Vice-chair of the House Armed Services Commitee Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-TX) believes that there is “no evidence” of a serious sexual assault problem at Lackland Airforce Base even though 12 training officers there have been charged or are being investigated for sexual misconduct and there are at least 31 alleged victims of sexual assault.

Today, 78 members of congress led by fierce women’s advocate Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) are calling on the House Armed Services Committee to join the Air Force in investigating the vast allegations of sexual assault at Lackland.

One man has already pleaded guilty to having an improper relationship and is serving 90 days in prison. Another, Military Training Instructor, Staff Sergeant Luis Walker, will be court martialed early next week. According to a press release from Speier’s office, “He faces 28 charges of sexual contact with 10 women including sodomy and rape in technical and basic training.”

According to a local Texas paper, Thornberry doesn’t think it’s a huge issue and is putting his faith in the military to deal with the assaults:

Rep. Mac Thornberry, HASC vice chairman, recently discussed the Lackland issues with Gen. Edward Rice Jr., commander of Air Education and Training Command.

“My understanding is there is no evidence of a widespread problem,” said Thornberry, a Republican from Clarendon. “It seems to be very limited, and he seems to be moving out very aggressively to deal with it.”

If the problem turns out to be limited, then the military system can probably best deal with it, Thornberry said.

Whether the the GOP controlled Armed Services Committee agrees to an investigation, the vice chair’s “no evidence” comment indicates that it will look no deeper into the base than whatever has already been uncovered by the Air Force.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta himself acknowledged the seriousness of the problem, and has issued a new directive to deal with such assaults which includes changing the reporting structure of sexual assault cases.

There were 6,350 reported cases of what the armed forces call “military sexual trauma” last year, but independent studies estimate (PDF) that there were 19,000 cases total last year, most of which went unreported.

When Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) recently escalated her paranoid quest to root out the Muslim Brotherhood from the U.S. government, she named names. There’s a problem, however, when conspiracy theorists get into specifics, people will start demanding facts to back up their wild-eyed assertions.

That’s exactly what her colleague form the Minnesota Congressional delegation Rep. Keith Ellison (D) did when he responded to her letter to the State Department insinuating that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s aide Huma Abedin (the wife of former Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner) was at the heart of the Brotherhood’s infiltration of the State Department. “If she has sources for this type of information,” Ellison said in a statement, “she owes it to the country to reveal them to the proper authorities, but definitely not this way.”

Now, Ellison has taken his request for specifics directly to Bachmann and the co-signers of her letters to State and other government departments — Reps. Trent Franks (R-AZ), Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Thomas Rooney (R-FL), and Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA) also signed. Ellison also calls out the source of their information, arch-Islamophobe Frank Gaffney. Ellison wrote:

I request that you provide my office a full accounting of the sources you used to make the serious allegations against the individuals and organizations in your letters. If there is not credible, substantial evidence for your allegations, I sincerely hope that you will publically clear their names.

(Read the whole letter here.)

After listing a host of ludicrous allegations made by Gaffney, Ellison wrote, “Mr. Gaffney’s views have been widely discredited, including by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and conservative organizations.” Gaffney was repudiated by the American Conservative Union, and barred from the powerhouse’s annual conservative CPAC confab.

Gaffney’s clearly pleased with Bachmann’s witch-hunt, soliciting support from other Members of Congress, like Republican House Intelligence Committee Chair Mike Rogers (MI), on his radio show. That he would serve as a source of information for what Ellison calls “serious allegations” is indeed troubling.

It seems now that Bachmann and her coterie of Republican Congressional conspiracy theorists will either have to put up, or shut up.

Women will represent the kingdom of Saudi Arabia for the first time in Olympic history when the 30th Olympiad begins in London later this month after the conservative Muslim monarchy agreed to add two women to its Olympic team earlier today. The decision followed similar moves by Qatar and Brunei, meaning that for the first time, every country participating in the Olympic Games will have at least one female on its team.

Saudi Arabia agreed last month to let women attempt to qualify for the Olympics, but after an injury to the horse of the country’s most serious contender — an equestrian rider — no female athletes qualified (some have said Saudi officials knew this when they agreed to let her compete). The International Olympic Committee, however, granted qualification status to two athletes — judoist Wodjan Ali Seraj Abdulrahim Shahrkhani and 800-meter runner Sarah Attar — after months of negotiations with Saudi Arabian officials, Sports Illustrated reported.

Attar, who lives and trains in the United States, said the decision will help make “big strides” for female athletes in Saudi Arabia:

“A big inspiration for participating in the Olympic Games is being one of the first women for Saudi Arabia to be going,” the 17-year-old Attar said in an IOC video from her U.S. training base in San Diego. “It’s such a huge honor and I hope that it can really make some big strides for women over there to get more involved in sport.” [...]

