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House passes SCHIP funding with strong support.

By Faiz Shakir on Sep 25, 2007 at 9:55 pm

An overwhelming bipartisan majority in the House voted 265-159 tonight to pass the popular and successful Children’s Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act. The support fell just short of the two-thirds majority needed to override Bush’s expected veto of the bill. Speaker Pelosi called on Bush to “dig deeply into his heart” before depriving millions of children of health insurance:

I’m reminded of the Bible tonight, and I speak with all of the sincerity and all of the hope to President Bush in the hope that he will change his mind. To dig deeply into his heart and think about the children in America who don’t have healthcare. Because if not, I think that the President is giving new meaning to the words, ‘suffer, little children.’ Suffer, little children, if your parents can’t afford health insurance.

Watch it:

Roll Call vote here. The Gavel has more from today’s floor debate.

Security

Durbin: Lieberman-Kyl Amendment Is ‘Dangerous,’ ‘Puts Us On Record’ In Support Of Iran War

By Faiz Shakir on Sep 25, 2007 at 7:47 pm

Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) spoke forcefully this afternoon on the Senate floor against the Lieberman-Kyl amendment. Durbin described the “sense of the Senate” legislation as a “dangerous effort to put us on the record for the use of military force in Iran.”

Noting that the language of the amendment suggests the use of “military instruments,” Durbin said:

What does that mean? Does that mean we are supporting the invasion of Iran? That we are supporting military tactics against Iran? Shouldn’t we be extra careful in the language of these resolutions when we find that the authorization for force for Iraq has dragged us into a war now in its fifth year, a war longer than World War II with bloody and deadly consequences for the United States and innocent Iraqis.

“I think it is dangerous language,” Durbin said, concluding his statement by saying he will oppose the amendment as it is currently written. Watch it:

[flv http://video.thinkprogress.org/2007/09/durbiniran.320.240.flv]

Due to earlier concerns raised by Sen. Jim Webb, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced this afternoon that the language of the Lieberman-Kyl amendment was being modified. The Senate then released new language, but as Carah Ong notes, the modifications did little to ease fears:

The new language allows for the use of U.S. military instruments inside of Iraq for dealing with Iran, but it still does not contain a measure to prevent a conflict from spilling beyond Iraq’s borders.

Due to the still outstanding concerns raised over the amendment, Reid announced this evening on the Senate floor that Lieberman-Kyl bill “will not have a vote in the near future.” Reid added that negotiations are ongoing and “maybe the night will be bring more clearness to the issue. But right now I think it’s fair to say there will be no votes tonight.”

Yglesias

Hitler’s Problem

By ThinkProgress on Sep 25, 2007 at 7:35 pm

Brad DeLong says he’s not sure “if this is a very good or very bad end-of-lecture sentence”:

Next time, I’ll talk about Adolf Hitler, whose big problem–besides being a bloodthirsty persuasive paranoid genocidal psychopath, that is–is that he pays to much attention to (a) Malthus, (b) social darwinists, and (c) cowboy novels.

Seems good to me. The answer, I think, is (a). Hitler suffered from, among other things, a Malthus-esque belief that “the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man” for sharply limited and that the acquisition of land — lebensraum — was crucial to national prosperity. Thus, he decided to invest a massive proportion of the German economy in a fruitless effort to greatly expand Germany’s land area. But instead of a larger land area, Hitler’s policies wound up making Germany smaller. And in destroying a huge proportion of Germany’s capital infrastructure. And in subjecting a substantial portion of Germany to decades of Communist rule. And at the end of the process, Germany does, indeed, have a higher population density than Italy or France or Spain.

And yet: Germany is a really rich country in the scheme of things, especially the Western part. Because Hitler was wrong. German prosperity doesn’t depend on acquiring more land and never did.

Politics

Inslee: Kennedy ‘Got Us To The Moon,’ But ‘Bush’s Energy Policy Wouldn’t Get Us To Cleveland’

By ThinkProgress on Sep 25, 2007 at 7:01 pm

On Thursday, President Bush will host a meeting of the world’s major emitters of greenhouse gases where he will push them to accept his misguided framework of “voluntary” reductions. Bush is using this meeting as an excuse for skipping yesterday’s conference at the United Nations where world leaders met to lay out an aggressive “road map” once the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012.

Yesterday, ThinkProgress spoke with Rep. Jay Inslee (D-WA), who sharply criticized Bush’s decision to skip the U.N. meeting and his destructive global warming policies. “Kennedy got us to the moon,” said Inslee. “George Bush’s energy policy wouldn’t get us to Cleveland.” From the interview:

[Bush] has this hallucination that somehow a voluntary system will cause the huge investment we need in high technology to be made. And we simply know that volunteerism is great for PTA bake sales, but they will not reorder the economic system of the world, and move to a clean energy technology. [...]

But if we continue down this path of George Bush, with the rose-colored glasses, and he can wave his magic wand and suddenly everyone is going to make this investment. That dog just won’t hunt. And we’ve seen this sort of fictional policies before in his optimism that he was going to sprinkle success over Iraq and it’s the same thing with global warming.

Watch it:

[flv http://video.thinkprogress.org/2007/09/insleegw.320.240.flv]

Bush’s chief science adviser, John Marburger, recently said that manmade global warming is an “unequivocal” fact. But as Inslee notes, embracing rhetoric isn’t enough. He added that Bush has basically been reassuring his “friends in the oil and gas industry” that “we accept global warming, but don’t worry friends, we’re not going to actually do anything about it.”

The Bush administration has repeatedly resisted mandatory emission reductions and a cap-and-trade system. At the G-8 summit in June, German Chancellor Angela Merkel proposed that countries adopt a 50 percent reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, “but had to settle for compromise language after President Bush made it clear the United States would not agree to it.”

