There are 52 Blue Dog Democrats in the Blue Dog Coalition.Key Democrat Senator objects to CIA torture probe
Posted By Agence France-Presse On August 30, 2009 @ 6:45 pm In
A key Democratic senator Sunday criticized a US Justice Department investigation into abusive CIA interrogations of Al-Qaeda detainees as poorly timed, signaling broadening opposition to the probe.
Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, raised her objections in a CBS television interview while former vice president Dick Cheney was blasting the probe on Fox television as “an outrageous political act.”
Saying she, too, was “horrified” by a classified 2004 Central Intelligence Agency report that detailed abusive interrogation practices, Feinstein said she understood Attorney General Eric Holder’s reasons for ordering a review of the interrogation program.
“However, I think the timing of this is not very good,” Feinstein said.
She said the intelligence committee was already well along in conducting a bipartisan “total look” at the interrogation and detention techniques used on so-called high value detainees.
“And candidly, I wish that the attorney general had waited,” she said.
“Every day something kind of dribbles out into the public arena. Very often it has mistakes. Very often it’s half a story. I think we need to get the whole story together and tell it in an appropriate way,” she said.
“A lot of things are being said — ‘Well, you know, torturing people is something that we did, but on the other hand, it produced all kinds of incredible information,’” she said.
“It did produce some information, but there is a great discrepancy, and I think a good deal of error out there in what people are saying it did produce,” she added.
The CIA inspector general’s report, parts of which were released last week, detailed the use of simulated drowning, mock executions, and threats of rapes of detainee family members in the course of the interrogations at secret CIA sites overseas.
Cheney, who was deeply involved in devising the previous administration’s interrogation policies, said he would have no problem even with interrogations that went beyond specific legal authorizations.
“My sort of overwhelming view is that the enhanced interrogation techniques were absolutely essential in saving thousands of American lives, in preventing further attacks against the United States, in giving us the intelligence we needed to go find Al-Qaeda, to find their camps, to find out how they were being financed.”
Instead, he took aim at President Barack Obama for first assuring CIA officers they would not be prosecuted and then washing his hands of Holder’s decision.
“I think it’s an outrageous political act that will do great damage long term to our capacity to be able to have people take on difficult jobs, make difficult decisions without having to worry about what the next administration’s going to say about it,” he said, in remarks first reported on Friday.
Cheney said he did not believe the investigation would be limited to CIA officers who went beyond the authorities granted at the time by the Justice Department.
“We had the president of the United States, President Obama, tell us a few months ago there wouldn’t be any investigation like this, that there would not be any look-back at CIA personnel who were carrying out the policies of the prior administration.
“Now they get a little heat from the left wing of the Democratic Party and they’re reversing course on that,” Cheney said.
“The president is the chief law enforcement officer in the administration. He’s now saying, well, this isn’t anything that he’s got anything to do with. He’s up on vacation at Martha’s Vineyard, and his attorney general is going back and doing something that the president said some months ago they wouldn’t do.”
Senator John Kerry, a Democrat from Massachusetts, defended Obama’s approach as being “unbelievably bending in the direction of trying to be careful about what happens to national security.”
“And in fact, I think there is a little bit of a tension between the White House itself and the lawyers in the Justice Department as they see the law and as what their obligation is,” he said on ABC television.
“And in a sense, that’s good. That’s appropriate, because it shows that we have an attorney general who is not pursuing a political agenda, but who is doing what he believes the law requires him to do.”
Five Symptoms of Republican Schizophrenia
By Jon Perr Monday Aug 31, 2009 10:00am
The Mayo Clinic, the world famous institution cited by all sides in the contentious health care debate, defines schizophrenia as a serious brain disorder "in which reality is interpreted abnormally" resulting in "hallucinations, delusions, and disordered thinking and behavior." Apparently, that affliction is now running rampant among supporters of the Republican Party. As recent polling about conservative beliefs regarding Medicare, taxes, supposed "death panels," President Obama's citizenship and more shows, the crisis of Republican schizophrenia has reached epidemic proportions.
Here, then, are the five symptoms of incurable Republican schizophrenia:
(If you exhibit one or more of these warning signs, see your physician immediately. If you don't have health insurance - and if your state voted Republican, you're much more likely not to - Democrats will try to provide it for you.)
