Forget the walls guys, this idea is even better. In an editorial today in the Washington Post we learn that the esteemed Gentleman from Colorado Tom Tancredo has a bold new initiative to curb immigration. He and others believe that Congress can prohibit children of illegal immigrant’s birthright citizenship. Apparently Representative Tancredo hasn’t bothered to read the Constitution or even the rulings of the court which are very, very clear on this. In fact so clear that it was decided about a century ago.

More disturbingly like the WaPo correctly points out, he argues that children of illegal immigrants should fall under the same designation as Diplomats, never mind that their mission is considered sovereign territory for so long as the government is recognized by the host country. More importantly, is Mr. Tancredo suggesting that we don’t have jurisdiction over these children or their parents and the crimes they commit; surely that’s not what he wants, unless of course he’s suggesting we submit them to indefinite detentions and immediate deportation, which of course wouldn’t be a stretch for someone with this kind of thinking.

This whole case just further shows how out of touch factions of the Republican Congress have become with what is actually going on in the world around them.

According to a release sent to The Raw Story Bush’s numbers have fallen even lower in the latest Newsweek Poll.

58 percent of Americans disapprove of the president’s handling of his job-a five-point decrease in approval since the September 29-30 Newsweek Poll. On the topic of how Bush is handling certain aspects of his job, 60 percent of those polled disapprove of the way he is handling the economy, 32 percent approve. Seventy-three percent disapprove of Bush’s handling of oil prices, 20 percent approve.

The poll has more troubling results, on the question of the direction of the country, Bush is doing even worse:

Sixty-eight percent of Americans are dissatisfied with the way things are going in the United States at this time, a seven-point drop in satisfaction since the last Newsweek Poll. Only 26 percent are satisfied.

And of course not to ignore Plamegate, the latest polling on Cheney isn’t too good either:

Fifty-two percent of Americans believe that Cheney was part of a cover up to try to prevent the special prosecutor from getting the truth about who leaked CIA agent Valerie Plame’s name to the news media, 27 percent do not believe he was involved.

And regarding the actions of Cheney and the White House Iraq Group and the reasons we are now at war:

When asked if the vice president deliberately misused or manipulated pre-war intelligence about Iraq’s nuclear capabilities in order to build support for war with Iraq-52 percent say he misused intelligence, 33 percent say he did not. Overall, 65 percent of Americans disapprove of Bush’s handling of the situation in Iraq, only 32 percent approve according to the latest Newsweek Poll.

Does anyone else remember when Bush called a 2% victory a mandate? Well what does he consider the last couple of months, sure looks like a whole different mandate to me. While Bush goes on political stunts yesterday during Veterans Day in a way to try to regain support the American people are seeing right through it. He’s exhausted all of his special backdrops, is manufactured media events, this President, his party, and his Congress have been weakened to new heights. In the coming months, and I expect shortly before or after the President’s last State of the Union before mid-term elections we will see a new Democratic plan for the country, and it’s time to put it into play.

According to Think Progress:

On Tuesday — three days before Veterans Day — House Veterans’ Affairs Committee Chairman Steve Buyer (R-IN) announced that for the first time in at least 55 years, “veterans service organizations will no longer have the opportunity to present testimony before a joint hearing of the House and Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committees.”

Happy Veterans Days guys. Remember my Congressman Chris Smith (R-NJ 11th) was the chair of this committee but then was removed when he tried to raise objections to under funding the VA hospital system as we marched to war. Apparently his replacement has no problem with that nor with denying veterans the chance to speak before Congress.

If it’s one thing we would expect the Republican leadership to agree on it would be spending cuts. Republicans love spending cuts, cut spending, cut taxes, let the chips fall where they may, and now RawStory is reporting they can’t find enough votes to pass their own budget in the House. It seems though that this ins’t their only shortcoming, in fact it appears as though the GOP leadership besieged with scandals, corruption, and low public opinion, is falling apart at the seems. Yesterday over on DailyKos we read that the GOP has dropped plans to drill in ANWR. I mean I think it’s more than fair for us to look at this and ask what in the hell is going on. They control both houses and the White House, they’ve been wanting to drill in ANWR for years, and have been waiting for a chance to cut spending, all of their dreams are coming true, and they still can’t make things happen.

