Harry Reid really frustrates me...

...he ticks me off, then makes me happy, then ticks me off, then makes me really happy...

“All Senators will be welcome to speak their mind. Those of us who are ready to end the war will make our case to the American people. Those who support the status quo are welcome to equal floor time to make their case. Let the American people hear the arguments. Let them see their elected representatives engaging in a full, open and honest debate. Let them hear why Republicans are obstructing us on this amendment."

Hells yeah.

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Hey Digby...

...Jonah Goldberg's theory that the voters simply don't know what they're doing? Missouri is run by a whole lot of pantloads.

The ballot language referred to the cost-of-living increase.

It read: “Shall Missouri Statutes be amended to increase the state minimum wage rate to $6.50 per hour, or to the level of the federal minimum wage if that is higher, and thereafter adjust the state minimum wage annually based on changes in the Consumer Price Index?”

However, Cooper and other Republicans have concluded that voters didn’t understand what they were considering.

Silly voters, you obviously don't understand what's going on, so we're going to go ahead and fix your mistakes for you.

And while we're picking on my home state...I posted that a couple of weeks ago. In the last week or so, there's definitely been something of a whiff of panic coming from Missouri Republicans. Governor Blunt is sinking further as corruption becomes more of a conversation topic, and it's starting to look like some major losses could be on the docket next year (then again, I could be underestimating the people who voted for these folks), so they're cranking through absolutely everything on their ideological agenda. And they're geting more and more transparent by the moment...

First there's the MoHELA initiative...from the KC Star...

Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt’s “Lewis & Clark Initiative” started out with a laudable goal but a nefarious means of getting there.

After a thorough mangling in the General Assembly, the plan has gone from half-bad to all bad.

To raise funds for a major expansion of the state’s life sciences industry, Blunt proposed plundering the assets of the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority (MoHELA), the nonprofit agency that helps families afford college.

Lawmakers are on the verge of grabbing those assets. Making things even worse, the life sciences building program has degraded into a hodge-podge of campus construction that excludes Kansas City and Columbia.

Legislative leaders already had purged medical research buildings from the list because of hysteria over stem-cell research.

So much for the state’s commitment to life sciences.

This week Senate Republicans, in an act of petty retribution, yanked $15 million that had been intended for an expanded pharmacy and nursing building at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. A $31 million new cancer center at the University of Missouri-Columbia was also scratched.

Republicans threw the temper tantrum because Democrats Jolie Justus of Kansas City and Chuck Graham of Columbia delayed a vote on the bill with a filibuster.

And from Fired Up! Missouri...

[T]he MOHELA appropriation legislation reveals that fifteen million of the dollars generated by the sale would go into a small, loosely overseen non-profit corporation controlled by Blunt's GOP crony Rob Monsees --the same man who brought the MOHELA sale to the Governor to begin with while employed as a deputy chief of staff in his office.

Those $15 million are being directed into sixteen "projects" controlled by the Missouri Technology Corporation --of which Rob Monsees serves as executive director--most or all of which are reportedly unknown to at least some members of the Missouri Technology Corporation's board of directors. Given that the legislation also provides for "100% flexibility" between projects for the appropriated funds, Monsees would have broad latitude to reapportion the funds into projects he favors.

And while we're at it, here's the desperate abortion legislation...

The House passed legislation yesterday that would subject abortion clinics to more stringent regulations, a move critics claim would make it harder for women to get abortions in Missouri.

...

Missouri has a strong anti-abortion majority in the General Assembly, which is pushing a bill that increases state oversight of abortion providers and bans them from teaching or distributing materials for school sex education courses.

Bans them from teaching or distributing materials for school sex education courses, i.e. information about contraception. This is going to end well.

And speaking of ending...I can't tell if I'm smelling Republican defeat in the air, or if it's getting so surreal living here that I just really want to smell defeat in the air. I don't want to get too optimistic, so I'll just stop thinking about it for now...

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This post says everything...

...that needs to be said about the Supreme Court's abortion decision. And if it doesn't, this one does.

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I hereby announce that I am starting a memoir...

Digby has a piece about Bob Shrum’s upcoming memoir and the role the Shrums and Carvilles played in losing, well, most recent elections. Really, I should write a memoir too...as far as I can tell, I’ve had as much success in electing presidents as Shrum has...

Kerry voted for Bush’s Iraq war resolution, following the “guidance” offered by Democracy Corps, a non-profit “dedicated to making the government of the United States more responsive to the American people.”

On October 3, 2002, prior to the Iraq war resolution votes, Democracy Corps (founded in 1999 by James Carville, Stan Greenberg and Bob Shrum) advised Capitol Hill Democrats: “This decision [to support or oppose an Iraq war resolution] will take place in a setting where voters, by 10 points, prefer to vote for a member who supports a resolution to authorize force (50 to 40 percent).”

So I don't have to waste the time, Digby goes ahead and points out that if the war went well, people were going to vote for Bush anyway, so nobody scored any political points for this horrid, immoral vote that helped to kill hundreds of thousands of people.

