US officials insist that no dates have been agreed on, but they have not denied that an agreement is close.  The implications of this development are enormous, especially since the timeline roughly corresponds to what Obama has been calling for. 

The Bush administration, along with McCain, has always contended that timelines are a bad idea and have left open the possibility for a long-term occupation.  If this agreement comes to fruition, it would represent a complete reversal of policy for them.  The only conceivable explanation would be that the Republicans are trying to undermine Obama's increasingly popular anti-war stance and usurp the credit that Obama would have gotten for getting us out.  It's dirty, underhanded politics at its worst.

Shockingly, this story has not gotten much attention in the mainstream media.  I first noticed it about 3:30 on Thursday afternoon (Eastern time) on Yahoo.  It was the #2 story in their news section.  Surprised that it wasn't the lead story, I checked out seven other major news sites.  None of them had the story at #1, either:

CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, Google, and USA Today all had it at #2 or #3, behind the trial of Bin Laden's limo driver and/or the saga of Detroit's mayor.  FOX, believe it or not, did not even have the story on its front page.  It was down in the "World News" section at the bottom of the page.  At 8:30 pm, I checked again, and all of these sites had moved the story off their front pages and into either US or world news.  I couldn't find any stations on TV covering the story.

Like I said, maybe I'm missing something.  The end of US involvement in Iraq would be the story of the year, and one of the top stories of the decade.  Granted, this is just the hearsay of two Iraqi officials, but it sure makes it seem like a complete Bush capitulation to the wishes of the Democrats is near - even though the Republicans will somehow try to claim it was what they planned on doing all along.

So someone please help me - why is this not huge news?

Gingrich and the rest of Republican leadership believed that if they forced a shutdown based on cutting spending that the American public would rally to their cause, but instead they were viewed as stubborn and Clinton, whose disapproval rating was a major cause for the Republicans winning Congress just one year earlier, recovered his own popularity and went on to win the 1996 presidential election in a landslide.

Now, as a small group of Republicans go to the floor of the House each day to debate offshore oil drilling in darkness and without microphones, they have brought Newt Gingrich back from political irrelevancy to support their effort.  So what does he propose?

"Are [Democrats] really prepared to close the government in order to stop drilling?" Gingrich asked. "Because I think the country will find that to be a suicidal strategy."

Now this is the same argument that he used in 1995 — that it was actually Clinton who was shutting down the goevrnment by vetoing the Republican budget.  Technically he was right, but the public did not see it that way, and while the Republicans stayed in control of Congress for another 10 years, they never regained the moral authority and popularity they had at that point.  But for some reason he believes that this strategy that failed him and the GOP in 1995 would be a grand strategy in 2008.

The issue of offshore oil drilling contains many pitfalls and is of course both a political gimmick and a boondoggle to big oil.  But it does have political resonance.  The House Democratic leadership has been avoiding placing any legislation that could be amended with an offshore oil drilling piece from even coming to the floor for debate.  The Republicans believe that with the country now supporting the idea, there would be enough Democrats to support it in a vote.  But they will get their chance to vote on it.  The Congressional ban on offshore oil drilling must be renewed this year by September 30th or it will expire, and the democrats want to place it in the Continuing Resolution that will fund the government through sometime next year. Republicans will be welcome to vote against that Resolution.

Instead Gingrich believes that shutting down the government would make the Democrats look bad. For those of us who remember the shutdown of 1995, the shutting down of national parks, passport agencies and other parts of government did not help the Republicans make their point. But it seems like this issue is so important to them, and their benefactors in the oil industry, they may be willing to take that chance again.  It may be a sign of total desperation for Congressional Republicans that they have decided to turn to Newt Gingrich once again for political strategy advice.

The premise of any smear campaign rests on a central truth of politics: Most of us will vote for a candidate we like and respect, even if we don't agree with him on every issue. But if you can cripple a voter's basic trust in a candidate, you can probably turn his vote. The idea is to find some piece of personal information that is tawdry enough to raise doubts, repelling a candidate's natural supporters…

It's not necessary, however, for a smear to be true to be effective. The most effective smears are based on a kernel of truth and applied in a way that exploits a candidate's political weakness.

That seems to be an accurate description of current McCain tactics. And who is the observer who explained the elements of a smear campaign above? None other than Rick Davis, John McCain's campaign manager in both 2000 and the current presidential races. The irony is that Davis wrote that description in an Op-Ed for the Boston Globe in 2004 when he was describing the disgusting tactics of the Bush campaign in the 2000 primary - especially the dissemination of the false story that McCain had an illegitimate black daughter. The use of push polling and viral emails to the voters of South Carolina helped spread the story and McCain lost South Carolina big. But Rick is obviously a good learner and has decided to implement those kinds of tactics.

