In his interview with Der Spiegel, that part that really got my attention was not the implicit endorsement for Obama's 16-month timeframe, but a comment that directly slams McCain, the whole Republican Party, the pro-occupation faction and their media enablers.  So far I have not seen this comment addressed in the mass media.  Surprise, surprise.

I'm referring to the response after the one about the 16 months.  After he said 16 months would be the right timeframe for withdrawal, der Spiegel continued,

SPIEGEL: Is this an endorsement for the US presidential election in November? Does Obama, who has no military background, ultimately have a better understanding of Iraq than war hero John McCain?

Maliki: Those who operate on the premise of short time periods in Iraq today are being more realistic.

[emphasis mine]

Remind me again who's talking about short time periods again?  Oh yeah...

Right this very minute. Every commercial that airs, every T-shirt and mailer printed, every minute every paid staffer works, every copy they make at every campaign office.  He can do this openly and with impunity because the Federal Election Commission has been rendered inoperable by the current Republican administration.

This is the most glaring and salient fact about the state of public financing of the presidential election right now, and should be a prominent part of every article written about Barack Obama's decision to opt out of public financing.

But it's somehow nowhere to be found in discussions in the old media.  Why?  Because it's too complicated for Joe Sixpack to follow?  Nonsense.  Let me explain it with a simple dialogue.

Hey, let's make a deal you and me.  Let's commit to only spending $100 a month on gas from now until the end of the year...

hey this is zeke, reporting LIVE! from the escher hilton in rye town, new york.

many props to swordsmith for putting together this dKos meet & greet at the con.

after a ong hard day of flaming about topics like the ethicality of settling mars, or whether the scientific revolution could have started in the 14th century, or the impact of magic on societal structure...

some of us decided to kick back and flame about, you guessed, it politics.

join the discussion.

(Non-candidate edition)

This is a placeholder for liveblogging in comments of the Democratic Caucus coverage, via C-SPAN. Video is live from Theodore Roosevelt High School in Des Moines.

Comments should focus on what's happening at the caucus they're covering on C-SPAN 1.

No pictures.

If someone wants to do the Republicant caucus, go for it with another diary.

From 7 PM on CSPAN has been broadcasting the coverage from local station KCCI. As of 7:30 they are interviewing a caucus leader.

Just started the live coverage.

Veto?  Bring it on.

In Chapter 3 of the Tao Te Ching the sage advises:

For those who practice not-doing,
everything will fall into place.

If only we had some Democrats in Congress who could learn the way of the Tao in the face of a Presidential veto.  If they did, they'd realize that they're sitting pretty right now, they hold all the cards.

Instead they think they have to "do something" like try to override the veto, or go crawling to a 29%-approval president.  Or send another bill.  Let me explain why all of those options are foolish, and why doing absolutely nothing is both ethically correct and a big political winner.

Note:  I ripped the Lao Tzu epigraph off from this post at My Left Nutmeg, Hey Congress: Time To Sit On Your Hands.  Read the whole thing.

This diary for liveblogging the dKos Meet&Greet at Lunacon 50 as advertised by Swordsmith.

It's a dark & stormy night (to quote an old, old SF writer) here at the M.C. Escher Hilton in Rye Town, New York, deep in darkest Westchester County.

Did anyone else see some of the things I did during the broadcast?

One bizarre thing I noticed was at least two instances where the video subtly faded from one frame to another.  If I had been watching it on a webcast, I would have said it was a buffering error.  The first one I thought I was imagining it, but the second one was clear, if subtle.  That one came, IIRC just a couple minutes before the "lookit these people in the gallery I brought in as props" segment.

He was saying something along the lines of "...and Congress fff... fun... [SPLICE] funded the program..." Visually it was obvious because there was a slight shift in Pelosi's image as she was sitting down, it faded from one position to another, as if the video had shifted a couple seconds forward.  Is that possible?  Could the network have had the president on a 7-second delay or something?

The 110th Congress will open tomorrow.  The first order of business will be organization, including any challenges to whether members are seated.  As you know by now, one of those questions is the results of FL-13, where touchscreen voting machines mysteriously made 18,000 votes from the Democratic part of the district disappear.