1. "Keep Government Out of Medicare." In July, Rep. Bob Inglis (R-SC) described an angry constituent who confronted him at a South Carolina town hall meeting, "keep your government hands off my Medicare." Despite his best efforts to explain that Medicare is a government program, the voter, Inglis lamented, "wasn't having any of it."
But as new data from Public Policy Polling revealed, that same cognitive failure is now far more widespread than swine flu. While 39% of all Americans responded that the government should "stay out of Medicare," 59% of self-identified conservatives and 62% of McCain voters hold that oxymoronic view.
2. "Barack Obama is a Muslim." An April survey by the Pew Research Center showed that 11% of Americans believe Barack Obama is a Muslim, a figure largely unchanged since its polling started in March 2008. Yet 17% of Republicans and 19% of white evangelicals (74% of whom voted for John McCain) insist the President is an adherent of Islam, despite his repeated pronouncements and decades of church attendance to the contrary.
3. "Barack Obama Was Not Born in the United States." This contagion is running rampant among the ranks of Republicans. And even with repeated treatments of birth certificates and Hawaiian newspaper announcements from 1961, there is apparently no cure.
A DailyKos/Research 2000 poll found that a stunning 58% of Republicans did not believe (28%) or were unsure (30%) that President Barack Obama was in fact born in the United States. To be sure, this is a Southern pathology, a region home to 69% of all birthers and the only part of the country to increase its Republican presidential vote in 2008. This week's PPP survey only confirmed the chronic birtherism plaguing the Republican Party:
Only 62% of respondents reported believing that Obama was born in the United States. 10% thought he was born in Indonesia, 7% thought he was born in Kenya, 1% thought he was born in the Philippines, and 20% weren't sure. Among Republicans 44% think he was not born here while just 36% believe that he was.
(In a promising development, only 10% of respondents weren't sure if Hawaii is part of the United States. On this score, conservatives were only slightly more confused than liberals and moderates.)
4. "Government Death Panels Will Euthanize My Grandma." Sadly, the Republicans' Birther and Deather psychoses represent a cradle-to-grave illness.
Despite the vaccinations administered by PolitiFact, ABC News, the New York Times and countless other care-givers, Republicans persist in their virulent health care death panel delusions. This out-of-control CTD (conservative transmitted disease) has spread like wildfire, thanks to vectors like Betsy McCaughey, Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin. (Even a Republican like Senator Chuck Grassley, previously diagnosed by President Obama as sane, came down with the deather flu.)
An NBC poll this week quantified the deather madness: a staggering 45 percent said it's likely the government will decide when to stop care for the elderly. (Majorities also wrongly believe that reform proposals on the table would constitute a government "takeover" of the health care system, one which would cover illegal aliens.)
As MSNBC noted, viewers of Fox News - a strong predictor of Republican allegiance - were overwhelmingly afflicted by this health care dementia:
In our poll, 72% of self-identified FOX News viewers believe the health-care plan will give coverage to illegal immigrants, 79% of them say it will lead to a government takeover, 69% think that it will use taxpayer dollars to pay for abortions, and 75% believe that it will allow the government to make decisions about when to stop providing care for the elderly.
5. "President Obama Raised Taxes on Working People." The Republicans' profound cognitive disorders are not limited to their hallucinations about Barack Obama's birth or the health care imbroglio. As the Tea Party movement shows, furious right-wing zealots are outraged by no taxation with representation.
As promised, Barack Obama in the stimulus package delivered on his pledge of tax relief for 95% of American households. Obama's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) didn't only jump start gross domestic product and refill empty state coffers in the second quarter of 2009. As Nate Silver thoroughly documented, "Obama has cut taxes for 98.6% of working households."
Nevertheless, frothing at the mouth Tea Baggers spouting Republican Tax Day lies took to the streets not to thank the President, but to blame him for the tax cuts they received. While Andrew Sullivan described their unreasoning mania as "adolescent, unserious hysteria," the Daily Show's Jon Stewart diagnosed their disorder:
"I think you might be confusing tyranny with losing."
