Bush Pulls Switcheroo - On Himself

Last August, President Bush issued bold and decisive rhetoric about Iran. As reported in The Guardian:

Mr Bush said Iran's nuclear programme would cast the Middle East "under a shadow of nuclear holocaust" and said the regime was the "the world's leading supporter of terrorism".

He followed that up in May with a speech in Israel in which he labeled as an appeaser anyone who wished to find a diplomatic solution to the problem of terrorism, and compared these unnamed people to the Nazi appeasers of World War II.



From the New York Times:

“Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along,” Mr. Bush said, in a speech otherwise devoted to spotlighting Israel’s friendship with the United States.

“We have an obligation,” he continued, “to call this what it is: the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

This all fit in very nicely with Bush's saber rattling over Iran ever since his infamous "Axis of Evil" speech. Imagine, then, my shock when I read that Bush had reversed his position and that, as The Guardian reported:

The US is planning to establish a diplomatic presence in Tehran for the first time in 30 years, a remarkable turnaround in policy by president George Bush who has pursued a hawkish approach to Iran throughout his time in office.

My first thought, of course, was that George Bush must be reading my blog, since just last month I pointed out why I felt that his hard-line stance toward Iran was the wrong way to go.

The true reason for Bush's about-face is difficult to pin down. He may be trying to salvage some sort of positive legacy in the Middle East, since his "roadmap to peace" led absolutely nowhere, and his wars are at this point not at all likely to succeed in the long term. Or he may truly be interested in negotiation with Iran for its own sake, to improve the prospects for peace in the region.

Whatever the motivation behind Bush turning into one of the appeasers that he lambasted only a couple months ago, since the alternative is a march to war, this is one Bush flip-flop that I can live with.
.

McCain's Health Care Plan Makes Me Sick

There is an interesting tidbit in this Associated Press article about McCain's health care plan. First, there was this:

McCain would provide refundable tax credits of $2,500 for individuals, and $5,000 for families, for all those who buy health insurance.

This, in itself, is not all that interesting, except that what McCain is offering is a huge give-away of our tax dollars to the insurance industry disguised as a health care plan. Coincidentally, Obama is offering pretty much the same thing. The problem with these plans is that insurance does not equal health care.

It is the job of the insurace industry to make money off of policy holders. They do not make money by paying out claims. Therefore, every insurance company has an army of people whose sole purpose is to deny paying for medical expenses. I am not faulting the insurance companies for this; they figured out how to make tons of money by not providing the services they promise, so bully for them. My issue is with the notion that having the government pay for peoples' insurance is the solution to the problem. It is not; it is merely feeding the beast.

But perhaps that is an issue for another time.

In the AP article, there is also this:

Employer contributions toward health insurance would be treated as income, meaning workers would have to pay income taxes on it.

Hmm... Couple that with this quote from the Houston Chronicle:

Companies that provide coverage to workers still would get tax breaks.

McCain's plan is to pay for health insurance credits by taxing workers for the amount that their employer contributes. According to the Chronicle, McCain's advisor Doug Holtz-Eakin states McCain's plan would raise "an estimated $3.6 trillion in revenues."

So to sum up McCain's philosophy, we need to keep the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy; we need to reduce or eliminate taxes on corporations; but it's OK to raise taxes on hard-working Americans to the tune of 3.6 trillion dollars.

So to every non-millionaire conservative, I ask this: how do you reconcile voting for a candidate who states flat-out that he's going to raise your taxes?
.

One Debate We All Lose

Senator Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, has announced that not only is he going to continue one of Bush’s most constitutionally questionable policies, the faith-based initiative, but he is actually going to expand the program. In fact, the New York Times reports that if Obama is elected, he “would consider elevating the director of his Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships to a cabinet-level post.”

Is this the sort of “change” that we can expect from an Obama presidency? I am not naïve enough to expect a candidate to agree with me on every policy position, but this is one of the more offensive initiatives that Bush has brought us. Despite the arguments that church-based organizations are often able to provide services better and/or cheaper than their secular counterparts, the government should not be giving money to them. Bush’s faith-based initiative represents a crack in the wall separating church and state; as such it should be filled, not expanded. I feel that Obama is really letting me down on this one.

One silver lining of the Obama plan is that he has pledged to rescind Bush’s executive order that allows the church-based organizations receiving tax dollars to discriminate in their hiring and firing based upon a person’s religious beliefs. Predictably, some religious groups are out of their minds over this.

“If you can’t hire people within your faith community, then you’ve lost the distinctive that is the reason why faith-based programs exist in the first place,” said Richard Land, head of the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Well, damn. And here I thought the reason the faith-based programs existed was to help people in need. Shows what I know.

For his part, Straight-talk McCain chimed in on the matter as well.

