Who is Really Running Congress - Vince McMahon?

Telecom immunity. A rollover on Iraq funding. George Bush’s continued petulance. Political gamesmanship. It’s enough to make an ordinary citizen give up on the political process in America. The thing is, none of this is really new — in fact, Vince McMahon perfected the “art of the show” in professional wrestling a long time ago. The political theater in Washington isn’t so very much different…

Richard Blair, AllSpinZone.com: In November, 2006, the GOP was overcome by a wave of anti-Iraq and anti-Bush sentiment, and a not-ready-for-prime-time Democratic Party was given majority control of both houses of congress. Thinking back to 2006, the Dem leadership was fairly confident all year that the GOP was extremely vulnerable in many House races, and it turned out that they were right, particularly after the Mark Foley scandal blossomed in the latter stages of the 2006 campaign. What was surprising, though, was that everything broke in the right direction (Foley, the Macaca moment, Conrad Burns connections to Abramoff, etc.), and Dems also took control of the U.S. Senate.

Happy days were here again, right? The Dems would listen to the electorate, and force the Bush regime to accept changes to policies in Iraq, un-stonewall criminal investigations that had been bottled up in limbo, and generally start America back on the right path.

A funny thing happened on the way to FantasyLand™. George Bush not only didn’t back down America’s commitment to Iraq, he escalated our involvement. And instead of challenging the least popular President in U.S. history, again and again the leadership of the Democratic Party did not listen to the electorate, but rather, turned completely tone deaf to the constituency that put them in control of the legislative branch of the government.

When illegal act after illegal act came to light, Chairmen of respective House and Senate committees made a lot of noise, heat, and light. And then did nothing. One of the more disheartening spectacles I witnessed during the course of the past year was watching John Conyers, heretofore a hero of progressives, sleepwalk through one hearing after another. I thought that, of all the Dem Committee Chairs, Rep. Conyers was the pit bull that was needed to get to the bottom of 7 years of Executive Office malfeasance. Damn, was I wrong. But it wasn’t just Conyers. It was Waxman. Rangel. Skelton. Reyes. The list seems endless.

It became a game. They issued subpoenas. The GOP promptly ignored the subpoenas (or flat out lied, and demonstrably lied through their teeth in testimony). There have been exactly zero “contempt of Congress” citations. No one is behind bars. Rove is still pulling strings in the White House. White House counsel Fred Fielding continues to ignore requests and strongly worded letters from the Democratic Party leadership who are demanding records, witnesses, and other evidentiary matter.

The Plame investigation went nowhere. The U.S. Attorney investigation went nowhere. Torture investigations went nowhere. Illegal wiretapping investigations went nowhere - in fact, these investigations went so far nowhere that the Dem leadership was (and still is) willing to offer retroactive immunity to the willing participants (telecom companies) in this illegal activity in order to pass a FISA bill after the first of the year. One after another, the scandals that surfaced flared briefly, inspiring momentary outrage, but then flamed out just as quickly.

It has been like the Democratic Party revolution of 2006 didn’t even happen.

Bush has only become more petulant. The Republicans continue to paint the Democratic Party as anti-American, terrorist supporting, politically motivated, partisan wieners. And even in the minority, the GOP continues to control the media bully pulpit.

Never, ever, have I witnessed such a weak-kneed bunch of lilly livered “leaders” trying to run the country. Sure, a few things have been accomplished, but in reality, Nancy Pelosi’s much ballyhoo’d “first one hundred hours” was little more than a publicity stunt. Her most memorable act has been taking impeachment off of the table.

Harry Reid has got to go. There are times that I’ve been supportive of his actions in the Senate, but most of those came during his tenure as Minority Leader, not when he was elevated to the majority. The final straw came earlier this week when he actually allowed the FISA bill, with telecom immunity intact, come up on the floor of the Senate. Thank the gods for Chris Dodd’s tenacity in ensuring that this travesty of a bill was shelved until at least the first of the year.

And today? The U.S. House of Representatives passed the latest Iraq funding bill, $70 billion worth, without so much as a peep, an attempt to attach conditions, a timetable for withdrawl, nothing. They again gave the least popular President in U.S. history everything he wanted.

