Political Glance
CQ's Jeff Stein reports that sometime before the 2006 elections, the National Security Agency wiretapped Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) offering a quid pro quo to unnamed Israeli agents: Harman would lobby the Justice Department to "reduce espionage-related charges against two officials of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee," while the Israelis would lobby soon-to-be House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to name Harman chair of the Intelligence Committee.
Gonzales Stopped FBI Probe Of Rep. Harman Because He 'Needed Jane' To Support Warrantless Wiretapping
More fuzzy math? How GOP estimates carbon tax impact
Congressional Republicans are trying to convince consumers that the White House and Democratic lawmakers will raise their taxes every time people flick on a light switch.
Republicans' main attack is a claim that climate legislation will cost U.S. households $3,100 a year. They got the number by doing some additional math based on a Massachusetts Institute of Technology study, and they're sticking with it, even though John Reilly, an MIT economist and the author of the study, told them that they misinterpreted his work and that their number is wrong.
Keith Olbermann's Scathing Criticism of Obama's Secrecy/Immunity Claims
Several weeks ago, I noted that unlike the Right -- which turned itself into a virtual cult of uncritical reverence for George W. Bush especially during the first several years of his administration -- large numbers of Bush critics have been admirably willing to criticize Obama when he embraces the very policies that prompted so much anger and controversy during the Bush years. Last night, Keith Olbermann -- who has undoubtedly been one of the most swooning and often-uncritical admirers of Barack Obama of anyone in the country (behavior for which I rather harshly criticized him in the past) -- devoted the first two segments of his show to emphatically lambasting Obama and Eric Holder's DOJ for the story I wrote about on Monday: namely, the Obama administration's use of the radical Bush/Cheney state secrets doctrine and -- worse still -- a brand new claim of "sovereign immunity" to insist that courts lack the authority to decide whether the Bush administration broke the law in illegally spying on Americans.
The Two Faces of Barack Obama - One for the masses, one for the power elite
The gullible Americans, who take things at face value, still believe their new president represents a real change, a challenge to the status quo, while the more sophisticated Europeans are quick to pick up on Obama’s inconsistencies – made all the more glaring by his habit of pairing two mutually contradictory stances on the same issue.
Following Bush lead, Obama moves to block challenge to wiretapping program
President Barack Obama invoked "state secrets" to prevent a court from reviewing the legality of the National Security Agency's warantless wiretapping program, moving late Friday to have a lawsuit that challenged the program dismissed.
FROM P.N.A.C. TO F.P.I.: THE REINVENTING OF NEOCONSERVATISM FOR THE ERA OF OBAMA.
And reinvent themselves they indeed have attempted to do, though their aims and rhetoric have the same old familiar warmongering ring about them as they had during the Bush years. The recently launched and far less grand-sounding Foreign Policy Initiative headed up by arch-neoconservatives William Kristol and Robert Kagan, has taken a different tack from the old PNAC. In there Mission Statement for the new FPI the neocons renew their old animosities toward those they considered past threats.
Scared Cheney puts his head in the noose
The former vice-president fears being held to account on torture and is lashing out.
Barack Obama’s most underrated talent is his ability to get his enemies to self-destruct. It takes a lot less energy than defeating them directly, and helps maintain Obama’s largely false patina of apolitical niceness.
Growling and sneering, Cheney accused the new president of actively endangering the lives of Americans by ending the detention and interrogation programmes of the last administration, and vowing to close Guantanamo Bay. It’s hard to overstate how unseemly and unusual this was.
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