Let's look at two recent examples of McCain lines of attack on Obama. First is the attack on Obama, also turned into a campaign ad, that Obama didn't visit the troops in Germany because there were going to be no cameras at the event. The truth, that the Pentagon told the Obama campaign that none of his political staff could join him, including a retired General that was a military adviser, was of course no interest to the McCain campaign, with the candidate himself claiming that he wouldn't listen to the Pentagon and would have found a way to visit the troops anyway. How do we know that this is a mere political smear tactic rather than an honest political debate? Because of this information that was published in a Business Week blog post by David Kiley:

What the McCain campaign doesn’t want people to know, according to one GOP strategist I spoke with over the weekend, is that they had an ad script ready to go if Obama had visited the wounded troops saying that Obama was…wait for it…using wounded troops as campaign props. So, no matter which way Obama turned, McCain had an Obama bashing ad ready to launch. I guess that’s political hardball. But another word for it is the one word that most politicians are loathe to use about their opponents—a lie.

So no matter what Obama did in Germany, the McCain machine had their smear tactic at the ready. Either way the attack takes a potential concern by the voters — that Obama is an inexperienced, ambitious and arrogant attention-seeker — and then takes a lie — that Obama wouldn't visit troops because cameras wouldn't be there (cameras had never been scheduled to join Obama on that venture), and repeat it over and over, with the right-wing propaganda tools of talk radio and Fox Noise repeating the charges as though they were fact, and you get the false story out there as though it is legitimate, despite the truth.

The smear campaign continues today as Obama travels the country, warning voters of these tactics:

"So nobody really thinks that Bush or McCain have a real answer for the challenges we face, so what they're going to try to do is make you scared of me," he told voters in Springfield. "You know, he's not patriotic enough. He's got a funny name. You know, he doesn't look like all those other Presidents on those dollar bills, you know. He's risky. That's essentially the argument they're making."

So how does the McCain campaign respond? Not by telling voters all of the policy differences that their candidate has with Obama. Not by showing all of the policy speeches that McCain has delivered. Those responses wouldn't be divisive enough. Instead they accuse Obama of "Playing the race card."

"Barack Obama has played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck. It's divisive, negative, shameful and wrong."

And who delivered this zinger? None other than Rick Davis.

As TalkLeft points out, compared to the notorious New Yorker cover, at least the implications in this cover are factually accurate. McCain is indeed old, his wife did indeed take pills, and of course, McCain is far more likely to have a picture of George Bush over the mantle than Obama is Osama.

But perhaps their most devious language shifts have to do with domestic policies.  Their tactic is to make Democratic initiatives sound like Communist plots to take over America - one piece of social legislation at a time.  Take health care reform, for example.  Here's what Rudy Giuliani had to say about Democratic plans for universal health coverage:

The American way is not single-payer, government-controlled anything. That's a European way of doing something; that's frankly a socialist way of doing something.  That's why when you hear Democrats in particular talk about single-mandated, universal health care, what they're talking about is socialized medicine.

In addition to having xenophobic overtones, comments like these are just plain wrong.  Dr. Ron Chusid writes on the Liberal Values blog:

Whenever Democratic health care proposals are raised, conservatives start screaming “socialized medicine” - but none of the Democratic proposals fit this by any reasonable definition of the term. Many conservatives reflexively refer to any Democratic proposal as socialism, even when their proposals are more consistent with the free market than the corporate welfare policies of the GOP. 

In reality,  what the conservatives brand as "socialized medicine" are any proposals that threaten to curtail the profits of companies such as Pfizer and Aetna - and their protection of these corporations means that millions of low-income Americans do not receive the care they need.  And health care is just the tip of the iceberg.

In 1965, LBJ initiated the "War on Poverty," which included a number of new programs such as Head Start, food stamps, work study, Medicare, and Medicaid.  This initiative certainly had its problems, but it did succeed in cutting the poverty level in half - a fact which is seldom reported today.  Instead, Republicans have stopped calling social programs such as these the "War on Poverty," now employing the more pejorative terms "class warfare" and "redistribution of wealth." 

Again, these are largely innacurate words that carry strong Marxist overtones, designed specifically to deceive and alarm the voting public.   SInce the Reagen administration, when "class warfare" came into popular usage, social programs have been consistently cut.  We are now seeing poverty levels on the rise again as taxes are being cut for the wealthy elite.  In an amazing turn of events, the conservatives have successfully manipulated the language to make the noble task of reducing poverty seem like the most foolish and un-American of pursuits.