I used to think that the answer was to elect a Dem to the office of President next year, but the more that I watch the crop of the current candidates, only two even begin to stand out as the type of person who will really shake things up. One of them is John Edwards, and I like his positions almost across the board. The other is Ron Paul - who I could support simply from the standpoint of his desire to shake things up, regardless of many of his positions that I detest. Unfortunately, both are so far outside of the Beltway Class that it’s doubtful if either could have a lasting impact.

A Democratic Party President, though, isn’t going to cause his or her colleagues in the legislative branch to suddenly grow a set of cast iron cajones. Let’s be clear about something. There is no way that the current administration should be allowed to walk away free from their involvement in the high crimes and misdemeanors that have been perpetrated against the American public (and indeed, humanity) over the past seven years. But I fear that’s exactly what’s going to happen, regardless of who’s running the show after 2008 because of the Washington insider culture of quid pro quo.

When Bush leaves office in January, 2009, his list of pardons is, by default, going to smash the records of his predecessors. But is it really going to make any difference what he does on the way out the door? No.

Hell, maybe that’s the super-double-secret Democratic Party strategy. Don’t seek indictments against anyone in the current administration, because if any one of the current suspects are convicted between now and the end of the Bush regime, they’re just going to be Libbyed as Bush takes his last ride on Air Force One. Wait until the new President is sworn in, and then go after the crooks.

I know, I know. I’m dreaming.

Which brings me full circle back to the original question in the title of this article — Who is really running congress right now? I ask, because it sure doesn’t appear to be the scared rabbits in the Dem leadership. But, then, maybe it wasn’t the GOP leadership running the show in the previous years, either.

It all comes back to an old axiom, that Dems and the GOP are two sides of the very same coin. A new Senator or Congresscritter may first step into office with the best of intentions, but are then quickly assimilated into the congressional collective. A newly elected representative operating under the Capitol dome for the first time is understandably quite intimidated, and doesn’t get the choice committee assignments (or future party backing) by rocking the establishment boat too vigorously.

The new representative sees visions of Mr. Smith going to Washington vanish pretty rapidly, and a degree of pragmatism settles in — if the pork isn’t brought home to the state by the representative, chances are that a second term isn’t very likely. Pork isn’t going to flow without cooperation, quid pro quo, and coloring within the lines of acceptable congressional wisdom (which is largely bi-partisan). Party insiders won’t work to reelect the non-conformist, in fact, to the degree that they’re willing to see an opposition candidate elected who might play “inside baseball”. That’s just the way things work in the Beltway.

So, we can rant and rave about Reid and Pelosi and Boehner and Hoyer and McConnell all day long, and it isn’t going to make much difference. At the end of the day, they’re all basically playing for the same team, and their primary job is to push the agendas that are given to them by the real controllers. The foot soldiers in the House and the Senate are there to play along, for the most part, and collect a paycheck - and fatten their resumes for the big lobby payday in advance of the time when either they tire of the game or get forced out the door.

It’s kind of like professional wrestling, in that regard. Most of what we see and hear from Washington is well scripted, with the outcome all but assured. Every now and then, a Christopher Dodd will step out of the shadows and challenge the status quo - but you can bet, for the most part, that Dodd’s outspoken response to the FISA outrage was (again) an expected part of an ongoing, orchestrated production.

There was no time for such orchestration today. The House members want to get out of town, and they had to do something with the Iraq funding bill. Rather than squawk, or put on a staged fight for timeline and withdrawal amendments that had no chance of going anywhere, they just voted “yes”.

Because it’s what they were told had to be done if they wanted to make that 5:30 flight.

The Grinch Who Stole SCHIP

AmericaBlog.com: Courtesy of Rep. Diana DeGette (D-CO). It's clever and funny.

Zoe Leonard’s 1992 “I Want A President”

Religious Extremist Tony Perkins Says “Secular Media” Partially Responsible For Church Shootings

Logan Murphy, Crooks and Liars: Think Progress:

In its Action Update today, the Family Research Council (FRC) partially cast blame for the tragic shooting at a megachurch in Colorado yesterday on “the secular media.” In the e-mail, which was sent under the name of FRC Action President Tony Perkins, the group says it’s “hard not to draw a line between” the shooting and “hostility” by “some in the secular media toward Christians”:

It is hard not to draw a line between the hostility that is being fomented in our culture from some in the secular media toward Christians and evangelicals in particular and the acts of violence that took place in Colorado yesterday. But I will say no more for now other than that our friends at New Life Church and YWAM are in our thoughts and prayers.

