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Corzine Blasts Bush’s ‘Misinformation’ On SCHIP

By Amanda Terkel on Oct 7, 2007 at 12:55 pm

Last week, President Bush vetoed an expansion of SCHIP, denying coverage to 3.2 million children who are currently uninsured. To justify his veto, Bush held up states who want to cover children above 300 percent of the poverty level as examples of the program’s misdirection. Yesterday in his weekly radio address, Bush claimed that he is “guided by a clear principle: Put poor children first.”

Today, New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine (D) appeared on ABC’s This Week and shot down Bush’s excuses. While New Jersey’s SCHIP program does cover children in families with incomes up to $72,000, “the cost of living in New Jersey is far higher than it is in other parts of the country”:

CORZINE: Now, the fact is that there’s only about 3 percent of our kids in that 300 percent of poverty to 350 percent.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Middle class to upper middle class.

CORZINE: Upper middle class. That’s hardly upper middle class in New Jersey. Median income’s about $65,000. The reality is that the vast majority, the vast majority of the children that are in the CHIPS program — we call it Family Care in New Jersey — are under 250 percent of poverty.

Watch it:

Corzine also responded to Bush’s criticism that states such as New Jersey spend “more SCHIP money on adults than they do on children.” “We cover parents up to 133 percent of poverty,” he said. “That’s $27,000 for a family of four. In New Jersey, that is poverty. … Yes, the cost of insurance for adults is more than for young folks, for kids, but that is not going to middle class or even moderate income families. Very low income.”

New Jersey is one of eight states that has sued the Bush administration for making it harder for them to cover more families under SCHIP. Additionally, the bill Bush vetoed actually put the poorest children “first in line” for benefits. It seems that in order to fund the Iraq war, poor and middle-income children come last for this administration.

Transcript: Read more

Politics

State Dept. ignored diplomats’ concerns on Blackwater.

By Amanda Terkel on Oct 7, 2007 at 12:30 pm

The State Department “overlooked repeated warnings from U.S. diplomats in the field that guards were endangering Iraqi civilians and undermining U.S. efforts to win support from the population.” Diplomats cautioned that the 2004 decision to grant contractors immunity from Iraqi courts was “a bomb that could go off at any time.” Earlier reports show that the State Department also ignored repeated complaints from Iraqi officials about Blackwater’s conduct.

Media

God Forbid We Tell Them!

By ThinkProgress on Oct 7, 2007 at 12:27 pm

I broke with habit and watched Tim Russert’s show today. After he finished his interview with John Edwards he brought on a panel of pundits since who wants to hear from presidential candidates when you could listen to journalists talking to each other. We had Russert, David Broder, Margaret Carlson, Ted Koppel, and David Brody — not bad as far as these things go. Eventually, someone — either Russert or Koppel — noted that the New York City press, which knows Rudy Giuliani much better than the national press corps, has been full in recent months of hard-hitting coverage that substantially undermines the narrative Giuliani is trying to create about his own campaign.

This, it seemed to me, was an interesting topic for a national broadcast television show. Maybe these worthy panelists would inform their audience of these pieces of information known to New Yorkers, and resolve to bring this information to their audiences at Time, The Washington Post, NPR, CBN, and the various General Electric-owned media properties.

Sorry, just kidding. It didn’t occur to me for a minute that they would do this. And, indeed, they didn’t. Instead, they went meta and had a brief discussion of why it is that these accurate accounts of Giuliani’s record and personal behavior “don’t penetrate.” And, of course, they never considered the possibility that their own failure to report on these accurate portrayal’s of Giuliani’s record and personal behavior might play any role in it. Instead, they concluded that his Powers of 9/11 Awesomeness must just be too great for the truth the penetrate. They were, however, willing to be scathingly critical of Fred Thompson for saying “Soviet Union” went he meant “Russia.”

Security

Fineman: Intel Community To Release ‘Three Iran Reports’ To ‘Slow Down’ Bush’s Warmongering

By Satyam Khanna on Oct 7, 2007 at 11:34 am

On the Chris Matthews Show today, NBC’s Howard Fineman revealed that the intelligence community will release “three different reports” in upcoming weeks to “slow down” the administration’s current drumbeat for war with Iran:

The intelligence community over the next few months is going to come out with three different reports on Iran about internal political problems of Iran, about the economy, and about their nuclear capability.

Those are going to be key to decide what the Bush administration is going to do, and it’s the intelligence community I think trying to slow down what the president, most particularly the vice president, want to do in Iran.

Watch it:

The intelligence community’s warning against war with Iran echo its warnings prior to the invasion of Iraq. Pre-war intelligence forewarned that occupying Iraq could be a “long, difficult and probably turbulent challenge” and would “accelerate” regional terrorism.