Yesterday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) wrote to Bush and urged him to support “mandatory national and international limits” on greenhouse gas emissions.

Transcript: Read more

Politics

Maliki downplays Iran’s influence in Iraq.

By Faiz Shakir on Sep 25, 2007 at 6:45 pm

While the Senate and House were busy today ratcheting up tensions with Iran, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki claimed that Iranian weapons are no longer flowing into Iraq. “Asked about Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Forces, which the U.S. military charges is arming, training and directing Shiite militias in Iraq, Maliki said: ‘There used to be support through borders for these militias. But it has ceased to exist.’”

Media

CNN’s Rick Sanchez Echoes O’Reilly While Discussing O’Reilly’s Racism

By ThinkProgress on Sep 25, 2007 at 5:43 pm

On Friday, Media Matters noted that on the Sept. 19 broadcast of his radio show, Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly made explicitly racist remarks about his recent dinner at Sylvia’s, a famous African-American-owned restaurant in Harlem. O’Reilly said he was shocked that the restaurant’s service was like that of “any other restaurant…even though it’s run by blacks“:

And I couldn’t get over the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia’s restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City. I mean, it was exactly the same, even though it’s run by blacks, primarily black patronship. … There wasn’t one person in Sylvia’s who was screaming, “M-Fer, I want more iced tea.”

CNN anchor Rick Sanchez spoke with O’Reilly about the incident last night. Sanchez told CNN host Don Lemon that O’Reilly was “screaming the entire conversation.” Sanchez said he told O’Reilly, “I’m a huge fan Bill and I’ve been watching you for years.”

Sanchez then proceeded to sympathize with O’Reilly’s racially-charged gaffes while simultaneously revealing his own ignorance and insensitivity on race issues. Some examples:

Sanchez On O’Reilly’s remarks:

— “At first glance, you don’t see it as questionable. Especially if you’re not an African-American!”

– “Here’s a guy who’s trying to give a compliment.”

– “I agree with him [there was no racist intent].”

– “We all have an uncle who comes to parties at our house…who will occasionally say things like this.”

Sanchez On African-Americans:

– [To Lemon] “People are actually offended. And you would know. They call this a ‘subtle type of racism’… it’s the velvet glove type.”

– “What my African-American friends and associates have told me…is that they were insulted that a man with his experience and his age would for the first time realize that … African-Americans who gather in places in America and have civilized meetings. That’s what they say.”

Watch the segment:

[flv http://video.thinkprogress.org/2007/09/OreillySanchezHarlem.320.240.flv]

Yesterday, too, Sanchez defended O’Reilly, downplaying the severity of O’Reilly’s remarks: “But just how big a deal is this? … What’s wrong with a white guy making social commentary about other people’s race, which is what he seems to be doing here?”

Station WABC interviewed Sylvia’s patrons about O’Reilly’s remarks. Said one customer: “I’m concerned that people are still in that type of mindset.”

UPDATE: Media Matters notes that O’Reilly plans to attack CNN on his show tonight.

Climate Progress

The Deniers are winning the war of words

By Joe Romm on Sep 25, 2007 at 5:39 pm

An Inconvenient Truth is so last year! Al Gore’s book may have been #1 in 2006, but the global warming deniers and delayers are outselling everyone this year.

Of course, Bj¸rn Lomborg’s collection of cherry-picked misinformation, Cool It, is the top-selling book in four categories: Climatology, Climate Changes, Public Policy, and even Conservation.

But who knew that the top book in both Meteorology and Weather was the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming (and Environmentalism) — a book whose title would be accurate if only the word “Politically” were removed?

And the #2 book in both Climate Changes and Weather is coauthored by world-class denier Fred Singer — Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years. Sounds like disaster movie dialogue: “It’s unstoppable, I tell, you, unstoppable.”

And the #4 book in Climate Changes (as of today) is a delightful piece of long-discredited disinformation, The Chilling Stars: The New Theory of Climate Change: “The authors explain their theory that sub-atomic particles from exploded stars have more effect on the climate than manmade CO2.” Not.

And let’s not forget the #1 book in the land — by champion delayer Alan Greenspan — The Age of Turbulence.

I guess I should have gone contrarian, maybe titled my book: Global Warming: A New Heaven on Earth.

Yglesias

Richardson’s Iraq Ad

By ThinkProgress on Sep 25, 2007 at 5:09 pm

Given that progressive bloggers have thus far mostly failed to inject the “residual forces” issue into the Democratic primary campaign, I’m not sure why Bill Richardson thinks putting netroots activists in his ad attempting to raise the issue will help him, but I’m glad he’s raising the issue:

One fears that Richardson may have committed too many gaffes at this point to gain traction, but I hope this ad helps him and forces the other candidates to start addressing this issue.

Politics

Giuliani fundraiser seeking $9.11 from guests.

By Matt Corley on Sep 25, 2007 at 5:03 pm

Tomorrow, a supporter of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani is hosting a “$9.11 for Rudy” fundraiser, in which guests are asked to give $9.11 donations to Giuliani’s presidential campaign. The campaign has distanced themselves from the fundraiser, but has not asked it to stop. The event has angered the International Association of Fire Fighters, which argues the 9/11 terrorist attacks are being exploited:

The union — already a vocal critic of Giuliani’s — said Tuesday that the fundraiser’s “$9.11 for Rudy” theme is an abuse of the image and symbols of the 2001 attacks.

“It is nothing short of disrespectful to the legacy of the thousands of civilians and 343 brave firefighters who died at ground zero,” IAFF president Harold Schaitberger said.

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