“To any woman who wants to participate, I say `go for it,’ and don’t let anybody hold you back,” Attar said in the video after running a lap on the track wearing pants and a headscarf.

Female athletes in Saudi Arabia still cannot enter sports stadiums or rent athletic venues, though the country is home to a vast network of underground women’s sports leagues. “The participation of two Saudi women in London is an important breakthrough, but will not hide the fact that millions of Saudi girls are effectively banned from sports in schools in Saudi Arabia,” Minky Worden of Human Rights Watch told Sports Illustrated.

In 1996, 26 countries sent teams to the Atlanta Olympics that did not include female members. Only three teams did so at the 2008 Beijing Games.

The “Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace” group J Street today released two ads highlighting rhetoric from two far-right Republicans in Congress — Reps. Joe Walsh (R-IL) and Allen West (R-FL) — that the group says “isn’t pro-Israel.”

Walsh introduced a resolution late last year supporting a proposal that Israel annex Jewish settlements in the West Bank. “There is no such thing as a two-state solution, and no such thing as land for peace,” Walsh said. West, who co-sponsored the resolution, has offered his fair share of far right rhetoric on Israel too, saying last year that a two-state solution would mean an end to Israel.

The J Street ads single out the Congressmen’s claims, urging constituents to tell them “the two-state solution preserves Israel’s democracy and its security. Opposing it isn’t pro-Israel. It’s playing with fire.” Here’s the text of the ad on Walsh:

The Middle East is a tinder box, more than any place on Earth words matter and Congressman Joe Walsh is playing with fire. Walsh wants Israel to take permanent control over Palestinian territory. He called the two-state solution insane even though Israel’s last three prime ministers supported it. Walsh even says the U.S. shouldn’t broker peace. Tell Joe Walsh, the two-state solution preserves Israel’s democracy and its security. Opposing it isn’t pro-Israel. It’s playing with fire.

Watch it:

Reporting on the video’s this morning, the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent wonders:

Is it possible to make Republicans pay a political price by hitting them from the left for being too confrontational on Israel’s behalf, and too hostile towards Palestinians, when it comes to Mideast peace issues? The left-leaning group J-Street is launching a new experiment to find out.

J Street president Jeremy Ben-Ami said in an interview with the New York Times back in May that “the assumption has always been that to run for office, you have to run to the right on this issue with a relatively hawkish view on Israel and the Middle East — the ‘Israel right or wrong’ position,” adding, “We’re changing that calculus. We are beginning to organize a very, very large network of people in the middle.”

This evening, former Vice President Dick Cheney will host a fundraiser for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign.

A GOP operative told Reuters that Romney’s “instinct is to call the Cheney-ites” on foreign policy issues, and indeed, Romney reportedly turned to a former Cheney aide to guide his hard line on China. Romney’s Cheney-esque foreign policy raising questions about how much a Romney presidency would resemble the disastrous Bush-Cheney administration.

The questions are more than reasonable: Romney and Cheney already share controversial positions on matters like ending the Iraq war and whether the U.S. should torture terror suspects. Here’s a quick rundown of their positions on some top issues:

	CHENEY	ROMNEY
TORTURE	Cheney said he was a “big supporter of waterboarding,” an interrogation method that is considered torture. “I would strongly recommend we continue it,” he has said.	Romney agrees. His aides have said he does not believe waterboarding is torture,” and refused to rule out the technique’s use by a potential Romney administration.
IRAQ	Cheney supported starting, continues to defend, and opposed ending the Iraq war. He said ending the costly war “would be a real tragedy.” When the war was winding down over his objections, Cheney said the U.S. should “negotiate with the Iraqis on some stay-behind forces.” But Cheney and his comrades seem not to care at all about what Iraq’s democratically-elected government had to say about it.	Romney also said withdrawing from Iraq was “more than unfortunate. I think it’s tragic.” Like Cheney, Romney called for the U.S. to maintain “an ongoing force, somewhere between 10 and 20 and 30,000 [troops] there,” without ever raising what Iraqis might think about it.
IRAN	Cheney said in 2009 that he wanted the United States to attack Iran in the waning days of the Bush administration. “I was probably a bigger advocate of military action than any of my colleagues,” Cheney said.	While Romney tries to keep quiet on Iran during the campaign, his top foreign policy advisers don’t. John Bolton, who regularly calls for war with Iran, said recently that he hopes negotiations fail. And a host of Romney advisers — many of whom helped bring about the Iraq war — also advocate for war with Iran.

With their closely mirrored language on these controversial issues, it’s no surprise that Romney said last year that Cheney was a “man of wisdom and judgment.” For good measure, Romney added: “That’s the kind of person I’d like to have [as vice president] — a person of wisdom and judgment.”