The question, then, is how can we neutralize the deceptive manipulations?  How can we make fighting poverty and economic injustice seem cool again?  How can we make sure that the American public is aware of the greedy corporate agenda that lies behind the conservatives' subtle word games?

It's been a hell of a week.

So, what are progressives to do? As has been evident for some time now, Obama is only loosely affected by progressive pressure. While he has moved left on some important issues, overall he has bigger constituencies to please, and he will do what he wants.

In the short term, there's probably not much we can do, as Mike Lux explains:

For me, being able to hold a politician accountable is having the real power to actually have a negative impact on something they really care about, namely getting elected and passing legislation they want to pass (although there might be a few other smaller things some politicians might care about). Unless you have the ability and willingness to mess with a politician in a serious way on either of those things, I don't think you can hold them accountable. I don't think saying bad things about them holds them accountable, I don't think holding a protest holds them accountable, I don't think starting a petition holds them accountable- unless it is affecting their ability to win an election or pass legislation.

…

But the only way to hold a Presidential candidate in the general election accountable once the general election season comes around is to work for their defeat or otherwise endanger their victory. For most of us, given the alternative of four more years of deadlocked government and a stubborn, hyper-aggressive President McCain, that is not an acceptable option. I see occasional commenters writing about not lifting a finger to help Obama now that he's screwed us on FISA or other issues, but I don't think very many of us in the progressive movement are there. Am I bummed, am I pissed that Obama and most of our Democratic leaders caved in on FISA? Absolutely, and there's nothing wrong with saying so. But am I going to "hold Obama accountable" for this action? Well, no, frankly. I don't think there's a way to do that without doing something far worse. It's the nature of the American political system: winner take all, no instant runoffs, no fusion voting (except in a few states). In the months before a Presidential general election, I can't think of another alternative re the Presidential race other than doing everything I can do to help Obama win.

The harsh reality is, Barack Obama can and will tack towards the center on issues that are important to progressives during the general election. We can argue until we're blue in the face that this is not a smart thing to do, and by extension, that the country is ready for real progressive leadership, but Obama will do what he wants to do. Unless we are willing to actively work against him, we have no leverage.

I am not willing to actively work against him. I'm not willing to call on people to pull their money and their volunteer hours either. But two can play at Obama's game.

To me, Obama's methods are obvious. He is selling out a constituency without leverage (progressives) to burnish his centrist image, which he believes will bring him more votes in November. Obama is practicing, as BooMan puts it, "raw political calculation." Well, guess what; I can do that, too!

I will work to elect Obama because, a la "Crashing The Gate," he is the candidate who will most likely bring about the change I want. But I realize that this raw political calculation is only a marriage of convenience. As soon as Obama is elected, I become his critic, looking to move him left.

I will use Mike Lux's second option for true accountability, and my opposition to centrist statements or legislation coming from an Obama administration will be very real. Progressives have shown they can work together to help pass or scuttle a bill. That power will be used against any and all Obama legislation that charts a triangulated path for this country as opposed to the right one.

And in the meantime, I will also work to rid Congress of conservative, Blue and Bush Dog Democrats, and build up long-term progressive infrastructure, building a progressive Congress to pressure President Obama.

I do not believe for one second that Obama or the Democratic party will necessarily bring all the change we need. No party stands for my bedrock principles all the time, principles like the rule of law, the balance of powers, the Constitution, civil liberties, opportunity for all, security through freedom, reduced corporate power, and responsible governance. Politicians will sell me out to get elected when they can get away with it, and I will sell them out to uphold these principles when I can get away with it.

As long as we don't stoop so low as to rationalize a candidate's political calculations, progressives can retain their authority while still supporting a center/center-left candidate.

But once Obama is elected, it's war. As I've said before, November is just the beginning.

Lawyers for the White House and Congress sparred in federal court today over whether lawmakers can force top presidential advisers to testify or produce documents for a legislative committee, in a case that marks an unusual conflict between the two branches of government.

The House Judiciary committee, which is investigating the firing of U.S. attorneys in 2006, filed a lawsuit in March seeking to force former White House counsel Harriet Miers to testify about a possible White House role in the dismissals. She has refused to appear, citing executive privilege…

The committee's lawsuit is the first time in U.S. history that either chamber of Congress has sued the president to force compliance with a subpoena.