A McCain campaign spokesman, Brian Rogers, said Mr. McCain “disagrees with Senator Obama that hiring at faith-based groups should be subject to government oversight.”

So McCain believes that not hiring someone because of their religious beliefs is okay. Do we really need laws protecting people from discriminatory hiring practices? If McCain is elected, maybe we can get rid of them and find out. You know, free market blah blah blah.

So who wins the great faith-based initiative debate? Nobody. The religious nuts come off as religious nuts; McCain comes off as clueless once more; and Obama shows himself to be a sellout. The real losers, though, are the American citizens. The separation of church and state is a cornerstone of our democracy, and it seems that no matter who we put in office, that separation will be a little narrower as a result.
.

Straight-Talking McCain Tells It Like It Isn't

John McCain has a new ad (available on his web site) in which he blatantly tries to distance himself from George Bush. His people have finally wised up to the fact that McCain's allegiance to Bush is going to weigh on him like an albatross in the general election. So the new ad shows Maverick John standing on a mountain staring into the distance in what may be the most hammed-up moment of the campaign so far.

Back in reality, however, we have a couple of interesting headlines:

Bush urges offshore oil drilling

McCain calls for lifting ban on offshore drilling

McCain is so different from Bush that he has the same worthless "plan" for easing down gas prices.

In his speech to the oil industry yesterday, McCain said, among other things,

But the stakes are high for our citizens and for our economy. And with gasoline running at more than four bucks a gallon, many do not have the luxury of waiting on the far-off plans of futurists and politicians. We have proven oil reserves of at least 21 billion barrels in the United States. But a broad federal moratorium stands in the way of energy exploration and production. And I believe it is time for the federal government to lift these restrictions and to put our own reserves to use.

What he said there is technically true, but it's misleading. While the US does have 21 billion barrels of proven reserves, according to the Department of Energy (check page 7 of this report,) there are 5.174 billion barrels of proven reserves that are not currently in production.

So if the US removed all impediments to drilling and the entire available reserves came online today, we would have the equivalent of a little under three years worth of OPEC imports available. This is McCain's big solution? He states that we can't afford to wait for "far-off plans of futurists and politicians," and yet, he offers little more than some far-off plans himself.

If McCain were truly serious about this problem five years ago, as his ad states, perhaps he should have done a little more to get the members of his party to join the cause instead of blocking every effort of the Democrats to promote conservation and improved fuel efficiency.

Maybe the real problem is that McCain just isn't a very effective leader.
.

Why The US Needs Obama's Foreign Policy

A lot of hay has been made by conservatives over Obama's foreign policy plans. The sentiments of the right were summed up nicely by President Bush when he stated that anyone who would have a dialog with our "enemy" was the equivalent of Chamberlain, who thought that appeasing the Nazis would avert a war.

Bush's analogy was, of course, absurd. Last I checked (though admittedly, I don't get CIA briefing on these things) Iran was not amassing troops at their border, preparing to attack a neighbor. Not even Israel.

Marco Vicenzino has an interesting article in the Turkish Daily News. In part, he states:

The reality is that dealing with Iran is less contingent upon who occupies the White House and more dependent on who wins Iran's next presidential election in 2009, and even more so upon the ultimate discretion of Grand Ayatollah Khamenei. If moderate rhetoric prevails on both sides at the early stages of both new presidencies, some form of a new direct or indirect dialogue could possibly evolve in a very gradual manner by the middle of each respective president's term.

Something that doesn't get a lot of play in the US media is the fact that Iranians elect their president. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is not a dictator, no matter how much the Bush administration likes to paint him as such. The coming election in Iran is at least as important as this fall's US election to the process of peace or war in the Middle East.

In the US, we have two main choices: Barack Obama or John McCain. McCain wants to bomb Iran. He has stated as much and even sang a song about it. With McCain in the White House, the people of Iran will have real reason to fear the US. They will live every day wondering if American HellFire is going to rain down on them and destroy their homes, their lives, and their country. McCain will push for more sanctions and further isolation of Iran from the global community. If those measures have their desired effect, the people of Iran will suffer as their economy takes a serious hit.

Within that context, they will be confronted by a choice: should they elect a president who will try to bargain with the Great Satan, or should they stick with Ahmadinejad, who stands defiantly thumbing his nose at the superpower?

Fear is a strong motivator. Just look at Bush's approval ratings after 9/11. Just look at the Republican scare tactics used in 2002 and 2004. All of you conservatives, think back to the election of '04 where you were faced with the threat of "Islamofascists" and had to pick between Kerry, who wanted to find a way to reduce our military involvement in the Middle East, and Cowboy Bush, who is so tough he told the enemy to "bring 'em on." Whom did you choose?