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Headline of the Day

Bush's Focus on Iraq Gives China `Golden Moment' to Flex Power

You know, Bushnev is right. His full legacy won't be completely known for decades. But bad news, Georgii.

It's going to be a lot worse than people can even imagine right now.

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Sadaam and Bush's Law...

I really wanted to mention something about Sadaam’s execution, but I couldn’t figure out a good way to write a full post of it. All I had to say on it was, “Only Dubya and his people could turn the one thing we (basically) got right into another giant screw-up.” Well, that wasn’t really insightful enough to post, was it? Luckily for me, Digby and Matt Taibbi (and scores of others) were on their A-game for this one. Not that you haven’t already read these, but for those of you who don’t actually read other blogs, I’ll post them anyway.

First, in today’s “Low Post” column (and seriously, I’m really ticked that I never came up with “Hussein in the Membrane”), Taibbi successfully summarizes the whole debacle in one paragraph...

And so this is how we got where we are. You get a whole nation full of people who spend 99 percent of their free time worrying about their lawns or their short iron game, you convince them that they know something about something they actually know nothing about, and next thing you know, they're blundering into a 1,000-year blood feud between rival Islamic groups, shooting things left and right in a panic, and thinking that they can make it all right and correct each successive fuckup by "keeping our noses to the grindstone" and "making lemons out of lemonade."

And then he continues...

The whole war has been characterized by this kind of behavior. The Americans continually make ghastly mistake after ghastly mistake, and they keep responding to their mistakes by digging down and seeking the aid of the same homespun American pseudo-folk wisdom that got them into this mess in the first place. Our foreign policy initiatives in the area resemble attempts to mend fences with a neighbor whose lawn has been mussed by bringing him a tuna casserole cooked specially by wifey; only in Iraq, when casserole-presenting Dad ends up with his eyes gouged out and his skull charred black, hanging upside down from a telephone wire and impaled on the shards of the casserole dish, the neighborhood committee convenes and...decides to bake a bigger casserole.

And then he nails the newest debacle (I apologize for this giant blurb...I just didn’t know where to cut it off)...

The execution was a complete and utter fiasco. When what is supposed to be a P.R. coup for the United States devolves into a situation where a crowd of Shia fanatics is chanting "Moqtada! Moqtada! Moqtada!" under the swinging feet of a new Sunni martyr, something has gone horribly wrong.

Not only did Saddam's execution serve notice to the entire world that the United States has essentially become the easily manipulated muscle for Shiite extremists in Iraq, but it infuriated the entire Sunni world by its timing -- the execution coincided with the Islamic holiday Eid.

Moreover, the U.S. even managed to alienate Shiites around the world by intervening in the execution process -- not enough to stop or slow the execution, mind you, but just enough to take Saddam's body away from the Shiites and force them to deliver it back to Saddam's home city for a "decent burial."

Now we've pissed off both the Shiites and the Sunnis and gotten both sides markedly more pissed off with each other (not just in Iraq but around the world), and we've done so by accelerating the execution of a prominent Sunni politician whose fate was the one card the United States was really holding with a Sunni minority already deeply upset at being made the subjects -- at the end of an American bayonet -- to a Shiite-led government.

Not only that, but the execution put the finishing touches on the "democracy lesson" we've supposedly been giving the Iraqi people, who, thanks to this move, still have yet to experience a government where a leader can leave power without losing his life. That is some interesting-tasting lemonade, I must say.

Rhetorical question: if you're going to offend the earth's entire Sunni population by letting a Shiite mob hang a prominent Sunni politician on a Muslim holiday -- on television on a Muslim holiday -- why bother interfering in the burial question? Seriously, why? To curry favor with the Sunnis? Because it's "the right thing" to do? What kind of deranged lunatic hangs "the Sunni sword" at the end of Ramadan and then tries to make up for it with the world's Sunnis by allowing a "civilized" burial? "We will all become a bomb," is how one Palestinian responded to this latest act of decency and goodwill on the part of the United States.

I'm not saying Saddam Hussein deserved to live. Fuck Saddam Hussein. The point is that his execution is a symbol of America's cultural blindness. America has one gear in its head: Saddam was a monster and a mass-murderer, so he should be executed and everyone should love us for doing it. Right? I mean, who doesn't like a tuna casserole?

The whole thing is that good. I promise I didn't post all the good stuff.

Digby tackled the Sadaam issue pretty much immediately, with this post from Monday:

Saddam Hussein is the the man I would have thought was least likely to be turned into a martyr, but damned if they didn't manage to do it. Bush's Law. And here's the great thing about it --- the US, which claims rather unconvincingly that it had no say in this because Iraq is a sovereign country, gets blamed for this right along with the Shi'a government and Moqtada al Sadr. Terrific. Lose, lose for us --- as usual. Heckuva job, Bushie.

...

What a horrible, stupid cock-up on top of all the other horrible stupid cock-ups. The United States simply cannot do anything right in Iraq. Nada.

...

