addition to Blackwater, the State Department’s two other security contractors in Iraq are DynCorp International and Triple Canopy.

At the same time, a government audit expected to be released Tuesday says that records documenting the work of DynCorp, the State Department’s largest contractor, are in such disarray that the department cannot say “specifically what it received” for most of the $1.2 billion it has paid the company since 2004 to train the police officers in Iraq.

But I’m afraid this is the best we can expect from a Republican administration today. They think their only job is to pass out government booty by the billions to their favorite private contractors and then don’t bother to follow up and make sure the funds are used properly. I’m sure they see that as unneccessary government intervention in business. But the result is that we are flushing our money down the drain in Iraq.
And unfortunately all of this is not new:

Corruption within the Iraqi government is costing the country billions of dollars, the US official monitoring reconstruction in Iraq has said.
Stuart Bowen told the BBC that Iraq was facing a second insurgency of corruption and mismanagement.
He said Iraqi government corruption could amount to $4bn (£2.1bn) a year, over 10% of the national income, with some money going to the insurgency.

And more here:

In a troubling sign for the American-financed rebuilding program in Iraq, inspectors for a federal oversight agency have found that in a sampling of eight projects that the United States declared successes, seven were no longer operating as designed because of plumbing and electrical failures, lack of proper maintenance, apparent looting and expensive equipment that lay idle.

U.S. officials have previously admitted, sometimes under pressure from federal inspectors, that some reconstruction projects have been abandoned, delayed or poorly constructed. But this is the first time that inspectors have found that projects officially declared successes - in some cases, as little as six months before the latest inspections - were no longer working properly.

The inspections ranged geographically from northern to southern Iraq and covered projects as varied as a maternity hospital, barracks for an Iraqi special forces unit and a power station for Baghdad International Airport.

At the airport, crucially important for the functioning of the country, inspectors found that while $11.8 million had been spent on new electrical generators, about three-quarters of the generators were no longer functioning.

At the maternity hospital, a rehabilitation project in the northern city of Erbil, an expensive incinerator for medical waste was padlocked - Iraqis at the hospital could not find the key when inspectors asked to see the equipment - and, partly as a result, medical waste including syringes, used bandages and empty drug vials were clogging the sewage system and probably contaminating the water system.
The newly built water purification system was not functioning, either.

Waste. Fraud. Corruption. And all of it being put on Uncle Sam’s credit card for our children and grandchildren to pay for someday. Thanks Republicans!
And they wonder why they are struggling in opinion polls these days. It must be that nasty liberal media.

Beginning To Wonder

Ann, another exile from ATC, has just set up her own blog.
She has decided to call it Beginning To Wonder which is similar sounding to my friend Robert's Beginner's Mind, but probably not based on the same Budhhist inspiration.
I will look forward to reading lots more of Ann's posts now that she has discovered this new outlet. ATC's loss is the rest of the blogosphere's gain!
Give 'em hell, Ann!

Pelosi unfairly attacked

Jonathan Gurwitz’ latest column in the Express-News is a partisan screed attacking Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi over matters of foreign policy.
Gurwitz begins with a trumped up accusation that Pelosi created a tempest during her visit to Syria last April:

Pelosi created an international tempest by claiming to bear a message for Syrian dictator Bashar Assad from Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, one stating his country was prepared to engage in peace talks with its longtime enemy without preconditions. That would have marked a significant departure from six decades of Israeli practice.
Olmert did not make such a departure, which forced the Israeli Foreign Ministry to issue a clarification that contradicted Pelosi's supposed communiqué.

First, we don’t know what was actually said between Pelosi and Olmert. After her meeting with Assad, all Pelosi said was that Israel was ready to negotiate for peace. She did not elaborate further and has not since. She did not say there were no preconditions or any other such nonsense that would have been a “significant departure” from Israeli policy.
Furthermore, Olmert’s “clarification” afterward did not contradict Pelosi, as Gurwitz implies, but simply reaffirmed these preconditions.
I personally think that Olmert’s “clarification” was brought on at the urging of the Bush administration which was looking for any excuse to undermine Pelosi for partisan political reasons.

Pelosi had, in fact, brought up quite a few of these “preconditions” with Assad during her meeting, accroding to the NYTimes.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her delegation said they had frank words with President Bashar al-Assad and other senior Syrian officials here on Wednesday, pressing the president over Syria’s support for militant groups and insisting that his government block militants seeking to cross into Iraq and join insurgents there.
Delegation members said that they sought to persuade Mr. Assad to distance himself from Iran, and its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

So the only real tempest that came from the meeting was that which was drummed up by the rightwing noise machine that had been desperately attacking Pelosi over the Syria trip from the moment it was announced.

That also calls into doubt Gurwitz’ next accusation that Pelosi “glossed over Assad's totalitarian tendencies and his regime's routine violation of human rights.”
That is a highly unfair and partisan charge that is unsupported by the reporting at the time of the meeting.

The rest of the column tries to lay the blame for the timing of the Armenian genocide resolution on Pelosi. The resolution, which Gurwitz admits has merit and should be approved, has come up time and time again only to be knocked down for fear that it would strain relations with Turkey. Apparently, there is never a good enough time to do the right thing in this case. It has once again been set aside due to foreign policy concerns. We are now even more indebted to the Turks than we have been in years past thanks to Bush’s blundering in the Middle East.

Poisoned discourse, Part II

Well, I didn't learn my lesson the first time and I went back to commenting over at All Things Conservative. That was clearly a mistake. The atmosphere for political discourse is at the lowest level I have ever seen it. It is sad, but I must consider the efforts to make ATC into a forum for a right/left dialogue to be a failure.
Bill Crawford made it clear today what he thinks about the situation.

The debate in this country is too partisan, and the blame for this lies squarely on the doorstep of Liberals.

When I tried to respond to the above linked post, my comment was deleted.
Since Bill feels that my comments at his site are abusive and disrespectful towards him, I will refrain from making them. I want to apologize for any percieved disrespect or discourteousness on my part.
And my other one-time friend at ATC, Mark Harden, should be pleased by my self-imposed exile from the site since he has been campaigning for my banishment for the past several months.
What I don't understand is why now? We've had this discourse going for more than four years. Why has it deteriorated to this level now?
Digby has some timely thoughts on that question which I think are instructive.

I don't know if you have noticed, but something truly ugly seems to be bubbling up from the primordial ooze of the conservative movement...
Clearly, people on the right are very, very angry right now and they are lashing out at their most hated enemies: Americans who disagree with them.

What I think we are seeing is the result of pent-up frustrations over the war in Iraq which has not gone as they expected and the realization that Hillary Clinton is likely to be our next president along with a veto-proof majority in Congress.
But whatever the reason, it has become practically impossible to carry on any kind of politcal discussion between right and left that does not quickly deteriorate into namecalling and hurt feelings.

But at least one good thing may come out of all this. The one other liberal commenter at ATC, Ann, is using this most recent blowup as the impetus to start her own blog. I will link to it as soon as she gets it up and running.