If the Iranian people are presented with a US president who is willing to work with their leaders to meet the security interests of the region and the world, while bringing them into the global economic community so they can prosper and have better lives, would they choose to reelect the radical Ahmadinejad, or the more moderate candidate who wants to work with the US to make their lives better?

So we have to decide: do we want to put the warmongering John "Bush III" McCain in charge so he can continue saber-rattling, all but guaranteeing that Ahmadinejad will win reelection and the spiral toward war will continue? Or do we want to put Barack Obama in the White House, so he can start moving Iran, and the Middle East, toward a more moderate leadership, so they can join the rest of the global community and perhaps make the Middle East a place where the constant threat of war is little more than a fading memory?

We need Obama's foreign policy. It's as simple as that.

NOTE: For an opposite view of Obama's foreign policy, check out According To Nikki.

Heads He Wins, Tails We Lose.

The Senate Intelligence Committee finally released their report on the Bush administration's "intelligence failures" leading to the Iraq war. Why did it take so long? Because the Senate Republicans stonewalled every step of the way, as usual. The report doesn't shed a whole lot of new light on the matter; it simply verifies what most of us on the left have been saying for a long time.

From Senate Intelligence Committee chairman John D. Rockefeller's press release:

“Before taking the country to war, this Administration owed it to the American people to give them a 100 percent accurate picture of the threat we faced. Unfortunately, our Committee has concluded that the Administration made significant claims that were not supported by the intelligence,” Rockefeller said. “In making ethe case for war, the Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent. As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed.”

“It is my belief that the Bush Administration was fixated on Iraq, and used the 9/11 attacks by al Qa’ida as justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein. To accomplish this, top Administration officials made repeated statements that falsely linked Iraq and al Qa’ida as a single threat and insinuated that Iraq played a role in 9/11. Sadly, the Bush Administration led th nation into war under false pretenses.

“There is no question we all relied on flawed intelligence. But, there is a fundamental difference between relying on incorrect intelligence and deliberately painting a picture to the American people that you know is not fully accurate."

You can read the entire report here.

The New York Times, in an editorial on the 6th, states:

Over all, the report makes it clear that top officials, especially Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, knew they were not giving a full and honest account of their justifications for going to war.

And:

According to the Senate report, there was no evidence that Mr. Hussein intended to use weapons of mass destruction against anyone, and the intelligence community never said there was.

The Times ends their editorial with this:

We cannot say with certainty whether Mr. Bush lied about Iraq. But when the president withholds vital information from the public — or leads them to believe things that he knows are not true — to justify the invasion of another country, that is bad enough.

The defense offered by Bush apologists has been that the intelligence was bad, therefore the Bush administration is not to blame. So let me ask this: which is worse, a president who would deliberately mislead us into a war, or a president who is so [dim, slow, oblivious, out of the loop] that he doesn't know to ask the questions that will determine how much of a threat we are facing?

Bonus question: Given all that we know about the Iraq intelligence failure/manipulation, how are we supposed to trust what they say about Iran? Or any country, for that matter?
.

EDIT: For an opposing view of the report, check out According To Nikki's take.

The Blue Wave

Last Thursday, Bob Beckel over at Real Clear Politics had an article about how the election this fall will be a blowout in Obama's favor. He makes a strong argument, starting with the results of the 2004 election, which looked like this:



He gave McCain New Hampshire, which seems fair. Then he gave Obama Iowa, Colorado, New Mexico and Ohio. He took Montana, North Carolina, Georgia and Florida away from McCain since they are all too close to call. His map looks like this:



Which would result in a nice big win for Obama, no matter which way the four swing states fell.
I think that Beckel missed one important state, though. There is one state that has been a Republican stronghold recently, and in most scenarios is considered a gimme for the GOP. Let me put a picture of it here, so you all can start to get used to seeing it.



The latest poll I can find shows McCain leading Obama in Texas by only 5 percent, 48 to 43, with 9% undecided. I think that as McCain tries to play tough on illegal immigration and border fences in order to placate the GOP base, a lot of hispanics are going to shift over to the Democratic camp. Add to that the quarter-million blacks displaced from New Orleans who now call Texas home and the emergence of Bob Barr as a Libertarian alternative for Ron Paul's supporters, and I think that the Lone Star State will tip back to blue, as it was in almost every election through 1976. This is what my electoral map looks like:



Isn't that nice? I left Florida as undecided because it's too hard to say how that one's going to fall. I think it will be blue, but I'm not confident in that prediction. I also gave North Dakota to Obama because he's currently leading McCain in that state as well.

So, will McCain get wiped out this November or is it just wishful thinking? We'll find out in five months. Stay tuned.

NOTE: All of the maps here were created on my new favorite web site: 270toWin.com. Go check it out.
.