Clinton wins Ohio primary.
Clinton wins Ohio primary.
CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News are reporting that Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) has won the Ohio Democratic primary. Clinton also won the Rhode Island primary, and Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) won Vermont.
UPDATE: The cable networks are now projecting that Clinton will also win the Texas primary.
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Beck: ‘Is Obama the Antichrist?’
Beck: ‘Is Obama the Antichrist?’
Today on his CNN Headline News show, Glenn Beck asked Pastor John Hagee whether Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) is the embodiment of evil:
There are people — they say this about Bill Clinton — he might be the Antichrist. Odds that Barack Obama is the Antichrist?
Watch it:
In 2006, Beck also called Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) the anti-Christ, stating, “I think we may have found our Antichrist and our next president.”
(HT: Chris Achorn)
Bush to endorse McCain tomorrow.
Bush to endorse McCain tomorrow.
CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News are reporting that Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) will head to the White House tomorrow to accept President Bush’s endorsement.
UPDATE: Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee has announced that he will drop out of the GOP presidential race.
UPDATE II: The Swamp has more details on McCain’s visit to the White House:
At the White House on Wednesday, Bush plans a noon welcome for McCain at the North Portico. Bush will host a lunch for McCain in the private dining room. Bush then plans a public statement with John McCain in the Rose Garden.
Majority of public has unfavorable view of health insurers.
Majority of public has unfavorable view of health insurers.
Both President Bush and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) advocate giving private insurance companies and pharmaceutical corporations more power over Americans’ health care. But a new poll by USA Today/Kaiser Family Foundation finds that the American public highly distrusts these groups, ranking them just above oil industry:
Ezra Klein responds, “Americans are pretty clear on their desire for more government regulation of Pharma, and fairly unconcerned with the effect that could have on innovation.”
Bush Appoints Loyalist Fran Townsend To ‘President’s Intelligence Advisory Board’
Bush Appoints Loyalist Fran Townsend To ‘President’s Intelligence Advisory Board’
On Friday, the White House issued an executive order revamping the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board (PIAB), “a nonpartisan body offering the President objective, expert advice on the conduct of U.S. foreign intelligence.”
Board members cannot be employees of the federal government, but the President is now stacking the board with former loyal Bushies. Yesterday, the White House announced it is appointing former Homeland Security Adviser Fran Townsend:
The President intends to appoint Fran Townsend, of New York, to be a Member of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board.
In her former role, Townsend functioned as a mouthpiece for Bush’s misguided national security priorities. For example, she was a key player in broadening the administration’s surveillance powers and vocally supported “special methods” of interrogation.
Historically, the PIAB has provided a check on administration’s intelligence gathering. For example, it was the first government body to conclude that the infamous “16-word” statement on Saddam Hussein’s WMD in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union was “questionable.”
Last week’s executive order also guts the Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB), a sub-unit of the PIAB that “advises the President on the legality of foreign intelligence activities.” Bush transferred much of the IOB’s investigative powers to DNI Mike McConnell, a Bush appointee. Under the order, IOB members may include PIAB appointees like Townsend:
The IOB shall consist of not more than five members of the PIAB who are designated by the President from among members of the PIAB to serve on the IOB.
Ultimately, President Bush is ensuring that both boards will be of little effectiveness in scrutinizing the White House’s intelligence activities.
(HT: State Of The Division)
Renzi pleads ‘not guilty’ to corruption charges.
Renzi pleads ‘not guilty’ to corruption charges.
Rep. Rick Renzi (R-AZ), who was indicted last month for extortion, wire fraud, money laundering and other crimes, pleaded not guilty today in U.S. District Court in Tucson. Renzi is also facing an investigation by the House ethics committee, but he maintains that he is “innocent” and “will not resign.”
White House Refuses To Disagree With Views Of Global Warming Deniers
White House Refuses To Disagree With Views Of Global Warming Deniers
Hundreds of people who don’t believe that humans contribute to global warming are currently congregated in New York City for a conference sponsored by the energy-industry funded Heartland Institute. Many of them, in fact, don’t believe that global warming even exists.
Conference participants include weather anchorman John Coleman, who wants to sue Al Gore to expose the “fraud” of climate change, and Patrick Michaels, who fabricated his legitimacy by inaccurately referring to himself as Virginia’s “state climatologist.”
In recent days, President Bush has tried to give the illusion that he is taking steps to solve global warming. In today’s press briefing, however, White House Press Secretary Dana Perino refused to distance the Bush administration from the deniers:
PERINO: I don’t think the President has an opinion on the meeting. I haven’t talked to him about it. And if people want to gather and express their views, they’re obviously very welcome to do so, and New York is as good a place as any.
QUESTION: You are saying that he doesn’t disagree with these people who are questioning…
PERINO: The President’s position on climate change is well- known. He’s long said that human beings are contributing in some ways to climate change.
Watch it:
Perino’s vague answer — that humans are contributing “in some ways” to global warming — mirrors the White House’s vague position. While trying to appear environmentally-friendly, the administration has dropped progressive energy investments, muzzled government climate scientists, kowtowed to industry executives, and spouted denier rhetoric.