Back in April, I appropriated Daniel Patrick Moynihan's classic statement to conclude that with their rag-tag band of revolutionaries, secessionists and agitators for violence, Republicans were "defining political deviancy down." Sadly, the delusional and the deviant are now descending on town hall meetings with guns. The Republican schizophrenics are no longer just a danger to themselves.
UPDATE: Newsweek adds the "Five Biggest Lies in the Health Care Debate" to its list of "Seven Falsehoods About Health Care." Meanwhile, the RNC added to a new pathology, suggesting in a poll that "GOP voters may be discriminated against for medical treatment" under a Democratic health care plan.
The Lesson of the Town Halls
Is there any reason for optimism on healthcare reform? In a weird sort of way there is.
Think about this: It turns out that heathcare reform is so fundamentally popular that the only way Republicans have been able to have any impact at all on the debate is via a campaign of demagoguery so egregious and brazen that Huey Long himself probably would have hesitated a moment or two before jumping in. For the first six months of the year nothing else had made a dent, so finally they had to resort to a full month of silly season frenzy about death panels and secret White House enemies lists and "healthcare racism" and benefits for illegal immigrants. The only thing missing was sharks with laser beams attached to their heads.
It's been a helluva show. But here's the weird fact: despite all this, public support for healthcare reform has declined only modestly. In fact, less than you'd expect even without the August freak show we've just gone through. Generally speaking, people still approve of Obama, still approve of his healthcare plan, still prefer Democrats to Republicans on the issue, and still support giving people the choice of being covered by either a public or a private plan. Fox News and FreedomWorks have managed to spin their audiences into a hysterical lather about fascism and socialism and pulling the plug on grandma, but in the end the shrieking crowds who showed up at the townhalls were tiny in number.
So that's the optimistic view: the Fox/FreedomWorks crowd has created some great political theater, but underneath it all not a lot has changed. If Democrats can just take a deep breath after the trauma of being yelled at all summer, they'll realize that the loons at their townhalls represented about one percent of their constituency; that the public still wants reform and will reward success; that the plans currently on the table are already pretty modest affairs; and then they'll stick together as a caucus and vote for them. And that will be that.
Unfortunately, that's also the reason for pessimism: can Democrats still think straight about all this? When Chuck Grassley announces dolefully that maybe healthcare needs to be rethought now that the people have spoken, he says it like he really means it. And even some Dems fall for it. So success depends on the Democratic caucus seeing through the "heartland uprising" charade and showing some backbone. The odds might not be so great on that.
Billionaires for WealthCare mocks healthcare protesters in California
“If God loved the poor people, he wouldn’t let them get sick.”
“Healthcare rationing, that’s our job!”
“We love BlueDogs. A solid investment in healthcare profiteering.”
Carrying signs with irreverent messages praising the status quo of the American healthcare system, a farcical anti-healthcare reform group, Billionaires for Wealthcare, paraded outside a Democratic town hall meeting in Spring Valley, California Sunday.
Dressed in business suits and cocktail dresses, and occasionally sporting champagne, the motley crew of “billionaires” cheered on anti-healthcare protesters. They carried signs with messages including “Survival of the RICHEST!” “IT’S A CLASS WAR AND WE’RE WINNING” and “Keep WEALTHCARE alive / NO on HealthCare reform.”
The cavalcade descended on protesters on both side of President Barack Obama’s healthcare proposals outside a townhall event for Rep. Susan Davis (D-CA). They mocked those in opposition to healthcare reform, positing that their opposition was a boon for the private insurance industry — and for the superrich in general.
In a YouTube video the group posted, one top-hatted “billionaire” is quoted as endorsing the privatization of other public services, as well.
“Along with privatized police, [we should have a] privatized fire department,” the gentleman quips. “I mean, because if my cat’s stuck in a tree, I don’t want the fire department taking ten extra minutes because of a silly fire going on somewhere else in my neighborhood. Because if I have the money, I get the first priority.”
The event received treatment in East County Magazine.
The article quotes Spring Valley resident Barbara Cummings, who strutted in black attire and pearls, “because sometimes street theater can have an impact where just yelling at one another accomplishes nothing.”
The group’s website, BillionairesforWealthcare.com, carries the follow message and YouTube video.
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