So basically, one branch of government has a problem with another branch of government, and has turned to the only branch of government left to sort it out.

More specifically, they've turned to one dude within the judicial branch of government to mediate, and he happens to be Bush appointee U.S. District Judge John Bates.

Encouragingly, Bates expressed skepticism at the White House's claim it should be allowed to disregard subpoenas. He told White House lawyers it would be "very helpful" if they would tell us all why these documents are so sensitive, later infoming them they had no case for the "absolute immunity" they were proposing. However, he also seemed curious as to why Congress felt the need to bring this case to court, noting that Congress already has the power to hold Miers in contempt (and thus arrest her). In addition, Congress can also suspend funding for White House projects, stop paying Justice Department salaries, or refuse all confirmations.

Better yet, as the HuffPo notes, if Congress really thinks the President is obstructing justice, it could always just vote to impeach him. After all, "it takes the same simple majority that approved the contempt measure against Miers and [White House Chief of Staff Josh] Bolten" to launch an impeachment.

The media seems to think it more likely that Bates will send the parties back to the negotiating table, or just shelf the case until the Congressional session is over and the case becomes moot. Either way, I am looking forward to the day we all get to hear (and we will, sooner or later) what these guys are so desperate to hide.

Only five days before Zimbabwe’s presidential runoff election, the opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai announced Sunday that he was pulling out of the race because armed forces backing President Robert Mugabe have made it clear that anyone who votes for Mr. Tsvangirai faces a real possibility of being killed.

At a news conference, Mr. Tsvangirai, who leads the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, or M.D.C., said he was unwilling to ask the party’s supporters to go to the polls on Friday “when that vote will cost them their lives.”

Mr. Tsvangirai’s decision came on a day when governing party youth militia armed with iron bars, sticks and other weapons beat his supporters as they sought to attend a rally for him in Harare.

There is little doubt that Mugabe never had any intention of letting this election go forward fairly, and even less intention of relinquishing power after 28 years as president. Mugabe lost the March election by his government's own admission, and yet he determined a run-off was necessary. During the lengthy interim his party wreaked havoc on the people of Zimbabwe, systematically beating, torturing, and slaughtering those who openly supported Tsvangirai, burning homes and shops in areas that voted for him, and (according to the MDC) making plans for widespread vote-rigging; all in an effort to intimidate and "re-educate" those stupid enough to consider voting for the opposition again in the run-off.

Apparently, all of these efforts paid off, as today Tsvangirai conceded there is no point in going forward with this "violent, illegitimate, sham of an election process."

Not to be a cynic, but I expect we'll see a tide of statements from international "leaders" voicing their "regret" over this decision — and stark reference to their collective refusal to oversee a free and fair election in Zimbabwe this week.

… and damned if you don't.

McClatchy's DC bureau has been running a series of investigative reports on the detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, and they have been outstanding. Outstanding, and very troubling. One of those reports, which I read in the Sacramento Bee, has been nagging at me for several days now because it raises a very important issue, one that will (in all probability) not be raised in public discourse, in Congress, or on the presidential campaign trail. What do we do with those who were detained wrongly but who have now been radicalized by the torture and conditions associated with their detention to the point that they really are ready to engage in terrorist activities against the US?

The article gives a pretty clear example of what is involved.

Mohammed Naim Farouq was a thug in the lawless Zormat district of eastern Afghanistan. He ran a kidnapping and extortion racket, and he controlled his turf with a band of gunmen who rode around in trucks with AK-47 rifles.

U.S. troops detained him in 2002, although he had no clear ties to the Taliban or al-Qaida. By the time Farouq was released from Guantánamo the next year, however – after more than 12 months of what he described as abuse and humiliation at the hands of American soldiers – he'd made connections to high-level militants.

This was made possible by the rank stupidity of the system into which he was dropped.

A McClatchy investigation found that instead of confining terrorists, Guantánamo often produced more of them by rounding up common criminals, conscripts, low-level foot soldiers and men with no allegiance to radical Islam – thus inspiring a deep hatred of the United States in them – and then housing them in cells next to radical Islamists.

The radicals were quick to exploit the flaws in the U.S. detention system.

Soldiers, guards or interrogators at the U.S. bases at Bagram or Kandahar in Afghanistan had abused many of the detainees, and they arrived at Guantánamo enraged at America.

