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$16
By Adrienne Mayor
$19.77
$18
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cnn.com
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The House has followed in the wake of the Senate, saying yes to $70 billion in funds for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Anti-war Democrats have had little success overcoming Republican filibusters and a publicity blitz meant to sell the “surge.”
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whitehouse.org
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Twenty-one Senate Democrats, Joe Lieberman and all but one Republican just approved $70 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Democrats had tried for weeks to tie funding for the wars to a withdrawal plan, but in the end the president got his way.
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Sen. Chris Dodd just put his money where his mouth has been in the presidential campaign, filibustering a nasty bit of legislation the Senate tried to push through before the Christmas break. Here he tells MSNBC why giving retroactive immunity to the telecom companies for spying on Americans is a bad thing.
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hoinews.com
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Sen. Chris Dodd is preparing to take to the Senate floor with a filibuster to thwart the legislative advancement of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act if it doesn’t include his proposed amendment, co-sponsored with Sen. Russ Feingold, that would prevent the Bush administration from retroactively letting big telecom companies off the hook for allowing the government to conduct warrantless surveillance on their networks.
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Sen. Joseph Lieberman, a self-described “Independent Democrat,” is expected to turn his back on the Democratic candidates to endorse John McCain for president. It’s a fitting move for the George Bush apologist, who was rejected by the primary voters of his own party for his unabashed support of the war.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Congressional Democrats need a Plan B. So far, they have been unable to place the blame for governmental paralysis where it belongs: on the Do-Nothing Republicans.
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By Amy Goodman — While Al Gore and the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were once again warning the world about the devastating effects of global warming, Senate Republicans and the United States government were working at home and abroad to bring us closer to catastrophe.
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By Marie Cocco — After a generation of self-indulgence, America is very close to taking a big step away from foreign oil and all of the environmental and security problems we’ve come to associate with that phrase. Now, if we can just keep the energy industry at bay… .
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CIA Director General Michael Hayden has been summoned by Congress and will appear Tuesday and Wednesday before the Senate and House Intelligence committees to answer questions about the destruction of secret CIA videotapes that documented the abuse of detainees. The White House counsel, meanwhile, has ordered press secretary Dana Perino to keep quiet on the matter.
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By David Sirota — Through their ethics scandals, Republicans in Washington long ago began making the word conservative synonymous with the term corrupt. Surprisingly, though, it is a group of Democrats that is cementing this definitional conversion for good.
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blogs.southflorida.com
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The Senate’s second-ranking Republican is expected to announce that he will resign by year’s end. Trent Lott’s health is fine, but he wishes to pursue “other opportunities,” a congressional official said. Lott famously put his foot in his mouth in 2002 when he said the country would have been better off had Strom Thurmond won his segregationist bid for the presidency. Update: Money and politics are likely to blame (or thank).
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By Marie Cocco — Sheldon Whitehouse, new to the Senate, was searching for what he called a “moment of moral clarity.” Seated alongside the other members of the Senate Judiciary Committee in its crowded hearing room, the Rhode Island Democrat was looking in precisely the wrong place.
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Do we really need another attorney general who doesn’t know what torture is? The Senate Judiciary Committee just barely approved the nomination of Michael Mukasey on Tuesday. He is expected to breeze through the rest of the process. Remember some weeks from now, when the head of the Justice Department is a man who, despite fact and testimony and common sense, can’t call torture by its name, Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Charles Schumer are responsible.
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By Amy Goodman — U.S. attorney general nominee Judge Michael Mukasey admits waterboarding is repugnant, but refuses to say whether it amounts to torture. Democratic Sens. Charles Schumer and Dianne Feinstein voted for his confirmation anyway.
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It looks as though Michael Mukasey is one step closer to becoming attorney general, having secured the support of Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Charles Schumer. Judiciary Committee Chairman (and former Truthdigger of the Week) Pat Leahy, on the other hand, plans to vote no, because “No American should need a classified briefing to determine whether waterboarding is torture.”