When Perkins can’t explain why this sick young man turned against his church and why God spared some people, but allowed others to be slaughtered, he sloughs it off on “evil secularists.” Tony, do you think that the fact this kid was kicked out of the missionary school he shot up had anything to do with it? Isn’t it possible that this rejection may have driven him to seek revenge? The secular media didn’t reject this young man, nor did it give him access to the gun. Mr. Perkins, you might want to look at the real root causes of this tragedy rather than blaming secularists.

Countdown: CIA Agent Involved In Torture Tapes Now Says Waterboarding Is Torture

Logan Murphy, Crooks and Liars: The #5 story on Monday’s Countdown delivered a bombshell — John Kiriakou, a former CIA agent who actually led the team of agents who appeared on the destroyed torture tapes has come forward in an interview with ABC to confirm the tapes DID show waterboarding and that while he believes the technique was effective, he now believes it is torture and is wrong. It’s becoming more and more difficult for President Bush to convince the world that he hasn’t committed war crimes.

Keith spoke with Richard Wolffe and Jonathan Turley about this revelation and the enormous damage it does to the CIA’s claim that the tapes were destroyed purely to protect the identities of the agents involved. They also give hell to Senator Jay Rockefeller and other Democratic leaders who knew that Bush was illegally torturing as far back as 2002, but did not speak out against it. (Click on the pic of the vid.)

LSB: Were these lawmakers prevented from saying anything at the time due to matters of confidentiality? And if they could have said anything, given the hysteria in the country at the time wouldn't the RNC and their lackies at FAUX News have branded them traitors? That certainly doesn't excuse them from taking the action that they should have taken when they learned about it, or at least making their strong objections in writing to the adminstration as soon as they learned about it. Dems need to take over the government and sweep out all of the trash - which, of course, would make them no better than what Monica Goodling did at the DoJ and other Repuglicans have done in other federal departments.

Former CIA Interrogator: We Carried Out Torture Because The White House Told Us To. In an interview last night with ABC News, John Kiriakou — the CIA official who headed the team that interrogated al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah — said that Zubaydah was waterboarded, but defended those actions as having prevented “maybe dozens” of planned attacks and “probably saved lives.”

But despite his vigorous defense of his past conduct, Kiriakou says he now views what he did as torture and says that he would not recommend those tactics going forward. “We don’t need enhanced techniques to get that nugget of information,” he said in an interview with Matt Lauer this morning on The Today Show.

Lauer asked Kiriakou where the permission was given to carry out torture. “Was the White House involved in that decision?” Lauer asked. “Absolutely,” Kiriakou said, adding:

"This isn’t something done willy nilly. It’s not something that an agency officer just wakes up in the morning and decides he’s going to carry out an enhanced technique on a prisoner. This was a policy made at the White House, with concurrence from the National Security Council and Justice Department."

Lauer then referenced an earlier interview he did with President Bush, in which Bush said he was assured by the Justice Department “we were not torturing.” “I disagree,” Kiriakou said.

As evidence increasingly builds for the argument that CIA interrogators carried out illegal acts of torture, the New York Sun reports that President Bush may soon decide to issue pardons:

With talk of a special prosecutor again in the air and the looming prospect of a Democrat taking over the White House, CIA officials involved in prisoner interrogations and the disputed handling of videotapes of those sessions may seek the only ironclad assurance against any criminal prosecution: a presidential pardon. […]

“I think there’s a real possibility one of President Bush’s last acts very well might be granting immunity to certain CIA employees,” a defense attorney who has defended military personnel accused of prisoner abuse, Frank Spinner, said. “I think it depends in part on the election.”

UPDATE: Carpetbagger has more.

