“But yeah, look, I'm sure people view me as a warmonger and I view myself as peacemaker." - Bush

Cheney Impeachment: Call for Hearings Rep. Robert Wexler’s (D-Fl) speech. He warns against running out the clock, hiding behind, ‘it’s too late.’

History demands that we take action - because the case against Vice President Cheney is far stronger than the illegalities surrounding Watergate and the charges brought against President Nixon.

When compared to the partisan and petty allegations made against President Clinton by Ken Starr and the GOP Congress, the true gravity of the case against the Vice President appears in its devastating clarity.

In fact, in the history of our nation we have never encountered a moment where the actions of a President or Vice President have more strongly demanded the use of the power of impeachment.

I have heard the arguments – that it is too late – that we have run out of time - and that we don't have the votes. While today there may not be enough votes in to impeach, it's premature to think that such support would not exist - AFTER hearings.

Let us remember that it wasn't until AFTER hearings began that the Watergate tapes emerged. Arguing that it is too late to hold hearings sets a dangerous precedent, as it signals to future administrations that in their waning months in office they're immune from constitutional accountability.

This House must have the conviction to face these troubling allegations. Holding hearings would put the evidence on the table - and the evidence alone must determine the outcome. http://wexler.house.gov/impeachmentspeech.shtml

Join the Call for Hearings: Go to www.wexlerwantshearings.com It takes only a minute.

The Stimulus Package: Hard to be confident that the Democratic-led Congress will come up with a helpful series of proposals. Between all the constituencies involved and their demonstrated lack of backbone…

A rush by President Bush and Democratic leaders to assemble an economic stimulus package to stave off a recession is being complicated by a potentially debilitating brew of presidential politics, ideological differences and special interest lobbying.

Already, a bidding war among the top three Democratic candidates is complicating congressional efforts to produce a package that would not worsen the budget deficit. Republican contenders and GOP leaders are warning the White House not to compromise too much with Democrats on an economic stimulus they are not even sure is warranted.

Meanwhile, lobbying groups for industries as varied as high technology and hotels are clogging the reception rooms and e-mail inboxes of senior lawmakers, pressuring them to include the groups' favorite benefits in a stimulus package. Small businesses are seeking to write off new equipment faster. Large businesses are appealing for lower tax rates. And home builders are pleading to offset their taxable income in years past with the losses they are suffering today.

"This package is not going to be all things to all people," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said yesterday, firing a warning shot to Republicans and Democrats alike while promising a proposal within two weeks. "It is not going to be a panacea." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/16/AR2008011604244_pf.html

The tough news continues:

A stream of unwelcome economic data has added to politicians' sense of urgency. The Labor Department announced Wednesday that consumer prices rose 4.1% last year -- the fastest in 17 years -- led by soaring gasoline costs and higher prices at the supermarket. Average wages, meantime, recorded a slight drop when adjusted for inflation. Earlier this month, the department reported unemployment had hit 5%, the highest rate in two years. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-stimulus17jan17,1,4923615.story?coll=la-headlines-nation

And:

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities currently is monitoring state fiscal reports and is in touch with state officials and/or relevant state nonprofit organizations in the 50 states and DC. The fiscal situation appears to be as follows.

• Over half of the states are anticipating budget problems.

• The 14 states in which revenues are expected to fall short of the amount needed to support current services in fiscal year 2009 are Arizona, California, Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Virginia. The budget gaps total $28.9 to $30.9 billion, averaging 8.5 - 9.1 percent of these states’ general fund budgets. http://www.cbpp.org/1-15-08sfp.htm

Bush: The Middle East View:

Scott MacLeod in Time:

Seldom has an American President's visit left the region so underwhelmed, confirming Bush's huge unpopularity on the street and his sagging credibility among Arab leaders he counts as allies. Part of the problem was the Administration's increasingly mixed message, amplified by the intense media coverage of his trip. For example, in Dubai he gave what the White House billed as a landmark speech calling for 'democratic freedom in the Middle East.' But during his last stop in Sharm el-Sheikh Wednesday, he lauded President Hosni Mubarak as an experienced, valued strategic partner for regional peace and security and made no mention of Cairo's ongoing crackdown on opponents and critics -- and the continuing imprisonment of Mubarak's main opponent in the 2005 presidential election. . . .

Commenting on the two main purposes of the tour, even the most liberal Arab press questioned the sincerity of Bush's efforts to establish a Palestinian state and criticized his campaign to pressure Iran over its nuclear program. On occasion, senior Arab officials contradicted or disputed Bush's pronouncements even before he left their countries. . . .

