The Political Chase

McCain: Bypass U.N., Russia, and China on Iran Issues

Presidential candidate Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) told Chris Matthews on MSNBC’s Hardball, he believes the U.S. should “get a league of democracies outside of the U.N.,” bypass Russia and China, and have the newly formed “league” deal with the issues of Iran.

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Governor Romney, it’s the U.N.

Mitt Romney must not have done well in GOV 101. Actually, that’s giving Governor Romney too much credit. One could infer that students are not taught about the United Nations until they reach college level classes, when instead the U.N., as I recall, was presented to students before entering junior high school.

Earlier today, Governor Romney said Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad should not be allowed to address the United Nations next week, but instead should be greeted “with an indictment under the Genocide Convention.”

I don’t care to listen to Ahmadinejad rant and rave either, but it looks like Governor Romney is having a little trouble with basic government. The U.N. is not part of the United States government, is virtually not on U.S. soil, and the U.S. has no legal authority to grant or deny access to the U.N.

Now, there could be a simple explanation for Governor Romney’s statement. Maybe he intends to govern like George Bush — make up and/or dismiss national and international laws in accordance with his personal wishes and desires.

Rudy and the Iraq Study Group

Ouch!

Hillary’s Health Care Plan

As mentioned earlier, Hillary Clinton released her health care plan today. I don’t know anything about the details yet, other than the price tag is around $110 billion per year (about one year in Iraq). Her campaign sent the following email, which you’ve probably already received; however if not, and you want to know more, here’s the info.

She will have a live Webcast tomorrow at 8:00 PM ET to answer questions, however according to this email, you have to RSVP to get the access info. It’s all explained below. 

Today in Iowa, I introduced my new plan to ensure that every American will have affordable, quality health care. But before I tell you about the plan, I want to tell you about Lisa Scott.

I met Lisa, who’s from Greenville, Iowa, back in May. Six years ago, her daughter, Janelle, began having chest pains and blackouts, and she was sick for almost a year. Janelle requested a chest X-ray, but she never received it. Because while she was working two jobs, she didn’t have health insurance and couldn’t afford to pay for it out of pocket. One week later, at the age of 18, Janelle died. Her death certificate listed the cause of death as “unknown,” because Janelle was never able to afford a proper diagnosis — a diagnosis that might have saved her life.

For seven years, people like Lisa and Janelle have been invisible to George Bush. When I’m president, they won’t be invisible to me. I promise to fight for families like theirs every day.

That’s why I’m introducing the American Health Choices Plan. And I want to invite you to an interactive webcast this Tuesday night at 8 p.m. Eastern time, where I will answer your questions live about how my new plan to cover all Americans affects you. Visit my website to RSVP for the webcast and to get the full details of the plan.

Read the plan and RSVP for the webcast:
http://www.hillaryclinton.com/healthcare

We have a health care crisis in America — and it’s getting worse. I know we can do better. We can improve the quality of our health care, lower costs, preserve our choices, and ensure that every person in America has quality coverage.

My plan offers new choices for those who have insurance and coverage for those who don’t. It ensures that care will be affordable and that insurance companies can no longer deny coverage because of preexisting conditions. It’s a fiscally responsible plan that we can afford.

If you like the insurance you have now, you won’t have to change a thing. But if you want to change your plan, or if you’re one of the 47 million Americans who don’t have coverage, you will have a variety of plans to choose from.

I have never wavered in my commitment to making sure that every single person in America has affordable, quality health care. And I have promised that as president, I will make universal coverage a reality.

The American Health Choices Plan is a roadmap that tells us how to get there. I hope you’ll take a look at the plan, and join me for Tuesday evening’s live webcast.

RSVP for the webcast and submit a question today:
http://www.hillaryclinton.com/healthcare

Thank you for all your support.

The British Media and Attacking Iran

When it comes to the Bush-Cheney administration, you never know what to believe, but one thing always remains constant - they can never be trusted. Unfortunately, they’re like children. When they say they’ve brushed their teeth, you have to check their toothbrush. A wet toothbrush doesn’t prove they did, but a dry one is proof they did not.

In that same vein, the administration’s escalating rhetoric of war with Iran is like a wet toothbrush. Pretty stupid analogy I know, but look what we have to work with. And, in some cases the media is the same. FOX News Noise comes to mind rather quickly for some reason.

Earlier, I posted the Telegraph’s blockbuster piece about the Bush-Cheney plans to attack Iran as has about everybody, however Josh Marshall says tread lightly.