On the ANWR story:

Republican leaders in the U.S. House of Representatives abandoned, at least temporarily, a drive to open Alaska’s National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling after concluding on Wednesday the initiative was threatening passage of a huge bill to cut spending. “ANWR and OCS will be out” of the legislation, said House Budget Committee Chairman Jim Nussle, an Iowa Republican. Besides the Alaska oil drilling initiative, the House spending-reduction bill had also called for opening outer-continental shelf, or offshore areas, to oil and gas drilling.

Let’s recall that drilling in Alaska was a major campaign goal of Bush in his energy policy and now it appears as though it won’t be happening for some time.

That’s not all however. According to Republican Senator Charles Grassley from Iowa, Social Security Reform is not only off the table for this Congress, but also the next, and won’t be revisited until the next Presidential election.

Not taking into account Democratic opposition, Republican members of the Senate Finance Committee have not been able to reach an agreement on proposed changes. Grassley said he will try to get his fellow committee members to act sooner than 2009, but those efforts may be hampered by next year’s Congressional elections. “I’m pessimistic that it could come up before 2009,” Grassley said. “Doesn’t mean that I won’t try to bring it up before 2009.”

So we have a budget, energy, and now as we all knew Social Security all falling behind, not to mention approval ratings that don’t break 40%. This president is in serious trouble, and his Congress isn’t doing anything to help.

But then comes the bigger question, can we as Democrats offer a positive plan for America for the mid-term elections in 2006. One year away the media is already harping on this, we should be clear the “Contract with America” wasn’t born until six weeks before the midterms in 1994. However, and in some ways unfortunately, because they did it, the expectations gap is on the Democrats now to come out with a plan for the midterms and by the first of the new year I imagine. The question is can Reid with all of the excellent work he’s been doing to draw attention to the administrations failures, come up with a strategy to convince the American people that we will do better.

So, yesterday I was watching and learned that a number of people were awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Many of the recipients were well deserved, including outgoing Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan. Then I remembered one of the last people to be awarded the Medal, CIA Director George “Slam Dunk” Tenet. Last month I wrote about the 16 words in the State of the Union that triggered the entire Wilson-Plame scandal, and how the CIA warned the white House not to use the statement in the speech.

However, as we all know he did anyway, and somehow after the revelations of Joe Wilson, the man they claim to be motivated by politics although funny how he was right, George Tenet and the CIA took the blame. I’ve thought about this a number of times, and every time I think about it, I can’t help but ask myself, did Tenet take the bullet for the White House. If the CIA was so wrong and Tenet caused Bush all of this trouble why award him the Medal? Now, at the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist I think it’s more than possible that the medal was given to George as a way of saying thank you for taking all the heat.

Also on Election Day in New Jersey voters authorized the state legislature to act on creating a position for a Lt. Governor. I think it’s an excellent step, as I often had qualms with an acting Governor being able to break ties in the Senate. The concerns though are how the State will move forward with a proposed amendment to the Constitution.

The biggest question is going to be should voters vote separately for a Governor and Lt. Governor, or should the Lt. Governor be picked on a party ticket. The advantage of having voters elect seperatley creates another state wide position to be elected in a state where the only locally state-wide position is the Governor. On the flip side, personally I’d be more comfortable picking a ticket so that we have continuous leadership in the case of a removal from office.

We’ll have more on this as the state legislature begins working on the amendment.

This one really is just too good. Pissed off about Valerie Plame and trying to shift the focus away from well everything, the GOP leaders are demanding an investigation into how the CIA “black sites” story was leaked to the Washington Post.

Congress’s top Republican leaders yesterday demanded an immediate joint House and Senate investigation into the disclosure of classified information to The Washington Post that detailed a web of secret prisons being used to house and interrogate terrorism suspects. The Post’s article, published on Nov. 2, has led to new questions about the treatment of detainees and the CIA’s use of “black sites” in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. The issue dogged President Bush on his recent trip to Latin America and has created consternation in Eastern Europe.

So now they get their panties in a bunch, but where’s the outrage about miss-used intelligence? Look, I have no problem with Congress taking on this investigation, they should things like this aren’t supposed to get leaked to the media. However, when the leak happened with Valerie Plame Republicans said the same things, but they also said it provided an opportunity to examine the motives of Joe Wilson. For most their attacks didn’t stick, but with this story, the media is now examining the motives of the government in using these prisons. It is forcing an honest and open debate about torture, and we should be having that debate especially post 9/11.

Corzine wins in New Jersey as does Kaine in Virginia. More to come on this later.

Speaking in Panama Bush told foreign reporters that the United States does not support, condone, or actively engage in it. So then, he won’t veto the McCain amendment right?