Also yesterday, these deniers released a report “arguing that recent climate change stems from natural causes.” Their report was the “work of 23 authors from 15 nations, some of them not scientists.” By contrast, the Nobel-Prize winning IPCC’s report was the work of several hundred scientists from more than 100 countries over a five-year period.
Transcript: More »
Oil prices to hit $120 barrel by September.
Oil prices to hit $120 barrel by September.
Peter Barker-Homek, CEO of Abu Dhabi National Energy Co., predicts that crude oil prices may hit $120 a barrel within the next six months due to the “softness of the dollar and the occasional interruptions that you have because of politics.” Last October, Barker-Homek also predicted that oil prices would “rise to $100 from $80 before the end of the first quarter.”
Bush: Americans ‘Ought To Say Thank You’ To Telecoms For ‘Performing A Patriotic Service’
Bush: Americans ‘Ought To Say Thank You’ To Telecoms For ‘Performing A Patriotic Service’
The Bush administration has launched an aggressive campaign to pressure the House into passing retroactive immunity for telecoms that participated in the government’s warrantless wiretapping program.
Because they complied in illegally wiretapping their customers, telecoms currently face around 40 lawsuits. Yesterday in a speech to the National Association of Attorneys General, Bush sharply criticized Americans who are suing the telecoms:
Now the question is, should these lawsuits be allowed to proceed, or should any company that may have helped save American lives be thanked for performing a patriotic service; should those who stepped forward to say we’re going to help defend America have to go to the courthouse to defend themselves, or should the Congress and the President say thank you for doing your patriotic duty? I believe we ought to say thank you.
Watch it:
Bush is implying that Americans who oppose telecom immunity are unpatriotic. But the American people don’t owe the telecoms any gratitude. These corporations chose to break the law and profited greatly from doing so. (At least one company refused to comply with the Bush administration’s request because it knew the actions were illegal.)
Last week in a letter to Congress, the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) — which represents groups such as Google and Microsoft — said that it “strongly” opposes retroactive immunity: “To imply that our industry would refuse assistance under established law is an affront to the civic integrity of businesses that have consistently cooperated unquestioningly with legal requests for information.”
Transcript: More »
Cheney may have leaked secret video in Gitmo case.
Cheney may have leaked secret video in Gitmo case.
Lawyers for Guantanamo Bay detainee Omar Khadr have alleged that Vice President Dick Cheney’s office leaked a secret video of Khadr in Afghanistan to CBS’ 60 Minutes after a judge denied a prosecution request to play the video in court. Former Gitmo chief prosecutor Col. Morris Davis told Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler — Khadr’s lawyer — that Cheney’s office may have been involved. Kuebler said that if proven, the leak is a “clear violation of the protective orders that are in place” in the case.
Heavy voter turnout in Texas.
Heavy voter turnout in Texas.
The Dallas News reports that already, polling places are experiencing a “crush” of voters for today’s primary elections. The Texas Secretary of State office said that “early voters last week had already surpassed the total early-voting numbers for both the 1996 and 2000 elections,” and that interest is expected to continue today. GOP polling sites, however, “were not as busy.”
UPDATE: Burnt Orange Report has more.
Despite Broad Coverage Of Global Warming Deniers Conference, Right Wing Slams Media For ‘Ignoring’ It
Despite Broad Coverage Of Global Warming Deniers Conference, Right Wing Slams Media For ‘Ignoring’ It
Last night on his CNN Headline News show, Glenn Beck exclaimed that he’d be covering the Heartland Institute’s global warming denier conference “like it was the second coming of Jesus himself.” Beck said his round-the-clock coverage was warranted because the mainstream media would ignore the entire conference:
After all, if this were a traditional gathering of global warming alarmists, the media would be everywhere. But, since it’s full of hundreds of credible, mainstream scientists who happen to disagree with their peers, it’s completely ignored.
Blaming the media for “ignoring” their side is a familiar right-wing trope:
John Fund: All this has led the Western Standard, a Canadian magazine sympathetic to the global warming skeptics, to predict that “the gathering will be completely ignored, even though it’s being held in the news media capital of the world.”
Fox News’ Steve Doocy: But is there another side to this story? Many scientists would say yes, but most media outlets, the mainstream media, only cover Al Gore’s earth has a fever perspective.
Business and Media Institute: Global warming skeptics rarely get any say on the networks…Skepticism is all but shut out of reports through several tactics.
In fact, Heartland’s sham conference has created quite a media stir. The New York Times has published two separate articles on the conference, and the Times’ John Tierney has written about it on his blog.
Other mainstream press outlets that have covered the conference: the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Daily News, the New York Sun, and Reuters.
In fact, getting the media to cover the real science behind climate change is sometimes more of a challenge. As the League of Conservation Voters recently pointed out, the leading Sunday political talk show hosts have dedicated 0.1 percent of their 2,275 questions to global warming.
