When questioning Attorney General Michael Mukasey today, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) insisted that “99% of Americans would support” waterboarding, and emphasized that the Bush administration should “not be defensive about using” the technique:

In regard to interrogation techniques — and I know you’re going to be asked a lot of questions about that today — I just want to express the personal opinion that I hope the administration will not be defensive about using some admittedly harsh but nonlethal interrogation techniques, even techniques that might lead someone to believe they’re being drowned even if they’re not.

My guess is that 99 percent of the American people, if asked whether they would endorse such interrogation techniques to be conducted on a known terrorist with the expectation that information that might be derived from such interrogation would save the lives of thousands of Americans, that 99 percent of the American people would support such interrogation techniques.

As Paul Kiel points out, a recent CNN poll showed that 68% of Americans said waterboarding was torture, and 58% said the U.S. should not be allowed to use the technique against suspected terrorists.

The Center for Public Integrity reports today that “for more than seven months, the nation’s top public health agency has blocked the publication of an exhaustive federal study of environmental hazards in the eight Great Lakes states” because of “alarming information” about “elevated infant mortality and cancer rates” potentially threatening “more than nine million” Americans. In July, just days before the report was to be released, the Center for Disease Control “withdrew it, saying that it needed further review.”

In an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay railed against Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) for acknowledging the problem of global warming, arguing that it is not a true conservative stance.

Matthews asked what the “conservative” position is on climate change. DeLay replied flatly, “Man is not causing climate change.” He added that it would be “arrogance” to suggest otherwise:

Man is not causing climate change. Climate change may be a phenomenon, but there is no science to suggest that man is the cause of climate change. [...]

It is arrogance to suggest that man can affect climate change. There’s no science that supports such a notion.

Watch it:

In fact, the Nobel-prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported nearly a year ago that “warming of the climate system is unequivocal,” and that human activity is contributing to this warming. Even President Bush has acknowledged that human activity is contributing to global warming.

Apparently, DeLay considers Nobe-prize-winning scientists no match for the Hammer.

Transcript: Read more

A new Department of Veterans Affairs report finds that “recently discharged veterans are having a harder time finding civilian jobs and are more likely to earn lower wages for years due partly to employer concerns about their mental health and overall skills.” For example, “18 percent of the veterans who sought jobs within one to three years of discharge were unemployed, while one out of four who did find jobs earned less than $21,840 a year.”

[Our guest blogger is John Halpin, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress focusing on the foundations of progressive thought, communications, and public opinion analysis.]

Matthew Yglesias and Duncan Black have initiated a dicussion about the meaning and use of “progressive” and “liberal” as ideological labels. I’d like to offer 2 quick points based on work I’ve done recently on the intellectual history of progressivism:

1) Ideological terms are notoriously fluid and hard to pin down. This is true whether discussing progressivism, liberalism, conservatism, libertarianism, populism, socialism, social democracy, or Christian democracy.

Looking back at the period from 1890-1920 — what is broadly described as the Populist and Progressive Era — you find that people who called themselves “progressive” or were labeled as such frequently held divergent views on a range of important philosophical areas including the role of the state, attitudes about business, views of human nature and social progress, the importance of faith versus empiricism and reason, and isolationism or internationalism in global affairs.

These intellectual divergences often reflected different sources of thought (Jefferson, Hamilton, obscure Europeans, or the Gospels, for example); different personal backgrounds and origins (city or rural, Midwestern/Western or Eastern, middle class or worker); and different political contexts (the progressivism of Midwestern Republicans like Bob La Follette or Al Cummins versus the Democratic populism of William Jennings Bryan and the Democratic progressivism of Joseph Folk). Read more

Earlier this week, CIA director Michael Hayden left open the option of reinstating waterboarding. Yet in a House Intelligence Committee hearing today, Hayden said that agency lawyers are unsure of the legality of the tactic:

It [waterboarding] is not included in the current program, and in my own view, the view of my lawyers and the Department of Justice, it is not certain that that technique would be considered to be lawful under current statute.

Watch it:

Hayden told the committee that he “officially prohibited CIA operatives from using waterboarding in 2006 in the wake of a Supreme Court decision and new laws on the treatment of U.S. detainees,” the AP notes.

I was looking over the exit polls for Illinois and New York and there’s an interesting pattern to the data. In her home state, Hillary Clinton did better among pretty much all groups than she does nationwide. Still, Obama won his core constituencies — young people and African-Americans. In Illinois, by contrast, Obama pretty much ran the table, eking out narrow wins even in bad demographic groups like old people and Hispanics. He even won women 64-35.

Now maybe this just reflects that fact that New York was more seriously contested than Illinois. Obama didn’t put resources into trying to win the state per se, but he was playing for New Jersey and Connecticut in the same media market and did some fundraisers and rallies over the months. But on the other hand, it does fit a broader pattern, namely that the better people keep to know Obama, the more they seem to like him. Every state he campaigns in shows a strong upward trajectory, and in the state where he’s best-known, even the most skeptical demographic groups come around to him. Hillary Clinton, by contrast, has her base and it’s a big base, but the tendency is to only drop down from that level.