Sunday, Nov 30th
Last update07:44:21 AM GMT
Political Glance
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, facing a string of costly ethics complaints, formally unveiled a defense fund Friday to help pay her legal fees — now surging past the half-million dollar mark. "For Alaskans, the time has come to end the siege on our government by political tricksters. Enough is enough. With the help of reform-minded advocates from across our nation, we will stand up for what is right," said a message on the Web site for the Alaska Fund Trust.
The Obama Administration will put forth new peace initiatives only if Israel wants it to, said Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman in his first comprehensive interview on foreign policy since taking office.
"Believe me, America accepts all our decisions," Lieberman told the Russian daily Moskovskiy Komosolets.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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