Bush's efforts to rally an Arab coalition to isolate Iran in the Gulf seemed to fall flat. Only days after he visited Kuwait, liberated in 1991 by a coalition led by the President's father, Kuwaiti Foreign Minister Mohammed Sabah al-Salem al-Sabah was standing beside Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki in Tehran, declaring: 'My country knows who is our friend and who is our enemy, and Iran is our friend.' . . .

'We ought to be celebrating President George Bush's declaration that a Palestinian state is 'long overdue,'' said the Arab News in Jidda. 'It is impossible to feel any excitement about Bush's words, because no Palestinian, no Arab believes he will, or can, deliver. We have the Bush record with its damning testimony of failure and disaster. That is the reason for the skepticism and the cynicism.' http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1704296,00.html

Hannah Allam for McClatchy Newspapers:

President Bush wraps up a weeklong tour of the Middle East Wednesday, leaving many Mideast political observers mystified as to the purpose of the visit and doubtful that the president made inroads on his twin campaigns for Arab-Israeli peace and isolation for Iran.

Bush is heading back to Washington mostly empty-handed, said several analysts and politicians throughout the region. Arab critics deemed Bush's peace efforts unrealistic, his anti-Iran tirades dangerous, his praise of authoritarian governments disappointing and his defense of civil liberties ironic.

"There is no credibility to his words after what the region saw during his presidency,” said Mohamed Fayek, the Cairo, Egypt-based director of the nonprofit Arab Organization for Human Rights. He cited the war in Iraq, the prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the Abu Ghraib detainee abuse scandal. “American policy threw the region off-balance and destabilized it. The visit caused deep disappointment. I don't see any results." http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/24819.html

Re-visiting / Summarizing that Iran Incident:

Senior Pentagon officials, evidently reflecting a broader administration policy decision, used an off-the-record Pentagon briefing to turn the Jan. 6 U.S.-Iranian incident in the Strait of Hormuz into a sensational story demonstrating Iran's military aggressiveness, a reconstruction of the events following the incident shows.

The initial press stories on the incident, all of which can be traced to a briefing by deputy assistant secretary of defence for public affairs in charge of media operations Bryan Whitman, contained similar information that has since been repudiated by the Navy itself.

Then the Navy disseminated a short video into which was spliced the audio of a phone call warning that U.S. warships would "explode" in "a few seconds". Although it was ostensibly a Navy production, IPS has learned that the ultimate decision on its content was made by top officials of the Defence Department.

The encounter between five small and apparently unarmed speedboats, each carrying a crew of two to four men, and the three U.S. warships occurred very early on Saturday Jan. 6, Washington time. But no information was released to the public about the incident for more than 24 hours, indicating that it was not viewed initially as being very urgent.

The reason for that absence of public information on the incident for more than a full day is that it was not that different from many others in the Gulf over more than a decade. A Pentagon consultant who asked not to be identified told IPS that he had spoken with officers who had experienced similar encounters with small Iranian boats throughout the 1990s, and that such incidents are "just not a major threat to the U.S. Navy by any stretch of the imagination". http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=40801

Pakistan: Militants Uncontrollable; leads to Blowback?

Pakistan’s premier military intelligence agency has lost control of some of the networks of Pakistani militants it has nurtured since the 1980s, and is now suffering the violent blowback of that policy, two former senior intelligence officials and other officials close to the agency say.

As the military has moved against them, the militants have turned on their former handlers, the officials said. Joining with other extremist groups, they have battled Pakistani security forces and helped militants carry out a record number of suicide attacks last year, including some aimed directly at army and intelligence units as well as prominent political figures, possibly even Benazir Bhutto.

The growing strength of the militants, many of whom now express support for Al Qaeda’s global jihad, presents a grave threat to Pakistan’s security, as well as NATO efforts to push back the Taliban in Afghanistan. American officials have begun to weigh more robust covert operations to go after Al Qaeda in the lawless border areas because they are so concerned that the Pakistani government is unable to do so.

The unusual disclosures regarding Pakistan’s leading military intelligence agency — Inter-Services Intelligence, or the ISI — emerged in interviews last month with former senior Pakistani intelligence officials. The disclosures confirm some of the worst fears, and suspicions, of American and Western military officials and diplomats. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/15/world/asia/15isi.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=todayspaper&pagewanted=print

Iraq: Another Surge: Poppys

Well! Here is some good news for the "free markets solve everything!" crowd!