The United States was sharply criticized for its handling of detainees after photographs of guards abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq shocked the world. U.S. forces have held hundreds of detainees at known facilities outside the United States since the September 11, 2001, attacks, such as Guantanamo Bay. But senior leaders of al Qaeda who have captured, such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, have been kept in secret detention facilities overseas. Bush did not confirm or deny the existence of CIA secret prisons that The Washington Post disclosed last week, and would not address demands by the International Committee of the Red Cross to have access to the suspects reportedly held at them. “We are finding terrorists and bringing them to justice,” Bush said at a news conference with Panamanian President Martin Torrijos. “We are gathering information about where the terrorists might be hiding. We are trying to disrupt their plots and plans,” he said. “Anything we do to that end in this effort, any activity we conduct, is within the law,” Bush said. “We do not torture. And therefore we’re working with Congress to make sure that as we go forward, we make it possible, more possible to do our job.”

Meanwhile, after such staunch denunciation of the illegal practice of torture Vice President Dick “Let’s go to war on Bad Intel” Cheney is fighting to get an exemption for the CIA in the McCain amendment that would only force the U.S. government to follow the ban on torture written in the Army’s field manual.

The Senate voted 90-9 for the McCain amendment to prohibit the use of torture and abuse of prisoners in U.S. custody, adding it to a $440 billion defense spending bill despite a White House veto threat. The House of Representatives did not include the detainee rules in its version of the bill, and House and Senate negotiators are working out differences for a final bill. The White House position is that international treaty obligations already on the books govern the treatment of suspects and that the United States is observing those rules.

Yes, well the part they leave out is the careful maneuvering the Bush White House has used with the help of now Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez to get around such provisions by classifying detainees as enemy combatants and not prisoners of war, a classification so effective the Supreme Court even allowed it to hold up against U.S. citizens.

The cover story on the Washington Post regards White House aides wondering if Rove should remain. I mean the story pretty much speaks for itself, but I wouldn’t except to see a Rove departure, at least not until December when the year ends, and Bush can clean house, which he like other Presidents when faced with second term difficulties have done.

“Karl does not have any real enemies in the White House, but there are a lot of people in the White House wondering how they can put this behind them if the cloud remains over Karl,” said a GOP strategist who has discussed the issue with top White House officials. “You can not have that [fresh] start as long as Karl is there.”

More importantly, if Rove is still indicted while he is working in the White House it will only provide more trouble for Bush already at new lows in approval ratings. With Senator Lott also questioning the role Rove plays, calls by Senator Reid for Rove to resign are not only appropriate, but appear to be mainstream.

CBS has just released a new poll showing the President at his lowest approval rating of all time. That’s right Bush has slid lower than Clinton did at the height of the scandal involving Monica Lewinsky.

Bush, Now Approve 35% Disapprove 57% Clinton 1/1998 Approve 58% Disapprove 29% 2/1998 Approve 72% Disapprove 22% 7/1998 Approve 64% Disapprove 29% 10/1998 Approve 65% Disapprove 30% 12/1998 Approve 66% Disapprove 30%

Is it wrong for us to start writing the chapter in the Presidential history books that say failure?

Today at the Press Conference, Scott McClellan tried to deflect any questions about the White House’s use of pre-war intelligence in making its case for war. Sadly for the Republicans the new party line isn’t new at all; it’s the same one they’ve been trying to pawn off since dissent began. Democrats also voted for the war, so we couldn’t have misused intelligence. The point is McClellan that they voted for the war based on the intelligence given to them by the White House.

He said the Clinton administration and fellow Democrats “used the intelligence to come to the same conclusion that Saddam Hussein and his regime were a threat.”

Yes, Clinton did recognize Saddam Hussein as a threat, but he didn’t make the decision to take the nation to war while we were already engaged in Afghanistan. The faults in McClellan’s arguments are clear as day, and if this White House is going to get around them they need a better line than Democrats voted for the war. That’s what deception is guys, you take the intelligence re-frame it to make a compelling case for war that Congress approves, and then all the reasons you gave Congress turn out to be false.

This White House strategy gets employed by young children every day, it’s saying that if I lie to you to get you to loan me your lunch money then I pull out five dollars of my own, and my response to you is “well you gave it to me, so obviously you were ok with it”. Maybe someone needs to clue this White House in on what the definition of deception is, or they can ask Scooter, I imagine he’s getting quite the lesson on it.