Having let Republican filibusters stymie a frighteningly large proportion of the Democrats congressional agenda, Harry Reid’s finally had enough and is going to try to curb abuse of the process . . . to try to stop Chris Dodd from blocking bad FISA legislation.
Reid’s office is organizing some kind of progressive media event on Monday and I imagine he’ll hear a thing or two about this.
According to View London, the British Foreign Office “has been ordered to publish an early draft of the controversial dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction”:
The final document, which was issued by then prime minister Tony Blair in September 2002, was at the centre of a government scandal after accusations that the dossier had been ‘sexed up’ in order to encourage support for an invasion of Iraq.
The document reportedly said that “Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had the ability to launch WMDs within 45 minutes.”
(HT: Newshoggers)
President Bush announced today that he is re-nominating Steven Bradbury to be head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, despite the Senate’s objections. Bradbury came under criticism last fall “when it was disclosed that he was the author of a pair of secret legal opinions that endorsed rough techniques for suspects in the custody of the Central Intelligence Agency.” More on Bradbury’s history with torture here.
Less than a week after Brave New Films launched a campaign against hate-radio host Michael Savage, four advertisers have pulled their ads from his radio show. The United Service Organizations (USO), however, is refusing to drop Savage and has demanded that Brave New Films “take the necessary steps to remove USO from [its] website entirely.”
A new study by the Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism found that the Bush administration issued 935 false statements about the threat from Iraq in the two years following 9/11. President Bush “led with 259 false statements, 231 about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.”
In today’s press briefing, White House Press Secretary Dana Perino attacked the study. Perino claimed the study “is so flawed” because it “only looked at members of the administration” and not “people around the world”:
I hardly think that the study is worth spending time on. It is so flawed, in terms of taking anything into context or including — they only looked at members of the administration, rather than looking at members of Congress or people around the world.
Because, as you’ll remember, we were part of a broad coalition of countries that deposed the dictator based on a collective understanding of the intelligence.
Watch it:
Perino argues that “we thought as a collective body that there” were WMDs. “The actions taken in 2003 were based on the collective judgment of intelligence agencies around the world,” added spokesperson Scott Stanzel.
The entire world community, however, didn’t endorse the Bush administration’s pre-war claims. For example, the IAEA’s Mohamed ElBaradei, Hans Blix, and other U.N. inspectors were all skeptical of Bush’s WMD allegations. Members of Congress who received the administration’s classified intelligence briefings raised similar concerns.
Dan Froomkin reports today that the Senate Intelligence Committee’s long overdue Phase II report on “whether the White House intentionally deceived the public” prior to the war will be out “before the end of spring.”
Transcript: Read more
I’ll admit that I clicked onto Ruth Marcus’ column grading candidates’ stimulus plans specifically expecting to find something I could object to and thus write a feisty blog post about. But actually it seems about right, except that giving Bush “extra credit” for “not insisting on extending his tax cuts, which made no sense as stimulus and would have doomed its chance of passing” seems silly — you don’t extra credit for not screwing up.
Of course the whole stimulus package issue on the campaign trail is a little bit surreal since clearly the situation will be different twelve months from now when any of these people are president. Consequently, I’m not sure how much we really learn from this except for the somewhat disturbing fact that John McCain doesn’t appear to know what a “stimulus package” even is or how to ask someone on his staff to explain the idea to him. There’s a certain artificiality to the whole thing in that I assume the Clinton and Obama campaigns each felt pressure to differentiate themselves from each other even though by most accounts there isn’t, in fact, any kind of gaping philosophical void between the two of them. Mostly I wish I’d seen something creative like Dean Baker’s “green stimulus” concepts thrown in along with the more conventional ideas.
In today’s press briefing, a reporter asked White House Press Secretary Dana Perino about the new CBO estimate on the skyrocketing deficit. Perino didn’t have much of an answer, however, and simply replied, “Well, I don’t know how they come to all of their numbers at CBO. It’s a little bit — math is not my strong suit.” Watch it:
Poor math skills obviously run in the Bush administration. In September, President Bush said he couldn’t predict whether there would be a recession because he “got a B in Econ 101.”
UPDATE: Perino isn’t so hot at history either.
One of our favorite climate sites, Desmogblog, has made it to the finals in two categories — and your vote might make the difference:
Opening his radio show with funeral music yesterday, Fox News host John Gibson callously mocked the death of actor Heath Ledger, calling him a “weirdo” with a “serious drug problem.”
Playing an audio clip of the iconic quote, “I wish I knew how to quit you” from Ledger’s gay romance movie Brokeback Mountain, Gibson disdainfully quipped, “Well, he found out how to quit you.” Laughing, Gibson then played another clip from Brokeback Mountain in which Ledger said, “We’re dead,” followed by his own, mocking “We’re dead” before playing the clip again.
Listen to it:
GIBSON: Maybe he had a serious position in the market.
TOM SULLIVAN: And possibly today, he looked at the window and said…
GIBSON: “Oh my God.”
SULLIVAN: His name’s not Keith Bledger, right?
GIBSON: He was depressed about yesterday’s downturn in the world stock markets.
On the Democratic debate in South Carolina:
GIBSON: Apparently Heath Ledger was suicidal and his friends saw it coming. I think he watched the Clinton-Obama debate last night. I think he was an Edwards guy, cause he saw his Edwards guy was just completely irrelevant.
In reality, New York City Police spokesman Paul J. Browne told the New York Times that there was “no obvious indication of suicide.”
You stay classy, John Gibson.
UPDATE: In 2006, when Brokeback Mountain was released, Gibson repeatedly made fun of the film, calling it “a gay agenda movie.”
UPDATE II: Newshounds is encouraging readers to complain to Fox News about Gibson’s comments.
UPDATE III: GLAAD has started a petition asking Fox News “why they continue to provide a platform for John Gibson’s cruel and tasteless comments.”
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