The Taliban and al-Qaida leaders in the cells around them were ready to preach their firebrand interpretation of Islam and the need to wage jihad, an Islamic holy war, against the West. Guantánamo became a school for jihad, complete with a council of elders who issued fatwas – binding religious instructions – to the other detainees. …

In a classified 2005 review of 35 detainees released from Guantánamo, Pakistani police intelligence concluded that the men – the majority of whom had been subjected to "severe mental and physical torture," according to the report – had "extreme feelings of resentment and hatred against USA."

 

"A lot of our friends are working against the Americans now, because if you torture someone without any reason, what do you expect?" Issa Khan, a Pakistani former detainee, said in an interview in Islamabad. "Many people who were in Guantánamo are now working with the Taliban."

So, there we have it. In our zeal to capture terrorists we offered bounties and rounded up all sorts of scalawags, anti-social miscreants, and targets of family quarrels, used "intensive interrogation techniques" on them, and slammed them into a prison thousands of miles from home right next to extremists who didn't have to advertise their recruitment efforts. Screw-up after screw-up after screw-up.

Now what?

If we continue to hold them, with or without charges, we just compound the hatred now being focused against the US by those being held, their families, friends, and countrymen, not to mention the rest of the world which is rightfully appalled by our overt breach of international law and basic human decency.

But if we release them, we run the risk of being attacked by these newly fledged terrorists, whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, Indonesia, or New York City. As H. Candace Gorman, who represents several Gitmo detainees, has pointed out, only one of the hundreds of detainees who have been released has actually 'returned to the battlefield.' Still, there are still hundreds more who could very well do so.

What to do. What to do.

Well, in my opinion, it's not really such a hard choice. We do the right thing. We release those who have been wrongfully detained, radicalized or not. We take our medicine. We take responsibility for those screw-ups.

I am reminded of the story, apocryphal or not, of then Secretary of State Colin Powell who initially urged against the Iraq War. He said something to the effect of "you break it, you own it." Unfortunately, Mr. Powell didn't have the cojones to follow through on that advice, especially since his pragmatic approach would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, but his instinctive response was right.

My point is that it is time, in fact, well past time, to finally admit that we were wrong. When I say "we," I mean not only the amoral scoundrels who stole power, but all of us because we allowed them to retain that power. We screwed up. It's time to stop screwing up. We must finally admit our error and try to do whatever is still possible to mitigate the damage we have wrought.

We can begin by freeing those men, radicalized or not, who should never have been detained. Unconditionally and with our most sincere apologies.

And then, as to those whom we believe to be directly involved in crimes against this nation, we accord them all of the rights of others who have committed crimes, even as we accorded those rights to the German criminals of World War II at Nuremberg. If we do so, and if we make it clear that we will pursue with vigor those who commit such crimes in the future within the framework of our Constitution and international law, we will have begun to restore the only thing which is exceptional about this country, our belief that justice under the law (rather than blind revenge) is not only possible but essential to freedom.

Selah

In the past two weeks Republican filibusters have included:

• The Climate Change Bill — While the Republican leadership claimed they were objecting to limiting the debate, their claim is dubious since they supposedly wanted the bill to be debated for weeks, knowing that the Democratic leadership needed floor time for other business as well.
• The Consumer First Energy Act – would have repealed tax benefits given to the oil industry in 2004 and 2005 and redirected funds to renewable energy.  Obviously upsetting Big Oil is not what Republicans want to do.
• Reversing Medicare Cuts — Payments to doctors for Medicare reimbursements is set t fall over 10% on July 1st.  Republicans claim their objections are about how the bill will be paid for.
• Extending Unemployment Benefits by 13 Weeks – This would be a temporary extension of unemployment benefits with the understanding that getting a new job as the unemployment rate rises is a difficult task.

Overall the filibusters by the Senate Republicans have included preventing votes on: A Voting Representative for Washington, DC; Fair Pay legislation; Putting restrictions on the number of troops in Iraq and length of stay; and, Restoring habeus corpus rights.  As Democratic Whip Senator Dick Durbin explained on the Senate floor yesterday:

Mr. President, this month the Senate Democrats have tried to confront many problems which face families across our Nation. From lowering taxes and addressing high gasoline taxes to ensuring quality health care for America's seniors and providing a helping hand to American workers who have been unemployed for more than 6 months, time and time again, the Senate Republicans have refused to give us an opportunity to address these issues. Republican obstruction has gone so far in the Senate that they will not even allow the Senate to debate legislation anymore, refusing to admit that these important concerns are worthy of Senate debate.

The filibuster is an important tool of the minority to prevent the tyranny of the majority and potential excess.  but in the current Congress it seems ass though the Republicans have decided that the filibuster is an important tactic to prevent anything substantive from getting done before the election.