Similarly, the administration “ignore[d] the intelligence community’s belief that the militant Islamist al-Qaida and Saddam’s secular dictatorship were unlikely allies,” instead setting up an “alternative intelligence” shop to disseminate false information about Hussein. Mohamad El Baradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency has also warned that pre-Iraq failures are being repeated with respect to Iran.

Digg It!

Politics

Just Gas?

By ThinkProgress on Oct 7, 2007 at 11:07 am

bushgas.png

Chris Bowers discusses the implications of the chart above, which appears to show the price of gasoline (mapped inversely so that the line goes down when the price of gas goes up) exerting a dominant influence on George W. Bush’s popularity. I was super-impressed the first time I saw that chart, but now I’m not so sure. Aside from the fact that gasoline has generally gotten more expensive and Bush generally gotten less popular, are we really seeing a correlation here? There must be any number of quantities that have also generally moved in one direction during the relevant time period.

Consider the quality of the basketball teams fielded by the New Jersey Nets. Like Bush, they were at their best in the season immediately following 9/11 and have been in slow but steady decline since then. But the Nets aren’t exercising a causal influence on Bush’s popularity. What’s more, I think the price of gas is being demarcated in nominal terms here, which is clearly the wrong way to do it.

Politics

Pelosi Says She Was Never Briefed ‘About The Secret Memos’ Authorizing CIA Torture

By Matt Corley on Oct 7, 2007 at 10:44 am

Earlier this week, after the New York Times revealed that the Bush administration gave the CIA secret approval in 2005 to use harsh interrogation techniques, White House Press Secretary Dana Perino asserted that members of Congress had been “fully briefed” on the secret opinions.

On Fox News Sunday today, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who as minority leader in 2005 would have been informed of the most highly classified information, said that she had not been briefed “about the secret memos” in 2005:

CHRIS WALLACE: You were never briefed about these secret memos in 2005?

NANCY PELOSI: No, not about the secret memos.

Watch it:

Pelosi is not the first member of Congress to say that they were never briefed about the secret memos. On Friday, Sen. John Rockefeller (D-WV), the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that the administration “can’t say that Congress has been fully briefed” because they have withheld “key documents“:

They can’t say that Congress has been fully briefed while refusing to turn over key documents used to justify the legality of the program.

The reality is, the Administration refused to disclose the program to the full Committee for five years, and they have refused to turn over key legal documents since day one.

As ThinkProgress has noted, the White House has little credibility when it says it has “fully briefed” Congress on its counterterrorism activities. Though officials have repeatedly claimed that they briefed key lawmakers on the NSA domestic wiretapping program and other spying programs, those claims have never held up in the past.

Yglesias

Adventures in Aerial Counterinsurgency

By ThinkProgress on Oct 7, 2007 at 10:18 am

This is a subject I’ve written about several times before, but it continues to be mind-boggling that even our new Petreausified, hip-to-COIN version of MNF-Iraq keeps relying so heavily on air power as a combat tactic. This simply won’t work. But it’s also a key signal that “surge” or no “surge” there are nowhere near enough American soldiers in Iraq to make anything like a proper counterinsurgency strategy viable. Nor are there enough such soldiers anywhere in the US military. And on the list of things not worth doing unless you’re able to do them right, fighting wars ranks pretty high.

Yglesias

Enforcement

By ThinkProgress on Oct 7, 2007 at 10:15 am

Tyler Cowen says “I’m still wondering what — de facto — will be done against those poor people who are required to buy health insurance but don’t do so.” Tyler comes at this from the perspective of a bad right-winger, an opponent of universal health insurance, but I wonder, too. To me, this problem seems like a significant disadvantage of the current vogue for mandate-and-subsidize over a more traditional set-up wherein the government pays for all or some of people’s health expenses and collects taxes from people in order to do so. We already have a mechanism in place for enforcing payment of taxes.

Climate Progress

Is Fiji Water part of the problem?

By Joe Romm on Oct 7, 2007 at 8:29 am

fiji_water_1.jpgI was at a roundtable discussion of climate a couple of weeks ago that served Fiji Water. Fiji is a long, long way to ship water. As their website brags:

There’s no question about it: Fiji is far away. But when it comes to drinking water, “remote” happens to be very, very good.

Look at it this way. FIJI Water is drawn from an artesian aquifer, located at the very edge of a primitive rainforest, hundreds of miles away from the nearest continent.

That very distance is part of what makes us so much more pure and so much healthier than other bottled waters.

That very distance is part of what makes me ask — Is Fiji the incandescent light bulb of bottled water?

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