UPDATE: Larry Johnson writes, “The media is woefully ignorant on the subject of waterboarding and torture. Consider the coverage of former CIA officer, John Kiriakou, who is telling his story as an interrogator of Abu Zubaydah and insisting that waterboarding is an effective technique. ABC and CNN are repeating this absurd propaganda. However, if you read the transcript of his interview some key points are obscured in the media propaganda push:”

• Kiriakou never witnessed the waterboarding. It was carried out by another group of individuals (nfi).
• None of the information provided by Zubaydah concerned threats inside the United States.

Happy Christmas, Your War is Over!

ThinkProgress.org: UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown yesterday made a surprise visit to British troops in southern Iraq, announcing to them that “within two weeks,” their combat operations in Basra will be over.

According to The Sun, his message was “cheered” with “warm applause” by the soldiers.

LSB: The coalition is getting smaller every day. Why are we still there? Why do the Republicans hate our troops?

(Best blogger response: "I have a feeling I’m going to be eating “Freedom Muffins” with tomorrow’s breakfast.")

New Health Care Ad: If Dick Cheney Didn’t Have Government Care, ‘He’d Probably Be Dead Now’

ThinkProgress.org: In Iowa today, 10 newspapers are running a full page ad advocating for a single-payer health-care bill, highlighting the fact Vice President Dick Cheney has benefited from his government-provided coverage. “If he were anyone else, he’d probably be dead by now,” the ad claims. Cheney, as the ad notes, has a long history of health problems:

The patient’s history and prognosis were grim: four heart attacks, quadruple bypass surgery, angioplasty, an implanted defibrillator and now an emergency procedure to treat an irregular heartbeat.

The ad, which is sponsored by the California Nurses Association and the National Nurses Organizing Committee, argues that without his government-provided health care, Cheney’s recent heart problems would have been “a death sentence“:

For millions of Americans, this might be a death sentence. For the vice president, it was just another medical treatment. And it cost him very little.

Unlike the average American, the president, vice president and members of Congress all enjoy government-financed health care with few restrictions or prohibitive fees.

In response to the ad, Cheney spokesperson Megan Mitchell told the Wall Street Journal that “something this outrageous does not warrant a response.”

The factual and provocative ad isn’t outrageous. What is outrageous is the fact that there are roughly 47 million people in America without health insurance, including 3.2 million children, but President Bush vetoed legislation in October that would have extended coverage to 4 million more children.

While it is certainly good that Vice President Cheney was able get the medical attention he needed, the groups’ ad is right. “The rest of us deserve no less” than Cheney.

LSB: Cheney has "heart problems?" YEAH! He's heartless!

Chief Guantanamo Prosecutor Resigned When Placed Under Command Of Torture Advocate

ThinkProgress.org: Until Oct. 4, Morris Davis served as chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay. When originally asked why he was stepping down, Davis said that the Pentagon had ordered him “not to communicate with the news media about my resignation or military commissions.”

Today in an LA Times op-ed, however, Morris reveals that part of the reason he resigned was that the Bush administration placed him under the chain of command of Defense Department General Counsel William J. Haynes, a torture advocate whose nomination to the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals was blocked by the Senate. Morris writes:

I had instructed the prosecutors in September 2005 that we would not offer any evidence derived by waterboarding, one of the aggressive interrogation techniques the administration has sanctioned. Haynes and I have different perspectives and support different agendas, and the decision to give him command over the chief prosecutor’s office, in my view, cast a shadow over the integrity of military commissions. I resigned a few hours after I was informed of Haynes’ place in my chain of command.

Haynes is a close ally of Vice President Cheney and has been described as a “prime mover” in the effort to contravene the dictates of the Geneva Conventions. A 2003 working group appointed and supervised by Haynes argued the Geneva Conventions “must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken pursuant to [Bush’s] Commander-in-Chief authority.”
More recently, Haynes blocked Lt. Col. Stuart Couch, a former Guantanamo Bay prosecutor, from testifying before Congress about his experiences with “enhanced” interrogation.

In October, Morris also revealed that the Pentagon had been pushing for “high-profile” convictions of detainees ahead of the 2008 elections. Morris said “that he felt pressure to pursue cases that were deemed ’sexy’ over those that prosecutors believed were the most solid or were ready to go.”