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nytimes.com
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President Bush issued an ultimatum of sorts on Thursday over his embattled nominee for attorney general, Michael Mukasey, who refuses to say whether he considers waterboarding a form of torture. Bush said if the Democrats block the nomination, it “would guarantee that America would have no attorney general during this time of war.”
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Perhaps this could be a diversionary tactic: On Tuesday, President Bush criticized the House and Senate for, it would seem, holding his administration accountable for its actions at home and overseas and looking for ways to bring our troops home.
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By Joe Conason — For an object lesson in the distorted values of the Senate, contrast how it is handling the Larry Craig case with how it is handling the Ted Stevens case.
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washingtonpost.com
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Comedians can now let out that sigh of relief: Disgraced Sen. Larry Craig isn’t going anywhere. While he says he won’t run again, Craig now plans to finish his term in the Senate.
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By Marie Cocco — Voters put Democrats in control of both houses of Congress last fall and, for this act of civic determination, they face an infuriating conundrum. Republicans are still running things.
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The former president calls BS on the Republicans for their “feigned outrage” over MoveOn’s “General Betray Us” ad: “Come on, these Republicans that are all upset about Petraeus ... these are the people that ran a television ad in Georgia with Max Cleland, who lost half his body in Vietnam, in the same ad with Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. ... And the person that rode to the Senate on that ad was there voting to condemn the Democrats over the Petraeus ad.”
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While attempting to clarify his previous remarks on the immorality of homosexuality, outgoing Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Peter Pace on Wednesday managed to put his foot even deeper into his mouth, saying that, while he’s willing to keep an open mind, our nation should not “condone activity [read: gay sex] that, in my upbringing, is counter to God’s law.”
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By Marie Cocco — The president’s strategy is to fake out the public so that it believes Democrats in Congress can’t perform basic governmental tasks. Is this any way to run a country?
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — This week’s showdown over children’s health insurance is the first skirmish in the new battle for universal health coverage. It is also the first confrontation between the president and Congress fought out almost entirely on terms set by the new Democratic majority.
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warnewsradio.org
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Senate Republicans have successfully blocked a three-month expansion of troop leave, which the Democrats hoped would provide pressure to withdraw without cutting off funds. John McCain called the effort to give our fighting men and women 15 months off between combat deployments “dangerous.”
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pbwt.com
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President Bush has selected former federal judge Michael Mukasey as his new attorney general. Mukasey has a reputation for being tough and impatient, which is fortunate, considering that he’ll have only 15 months to turn around an ailing Justice Department.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — As Virginia goes, so goes the Senate—and the nation? The decision of former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner to run for the seat of retiring Republican Sen. John Warner is more than just bad news for the GOP.
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By Joe Conason — Following two days of carefully staged theatrics on Capitol Hill and cable television, the essential facts about Iraq remain unchanged. Despite the big charts and the blustering fanfare highlighted by Fox News, neither Gen. David H. Petraeus nor Ambassador Ryan Crocker could convincingly claim that the American military escalation in Iraq is achieving its original goals.
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AP Photo / Charles Dharapak
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Aaron Glantz —
The sorry state of care of American veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan is not accidental. It’s on purpose. Since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Bush administration has fought every effort to improve care for wounded and disabled veterans.
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After German authorities foiled a terror plot earlier this month, U.S. National Intelligence Director J. Michael McConnell was all to eager to give credit to recently revised FISA rules, arguing, in effect, that potential civil liberty violations helped save American lives. Woops. It turns out that much of the information used by the Germans was obtained under the old FISA law, which McConnell continues to claim wasn’t effective enough.
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By Ellen Goodman — After 9/11, my husband started each morning reaching for the remote and saying, “Let’s see if they caught Osama.” This greeting began as an expectation, evolved into a lingering hope, and finally deteriorated into irony.
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Sen. Russ Feingold didn’t wait long after the obligatory declaration of respect to lay into Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker during Tuesday’s testimony before the Senate. One particularly contentious moment occurred after the senator asked, “When can we expect the troop deaths to decline in Iraq?”
