Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who coined the label “hate radio” to refer to the virulent commentary on right-wing radio, again reiterated her point today in the context of the right-wing smears against Graeme Frost:

Hate radio has made a vicious attack on the Frost family, a family that was involved in a very serious automobile accident injuring two of its children who are SCHIP recipients. … Again, beneath the dignity of the debate but of course I would fight to the death for their right to say whatever they say in our great country.

Andrew says that “There is only one person who can rescue Republican fundraising, reunite the party, rally the base and win the presidency for the GOP. And you know who she is.” This is certainly what Republicans are hoping, and I certainly agree that she has the best chance of losing, but I wouldn’t bet too heavily on this if I were a conservative. After all (Bill) Clinton-hatred was a plenty strong political force in the 1990s, but Bob Dole got a bit less than 41 percent of the vote and Clinton left office with sky-high approval ratings even before the country got a taste of how bad the alternative might be.

Speaking as an admirer of both Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, I sincerely doubt that the GOP wound up in its current predicament because the American people were bowled over by the Pelosi/Reid charisma or their inspiring rhetoric. Rather, the Republicans, having consolidated power in 2002 and 2004 proceeded to unveil a governing agenda whose consequences have been bad for everyone outside a narrow economic elite. The Republican Party needs a nominee who can distance himself from that agenda, but that person needs to run a primary gauntlet dominated by the smallish minority of people (and donors — just look at Mike Huckabee’s fundraising) who think Bush is great and everything would be fine if the president had just vetoed some popular spending initiatives. All of the leading candidates have stood up on stage and pledged support for endless war in Iraq, vetoing bipartisan childrens’ health care bills, and sworn that the economy is performing fantastically.

Come November, that’s going to be a problem and it’s not one Hillary Clinton is going to solve.

Before President Bush vetoed a bipartisan expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), he held a press conference on Sept. 20 to try to bully Congress into caving to his demands, calling them “irresponsible.” During the presser, he also declared “I have strongly supported S-CHIP as a governor, and I have done so as President.”

Bush’s claim to being a “strong” supporter of SCHIP as governor of Texas is laughable, according to former Texas Observer reporter Lou Dubose. Writing in the Washington Spectator yesterday, Dubose details how Bush tried to limit the program, setting the qualifying threshold at 150% of the poverty level, which would have insured only 300,000 of Texas’ 1.4 million uninsured kids:

Other Republican governors, such as Florida governor Jeb Bush, set the qualifying threshold at 200 percent of the national poverty level. Some went higher. In New Jersey, Governor Christine Todd Whitman, whom Bush would appoint as his first director of the Environmental Protection Agency, set the threshold at 300 percent, opening the program up to greater numbers of children. [...]

The Democratic legislature prepared to budget for enrollment at 200 percent, which would have opened the program up to 500,000 of the state’s 1.4 million uninsured kids. Bush drew the line at 150 percent, which would have insured 300,000 kids.

Eventually, Bush yielded to political pressure and agreed “to the Democrats’ plan, with its enrollment of 500,000 children in the program.” After the bill was signed, Bush told one Democratic legislator, “Congratulations, you shoved it down our throat.”

As Dubose noted in a 1999 Nation article, at the same time Bush was fighting efforts to cover more children, he was also pushing “a tax break for oil-well owners.”

(HT: Dan Froomkin)

In an MSNBC interview today, host Norah O’Donnell asked Lynne Cheney her views on Sen. Hillary Clinton’s (D-NY) presidential campaign and whether “America is ready for a woman president.” Cheney replied that she actually has a “certain bias”:

One of the things I discovered was that Dick and Barack Obama are eighth cousins. Is that an amazing thing? If you go back eight generations, we have a common ancestor.

Watch it:

When asked if that means she’s “for Barack Obama,” Cheney replied, “No.”

UPDATE: A spokeswoman Lynne Cheney explained to the AP that Obama “is a descendent of Mareen Duvall. This French Huguenot’s son married the granddaughter of a Richard Cheney, who arrived in Maryland in the late 1650′s from England, said Ginny Justice, a spokeswoman for Lynne Cheney.” The Obama campaign’s response? “Every family has a black sheep.”

Digg It!