The problem of course is that — how delicately to say this — the British press isn’t that reliable. Yes, yes, yea, yea, I know I’ll catch hell for saying that. And I’m an avid reader of British papers. But as I learned while doing full-time reporting on intelligence and national security topics the British press — even, perhaps especially prestige outlets like the Telegraph, the Times, and the FT — turn out to be far more porous than the American papers to agitprop of this kind, sundry false-flag bamboozlement and even cases where particular reporters (if not the papers themselves) were not above planting false stories at the behest of various European intelligence agencies.

It’s a guessing game; therefore, we can only watch the War Mongers carefully and hope they in fact have more intelligence than what has been presented publicly for six and one-half years.

Eating steak, turning Baptist, and cleaning up the mess

For Lunch today, Iowa democrats serve up fried steak a la Tom Harkin, McCain gets pressed for a little straight talk, Giuliani tries to blend in (again) on race day, and we ponder the claims of Hillary’s healthcare critics.

You’ll enjoy Mitt Romney cleaning up and John “the Baptist” McCain.

Clinton unveils $110 billion health plan

Hillary takes another run at health care. $110 billion per year or about one year in Iraq. 

Bush and Reid spar, Mukasey is nominated

President Bush officially nominated Michael Mukasey for Attorney General earlier today, but in spite of cordial remarks and a general atmosphere of approval from Democrats and Republicans, Harry Reid took a swipe at the president, and the president, through his Press Secretary, gave Reid a smack down.

Speaking in the Rose Garden, Mukasey emphasized the importance of adhering to the rule of law and the Constitution. Displaying resolve and what appeared to be a pointed statement to President Bush, Mukasey said the Justice Department “faces challenges vastly different from those it faced when I was an assistant U.S. attorney 35 years ago.” But he said the “principles that guide the department remain the same: to pursue justice by enforcing the law with unswerving fidelity to the Constitution.” (See the video.)

After Bush made the announcement, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said he was pleased Bush listened to Congress in making his decision and commented positively on Mukasey’s credentials. Reid also said, given Mukasey’s credentials, he “surely understands the importance of checks and balances and knows how to say no to the president when he oversteps the Constitution.”

Bush’s smack down of Reid came during today’s White House press briefing.

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino told reporters that Bush first met Mukasey on Sept. 1 at the White House and offered him the job on Friday. She said criticism from Reid and other Democrats had no impact on his thinking.

I find it hard to disagree with Perino’s comment. One cannot impact something that does not exist.

Dems need to continue saying ‘No’

Christy at FDL is right — there are benefits when the Democrats show a little spine. Ted Olson was George Bush’s first choice to be Gonzales replacement, but Harry Reid said no, and it worked.

Theodore B. Olson, the former solicitor general, was said to be a White House favorite for the post. But talk of his possible nomination provoked a preemptive strike from Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), who threatened that Senate Democrats would block the nomination.

That may have doomed Olson’s prospects to replace Gonzales, according to several conservatives who talked to Washington Post reporters Michael Abramowitz and Dan Eggen over the weekend. One insider said that in spite of his outstanding legal credentials, Olson, who represented Bush in the Supreme Court fight over the contested 2000 election, would be seen by senators voting on his confirmation as “very political.”

The Dems need to take the same position on Iraq and quit worrying about the ludicrous accusations that will come from Bush-Cheney and the paltry 15% of the people that support the War Mongers.

Apparently the message is starting to sink into some — hopefully John Edwards’ response to Bush’s speech Thursday night stirred up a little dust inside the Beltway. Barack Obama said this weekend he would not vote for any war-funding bills that did not include a timeline for troop withdrawal. I believe Hillary Clinton committed to do the same over the weekend, but I cannot remember where I read it at the moment.

Time has proven George Bush and Dick Cheney will fight to the bitter end. They need to encounter the same resolve from the Dems.

No timeline, no funding, no excuses.

TPC Roundup - Bombs Literally and Figuratively

HEADLINES

• Bush Drawing Iran War Plans
• Bush to Nominate Ex-Judge Attorney General
• Greenspan Says Iraq War About Oil
• Crocker Blasts Refugee Process
• France Warns of War with Iran
• Gates Sees Extended Stay in Iraq
• Medicare Recipients May Be Denied Drugs

TPC MOST POPULAR

Bush Speech Highlights
Bush Speech Filled With Lies
Counting the ‘Coalition of the Willing’
Few Rise to This Level
John Edwards Ad on Bush’s Iraq Speech