Leave it to an atheist to see the glaring religious symbolism:

You know, foreign occupying power, powerful religious group agitating for the execution of a hated, charismatic competitor, promises of who will bear the guilt for the deed, metaphorical washing of the hands…jebus, if I know what a counterproductive PR disaster that was for the Pharisees and the Romans, what's the matter with the American leadership in Iraq? Don't they read the bibles they thump? Add to that that they've apparently done the execution at a time when it is "religiously unacceptable", and we've got a situation that makes Pontius Pilate look good.

Salon’s Joan Walsh chipped in, too. They all said basically the same thing, but they all said it well.

It was impossible not to notice that the Democrats came to power against the backdrop of two widely watched deaths -- Saddam Hussein's execution, which divided Sunni and Shiite in Iraq, and former President Gerald Ford's quiet passing, which briefly united this country. The symbolism was powerful. The controversy over Saddam's taunting, and what came to look like his lynching, at the hands of the Mahdi Army was a perfect microcosm of our can't-win situation in Baghdad. We couldn't execute him ourselves, so we handed him over to the Shiite-dominated al-Maliki government, which defied the U.S. and rushed to execute Saddam at dawn on Saturday, while Sunni Muslims were celebrating Eid-al-Adha. (For Shiites, the holiday didn't start until Saturday evening.) But that's self-governance; the Iraqis stood up, the Bush administration had to stand down, and together they managed to make a Sunni martyr out of a murdering tyrant.

By contrast, the lovely pageantry that followed the death of President Ford inspired an understandable yearning for a more bipartisan era. But if President Bush felt his heartstrings tugged, it didn't show. He came straight from the funeral and talked bipartisanship while promising no surrender -- he wants his temporary tax cuts to be permanent, he wants more troops in Iraq, he wants Democrats to balance the budget. Democrats should spurn the White House's insincere advances and develop an aggressive plan to end the war with as little carnage as possible.

We're only one day or so (and as I said earlier, a few of the thousands of tests) into the new Congress, but on Democrats and the Iraq issue, so far so good, I guess.

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One Test at a Time

Well, there are roughly 10,458 tests to go, but the Congressional Democrats are at least passing the first few tests that have come their way.

Dear Mr. President:

The start of the new Congress brings us opportunities to work together on the critical issues confronting our country. No issue is more important than finding an end to the war in Iraq. December was the deadliest month of the war in over two years, pushing U.S. fatality figures over the 3,000 mark.

The American people demonstrated in the November elections that they do not believe your current Iraq policy will lead to success and that we need a change in direction for the sake of our troops and the Iraqi people. We understand that you are completing your post-election consultations on Iraq and are preparing to make a major address on your Iraq strategy to the American people next week.

Clearly this address presents you with another opportunity to make a long overdue course correction. Despite the fact that our troops have been pushed to the breaking point and, in many cases, have already served multiple tours in Iraq, news reports suggest that you believe the solution to the civil war in Iraq is to require additional sacrifices from our troops and are therefore prepared to proceed with a substantial U.S. troop increase.

Surging forces is a strategy that you have already tried and that has already failed. Like many current and former military leaders, we believe that trying again would be a serious mistake. They, like us, believe there is no purely military solution in Iraq. There is only a political solution. Adding more combat troops will only endanger more Americans and stretch our military to the breaking point for no strategic gain. And it would undermine our efforts to get the Iraqis to take responsibility for their own future. We are well past the point of more troops for Iraq.

In a recent appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee, General John Abizaid, our top commander for Iraq and the region, said the following when asked about whether he thought more troops would contribute to our chances for success in Iraq:

"I met with every divisional commander, General Casey, the Corps commander, General Dempsey. We all talked together. And I said, in your professional opinion, if we were to bring in more American troops now, does it add considerably to our ability to achieve success in Iraq? And they all said no. And the reason is, because we want the Iraqis to do more. It's easy for the Iraqis to rely upon to us do this work. I believe that more American forces prevent the Iraqis from doing more, from taking more responsibility for their own future. "

Rather than deploy additional forces to Iraq, we believe the way forward is to begin t he phased redeployment of our forces in the next four to six months, while shifting the principal mission of our forces there from combat to training, logistics, force protection and counter-terror. A renewed diplomatic strategy, both within the region and beyond, is also required to help the Iraqis agree to a sustainable political settlement. In short, it is time to begin to move our forces out of Iraq and make the Iraqi political leadership aware that our commitment is not open ended, that we cannot resolve their sectarian problems, and that only they can find the political resolution required to stabilize Iraq.

Our troops and the American people have already sacrificed a great deal for the future of Iraq. After nearly four years of combat, tens of thousands of U.S. casualties, and over $300 billion dollars, it is time to bring the war to a close. We, therefore, strongly encourage you to reject any plans that call for our getting our troops any deeper into Iraq. We want to do everything we can to help Iraq succeed in the future but, like many of our senior military leaders, we do not believe that adding more U.S. combat troops contributes to success.

We appreciate you taking these views into consideration.

Sincerely,­­­­

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi

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