November 3rd, 2006
Everybody else seems to be putting themselves out there, so I might as well do the same. After the midterms:
The Republicans will lose seats but retain control of the Senate, with a 51-49 advantage. Lieberman will be one of the nominally-Democratic 49, so there’s always the risk of a party switch and a 52-48 Republican advantage.
The Democrats will win control of the House, but not by as wide a margin as some are predicting. I’m calling a 223-212 advantage for the Democrats, or 11 seats.
The Democrats will have a 28-22 advantage in governorships, an exact reversal of the current scenario.
Please remember that I’m always wrong about this stuff, so there’s a good chance I just jinxed the Dems.
UPDATE: Over in the comments here, commenter “tomeck” has my favorite prediction:
Bush picks Rove for VP, figuring that would keep impeachment off the table for himself.
Two weeks later, Bush resigns after the details of his cocaine use, drunk driving records, poppy’s bribe to get him into the National Guard and the Nov 2000 telegram from Jeb saying “It’s all fixed, you’ll win by 500 votes. TV will love it” are “leaked” to the press by a high White House source.
Two weeks later, Rove nominates Caligula for VP.
Categories: Politics |
6 Comments
November 3rd, 2006
We spend a lot of time on this page discussing partisan issues. This isn’t one of them. There’s a retirement crisis brewing in America, and it will affect Democrats, Republicans, and Independents alike. The typical American is woefully unprepared for retirement, and this situation gets worse and worse with each successive generation.
I strongly recommend that everyone watch this excellent Frontline special on the subject. It’s scheduled to re-air this upcoming Tuesday night (yeah, election night) on PBS at 9 PM Eastern, 8 PM Central. Check your local listings and TiVo or record it, or watch it on-line. It is, quite simply, a must-view.
UPDATE: While I’m at it, everyone should also read this article.
Categories: Economics |
24 Comments
November 3rd, 2006
Oh, I feel sooooooo much safer now:
Last March, the federal government set up a Web site to make public a vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war. The Bush administration did so under pressure from Congressional Republicans who had said they hoped to “leverage the Internet” to find new evidence of the prewar dangers posed by Saddam Hussein.
But in recent weeks, the site has posted some documents that weapons experts say are a danger themselves: detailed accounts of Iraq’s secret nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The documents, the experts say, constitute a basic guide to building an atom bomb.
Last night, the government shut down the Web site after The New York Times asked about complaints from weapons experts and arms-control officials. A spokesman for the director of national intelligence said access to the site had been suspended “pending a review to ensure its content is appropriate for public viewing.”
Officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency, fearing that the information could help states like Iran develop nuclear arms, had privately protested last week to the American ambassador to the agency, according to European diplomats who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity. One diplomat said the agency’s technical experts “were shocked” at the public disclosures.
And, just to add to include every arm of the right wing in this giant cluster fsck, bloggers like Powerline were apparently instrumental in getting these dangerous documents released online. Go team! I am not actually sure that these people could have done this much harm to American security if they were actually working for Al Qaeda.
Insty is already spinning through linking, btw:
JIM GERAGHTY writes: “I’m sorry, did the New York Times just put on the front page that IRAQ HAD A NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROGRAM AND WAS PLOTTING TO BUILD AN ATOMIC BOMB?”
UPDATE: Ed Morrissey has more:
This is apparently the Times’ November surprise, but it’s a surprising one indeed. The Times has just authenticated the entire collection of memos, some of which give very detailed accounts of Iraqi ties to terrorist organizations. Just this past Monday, I posted a memo which showed that the Saddam regime actively coordinated with Palestinian terrorists in the PFLP as well as Hamas and Islamic Jihad. On September 20th, I reposted a translation of an IIS memo written four days after 9/11 that worried the US would discover Iraq’s ties to Osama bin Laden.
It doesn’t end there with the Times, either. In a revelation buried far beneath the jump, the Times acknowledges that the UN also believed Saddam to be nearing development of nuclear weapons. . . . The Times wanted readers to cluck their tongues at the Bush administration for releasing the documents, although Congress actually did that. However, the net result should be a complete re-evaluation of the threat Saddam posed by critics of the war. Let’s see if the Times figures this out for themselves.
Kind of undercuts that whole “Bush lied about WMD” thing. Reader Eric Anondson emails: “It surely must have been a Rovian plot to somehow get the Times to admit that Iraq has a nuclear weapons program on the verge of an atomic bomb by as early as 2003… and right before an election where the Iraq War is listed as the top election concern among likely voters.”
Umm, no, no they did not, not in any meaningful sense. Notice the bit about “before 1991″ in the paragraphs above? See, we have this thing called “time” — it is a way to distinguish what is happening now form what happened a little awhile ago from what happened even further back than that. The phrase “before 1991″ means that these plans were for a program that the Gulf War ended. Now, it’s true that there is an ambiguous statement further down in the article:
Among the dozens of documents in English were Iraqi reports written in the 1990s and in 2002 for United Nations inspectors in charge of making sure Iraq had abandoned its unconventional arms programs after the Persian Gulf war. Experts say that at the time, Mr. Hussein’s scientists were on the verge of building an atom bomb, as little as a year away.
I suppose one could read that as saying Iraq was one year from a bomb in 2002, but you would have to be lying or woefully uninformed to believe that that was what the article meant. See, a nuclear weapons program requires some pretty substantial equipment; at least once it gets to the bomb making stage. In 2003, the UN weapons inspectors found no sign of such a program, and the Kay Report found no evidence of such an advanced program:
these officials assert that Saddam would have resumed nuclear weapons at some future point. Some indicated a resumption after Iraq was free of sanctions.”
… “These initiatives did not in and of themselves constitute a resumption of the nuclear weapons program, but could have been useful in developing a weapons-relevant science base for the long-term.”
So either the wording is just off and the passage meant to refer to the state of the program in the 1990s, or the passage is just awkwardly saying that some experts in 2002 were saying that Iraq was a year away from a bomb. Unfortunately for those experts, they have been proven wrong – unless you want to argue that vague wishes for the future constitutes a “program”. But you don’t want to do that, because that would be stupid.
As for the other quote, again: no. The article makes no claims about any of the other documents veracity aside form the ones dealing with the nuclear weapons plans from before 1991. the only statement it makes about the veracity of the collection as a whole is that experts are concerned that people will latch onto inaccurate translations and documents of dubious providence to support their pet theories:
Some intelligence officials feared that individual documents, translated and interpreted by amateurs, would be used out of context to second-guess the intelligence agencies’ view that Mr. Hussein did not have unconventional weapons or substantive ties to Al Qaeda. Reviewing the documents for release would add an unnecessary burden on busy intelligence analysts, they argued.
Gee, I wonder why they were worried about that happening.
So, to sum up: Republicans, egged on by right wing bloggers, put up a web site that contained information that would be useful to a country like Iran in building an atomic weapon. When the NYT reports on the resulting disaster, prominent right wing bloggers suddenly forget everything that ever learned about logic, reading comprehension, and how time functions in order to imply that the article is proof that Saddam had an active nuclear weapons program at the time of the invasion.
An Army of Davids marching right off the edge of the cliff ….
Categories: Iraq |
6 Comments