Iraqi farmers, desperate to make ends meet while simultaneously facing escalating fuel and fertilizer costs, as well as cheap imported fruits and vegetables, have taken to growing opium poppies. Poppy cultivation is spreading rapidly all across Iraq, but is especially prevalent in Diyala province, where local police and security forces are so preoccupied with the ethnic conflicts among the residents of the region, as well as a tenacious insurgency that brings the war and it's associated chaos home - suffice it to say that the drug trade is low on their list of priorities…

The shift to opium cultivation by Iraqis is a very recent development. The first fields, underwritten by Afghani smugglers who supplied the lucrative markets in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, were discovered less than a year ago near Diwaniya in the south, but the practice has now spread to the lush orchards of Diyala, north of Baghdad. A local agricultural engineer identified as M S al-Azawi said that the local farmers received no government support, and turned to opium production as an effort to offset high production costs and low sale prices. http://proctoringcongress.blogspot.com/2008/01/opium-poppies-cropping-up-across-iraq.html

Voter ID: Major ramifications if the Supreme Court OK’s the Indiana Law. Adam Cohen:

The Supreme Court heard arguments last week in a hugely important case about voter ID laws. Asking for identification at the polls may sound reasonable, but an Indiana law disenfranchises large numbers of people without driver’s licenses, especially poor and minority voters. If the court upholds the law, as appears likely, it will be a sad new chapter in its abandonment of voters, a group whose rights it once defended vigorously.
As long as there have been elections, there have been attempts to keep eligible people from voting. States and localities adopted poll taxes, literacy tests, “white primaries,” “malapportionment” — drawing district lines to give a small number of rural voters the same representation as a large number of urban voters — and restrictions on student voting. In recent decades, the Supreme Court has rejected all of them.

The court understood that the Constitution guaranteed a robust form of democracy and saw its clear value for the nation. During the tumultuous late-1960s, Chief Justice Earl Warren declared that most of the country’s problems could be solved through the political process if everyone “has the opportunity to participate on equal terms with everyone else and can share in electing representatives who will be representative of the entire community and not of some special interest.”

In recent years, however, with a conservative majority in place, the court has become increasingly hostile to voters. During the oral arguments in the Bush v. Gore case in 2000, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor showed disdain for voters who had trouble with Florida’s disastrous punch-card ballots. After insisting that the directions “couldn’t be clearer,” she suggested that the court ignore the ballots of voters who had failed to master the intricacies. That is precisely what it did, by a 5-4 vote. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/15/opinion/15tue4.html?sq=Voter%20ID&scp=4&pagewanted=print

U.S. as ‘Developing’ Country: UN Condemns Katrina Aftermath

A United Nations official who has toured parts of Louisiana and Mississippi devastated by Hurricane Katrina says the thousands of victims of the storm resemble poor people displaced by natural disasters in other parts of the world.

''Whether you're displaced in a rich country or a poor country, what remains the same is you need to get the help, the assistance of the authorities, of the communities, to be able to restart a normal life, and the people I have met are not there yet,'' said Walter Kalin, the UN secretary general's representative on the human rights of internally displaced persons.

Kalin spoke Wednesday, a day when he also saw hard-hit areas of the two states. He met Tuesday with evacuees in Houston.

The United Nations' human rights committee has been critical of the Bush administration's efforts to help people displaced by Katrina, particularly those without the financial means to rebuild. http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Katrina-United-Nations.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

Campaign: A Study confirmed what anyone who is observant; that Edwards has been dismissed by the major media. http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/horsesmouth/2008/01/study_john_edwa.php http://www.journalism.org/node/9266 The Edwards campaign issued their own statements and video. From CNN:

John Edwards' campaign is launching a full-on assault on the media for what they claim is inadequate and unfair press coverage of the former North Carolina senator's presidential bid.

"For the better part of a year the media has focused on two celebrity candidates,” Edwards Communications Director Chris Kofinis said Thursday. “And they continue to act as if there were only two candidates in the race, even after John Edwards beat Senator Clinton in Iowa and poll after poll show competitive races in Nevada, South Carolina and other key states."

On Thursday, the campaign went live with a Web site that sites several recent news headlines that only include Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. It also includes recent statistics from the Project for Excellence in Journalism that indicate that from January 6-11, Edwards received just a fraction of the news coverage allotted to his two rivals.

The campaign has even produced a Web video, "What about John Edwards?", that scrolls through several clips of media pundits discussing only Clinton and Obama, and ends with the results of a focus group that suggested Edwards won the most recent debate in Las Vegas. http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/01/17/edwards-camp-takes-aim-at-media/

Obama is clearly an ‘out of the box’ politician. His latest is a head-turner. Lauding Reagan as someone who changed the country, unlike Clinton, sounds impolitic, but is accurate. However Obama then says that Reagan provided “clarity, optimism, dynamism” that the country wanted.

Ouch. Many of us would say that Reagan took us backwards: he busted unions, hurt the middle class, enriched the wealthy, etc. But, again, Obama is most unusual.

Bill Clinton continues his unusual role- playing hit man for a candidate for president, losing his temper, sometimes playing loose w/ facts.

-R