WASHINGTON

• “Senior American intelligence and defence officials believe that President George W Bush and his inner circle are taking steps to place America on the path to war with Iran,” the Telegraph reports.  “Pentagon planners have developed a list of up to 2,000 bombing targets in Iran, amid growing fears among serving officers that diplomatic efforts to slow Iran’s nuclear weapons programme are doomed to fail.” See TPC related post.
• “President Bush has decided to nominate Michael B. Mukasey, a former federal judge from New York…as his next attorney general,” the New York Times reports. If confirmed, “he would preside over a Justice Department that has been buffeted by Congressional inquiries into the firing of federal prosecutors and the resignation of the previous attorney general, Alberto R. Gonzales.” See TPC related post.
• “Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, said in an interview that the removal of Saddam Hussein had been ‘essential’ to secure world oil supplies, a point he emphasized to the White House in private conversations before the 2003 invasion of Iraq,” the Washington Post reports. “Greenspan … made the striking comment in a new memoir out today that ‘the Iraq War is largely about oil.’” See TPC related post.
• “The Justice Department inappropriately put pressure on a former” Alaska state representative Victor Kohring “to consider pleading guilty in a corruption case, said his lawyer, who wants a federal judge to review the department’s actions,” the New York Times reports. “The case has reached into Washington, where a senator and a member of the House have come under scrutiny.”
• “Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell heads to Capitol Hill this week seeking to extend the government’s power to read e-mails, listen to telephone calls and carry out other surveillance within the USA in national security cases,” USA Today reports. “Democrats, including” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., “are criticizing McConnell’s proposals.”

IRAQ

• “Militants stepped up attacks across Iraq on Sunday, killing at least 30 people in a spate of bombings and shootings that followed a threat by al Qaeda to launch a new phase of violence,” Reuters reports. “Besides the attacks by militants, Iraqi police said security contractors were involved in an incident in which up to 10 people were shot dead in Baghdad’s western Mansour district.”
• “The U.S. ambassador to Iraq warned that it may take the U.S. government as long as two years to process and admit nearly 10,000 Iraqi refugees referred by the United Nations for resettlement to the United States, because of bureaucratic bottlenecks,” the Washington Post reports. “In a bluntly worded State Department cable titled ‘Iraqi Refugee Processing: Can We Speed It Up?’ Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker noted that the Department of Homeland Security had only a handful of officers in Jordan to vet the refugees.”
• “Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said he would advise President Bush to veto a Senate proposal that would effectively force a major drawdown of American forces in Iraq,” the Washington Times reports.  “The proposal, sponsored by Sen. James H. Webb Jr., Virginia Democrat, that would require that troops be given equal time off to match tours of duty, was dismissed by Mr. Gates as ‘a backdoor way to try and force the president to accelerate the drawdown.’ ”
• “The U.S. military said Sunday that its forces had captured an Iraqi suspected in the killing of a tribal leader who had helped organize local forces against Al Qaeda-linked insurgents in Anbar province,” the LA Times reports. “The slaying of Abdul Sattar Rishawi on Thursday was part of a plot by militants to kill leaders of the Anbar Salvation Council, a coalition of tribes, military officials said.”

NATION

• “An obscure provision slipped into a $120 billion Iraq spending bill in May threatens to leave some poor and disabled Medicaid recipients without prescription drugs in October,” USA Today reports. “In a case of unintended consequences, Congress inserted a rule cracking down on Medicaid fraud that requires that all non-electronic prescriptions for Medicaid patients be written on tamper-resistant paper.”
• “In the first major antiwar demonstration in the nation’s capital since January, several thousand protesters marched from the White House to the Capitol on Saturday, carrying signs and chanting slogans demanding an end to the Iraq war and the impeachment of President Bush,” the Los Angeles Times reports.  “A smaller group conducted a counter-demonstration to support the president and the war, leading to some heated confrontations. But the event was mostly peaceful — until more than 100 protesters jumped barriers around the Capitol and were arrested on the building’s steps late in the day.”

WORLD

• “French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner says the world should prepare for war over Iran’s nuclear programme,” the BBC reports. ” ‘We have to prepare for the worst, and the worst is war,’ Mr Kouchner said in an interview on French TV and radio.”
• “A suicide bomber blew himself up inside a local government compound in southern Afghanistan on Monday, killing four policemen and four civilians and wounding seven, the district chief said,” Reuters reports.   “He said the attack took place in the Naadali district of Helmand province, which has seen some of the worst violence between the resurgent Taliban on one side and Afghan and foreign troops on the other.”
• “Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf plans to stand down as army chief by 15 November, an official from the ruling Pakistan Muslim League (PML) says,” BBC News reports. “Musharraf will resign from the powerful post after the presidential elections, said Mushahid Hussain Sayed, the PML’s secretary general.”

TELEGRAPH: BUSH-CHENEY PLANNING WAR WITH IRAN

(See Update Below)

On September 4, I noted allegations made by a Navy Land Signal Officer based in a Gulf “strike group deployment” that an attack on Iran was imminent.

In his address to the nation Thursday evening the president said:

If we were to be driven out of Iraq, extremists of all strains would be emboldened. Al Qaeda could gain new recruits and new sanctuaries. Iran would benefit from the chaos and would be encouraged in its efforts to gain nuclear weapons and dominate the region.

