A great article on Afghanistan…

There’s a lot of talk about what’s going on in Afghanistan…including on our show. It’s very important to understand the history of this country in order to better understand what’s really going on. To that end, here’s a great article from the BBC. — Jeff

Happy Birther Day, President Obama – Obama’s Birth Certificate(s)

Poor guy. It’s not enough to have another birthday (when you get older, you kind of stop counting the years). But as a special birthday celebration, the conspiracy-laden nuts of the Republican Right continue to generate unwarranted controversy over President Obama’s status as a citizen of the United States. We’ve resisted going into it on our show because the claim is so ludicrous, but we thought their latest attempt — creating a fake birth certificate — speaks volumes about their desperation. Fact: the Republic of Kenya didn’t exist at the time this birth certificate was supposedly created. Fact: the Registrar on the forged birth certificate is not a real person. Fact: President Obama’s birth announcement was placed in two local papers in 1961 — something that cannot be forged in 2009 — and his birth certificate was certified as real, to the extent that any of ours can be, by the registrar in Hawaii, a U.S. State. To call President Obama illegitimate is to levy that charge against us all, and it is an affront to our sensibilities and to human decency. Have you not enough issues with the President’s public agenda that you have to resort to baseless personal attacks against him that call on the worst of humanity?  Take a look at the documents and make your own decision.

Don’t Forget the Deficit…

I am a progressive. I want a leaner, more efficient, more effective progressive government. My liberal tendencies don’t preclude me from being a traditional Yankee — and fiscally conservative at that, despite the “progressive” label and popular beliefs. As we have discussed on our show, I’m also a huge proponent of health care reform. But the thing I fear the most right now is that our deficit is growing out of control and nobody is really focusing on it. Sure, there’s talk about it, but there isn’t action yet in the form of legislation. The best article I’ve read on this? From the Brookings Institution. Yeah, that’s right, the so-called liberal Brookings Institution. Here it is, and kudos to them. Everyone should read this article, which is why I’m posting it on the site. — Jeff

Special Discount at Personal Democracy for our PoliTalk Audience

PoliTalk Listeners get $100 off the registration fee for the upcoming Personal Democracy Forum. To get your discount, click here and use discount code “gothammedia”.

Use discount code “gothammedia”

The Personal Democracy Forum is the world’s largest and best known conference on the intersection of technology and politics. For the sixth year, more than 1,000 top opinion makers, political practitioners, technologists and journalists will come together to network, exchange ideas, and explore how technology and the Internet are changing politics, democracy, and society.

Audio of Burris Conversation w/Blagojevich Released: He MUST resign

Listen to the audiotapes (thanks to myfoxchicago.com) and decide for yourself.  I have decided: he needs to do the honorable thing (hard to do when you don’t act honorably) and resign. He is a disgrace to the United States government. Keep in mind he said under oath that he didn’t engage in pay-to-play or in any schemes to trade the seat for funds raised for former Illinois Governor. — Jeff  P.S. Who answers their phone by saying “Burris speaking…” Whatever happened to Hello?!?!

Credit Card Bill: Good Politics, Bad Policy

Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT), a real profile in courage…slumping dramatically in the polls, in need of working class votes, needing to innoculate himself as a champion of the banking special interests, who received favorable treatment on a loan and sneakily slipped provisions favoring the industry into bills during closed-door conferences…now authors a bill essentially pantsing the credit card industry. No doubt, they needed to be reined in and changed needed to be made, but the federal reserve has already announced that it is issuing new rules to cover these issues, and the regulatory parameters are already in place to keep a lot of these unfair practices in check…and the market itself can put its own check on the system.

The Senate overwhelmingly passed the bill 90-5. You can read the AP story about the Credit Card Bill of Rights here. Now they can all go home and tell their constituents that they’re doing something to stop those bad people from hurting you — everyone has a credit card, everyone feels the pain. It’s a slam dunk. But if this was so needed, why not put these measures in place a year ago or even six months ago? 

The politics of this bill are so transparent, my hope is that we accidentally end up with good policy and those doing the political grandstanding will suffer even more for the almost stunning knee-jerk reactionary politics. Do you take us all for idiots? 

But I could never endorse this as good policy as long as it contains a provision, which the Senate bill incredibly does, that allows someone to carry a loaded weapon into a national park. What that has to do with credit card policy is beyond me, but then again, maybe a lot of public policy today has more in common with the credit card industry than we really think. Lets get our quick quick fix now, and worry about the payments later. 

Well, have to run. I’m feeling the need to do some online shopping:) — Jeff

FBI Interrogator who Questioned al-Quida, Questions Torture Methods

We at PoliTalk always strive to expose our biases and understand information for what it is. As a part of your discovery of how we as a nation should be getting information out of detainees, consider the views of Ali Soufan, a former FBI interrogator who questioned members of al-Quida.

In his sworn testimony today, he said his non-threatening interrogation yielded critical information which, it appears, did prevent other attacks. When CIA contractors came in and forced him out and began using new so-called enhanced interrogation techniques, the information flow stopped. Read more about Soufan’s testimony here.

It’s sad when those like Soufan, literally on the front lines, are pushed aside by a overly-aggressive administration and not allowed to do their job as they see fit. Wait, what’s that? No comment from Dick Cheney on this story today? Well, Mr. Vice President, you’ve been out there every other day. Why don’t you go after Mr. Soufan the way you’ve gone after President Obama? You can’t because there’s one small, tiny, little itty bitty thing in your way: the truth.

