Eideard

He knows what we’ve done even if Rohrabacher doesn’t care

The U.S. Embassy in Iraq is distancing itself from statements made by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher that led to a government spokesman saying the congressman and his delegation are not welcome in the country…

Dana Rohrabacher, the chairman of the Oversight and Investigation Subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee…told reporters during a news conference at the embassy in Baghdad that he suggested Iraq repay some of the cost of the war.

“Once Iraq becomes a very rich and prosperous country … we would hope that some consideration be given to repaying the United States some of the mega-dollars that we have spent here in the last eight years,” said Rohrabacher, according to the Agence France-Presse news agency…

It was unclear whether the U.S. Embassy recorded the news conference. It did not make any video or audio recordings of Rohrabacher’s statements available to the media…

“We have contacted the U.S. Embassy and they said the remarks of Congressman Dana Rohrabacher expressed his own opinion and not the official opinion of the United States,” the spokesman said…

Traveling with Rohrabacher were Democratic Rep. Russ Carnahan of Missouri; Rep. Ted Poe of Texas, a Republican member of Rohrabacher’s subcommittee; Republican Rep. Jeff Duncan of South Carolina; Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas; and Democratic Rep. Jim Costa of California.

Telephone calls to the district and Washington offices of all five congressmen were either not answered or not immediately returned.

Once again, the world gets a clear vision of the worst in American foreign policy. Guided by imperial greed, the stink of military power put to tasks benefitting the Oil Patch Boys above all else, Rohrabacher emphasizes his role as spokesman for the most reactionary, power-hungry thugs in Congress.

Michael Steele measures the narrowness of Republican honesty
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

Remember “soft money,” the shadowy torrents of unregulated cash supposedly designated for “party building” or other such nebulous activities that caused such political heartburn in the 1990s?

The ban on soft money was one of the few provisions of the McCain-Feingold Act to survive challenge in the courts.

Now the Republican National Committee is making a major new legal effort to remove the ban. It intends to take its challenge to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Soft money used to be an equal opportunity issue for Democrats and Republicans back in the 1990s, and a prime culprit in the obscene amount of money being spent on campaigns. In 1997, President Bill Clinton conceded soft money had fueled a blitz of Democratic party advertising, but argued Republicans had abused it more. The “abuse” was that both parties had used soft money, as opposed to “hard money,” indirectly or directly to influence specific elections…

The latest challenge to the soft money ban is pretty much an all-Republican effort.

The soft money ban received a major boost last month in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the federal appeals court in Washington sometimes called the second most powerful court in the United States. The appeals court upheld the ban, but the setback for the RNC was strictly temporary…

The proposed challenge was part of a legal presentation to the RNC, Politico reported. The Supreme Court upheld the soft money ban in a “facial” challenge — the ban allegedly was unconstitutional on the face of it. But the new RNC challenge would be “as applied” — a challenge based on how the ban was being applied.

Politico reported the presentation said the RNC expected to ask for immediate expedited review in the Supreme Court if it lost on the lower level.

In fact, the RNC did lose its challenge in the Washington appeals court last month. The appeals court said it had a simple reason for ruling against the RNC: The challengers wanted the appeals court to do something the Supreme Court had yet to do.

The Republican Party is now carrying forward the projected strategy – which will give the Supreme Court another opportunity to return the most political power to the corporations with the most money.

An American tradition that has little or nothing to do with democracy or liberty. Not that today’s conservatives would notice.

David Frum is a Republican, a former speechwriter for George Bush best known for crafting the phrase “axis of evil.” But he thinks for himself, and he doesn’t always like what he sees on the Republican side of the aisle.

When he disagrees with Republicans, he criticizes them. On his blog last Sunday, he issued a harsh critique of the GOP’s strategy of refusing to negotiate on the health care bill:

“Conservatives and Republicans today suffered their most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s. . .A huge part of the blame for today’s disaster attaches to conservatives and Republicans ourselves…

“Could a deal have been reached? Who knows? But we do know that the gap between this plan and traditional Republican ideas is not very big. The Obama plan has a broad family resemblance to Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts plan. It builds on ideas developed at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s that formed the basis for Republican counter-proposals to Clintoncare in 1993-1994.

“Barack Obama badly wanted Republican votes for his plan. Could we have leveraged his desire to align the plan more closely with conservative views?…Too late now. They are all the law.”

For that, apparently, he has just been kicked out of his job at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

From the WaPo:

“Three days after calling health-care reform a debacle for Republicans, David Frum was forced out of his job at the American Enterprise Institute on Wednesday…

“Frum made clear, in a letter to AEI President Arthur C. Brooks, that his departure after seven years as a resident fellow at the conservative think tank was not voluntary. “I have had many fruitful years at the American Enterprise Institute,” he wrote, “and I do regret this abrupt and unexpected conclusion of our relationship.”

“If conservatives can’t tolerate dissent, they’re likely to be wandering in the political wilderness for a long time.”

I’ll second that emotion.