Politics

It’s no wonder that Democrats get labelled with the dreaded ‘L’ word.

“When I’m president, we’ll do executive orders to overcome any wrong thing the Supreme Court does tomorrow or any other day,” said Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri. (while referring to the then upcoming Supreme Court decision on affirmative action in university admissions)

The Supreme Court is the highest court of the land. I don’t always agree with their decisions, but their decisions are supposed to be respected. If you don’t like their decisions, then change the law or the Constitution, but I don’t see anywhere in the Constitution where the President can unilaterally overrule the Supreme Court!

And in true dumbass fashion-

From TBOGG:

The tangled web starts to unravel

Jake Tapper writes about the lies that took us into war over at Salon (it’s Salon Premium). Here is an interesting taste:

Korb also suggests that this affair could seriously affect the ability of the U.S. government to function efficiently. “What this administration has done to military and intelligence professionals in government is disgraceful,” he says, citing Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki, who was publicly rebuffed by Wolfowitz and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld after predicting — correctly, it now seems — that it would take “several hundred thousand troops to keep the peace in postwar Iraq.” Korb also cites the formation earlier this year of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group of a few dozen former intelligence officials from Army Intelligence, CIA, FBI, Defense and State Departments, to protest what they saw as a misuse of intelligence for the purposes of building a case for war. “This will also have long-term ramifications,” Korb says.

With the way that the economy is going and all of the different things that the government is doing to royally screw all middle and lower class Americans (like the recent ‘dividend tax cut’ and the passing of the estate tax repeal in the HOR), I was going to post a major bitch post, but then I came across this post by Jeff Cooper and decided that he said everything that I wanted to say and more, but more eloquently (and it’s nearly a month old)!

What’s Going On?

From the watch:

The American Dilemma

As many people warned before Bush took us into war, the problem was not the war itself. The really ugly problem would be dealing with the aftermath. Well, now we are well and truly stuck in a quagmire, with no end in sight. Today when the costs of empire are being exposed and both our soldiers and the Iraqis are dying, it looks increasingly like there are no good answers to our dilemma: how can we extract ourselves from this mess without creating greater carnage and leaving even more disaster in our wake?

From It’s Still the Economy, Stupid:

Cassandra Revisted

Earlier today on Wampum, I hinted as to some developing controversy regarding tomorrow’s unemployment numbers. This has its roots the Cassandra Complex ™ I unfortunately developed back in January, when I first began to read the raw unemployment reports from the BLS [Bureau of Labor Statistics]. I noted back then that January’s employment picture looked particularly rosy not due to any major upswing in the economy, but because the Administration had altered the way it was collecting and reporting data, conveniently skewing results in the process. February and March’s results were also tampered with, but decidedly less so than January’s. Then, in April, I noticed that the BLS had planned in June to once again institute major changes to the employment reports. Whether these changes will effect the spinning of tomorrow’s unemployment report, I can’t say. But it’s also a question I noticed was asked by at least two media sources today:

Is running up huge deficits today the Republican plan to curtail future spending?

US ‘faces future of chronic deficits’
By Peronet Despeignes in Washington

The Bush administration has shelved a report commissioned by the Treasury that shows the US currently faces a future of chronic federal budget deficits totalling at least $44,200bn in current US dollars.

The study, the most comprehensive assessment of how the US government is at risk of being overwhelmed by the “baby boom” generation’s future healthcare and retirement costs, was commissioned by then-Treasury secretary Paul O’Neill.

But the Bush administration chose to keep the findings out of the annual budget report for fiscal year 2004, published in February, as the White House campaigned for a tax-cut package that critics claim will expand future deficits.

Donald Rumsfeld Seems to Think So

The basis of the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein posed an immediate threat to the United States because of his possession of WMDs. Now, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has stated that a reason that no WMDs have been found is because Hussein may have destroyed all of the WMDs prior to the war. If he destroyed the WMDs prior to the war and the U.S. knew he had WMDs prior to the war, then why didn’t the U.S. know that he destroyed the WMDs? Or did the current administration know this, but just neglected to pass that along to the American people?

Talking Points Memo by Joshua Micha Marshall has the following article on WMDs and the political machine in the White House today.

In recent days there has been a spate of news stories and editorials on whether the US intelligence community might have greatly overstated Iraq’s WMD capacity and, if this is so, why this might have happened.

First, let’s stipulate that if we eventually find that Iraq had few if any continuing WMD programs, that would be a major intelligence failure.

Brad Delong summarizes a Paul Krugman article on last year’s Presidential State of the Union Speech.

Remember Last Year?

Paul Krugman reminds us of the things George W. Bush said in his last State of the Union Address that turned out not to be so:

* …the axis of evil… a phrase… that has vanished from Mr. Bush’s vocabulary…
* …the name of that guy he promised to bring in dead or alive…
* …he assured those who worried about red ink that “our budget will run a deficit that will be small and short-lived”…
* …”my economic security plan can be summed up in one word: jobs”…
* …can Mr. Bush convince us that his latest tax cut is just the tonic the economy needs? There are several reasons to doubt whether he can pull it off. For one thing, economists outside the administration, even those who always find ways to praise whatever he proposes, can’t see what this tax cut has to do with the economy’s immediate problems. This has led to a striking dissonance…

Talking Points Memo has two articles on how the liberal media has given the republican party a pass on its connections to China.

May 8th, 2003 — 2:06 PM
There’s only so much oxygen in the media universe at any one time. And much of it, understandably, is being taken up now by Iraq, Iran and North Korea. But if that weren’t the case, you’d think there’d be a lot more attention to the fact that a prominent Republican activist and fundraiser has been arrested on suspicion of being a double-agent for the People’s Republic of China.