Cheney’s Tortured Logic

The sign of a truly great leader is someone who knows when, where and how to exit the stage gracefully. And then there’s Dick Cheney. Exhibiting a tortured logic, he whimsically holds onto shards of truth, as facts that don’t fit neatly into his rigid paradigm fall in heaps by the side of the road… a path, if you will, to self-aggrandization, where it’s okay to break the country’s covenants to protect the good of the country; where it’s okay to talk about, indeed moralize about one set of (conservative) principles, but act in a wholly different manner that betrays those very principles — war, intolerance, division, debt; a path where he takes great pride in preventing another terrorist attack, while glibly ignoring the fact that The Terrorist responsible for The Attack is still lurking out there; a path that would have us invade a country based on, well, “facts” that we would tell our children were lies if they tried to tell them (WMD); a path that has led to the degradation of the environment to the point where polar ice caps are melting and it’s sleeting in April, and we’re all told this is just an abberation — just a flesh wound, if you’ll pardon the Monty Python pun. Tell that to the people in New Orleans, North Dakota, Minnesota, or in developing countries (thanks Daniel). His chief argument, when it comes to torture, is that waterboarding worked. If it works so well, then why isn’t it written into the Army Field Manual, and why don’t we use it on everyone and anyone? Don’t get me wrong, I have a personal connection to 9-11, so Dick Cheney isn’t going to play that trump card on this hand — there is no amount of pain that could be inflicted on Bin Laden to make him feel the pain of those who lost someone on 9-11. But if torture worked so well, why haven’t we captured Bin Laden? Why haven’t we shut down his network? Why has it festered like a cancer in Afghanistan and Pakistan while we had our eyes off the ball in Iraq, wasting precious American lives as well as billions of dollars, all for what? Do you think our soldiers on the front lines feel safer knowing we now condone torture? Oh, I forgot, Dick Cheney didn’t fight on the front lines. In fact, he didn’t serve. But maybe nothing illustrates Cheney’s Tortured Logic than his inability to keep his mouth shut, even for the good of his country. You have to ask yourself, if Al Gore started launching attacks against George Bush during his first 100 days in office, what would VP Cheney say? Look no farther than his logic. His thinking goes: I have to speak out because nobody knows more about this than me. Obama is not doing what we did. What we did was the right thing to do. By not doing what we did, he’s making us weaker and more vulnerable. Obama needs to listen to me. There are two problems with this tortured logic: 1) his team lost the election in a landslide. it wasn’t even close. Obama deserves a chance to try it his way, without the former VP sniping at his heels. 2) Could it be, sir, that you were wrong all along? You turned the word conservative on its head by increasing Medicare, Medicaid and non-discretionary spending to record levels, increasing the debt and deficit and growing spending per household to its highest levels ever — all under a so-called “conservative” government, while not giving us change, not giving us health care reform, not reigning in the size of government or even slowing the rate of growth, all while driving the economy into a depression the likes of which we haven’t seen in a generation. Haven’t you done enough? Maybe it’s time for a new voice in the Republican Party that doesn’t date back to the Ford Administration? Great leaders know how, when and where to exit the stage gracefully. It’s innate. Good leaders know when to go. Leaders get a clue. And then there are those, who when the doors close and the company shuts its doors, still come back to the plant, almost by force of habit. I’ve met these folks at political rallies. They’re cranky, mean spirited, full of hate, condescension, fear —  you can almost watch as time passes them by, and while your first instinct is to rise up an meet their anger, a part of you almost feels sorry for them…until they go and do something stupid, like go on Face the Nation, and then, as if that wasn’t enough, Fox, and so on, and so on, and so on. He’s had more press in the last few weeks than he did during his entire tenure as VP.  Do yourself a favor, Dick. Go back to Wyoming, get on a treadmill and stop draining our Medicare dollars. We need them for health care reform. — Jeff

The Mariachi Political Test: Do you hide or do you smile? Be HONEST…

We spend a lot of time on this blog getting really deep. So here’s something light and fun for the weekend. Imagine you’re sitting with some friends, or maybe a date, in a Mexican restaurant. The Mariachi band is playing a few tables over. You can tell they’re hitting every table. Politically, there are two types of people — those who keep their heads down in their drinks (or hands up to face), and those who put their heads up, smile, and pretty much wave the band over. Which one are you? Be honest? And then tell us how you vote — not just Republican or Democrat — but do you lean liberal or conservative or do you tend to pick the best candidate available? Call it the PoliTalk Mariachi Band Quiz. — Jeff

An Interesting Case AGAINST Judge Sotomayor

Now is not the time to render judgment…so let me start this entry by rendering judgment:) As the nomination process unfolds for a new Supreme Court Justice, I know from my experience in the Senate and in working on Justice Souter’s confirmation hearing just how important certain qualities are. Intellectual curiosity, empathy and innate political skills — the ability to move votes — to work justices behind the scenes, to negotiate — are three qualities that need be prized in the next justice. There’s no doubt that whoever rises to the top will have the requisite legal credentials. But would you run the risk of compromising the aformentioned qualities in order to meet a quota? Or, given a choice, would you select someone who better fits this criteria who maybe didn’t fit a politically-driven quota, like, oh I don’t know, former Senator George Mitchell? or maybe even former Vice President Al Gore?  To better understand my point, a point I made in our most recent Podcast, you can read this excellent article from NPR.org by Jeffrey Rosen — a brilliant writer and legal scholar…