To Iraq’s neighbors who seek peace: The violent extremists who target Iraq are also targeting you. The best way to secure your interests and protect your own people is to stand with the people of Iraq. That means using your economic and diplomatic leverage to strengthen the government in Baghdad. And it means the efforts by Iran and Syria to undermine that government must end.

I mentioned last week that Tony Snow, in his last press briefing, put a new twist on the Bush-Cheney Iraq strategy, which sounded ominous at the time. Snow said, the strategy had “developmental components including: (1) provincial reconstruction teams; (2) seeks greater cooperation and interaction with regional powers and regional allies; and, (3) is a strategy that has expectations in terms of what the neighbors ought to do including Iran and Syria.”

Now, The Daily Telegraph is running this piece:

Bush setting America up for war with Iran

Senior American intelligence and defence officials believe that President George W Bush and his inner circle are taking steps to place America on the path to war with Iran, The Sunday Telegraph has learnt.

Pentagon planners have developed a list of up to 2,000 bombing targets in Iran, amid growing fears among serving officers that diplomatic efforts to slow Iran’s nuclear weapons programme are doomed to fail.

Pentagon and CIA officers say they believe that the White House has begun a carefully calibrated programme of escalation that could lead to a military showdown with Iran.

Now it has emerged that Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, who has been pushing for a diplomatic solution, is prepared to settle her differences with Vice-President Dick Cheney and sanction military action.

In a chilling scenario of how war might come, a senior intelligence officer warned that public denunciation of Iranian meddling in Iraq - arming and training militants - would lead to cross border raids on Iranian training camps and bomb factories.

A prime target would be the Fajr base run by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Quds Force in southern Iran, where Western intelligence agencies say armour-piercing projectiles used against British and US troops are manufactured.

Under the theory - which is gaining credence in Washington security circles - US action would provoke a major Iranian response, perhaps in the form of moves to cut off Gulf oil supplies, providing a trigger for air strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities and even its armed forces.

Senior officials believe Mr Bush’s inner circle has decided he does not want to leave office without first ensuring that Iran is not capable of developing a nuclear weapon.

The intelligence source said: “No one outside that tight circle knows what is going to happen.” But he said that within the CIA “many if not most officials believe that diplomacy is failing” and that “top Pentagon brass believes the same”.

He said: “A strike will probably follow a gradual escalation. Over the next few weeks and months the US will build tensions and evidence around Iranian activities in Iraq.”

(click image to enlarge)

Previously, accusations that Mr Bush was set on war with Iran have come almost entirely from his critics.

Many senior operatives within the CIA are highly critical of Mr Bush’s handling of the Iraq war, though they themselves are considered ineffective and unreliable by hardliners close to Mr Cheney.

The vice president is said to advocate the use of bunker-busting tactical nuclear weapons against Iran’s nuclear sites. His allies dispute this, but Mr Cheney is understood to be lobbying for air strikes if sites can be identified where Revolutionary Guard units are training Shia militias.

Recent developments over Iraq appear to fit with the pattern of escalation predicted by Pentagon officials.

Gen David Petraeus, Mr Bush’s senior Iraq commander, denounced the Iranian “proxy war” in Iraq last week as he built support in Washington for the US military surge in Baghdad.

The US also announced the creation of a new base near the Iraqi border town of Badra, the first of what could be several locations to tackle the smuggling of weapons from Iran.

A State Department source familiar with White House discussions said that Miss Rice, under pressure from senior counter-proliferation officials to acknowledge that military action may be necessary, is now working with Mr Cheney to find a way to reconcile their positions and present a united front to the President.

The source said: “When you go down there and see the body language, you can see that Cheney is still The Man. Condi pushed for diplomacy but she is no dove. If it becomes necessary she will be on board.

“Both of them are very close to the president, and where they differ they are working together to find a way to present a position they can both live with.”

The official contrasted the efforts of the secretary of state to work with the vice-president with the “open warfare between Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld before the Iraq war”.

Miss Rice’s bottom line is that if the administration is to go to war again it must build the case over a period of months and win sufficient support on Capitol Hill.

The Sunday Telegraph has been told that Mr Bush has privately promised her that he would consult “meaningfully” with Congressional leaders of both parties before any military action against Iran on the understanding that Miss Rice would resign if this did not happen.

The intelligence officer said that the US military has “two major contingency plans” for air strikes on Iran.

“One is to bomb only the nuclear facilities. The second option is for a much bigger strike that would - over two or three days - hit all of the significant military sites as well. This plan involves more than 2,000 targets.”

You decide.

Late Update:  The Telegraph’s piece has been propagated everywhere today, however some say exercise more caution with this piece than the norm. See this post for an update.