Obviously, the mere fact that the ACLU was able to commission a poll (that’s via Matt Stoller) showing public support for its positions on surveillance has limited probative value. Advocacy groups can always pull that off. The question is, how did they need to frame the question to get their result:

It turns out that a fairly anodyne wording gets the civil libertarian result:

Traditionally, the law has required a warrant from a court for each individual the government wants to wiretap. Some people want to permanently change this law to allow courts to issue blanket warrants for wiretapping American citizens that would not have to name any specific individual. Do you favor or oppose allowing courts to issue these blanket warrants?

This probably shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. A lot of people seem to have the idea that the American electorate is ruthlessly authoritarian and will punish any candidate who stands up for civil liberties. In reality, it seems to me that the reverse is true — this is the country where you can’t even do something sensible let have a national ID card or a national gun registration system without people freaking out. Combine that with the fact that the specific president who would be empowered with all this discretion is wildly unpopular, and I don’t see any reason to think there’s an unstoppable public opinion juggernaut here.

Commandant Gen. James Conway said yesterday that “he is concerned about the Marines Corps’ ability to respond to security flare-ups around the world” because of “the demands put on it by the Iraq war.” “I’m a little bit concerned about us keeping our expeditionary flavor. … We are much heavier than ever before,” he said. Conway’s comments come after The New York Times reported last week that Marine officials are pushing to redeploy their forces to Afghanistan to relieve these burdens.

Digg It!

Yesterday, TrueMajorityAction released an ad of 2-year old Bethany Wilkerson, who was born with a serious heart problem and received health insurance through the SCHIP program. Today, the Wilkerson family will appear with lawmakers on Capitol Hill to rally support for increased funding of the SCHIP program.

Like the Frost family, the Wilkerson family has already become the subject of right-wing attacks. Michelle Malkin — whose baseless smear campaign against 12-year old Graeme Frost was deemed too bogus for even Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) — is now trying to rally the right against Bethany.

Heralding the arrival of a “new toddler-aged human shield,” Malkin writes that “the Wilkersons made a choice” — a seeming reference to the fact that Malkin now believes she has the license to attack the Wilkersons for their public support of SCHIP. “We need more ‘partisan bickering,’ not less,” added Malkin.

Malkin’s not alone in her rage. In a piece entitled “Meet the New Frosts, Same As the Old Frosts,” the National Review’s Mark Hemingway attacks the Wilkersons as irresponsible parents:

While the debate around the Frost family at least initially centered around their relative wealth, the issue really at hand is one of bad behavior. [...]

For Dara and Brian Wilkerson, the fact that they don’t have health insurance is less about falling through the cracks than the decisions they’ve made.

Hemingway claims that Bethany’s mother, Dara, “voluntarily left a job at a country club that had good health insurance, because the situation was ‘unmanageable,’” to “take a job at a restaurant with no health insurance.” He mourns the fact that the Wilkersons “went on to have a baby anyway.”

Dara Wilkerson released this statement responding to the attacks on her choice of employment:

We have seen the statement about my previous employment and here is what we have to say: I left my previous place of employment years before Bethany became part of our lives. I am a hard working woman. I have worked at Snappers Sea Grill for over 6 years. It is a good work environment and I am a loyal employee. My husband and I were blessed with Bethany two years ago and we are even more blessed to still have her with us today.

So according to this “pro-life” right-wing logic, the Wilkersons should have sacrificed having a daughter in order to stay in an “unmanageable” job.

Last night on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, CBS News’ Chief Foreign Correspondent Lara Logan was asked, “How are we doing” in Iraq? Logan responded, “It’s much worse than the picture, the image we even have of Iraq”:

We’re doing extremely badly, from my point of view. I was asked if I felt any guilt for the fact that the world has an impression of the war in Iraq as being very bad and going very wrong. And I said I really don’t because I can’t imagine the last time anyone saw a dead American soldier. We’ve hidden that from view. Nobody knows what that looks like, and I’ve seen plenty of it. It’s much worse than the picture, the image we even have of Iraq.

Watch it:

In light of a recent Washington Post story reporting that the U.S. had “crippled” al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), Logan explained that AQI and al Qaeda are “two entirely different things.” “To say that we have crippled them is suicide,” she stated.