The Obama administration may have scrapped the “war on terror” but it is revamping the war in Afghanistan. Obama’s new strategy includes sending an additional 21,000 troops to the region, strengthening the Afghan army and police forces, and establishing what Obama calls clear metrics for evaluating progress. Not everyone agrees, however, that increasing the number of troops is a good idea. Robert Greenwald of Brave New Films says it is a flawed approach and is calling for a policy that does not rely primarily on military force.
But Obama is winning support from his liberal base, particularly the Center for American Progress whose recent report, Sustainable Security in Afghanistan, calls for even more troops than Obama has pledged. Other organizations who opposed Bush’s policies in Iraq, including VoteVets and the Out of Iraq Caucus have voiced their support for or remained conspicuously silent on Obama’s war. Robert Greenwald, Terry Rockefeller of September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, Kathleen Foster director of Afghan Women: A History of Struggle, and Sean Duggan of the Center for American Progress discuss the future role of the US in Afghanistan.
John McCain has become the leader of the GOP obstructionists when it comes to the economic stimulus. He has criticized President Obama, complaining the proposed tax cuts would be insufficient, and today, he issued an e-mail that claimed, “the proposal on the table is big on the giveaways for the special interests and corporate high rollers, yet short on help for ordinary working Americans.”
Of course, Obama’s plan would have largely the opposite effect. And strangely, the so-called special interests McCain is up in arms about now are the ones he actually campaigned for throughout the election. Not to mention the fact that the tax cuts for businesses in Obama’s plan were designed to appease conservative members of the Senate, including McCain. Good to see the Double Talk Express back in action.
Raise your hand if you thought you’d seen the end of John McCain. Well Mac is back, criticizing the Obama administration on the GOP’s favorite only mouthpiece, FOX News. Yesterday, McCain told Chris Wallace that he wouldn’t have announced the close of Guantanamo Bay prison without first finding a place to send its 240 odd detainees. McCain, who supports shuttering the prison, echoed the NIMBY calls heard from Karl Rove, Sam Brownback and other Republicans worried that sending Gitmo detainees to Fort Leavenworth, Supermax or another maximum-security prison within the United States.
What really got me, aside from McCain’s creepy smile when talking about what US state would want to take in Gitmo prisoners, was when he slipped in there that military commissions finally began to function recently. This is patently untrue. Not only are these tribunals unconstitutional, but as John Amato notes at C&L, the abuse and chaos that has occurred is just plain staggering.
Equally infuriating is McCain’s call to move on and not prosecute members of the Bush administration or intelligence community for violating the Geneva convention. If as Eric Holder has said and McCain agrees, waterboarding constitutes torture, then we absolutely must prosecute those who authorized and committed torture, regardless of their level or how little some of them make or whether they were just “following orders”–which makes them sound an awful lot like Nazis.
Letterman was on fire in his monologue last night. Here's a paraphrase of some of his jokes:
To John McCain: "Don't show up for me, America won't show for you!" On Obama's victory margin: "By the end of the evening, the electoral score was 349 to 163, or as FOX News says it, 'too close to call.'" On Plumber Joe: "Right about now Joe the Plumber is meeting with his transition team. They are preparing to guide him back from obscurity into oblivion." On the moosehunting maverick: "How about that Sarah Palin? [scattered reluctant applause] I hear she's going back to Alaska. How'd you like to be a moose right about now?"
Here's a hilarious segment from the show on John McCain's farewell message, and Sarah Palin's announcement of her post-election plans.
Today, tens of millions of Americans will head to the polls. Is the nation's voting system ready for the unprecedented turnout?
In record early voting, more votes have been cast before Election Day than ever before. Already, reports of voting irregularities, long lines, malfunctioning machines and badly managed polling stations are pouring in from across the country.
John McCain launched the final attack of his campaign, a fraudulent assault on Barack Obama that serves as a fitting reminder of the fundamental dishonesty not only of his own campaign, but also of the dishonesty of his allies in the right-wing propaganda establishment: Matt Drudge and FOX News.
All you need to know to understand the video is that the Drudge, FOX, and the McCain campaign joined forces with Newsbusters to push a story that the San Francisco Chronicle had concealed an eleven month old recording that supposedly contained devastating audio of Barack Obama proposing to bankrupt the entire coal industry.
Not only was that story false (more detail below), but it turns out that Barack Obama and John McCain have the same position on clean coal technology, and Ohio's Republican senator said McCain's plan to fight global warming would "put coal out of business."
McCain supporter Charles David Ficken descended upon an Obama rally in Raleigh, North Carolina with a 10-foot tall picture of Barack Obama in East African attire, shouting the United States doesn't need a "Muslim-leaning" person for president. While exercising his free speech at the rally, so too did several dozen fiery Obama supporters.
For the past two months, a major American magazine and an allied news service have been engaged in a legal battle with the United States Navy over records that they believe show that John McCain once was involved in an automobile accident that injured or, perhaps, killed another individual.
Vanity Fair magazine and the National Security News Service claim to have knowledge "developed from first-hand sources" of a car crash that involved then-Lt. McCain at the main gate of a Virginia naval base in 1964, according to legal filings. The incident has been largely, if not entirely, kept from the public. And in documents suing the Navy to release pertinent information, lawyers for the NS News Service allege that a cover-up may be at play.