That sort of lavish praise and the fundraising relationship could portend more war and strife for the U.S. in a potential Romney administration. Cheney is the second Romney fundraiser host this week who has been intimately involved with advocating for an attack on Iran.

Since joining Mitt Romney’s campaign as an adviser in 2011, Republican politician and “super-lobbyist” Vin Weber took up a position lobbying for Ukrainian interests on behalf of an association aligned with the ruling party there. Over the past year, Ukraine’s human rights record has come under fire, becoming only the latest in a line of clients with questionable practices taken on by Weber.

The Daily Beast reports that Weber appeared on a disclosure form as a lobbyist for the Brussels-based European Centre for a Modern Ukraine (ECMU). A spokesman for Mercury/Clark & Weinstock, where Weber is a partner, said the group shares interests with Ukraine’s ruling party “to further integrate and align with the West.”

In practice, however, Ukraine’s president Viktor Yanukovych has, as the Daily Beast notes, “at times sought closer ties with [Russian president] Vladimir Putin,” and carried out prosecutions against opposition figures that raised the ire of Western European neighbors. Romney, for his part, has called Russia “without question our number one geopolitical foe.” The Daily Beast, whch cited criticisms that Ukraine is “backsliding from a democratic revolution,” also noted that the EU “in December opted not to conclude a trade agreement with Ukraine” because of Yanukovych’s questionable tactics in consolidating power.

A group of Western European heads-of-state boycotted soccer matches in Ukraine this year as groups like Human Rights Watch (HRW) called on Ukraine to investigate allegations that Tymoshenko was beaten in prison.

But Weber’s lobbying did not begin with Ukraine. In addition to clients like Morocco, Greece, the Iraqi Governing Council, and Panama, a year ago, a ThinkProgress investigation revealed a pitch Weber made to the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.). In its annual report this year, HRW said that the U.A.E. “muzzled the right of its citizens to express themselves and to form independent associations.” In a follow-up in April, HRW joined with Amnesty International in condemning a “widening attack on dissent” in the tiny Persian Gulf sheikhdom.

In his 2005 proposal to represent the U.A.E. in Washington, Weber advocated portraying the UAE as a U.S. ally in combating terrorism and an observer of human rights. (That lobbying appears to have ended in 2007.) He boasted on his relationships with D.C. thinktanks like the American Enterprise Institute, and noted, “These are all groups with impecable reputations. Working with them goes well beyond writing a check — if that is even part of the relationship.”

Further burnishing his credentials as a Washington lobbyist, Weber was mentioned in connection with the scandal surrounding disgraced former Republican House Majority Leader Tom Delay. Weber reportedly donated $1,000 to Delay’s legal defense fund, even as House rules prohibited money from lobbyists.

Romney has sought to portray himself as a Washington outsider, and attacked fellow Republican candidates for lobbying. But the former Massachusetts governor surrounded himself with lobbyists in both his current run and its 2008 iteration.

In an interview with a Miami-based Spanish-language media outlet, President Obama gave this banal answer to a question about the supposed “threat” Venezuela poses to America: “what Mr. [Hugo] Chávez has done over the last several years has not had a serious national security impact on us.”

Right-wing hawks immediately jumped on the line as evidence of the President’s supposed naïvete on foreign policy. Mitt Romney — who doesn’t really have much of a foreign policy game this election season — got in on the action too, claiming Obama’s statement shows “weakness”:

This is a stunning and shocking comment by the President. It is disturbing to see him downplaying the threat posed to U.S. interests by a regime that openly wishes us ill. Hugo Chavez has provided safe haven to drug kingpins, encouraged regional terrorist organizations that threaten our allies like Colombia, has strengthened military ties with Iran and helped it evade sanctions, and has allowed a Hezbollah presence within his country’s borders. And he is seeking to lead — together with the Castros — a destabilizing, anti-democratic, and anti-American ‘Bolivarian Revolution’ across Latin America.

Romney’s not wrong to deplore the odious pseudo-dictatorial Chávez government (he could have mentioned its nasty habit of using state media to push anti-Semitism), but Obama has the same view – in the next sentence of his answer, the President said “My main concern when it comes to Venezuela is having the Venezuelan people have a voice in their affairs, and that you end up ultimately having fair and free elections, which we don’t always see.” Indeed, Obama didn’t downplay Chávez’s antipathy towards the United States — he was simply suggesting Chávez was too weak to follow through on his words.

On this point, the experts are with Obama. Riordan Roett, who directs Johns Hopkins’ Latin American Studies Program, said Chávez “poses no security threat to the United States or anyone else,” calling Romney’s statement “just pure electoral politics.” American diplomats think of Chávez’ so-called “Bolivarian Revolution” as a farcical failed model that is “imploding under its own weight” and that the best way to respond to Venezuelan rhetorical provocation is to simply “not take the bait.”

Read more