UPDATE: Despite the above noted press reports, Beck claimed in an e-mail to listeners today that only “one” reporter attended the conference.
The economic costs of war.
The economic costs of war.
The New York Times’ Bob Herbert writes:
The war in Iraq will ultimately cost U.S. taxpayers not hundreds of billions of dollars, but an astonishing $2 trillion, and perhaps more. There has been very little in the way of public conversation, even in the presidential campaigns, about the consequences of these costs, which are like a cancer inside the American economy.
On Thursday, the Joint Economic Committee, chaired by Senator Chuck Schumer, conducted a public examination of the costs of the war. The witnesses included the Nobel Prize-winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz (who believes the overall costs of the war — not just the cost to taxpayers — will reach $3 trillion), and Robert Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International.
Both men talked about large opportunities lost because of the money poured into the war. “For a fraction of the cost of this war,” said Mr. Stiglitz, “we could have put Social Security on a sound footing for the next half-century or more.”
Matt Yglesias notes, “Few people seem to appreciate it, but it’s quite literally true that al-Qaeda’s strategy is to cripple the U.S. economy by dragging us into quagmires abroad.” Arianna Huffington writes, “The thing about $3,000,000,000,000 is that, at a certain point, it becomes hard to ignore.”
McCain Hasn’t Changed Website To Reflect His Embrace Of Bush’s Plan To Privatize Social Security
McCain Hasn’t Changed Website To Reflect His Embrace Of Bush’s Plan To Privatize Social Security
In an interview published in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) abandoned his plan for Social Security, in which he proposes “supplementing the current Social Security system with personal accounts.” Instead, McCain told the WSJ that “as part of Social Security reform, I believe that private savings accounts are a part of it — along the lines that President Bush proposed.”
Asked about the contradiction between his website and his own statements, McCain said he would “correct any policy paper that I’ve put out.” As of today, however, his website still hasn’t been changed to reflect his embrace of Bush:
As Steve Benen notes, McCain is now aligning himself with “Bush’s biggest domestic policy debacle.” In 2005, when President Bush was pushing his plan to privatize Social Security, 55 percent of Americans believed that it was “a bad idea to change the Social Security system” while only 36 percent of Americans approved of how Bush was handling the issue.
McCain fails to understand that replacing the current Social Security system “in whole or in part, with personal investment accounts” would likely “make things worse.” This should come as no surprise though, as even members of his own campaign team admit he is unprepared for a “policy wonk debate“:
“If this comes down to some policy wonk debate between McCain and Hillary or Obama, well, we’re not going to win that one,” is how a John McCain political adviser, in a recent chat with me, assessed the Republican presidential candidate.
McCain’s Social Security flip-flop is yet another example of his cluelessness on economic issues.
Federal agents ’secretly’ profile immigrants.
Federal agents ’secretly’ profile immigrants.
According to a 2006 Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo obtained by McClatchy, the Bush administration has “secretly established profiling techniques to screen immigrants based on their nationalities, protocols that critics charge encourage the unjustified targeting of Muslims.” After 9/11, “federal agents detained 1,200 mainly Muslim men and separately required visa-holders from predominately Muslim or Arab countries to be fingerprinted and registered in a database.”
High-powered lobbyist joins McCain campaign.
High-powered lobbyist joins McCain campaign.
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has hired John Green, “a leading GOP lobbyist” and founding partner of Ogilvy Government Relations. Green will coordinate McCain’s “message and travel schedule with congressional Republicans.” According to Public Citizen, “McCain has 59 lobbyists raising money for his campaign, more than any of the other presidential candidates.”
ThinkFast: March 4, 2008
ThinkFast: March 4, 2008
Right-wing radio host Melanie Morgan — who once called for the editor of The New York Times to be “sent to the gas chamber” — has been fired from her job at KSFO 560 AM, but will continue her World Net Daily column. “[J]ust because Melanie Morgan is off the air doesn’t mean she’s off our radar,” said Media Matters spokesman Karl Frisch.
Commenting on the climate change deniers conference in New York City, Princeton University geosciences professor Michael Oppenheimer said that climate skeptics “have to get together to talk to each other, because nobody else is talking to them.”
Federal Communications Commission commissioner Michael Copps has asked the board’s chair to open an inquiry into “the blacking out of a politically charged segment of the CBS News magazine ‘60 Minutes’ by a local television station in Alabama.” “Was this an attempt to suppress information on the public airwaves, or was it really just a technical problem?” asked Copps.
“House Democrats said a civil lawsuit could be filed as early as this month that challenges the Bush administration’s claims of executive privilege in curtailing aides from testifying on Capitol Hill.” Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is pursing civil litigation because Attorney General Michael Mukasey refuses to enforce contempt citations against two White House aides.
Vanity Fair writes that the Bush administration’s plan to arm and train Palestinian fighters loyal to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas backfired and led to the Hamas takeover of Gaza. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called the central premise of the article “ludicrous” and said it was necessary to counteract Iranian influence. More »
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