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Tuesday, January 31, 2006 |
Arianna Huffington: Big Lie Alert: Untruths to Be on the Lookout for During the SOTU. Mr. President, once again you will no doubt try to paint the state of the union in the rosiest light possible tonight. But can you please spare us the out-and-out lying? It's offensive, demeaning, and really out of synch with America's newfound big-time crush on the truth.
So do us all a favor and don't tell us the following:
Don't tell us that democracy in Iraq will inevitably lead to peace over there and make us safer over here. So far, the elections haven't stopped Iraq from moving closer to civil war -- indeed, the disparate factions have grown more bellicose and the number of daily attacks is on the rise. We're all for democracy, but you've got to stop selling it as a panacea. Yes, we should champion peoples' right to vote -- but we have to realize that sometimes those people will want to vote for Hamas and Hezbollah and Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood and Iraqi clerics friendly with Iran. And democracy in Iraq doesn't seem to have shifted Osama Bin Laden's murderous focus away from our shores.
Don't tell us that the economy is humming along. Yes, the GDP grew 3.5 percent in 2005 (though it was only up 1.1 percent in the last quarter). And, yes, productivity is up. But median wages fell, our trade deficit is over $760 billion (80 percent higher than when you took office), inflation is at 3.4 percent, the highest it's been in half-a-decade, and the gap between the Two Nations is wider than ever. Thirty-seven million Americans live in poverty (4.1 million more than in 2001), 45.5 million don't have health insurance, and one in five American children live is households that can barely afford food. Not exactly figures to crow about.
Don't tell us that you approved the NSA domestic spying program because it was necessary to keep us safe. Tell us why you stubbornly and provocatively refused to submit to a warrant process that already allowed for immediate wiretaps and why, when given the chance in 2002 to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to make it even easier to obtain those warrants, your Justice Department argued against it. And while you're at it, please, at long last, address the real questions about your so-called "terrorist surveillance program": Exactly who is being targeted? How do you decide who to bug? How many Americans have been spied on? And why have you claimed there is congressional oversight of the program when this is clearly not the case?
Don't tell us -- yet again -- about how committed you are to developing alternative sources of energy. Don't insult us by waxing lyrical about ethanol and hybrid cars and other nonoil sources of fuel. Please. It's the same song-and-dance we heard during your 2003 State of the Union when you promised "a new national commitment" to hydrogen technology that would "make our air significantly cleaner, and our country much less dependent on foreign sources of energy." And we saw where that led us: skyrocketing gas prices, record oil company profits, and yet another push to drill in ANWR.
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4:01:04 PM 
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Gonzales Is Challenged on Wiretaps
By Carol D. Leonnig
The Washington Post
Tuesday 31 January 2006
Feingold says attorney general misled senators in hearings.
Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) charged yesterday that Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales misled the Senate during his confirmation hearing a year ago when he appeared to try to avoid answering a question about whether the president could authorize warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens.
In a letter to the attorney general yesterday, Feingold demanded to know why Gonzales dismissed the senator's question about warrantless eavesdropping as a "hypothetical situation" during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in January 2005. At the hearing, Feingold asked Gonzales where the president's authority ends and whether Gonzales believed the president could, for example, act in contravention of existing criminal laws and spy on U.S. citizens without a warrant.
Gonzales said that it was impossible to answer such a hypothetical question but that it was "not the policy or the agenda of this president" to authorize actions that conflict with existing law. He added that he would hope to alert Congress if the president ever chose to authorize warrantless surveillance, according to a transcript of the hearing.
In fact, the president did secretly authorize the National Security Agency to begin warrantless monitoring of calls and e-mails between the United States and other nations soon after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The program, publicly revealed in media reports last month, was unknown to Feingold and his staff at the time Feingold questioned Gonzales, according to a staff member. Feingold's aides developed the 2005 questions based on privacy advocates' concerns about broad interpretations of executive power.
Gonzales was White House counsel at the time the program began and has since acknowledged his role in affirming the president's authority to launch the surveillance effort. Gonzales is scheduled to testify Monday before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the program's legal rationale.
"It now appears that the Attorney General was not being straight with the Judiciary Committee and he has some explaining to do," Feingold said in a statement yesterday.
A Justice Department spokesman said yesterday the department had not yet reviewed the Feingold letter and could not comment.
1:36:33 PM
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Michelle Pilecki: Many Iraqis, Most Sunnis Support Attacks on US Troops. Here's a batch of statistics that are sure not to show up in tonight's State of the Union address. The Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland reports that
[A] large majority [80 percent] of Iraqis think the US plans to maintain bases in Iraq permanently, even if the newly elected government asks the US to leave. A large majority [70 percent] favors setting a timeline for the withdrawal of US forces, though this majority divides over whether the timeline should be over a period of six months or two years. Nearly half of Iraqis [47 percent] approve of attacks on US-led forces--including nine out of 10 Sunnis [actually 88 percent]. Most Iraqis [67 percent] believe that many aspects of their lives will improve once the US-led forces leave, but are nonetheless uncertain that Iraqi security forces are ready to stand on their own.
There are handy graphs that break down the attitudes by ethnic group, with the Sunnis overwhelmingly negative toward the US and the Kurds largely positive -- except that even 64 percent of the Kurds stand with the larger majorities of other ethnic groups in approving of the Iraqi government setting a timeline for US withdrawal.
There hasn't been much major media coverage of this latest study, except from Knight Ridder newspapers, which add some perspective from Anthony H. Cordesman, a former Pentagon official and a longtime Iraq watcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a center for national-security studies in Washington:
They're pretty much the same results that have been going on since 2003, so it's consistent with a lot of the attitudes that exist.... We're not seen as liberators by the Sunnis, but what else is new?
It was clear after the invasion that about a third or more of Shiites did not see us as liberators, and did not see the war as justified, and somewhere around 15 percent supported attacks on coalition forces then.... We're also seen as creating all kinds of internal problems without creating any kind of internal solutions.
BTW: The future for KR does not portend well, with earnings down as it looks for a buyer. More details here.
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1:27:47 PM
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© Copyright 2006 Patricia Thurston.
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