Short Takes

Digby makes good points about "values and morality":

As I look at all these issues that have come to the forefront in the last few years, I'm struck by how dumb it is to let the Republicans claim the mantle of values and morality. People who believe that torture is ok or that it's better to let blastocysts be thrown away rather than use them to save living breathing human beings are immoral. If they want to play politics on that field, I say bring it on.

And about BushCo and the religious right:

Rove is a cynical political operative and Bush is an idiot whose only religious commitment is to the idea that he was anointed by God to follow his "instincts" (which amounts to running the country by coin flipping.) I honestly don't know anyone who thinks the big money boys of the Republican Party give a damn about religion except to the extent it brings them votes.

What we did believe is that the religious right wants to build a theocracy and that seems indisputable to me. Of course they do. And because they are an enormously valuable consituency they are managing to incrementally blur the lines between church and state and pass laws of a theocratic nature or that conflict with progressive values.

And about the Republican campaign message:

The argument seems to be, "yes we've fucked up, and we've fucked up so badly that there are no good choices. Do you want to take a chance that the Democrats will fuck it up too?"

ThinkProgress shares some reasons to be outraged:

Just last month, the Senate Intelligence Committee — chaired by Bush-ally Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS) — concluded that there was absolutely no relationship between Saddam Hussein and the late al-Qaeda operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Nevertheless, in an interview with a South Bend, Indiana television station yesterday, Vice President Cheney falsely asserted that Zarqawi was proof of a connection between Iraq and al Qaeda. Watch it:
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Iraq’s Prime Minister had ordered the country’s health ministry to “stop providing mortality figures to the United Nations, jeopardizing a key source of information on the number of civilian war dead in Iraq.”
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President Bush recess-appointed former coal industry executive Richard Stickler to head the Mine Safety and Health Administration. The Senate had twice refused to confirm him “because of his troubling mine safety record — the mines he managed from 1989 to 1996 incurred injury rates double the national average.”
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“Moving quickly to implement” the new Military Commissions Act, the Bush administration “has formally notified the U.S. District Court here that it no longer has jurisdiction to consider hundreds of habeas corpus petitions filed by inmates at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba.”
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This week, on the request of Rep. Ray LaHood (R-IL), Intelligence Chairman Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) suspended a Democratic staffer’s access to classified information. Hoekstra said the suspension would remain in place pending a review to determine if that staffer leaked a classified National Intelligence Estimate to the New York Times.

Today on Fox News, LaHood said, “I’ll tell you why I did it. The reason I did it was because Jane Harman released the Duke Cunningham — who sat on our Intelligence committee — report.” That report, which detailed the misconduct of Cunningham, who is now serving a jail term, was not classified.

A Fox anchor asked, “So, it’s payback?” LaHood responded, “There are some of us on the other side who can equally play politics, and I’m not afraid to do it.”

Do you think that this might explain why it has been leaked that Harman is under DOJ investigation?