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Wag the Debate

By Guest Blogger on Feb 11, 2005 at 8:00 pm

[Ed. Note: Sam Seder, Janeane Garofolo and the Majority Report Team will be guest blogging this weekend on ThinkProgress.org from the HBO Comedy Festival in Aspen, CO.]

Greetings from Aspen!

We’re here in Colorado to broadcast our Air America Radio show, “The Majority Report,” live from the HBO U.S. Comedy Arts Festival. As part of the festival, tomorrow, our co-host Janeane Garofalo will be in a panel called “Wag the Debate,” sponsored by none other than the Center for American Progress.

Everyone on our staff is a big fan of the new thinkprogress.org project, so we jumped at the opportunity to guest-blog. And since we’re much, much better looking than Judd Legum (and, to be honest, than most of the thinkprogress.org staff), we figured we could add some much-needed show-business glitz to this thing. But then Judd vetoed our photo submissions, on the basis that radio doesn’t qualify as show-business glitz. After giving it some thought, we decided he was right, so we’re just sticking to the words.

One of the things we’ve focused on time and time again on the Majority Report is exposing the crucial role cable-news pundits and hacks (we’re still trying to figure out the difference) play in selling the Bush Administration policies to the public. We saw the same play used time and time again in the run-up to the Iraq war: unqualified, uninformed people going on television to dishonestly convince the American people that we urgently needed to send our sons and daughters to war in Iraq to prevent an imminent attack, perhaps even a nuclear attack, on our home soil.
Read more

Media

Post Mortem

By Judd Legum on Feb 11, 2005 at 3:32 pm

Today, the Washington Post editorial page shills for President Bush’s Social Security privatization scheme. They try to make a tortured argument that private accounts will help solve Social Security’s long term deficits — a position even the administration has given up defending.

The Post argues that while the accounts themselves do nothing to improve Social Security’s financial situation, they will make people more willing to accept a benefit cut. According to the Post, potential gains in a bull market “would cushion the shock of any separate benefit cut imposed to fix the solvency problem.”

In other words, we should stop worrying about the economics of Bush’s plan and start paying more attention to its psychological benefits.

Sounds like the Post editorial page really has a handle the Social Security issue. Just like they did on WMD. Flashback to June 4, 2003:

It still is possible — we’d say probable — that weapons will be found… Many critics of the war have rushed to the conclusion that Iraq never had weapons of mass destruction and that the Bush administration falsified or deliberately hyped the evidence. This seems unlikely on both counts.

Politics

Justice for All, Just Not the Poor

By ThinkProgress on Feb 11, 2005 at 12:50 pm

“The fundamental right to a lawyer that Americans assume apply to everyone accused of a criminal conduct effectively does not exist in practice for countless people across the United States.” So states an American Bar Association report that continues on to find that wrongfully convicted individuals have collectively served 1, 800 years of prison time. Yes, EIGHTEEN centuries of wrongfully served time. And since the analysis was only done with data from 31 states and the District of Columbia, this is likely a lowball figure. So when the Department of Justice reports that “about three-fourths of the inmates in State prisons and about half of those in Federal prisons received publicly-provided legal counsel for the offense for which they were serving time,” one must wonder how many more years of freedom have been stolen from innocents.

In an overly complex criminal justice system, people are getting lost every step of the way. And though “it has been more than 40 years since the Supreme Court ruled the government must provide legal counsel to indigent defendants,” the callous words of Atlanta Judge Hulane George sum up the current state of affairs, “You have a right to a lawyer — not the lawyer of your choice.” Read more

Security

Iraq Strategy Short on Substance

By ThinkProgress on Feb 11, 2005 at 11:57 am

Reasonable people disagree on the right course for Iraq, that much is obvious. Some, like Sen. Ted Kennedy, want the White House to issue a detailed timeline for withdrawing U.S. troops. Others, like Rep. Marty Meehan, favor withdrawal but eschew the notion of a timeline. Another camp, which includes prominent MidEast scholar Juan Cole, warns a precipitous withdrawal might make conditions in Iraq far worse.

Here’s one demand we can all agree on: the White House needs to publicly announce its goals for training Iraqi security forces. Right now, we know neither the training goals that will satisfy our mission, nor the timeline for when those goals will be met. Sec. Rumsfeld even says such information is “unknowable.” This is false. If American commanders can make reasonable estimates about the training of American forces, it can do the same for Iraqi forces. Setting standards that define our success or failure is a basic step, and should be expected from an administration that so frequently preaches accountability.

Politics

Our New Secretary of State

By ThinkProgress on Feb 11, 2005 at 10:05 am

Did Condoleezza Rice perjure herself?

CLAIM: “One of the problems was there was really nothing that look like was going to happen inside the United States…Almost all of the reports focused on al-Qaida activities outside the United States.” [Condoleezza Rice, Senate Testimony, 4/8/04]

FACT: In the months before Sept. 11, the Federal Aviation Administration told some of the nation’s largest airports that if a terrorist wanted to hijack a plane to commit suicide in a “spectacular explosion,” it would probably be a hijacking on U.S. soil rather than overseas. [Newsday, 2/11/05]

More memories…

CLAIM: “I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon. [No one predicted] that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile.” [Condoleezza Rice, 5/16/02]

CLAIM: “We received no intelligence that terrorists were preparing to attack the homeland using airplanes as missiles.” [Condoleezza Rice, 3/22/04]

CLAIM: “Richard Clarke had plenty of opportunities to tell us in the administration that he thought the war on terrorism was moving in the wrong direction and he chose not to.” [Condoleezza Rice, 3/22/04]

FACT: Eight months before 9/11, “Clarke urged then national security adviser Condoleezza Rice to hold a high-level meeting on the al-Qa’ida network…a memo has revealed. “We urgently need such a principals-level review on the al-Qa’ida network,” Clarke wrote on January 25, 2001. [AFP, 2/12/05]

FACT: The report by the 9/11 commission detailed 52 warnings given to Federal Aviation Administration leaders from April to September 10, 2001, about al Qaeda and its desire to attack airlines, according to a previously undisclosed report by the commission that investigated the terror attacks. [CNN, 2/11/05]

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