UPDATE: Pentagon blocks ex-Gitmo prosecutor from testifying. Yesterday, ThinkProgress noted that Air Force Col. Morris Davis resigned his position as the chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay after he was placed under the command of torture advocate William Haynes. During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing this morning, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) revealed that the Pentagon had blocked Davis from testifying before the committee. “The Defense Department has ordered him not to appear,” said Feinstein. Watch it:

Calling it a shame, Feinstein said that she had “to conclude” that the administration is trying to stop a fair and open discussion about the legal rights of detainees at Guantananmo.

UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday that Davis “planned to say that he considered information obtained through” waterboarding to be “unreliable and that he had ordered his staff to exclude such evidence from their cases.”

UPDATE II: In November, the Pentagon blocked another former Guantanamo prosecutor, Lt. Col. Stuart Couch, from testifying about “enhanced” interrogation techniques.

No Press Secretary Left Behind

Jason Linkins, HuffingtonPost.com: Like Dana Perino, I was seven years old during the Carter administration. And back then, I hardly had an encyclopedic knowledge of world history. Frankly, I don't now. But, I know a little bit, and one of the things I know is that if you were seven during the Carter administration, and are currently serving as White House Press Secretary, it should not be possible for you to tell the story Perino told on this weekend's episode of "Wait...Wait...Don't Tell Me" on NPR.

I had a situation the other day when they said President Putin said that our missile defense program was like the Cuban Missile Crisis. And so I got asked about the Cuban Missile Crisis and I was panicked a little bit because I really know nothing about the Cuban Missile Crisis... I came home and I asked my husband... wasn't that like, the Bay Of Pigs thing? And he said, "Oh, Dana."

Rarely is it asked, "Is our press secretary learning?" Probably because we don't want to know the answer.

To hear Perino in the segment entitled "Not My Job," click here.

LSB: Is no one in the Bush Administration responsible for THE FACTS? I know the President and Vice President can't be bothered with THE FACTS, but I'm wondering who is responsible for THE FACTS. (BTW, favorite reader reply is from TAAN: "Folks, please remember that the Press Officer is merely the public end of a pipeline that originates in the Oval Office. They cannot say anything that contradicts the input or they will be busy updating their resumes pronto. If the P.O. seems a bit evasive, artificial or downright uninformed, remember they are paraphrasing input from the man in the 10 gallon hat with a 2 quart brain. For these hapless souls, garbage in, garbage out.")

Larry Birkhead had a swelled head

Ben Widdicombe, Daily News: Larry Birkhead had some pals around to watch Barbara Walters' "10 Most Fascinating People of 2007" special Thursday night, but the evening didn't go quite as he had planned.

"Larry had been approached by ABC to be one of the candidates, but unknown to him they didn't use him," says a snitch. "So when they released all the names except the top one — the most fascinating person that they were going to reveal on the show — he thought it was going to be him. That's what he was telling people."

Sadly, No. 1 turned out to be "Harry Potter" author J.K. Rowling.

Ouch!

According to the source: "Larry even let the paparazzi know he'd be out shopping in L.A. on Thursday for Dannielynn [his daughter with the late Anna Nicole Smith], because he thought the papers were going to need fresh pictures of him."

Folks who did make the cut included David and Victoria Beckham, Justin Timberlake, Katherine Heigl, Jennifer Hudson, Bill Clinton, MySpace moguls Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe, Don Imus and Hugo Chavez. No Howard K. Stern, either!

LSB: SNAP! Ok, not the usual story I include here, but this actually made me laugh out loud. Sorry, Larry, but Barbara doesn't find me fascinating either. Guess we'll both just have to deal with it. (Of course, you'll have hundreds of millions of dollars in Dannielynn's in heritance to comfort you; I'll have a maxed out Visa statement.)

Bradley Whitford on Telecom Immunity: Call Your Senators Now

Victim: Gang-Rape Cover-Up by U.S., Halliburton/KBR

Brian Ross, Maddy Sauer & Justin Rood, ABC News: A Houston, Texas woman says she was gang-raped by Halliburton/KBR coworkers in Baghdad, and the company and the U.S. government are covering up the incident.

Jamie Leigh Jones, now 22, says that after she was raped by multiple men at a KBR camp in the Green Zone, the company put her under guard in a shipping container with a bed and warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she'd be out of a job.

