Politics

I’m not diving into it full-bore right now (gotta get ready to go to work), but the GWU Democracy in Action site looks to have a ton of good information on all aspects of the upcoming election cycle. Definitely worth browsing through.

(via MeFi)

A major step forward for Howard Dean today — he’s currently leading the polls in California!

Howard Dean has surged from the middle of the pack to join the top tier of Democratic presidential candidates in California, according to a new Field Poll that indicates growing momentum for the former Vermont governor.

The poll, released Tuesday, showed Dean is the choice of 16 percent of likely Democratic voters in California, followed by Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., at 15 percent and Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., at 14 percent.

Because the poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 5 percentage points, the three candidates are essentially tied, meaning the race for California’s haul of convention delegates in the March 2 primary is still up in the air. A third of respondents said they are undecided.

But the showing is still a significant achievement for Dean, who ranked fourth among the nine presidential candidates in an April Field Poll of registered Democrats, with just 7 percent.

[…]

Lieberman, the leader in the April poll, saw his support drop from 22 percent three months ago. And Gephardt, who was third behind Lieberman and Kerry with 12 percent in April, is now a distant fourth with 7 percent. The latest poll was of 1,040 registered voters, with 335 likely Democratic voters asked about the party’s candidates.

The poll also reflected President Bush’s drop in approval ratings in California. According to the poll, he now would narrowly lose a matchup in California with whoever wins the Democratic nomination – 40 percent to 39 percent. In April, Bush was ahead of the unnamed nominee, 45 percent to 40 percent.

(via Joe Rospars and John P. Hoke, my e-mail from the Dean Campaign was corrupted for some reason)

Howard Dean has published a list of sixteen questions that President Bush needs to answer, and has created a petition to sign asking that Bush address these questions. Sign the petition here.

The questions (along with citations, thanks to Steve Perry and John P. Hoke) are reprinted below.

1. Mr. President, beyond the NSC and CIA officials who have been identified, we need to know who else at the White House was involved in the decision to include the discredited uranium evidence in your speech, and, if they knew it was false, why did they permit it to be included in the speech? (Washington Post, NY Times)
2. Mr. President, we need to know why anyone in your Administration would have contemplated using the evidence in the State of the Union after George Tenet personally intervened in October 2002, to have the same evidence removed from the President’s October 7th speech. (The Washington Post, Walter Pincus and Mike Allen, 7/13/2003)
3. Mr. President, we need to know why you claimed this very week that the CIA objected to the Niger uranium sentence “subsequent” to the State of the Union address, contradicting everything else we have heard from your administration and the intelligence community on the matter. (Washington Post, Priest, Dana and Dana Milbank, 7/15/2003)
4. Mr. President, we urgently need an explanation about the very serious charge that senior officials in your Administration may have retaliated against Ambassador Joseph Wilson by illegally disclosing that his wife is an undercover CIA officer. (The Nation, Corn, David, 7/16/2003)
5. Mr. President, we need to know why your Administration persisted in using the intercepted aluminum tubes to show that Iraq was pursuing a nuclear program and why your National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, claimed categorically that the tubes were “only really suited for nuclear weapons programs,” when in fact our own government experts flatly rejected such claims. (CNN, 9/08/2002, Knight Ridder News Service, 10/04/2002)
6. Mr. President, we need to know why Secretary Rumsfeld created a secret intelligence unit at the Pentagon that selectively identified questionable intelligence to support the case for war including the supposed link to al-Qaeda while ignoring, burying or rejecting any evidence to the contrary. (New Yorker, Seymour Hersh, 5/12/03)
7. Mr. President, we need to know what the basis was for Secretary Rumsfeld’s assertion that the US had bulletproof evidence linking Al Qaeda to Iraq, despite the fact that U.S. intelligence analysts have consistently agreed that Saddam did not have a “meaningful connection” to Al Qaeda. (NY Times, Schmitt, Eric, 9/28/2002, NY Times, Krugman, Paul, 7/15/2003)
8. Mr. President, we need to know why Vice President Cheney claimed last September to have “irrefutable evidence” that Saddam Hussein had reconstituted his nuclear weapons program, an assertion he repeated in March, on the eve of war. (AP, 9/20/2002, NBC 3/16/2003)
9. Mr. President, we need to know why Secretary Powell claimed with confidence and virtual certainty in February before the UN Security Council that, “Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent. That is enough agent to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets.” (UN Address, 2/05/2003)
10. Mr. President, we need to know why Secretary Rumsfeld claimed on March 30th in reference to weapons of mass destruction, “We know where they are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.” (The Guardian, Whitaker, Brian and Rory McCarthy, 5/30/2003)
11. Mr. President, we need an explanation of the unconfirmed report that your Administration is dishonoring the life of a soldier who died in Iraq as a result of hostile action by misclassifying his death as an accident. (Time, Gibbs, Nancy and Mark Thompson, 7/13/2003)
12. Mr. President, we need to know why your Administration has never told the truth about the costs and long-term commitment of the war, has consistently downplayed what those would be, and now continues to try keep the projected costs hidden from the American people. (Miami Herald, LA Times).
13. Mr. President, we need to know why you said on May 1, 2003 , that the war was over, when US troops have fought and one or two have died nearly every day since then and your generals have admitted that we are fighting a guerrilla war in Iraq. (Abizaid, Gen. John, 7/16/2003)
14. Mr. President, we need to know why your Administration had no plan to build the peace in post-war Iraq and seems to be resisting calls to include NATO, the United Nations and our allies in the stabilization and reconstruction effort. (Miami Herald, LA Times)
15. Mr. President, we need to know what you were referring to in Poland on May 30, 2003, when you said, “For those who say we haven’t found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they’re wrong. We found them.” (The Washington Post, Mike Allen, 5/31/2003)
16. Mr. President, we need to know why you incorrectly claimed this very week that the war began because Iraq would not admit UN inspectors, when in fact Iraq had admitted the inspectors and you opposed extending their work. (The Washington Post, Priest, Dana and Dana Milbank, 7/15/2003)

Sign the petition here!

“I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq,” said Wolfowitz, who is touring the country to meet U.S. troops and Iraqi officials.

How is this adminstration able to say anything with a straight face anymore?

(via Atrios)

Still, [Douglas J. Feith, the No. 3 official at the Pentagon] and other Pentagon officials said, they are studying the lessons of Iraq closely — to ensure that the next U.S. takeover of a foreign country goes more smoothly.

“We’re going to get better over time,” promised Lawrence Di Rita, a special assistant to Rumsfeld. “We’ve always thought of post-hostilities as a phase” distinct from combat, he said. \”The future of war is that these things are going to be much more of a continuum.

“This is the future for the world we’re in at the moment,” he said. “We’ll get better as we do it more often.”

— The final three paragraphs of this LA Times article

(via Atrios)

This is just creepy: David Kelly, the British scientist named as the possible source for some of the disputed Iraq intelligence, has been found dead in the woods.

Accident? Or “accident”? Too soon to tell.

(via Atrios and Kos)