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Amal Graafstra / amal.net
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The California state Senate, anticipating a worst-case employment scenario that would make George Orwell and Karl Marx spin in their graves, passed a bill Thursday that prohibits employers from requiring that their workers be tagged with an implanted identification device similar to the kind that has become popular among pet owners to ID their lost animals.
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engadget.com
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AP is reporting that Sen. Ted Stevens may have broken the law by not declaring a gift from a longtime aide. Earlier this week, the FBI and IRS raided Stevens’ Alaska home as part of an investigation into the Republican senator’s relationship with a local contractor who admitted to bribing Alaskan lawmakers.
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AP Photo / Charles Dharapak
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Although Alberto Gonzales’ critics might say otherwise about the attorney general, Vice President Dick Cheney (pictured) thinks Gonzales is a real standup guy. In an interview with CBS, Cheney insisted that Gonzales has been telling the truth in his face-offs with the Senate Judiciary Committee and said he’s a “big fan” of the beleaguered attorney general.
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The FBI has raided the home of Sen. Ted Stevens, the longest-serving Republican in the U.S. Senate’s history, who famously described the Internet as “a series of tubes.” Agents were apparently searching for documents related to a contracting company that may have profited from relationships with prominent lawmakers.
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By Amy Goodman — Republican and Democratic senators have reached agreement on a measure that would boost healthcare coverage for millions of poor children, but President Bush has vowed to veto the win-win legislation.
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“The Daily Show’s” Jon Stewart and John Oliver take down the most recent Democratic disappointment: the Senate’s all-night session. Oliver, political theater critic for the show, gives his most scathing review to date.
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Well, we might have seen this one coming, but yet another plan to set a timetable to begin the gradual withdrawal of American troops from Iraq has been deep-sixed in the Senate.
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tdhstrategies.com
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The president is sick and tired of those Democrats and their pesky checks and balances and will not allow his aides to testify, as summoned, before the Senate. Bush and his legal team are relying on executive privilege—the notion that what happens in the White House stays in the White House. But Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy isn’t buying it.
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After attempting to collaborate on a workable immigration bill, President Bush and the Senate couldn’t see eye to eye on the issue. The vote count fell 14 short of the 60 required to pass the bill Thursday.
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Sen. Richard Lugar, a respected figure in the Republican Party and a traditional backer of the president’s war policy, has broken with the White House and called for a draw-down of troops in Iraq—ahead of the much-touted September review of the surge. In what some have described as a watershed speech on the Senate floor, Lugar warned that the coming election would make rational policy choices in Iraq politically unrealistic.
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Chances are your elementary school education about how the federal government works (or doesn’t) wasn’t much like the schooling of these L.A.-area public school students. Perhaps some big players on Capitol Hill might want to drum up their own hip-hop-inflected response to the key issues addressed here in “Showdown in the Senate.”
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — We have become political hypochondriacs. We seem eager to declare that “the system” has come down with some dread disease, to proclaim that an ideological “center” blessed by the heavens no longer exists, and woe unto us. An imperfect immigration bill is pulled from the Senate floor and you’d think the Capitol dome had caved in.
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slate.com
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Senate Republicans successfully blocked a symbolic vote of no-confidence in Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on Monday, although none defended his performance. A handful of Republicans, including some who have called for Gonzales’ resignation, voted with the Democrats, while Joe Lieberman voted against the measure.
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news.yahoo.com
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Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday that he had “concerns” over the military “surge” in Iraq during its planning and development. He said the operation would “likely have only temporary and localized effects” unless it was matched by efforts from the Iraqi government and American civilian authorities.
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Sen. Craig Thomas, R-Wyo., died at the age of 74 on Monday. Under Wyoming law, the state Republican Party will choose three candidates, and Democratic Gov. Dave Freudenthal will appoint the successor.
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Mark Danner —
In his commencement speech to the class of 2007 at UC Berkeley’s Department of Rhetoric, author Mark Danner gives the new graduates a crash course in Bushian rhetoric (not quite on par with Aristotle’s celebrated canon) and dubs Bush the “first Rhetoric-Major President.” (Note: Article courtesy of Tom Engelhardt at TomDispatch.com.)
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