Day: November 28, 2006

Here at Capitol Hill Blue we have a simple test to determine whether or not President George W. Bush is lying: If his lips move he’s lying.

OK, that’s the smartass answer but in these troubled political times it is possible to be both a smartass and correct. Bush lies out his ass so much that an occasion when he actually told the truth would be front page news.

Which brings us to Eric Alterman’s incisive column in The Nation.

Writes Alterman:

Globalization is more domestic policy than foreign policy because when America connects to the world outside, that outside world inevitably penetrates our communities, our workplaces, our homes. This recent election had a lot to do with modulating America’s connectivity to the world, whether we’re talking immigration, trade or Iraq.

The question for son-to-be ruling Democrats is, Will they build bridges or will they build walls?

He met her in a Starbucks in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. While the story she told was gut-wrenching, it wasn’t unlike those he’d heard countless times over the past four years.

Nour Miyati, an Indonesian woman in her 20s, had come to Saudi Arabia to work as a domestic servant. But her dream of supporting her family back home turned into a nightmare. Her employers abused and tortured her. She lost fingers and toes to gangrene when the wounds from her beatings went untreated and festered. When she finally escaped and sought justice in a Saudi court, she was sentenced to 79 lashes.

With one brilliant decision, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has wiped out hunger in America. In the eyes of the USDA, folks are no longer "hungry." The solution was so simple that people should have thought about it generations ago.

President Bush said Tuesday that the sectarian violence rocking Iraq is part of an al-Qaida plot to goad Iraqi factions into repeated attacks and counterattacks.

"No question it’s tough, no question about it," Bush said at a news conference with Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves. "There’s a lot of sectarian violence taking place, fomented in my opinion because of the attacks by al-Qaida causing people to seek reprisal."

The Justice Department has begun an internal investigation into its handling of information gathered in the government’s domestic spying program. However, Democrats criticized the review as too narrow to determine whether the program violated federal law.

The inquiry by Glenn A. Fine, the department’s inspector general, will focus on the role of Justice prosecutors and agents in carrying out the warrantless surveillance program run by the National Security Agency.

Several members of a government board appointed to guard privacy and civil liberties during the war on terror say they’re impressed with the protections built into the Bush administration’s electronic eavesdropping program.

The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board received a long-awaited briefing on the secret program last week by senior members of the National Security Agency.

Sen. Joe Biden, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s incoming chairman, wants to get tough with Mexico, calling it an "erstwhile democracy" with a "corrupt system" responsible for illegal immigration and drug problems in the U.S.

Biden, D-Del., was in Columbia on Monday in his first postelection trip to this first-in-the-South presidential primary state as he continues to line up support for his presidential bid.

During a question-and-answer session before more than 230 Columbia Rotary Club members, Biden was asked about immigration problems.

He may be Iowa’s governor, but Tom Vilsack’s home-field advantage isn’t enough to force rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination to cede him the game — far from it.

Not only won’t Vilsack get a pass in Iowa’s 2008 Democratic caucuses, but party leaders are bending over backward to keep the start-off of the contest evenhanded, key activists and strategists said.