"Don't plan on working back in Iraq. There won't be a position here, and there won't be a position in Houston," Jones says she was told.

In a lawsuit filed in federal court against Halliburton and its then-subsidiary KBR, Jones says she was held in the shipping container for at least 24 hours without food or water by KBR, which posted armed security guards outside her door, who would not let her leave.

"It felt like prison," says Jones, who told her story to ABC News as part of an upcoming "20/20" investigation. "I was upset; I was curled up in a ball on the bed; I just could not believe what had happened."

Finally, Jones says, she convinced a sympathetic guard to loan her a cell phone so she could call her father in Texas.

"I said, 'Dad, I've been raped. I don't know what to do. I'm in this container, and I'm not able to leave,'" she said. Her father called their congressman, Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas.

"We contacted the State Department first," Poe told ABCNews.com, "and told them of the urgency of rescuing an American citizen" -- from her American employer.

Poe says his office contacted the State Department, which quickly dispatched agents from the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad to Jones' camp, where they rescued her from the container.

According to her lawsuit, Jones was raped by "several attackers who first drugged her, then repeatedly raped and injured her, both physically and emotionally."

Jones told ABCNews.com that an examination by Army doctors showed she had been raped "both vaginally and anally," but that the rape kit disappeared after it was handed over to KBR security officers.

A spokesperson for the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security told ABCNews.com he could not comment on the matter.

Over two years later, the Justice Department has brought no criminal charges in the matter. In fact, ABC News could not confirm any federal agency was investigating the case.

Legal experts say Jones' alleged assailants will likely never face a judge and jury, due to an enormous loophole that has effectively left contractors in Iraq beyond the reach of United States law.

"It's very troubling," said Dean John Hutson of the Franklin Pierce Law Center. "The way the law presently stands, I would say that they don't have, at least in the criminal system, the opportunity for justice."

Congressman Poe says neither the departments of State nor Justice will give him answers on the status of the Jones investigation.

Asked what reasons the departments gave for the apparent slowness of the probes, Poe sounded frustrated.

"There are several, I think, their excuses, why the perpetrators haven't been prosecuted," Poe told ABC News. "But I think it is the responsibility of our government, the Justice Department and the State Department, when crimes occur against American citizens overseas in Iraq, contractors that are paid by the American public, that we pursue the criminal cases as best as we possibly can and that people are prosecuted."

Since no criminal charges have been filed, the only other option, according to Hutson, is the civil system, which is the approach that Jones is trying now. But Jones' former employer doesn't want this case to see the inside of a civil courtroom.

KBR has moved for Jones' claim to be heard in private arbitration, instead of a public courtroom. It says her employment contract requires it.

In arbitration, there is no public record nor transcript of the proceedings, meaning that Jones' claims would not be heard before a judge and jury. Rather, a private arbitrator would decide Jones' case. In recent testimony before Congress, employment lawyer Cathy Ventrell-Monsees said that Halliburton won more than 80 percent of arbitration proceedings brought against it.

In his interview with ABC News, Rep. Poe said he sided with Jones.

"Air things out in a public forum of a courtroom," said Rep. Poe. "That's why we have courts in the United States."

In her lawsuit, Jones' lawyer, Todd Kelly, says KBR and Halliburton created a "boys will be boys" atmosphere at the company barracks which put her and other female employees at great risk.

"I think that men who are there believe that they live without laws," said Kelly. "The last thing she should have expected was for her own people to turn on her."

Halliburton, which has since divested itself of KBR, says it "is improperly named" in the suit.

In a statement, KBR said it was "instructed to cease" its own investigation by U.S. government authorities "because they were assuming sole responsibility for the criminal investigations."

The safety and security of all employees remains KBR's top priority," it said in a statement. "Our commitment in this regard is unwavering."

Since the attacks, Jones has started a nonprofit foundation called the Jamie Leigh Foundation, which is dedicated to helping victims who were raped or sexually assaulted overseas while working for government contractors or other corporations.

"I want other women to know that it's not their fault," said Jones. "They can go against corporations that have treated them this way." Jones said that any proceeds from the civil suit will go to her foundation.

"There needs to be a voice out there that really pushed for change," she said. "I'd like to be that voice."