If we want to have House Democrats stand up for the integrity of elections in the most egregious case we've seen so far, we have to make ourselves heard, and this afternoon is our last chance to do so.  Tomorrow they'll already be in session, and by the time they get your message whatever is going to happen may well be over.

A procedural move is planned to keep options open, but I think we should push for something stronger: declaring the FL-13 seat vacant.  If nothing else we set the bit with Congress that what happened in FL-13 is simply unacceptable to voters.

What I want you to do:  Contact your representative and the rest from your state, both Republican and Democrat.  (If you're from a really big state like NY, just get the closest 5.)

More info and links on how to do this and what to discuss on the flip...

Welcome to the last workweek before the holidays, Kossacks. Many of us will be working right up through Friday, maybe even late, to wrap up some important projects.  Don't bother. You can slack off completely the next two weeks by looking to a paragon of modern management, the leader of the free world himself, George W. Bush.

People have been asking why bush is waiting until January to release his new "plan" for Iraq.  My theory was stalling for more favorable PR timing, a la "You don't release a new product in August."  But now that it's Monday, and Christmas is only a week away, it became much clearer to me.  In most workplaces around the country pretty much nothing is going to get done this week, because for many people a week-long holiday is coming up, and then the end of the year.  January seems like a good time to start things up again, so why bother with wrapping up any loose ends now, at the end of December?

I guarantee that's what your office-mates are thinking.  Just look around.  So if you're still working on something, like a chump, I'll tell you how to take a cue from our president and make your life easier and happier this week...

Brooks claims that we're a bunch of rabid sheep, or fodder for loose cannons, or agents for his arch-nemesis, Barbra Streisand, or... I don't know, I can't keep up with all the oxymoronic descriptions of This Thing of Ours that are spewing forth from the Right Wing Hate Noise Machine.

But these two letters - I was almost tempted to black out the names of the candidates to see if you could tell.  They tell the opposite story of the fable Brooks is spinning.

This the new non-answer answer to the question of whether Joe is planning to do a spoiler run to deny Democrats his Senate seat if he doesn't get his way in August.

All day today I've been hopping mad about the revelation that up to 200 million loyal Americans are being spied on by the NSA as terrorist sympathizers. I thought I'd like to get my Senator's opinion on that.

Then I realized I hadn't asked him directly about his threat to run as an Independent, something which concerns me greatly right now as a convention delegate.

And since we're talking about rational discourse, I'm picking a piece from their Op-Ed page today that illustrates one of the classic logical fallacies: the red herring.

SHORTLY after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush ordered surveillance of international telephone communications by suspected members of Al Qaeda overseas, even if such calls also involved individuals within the United States... Judicial warrants for this surveillance were neither sought nor obtained... The program's existence has now become public, and howls of outrage have ensued. But in fact, the only thing outrageous about this policy is the outrage itself.

The president has the constitutional authority to acquire foreign intelligence without a warrant or any other type of judicial blessing. The courts have acknowledged this authority, and numerous administrations, both Republican and Democrat, have espoused the same view.

Did you spot the red herring?

And even if you're not celebrating Christmas today, it's something you can do on the way to the annual Chinese-food-and-movie observance.  In fact it's a great thing to do at the Chinese restaurant, or the movie theater, or the Native American Casino for that matter.

Because whether you're eating Christmas turkey or Peking Duck, we all know that there's a certain President whose goose needs to be cooked for his continued antipathy toward American values.

All I'm asking is that you spread the word.  And that word is IMPEACH

(impeachment carols and saint nicholas tie-in on the flip)

...the lesson continues...

The best thing Patrick Fitzgerald could do for his country is get out of Washington, return to Chicago and prosecute some real criminals.

I was wrong.  It only gets stupider.

As it is, all he has done so far is send Judith Miller of the New York Times to jail and repeatedly haul this or that administration high official before a grand jury, investigating a crime that probably wasn't one in the first place...

Our "amplified" version includes the president's stray thoughts as he made this historic address.

Since the day President Ronald Reagan set out the vision for this endowment, the world has seen the swiftest advance of democratic institutions in history. And Americans are proud to have played our role in this great story.

Our nation stood guard on tense borders. We spoke for the rights of dissidents and the hopes of exiles. We aided the rise of new democracies on the ruins of tyranny.

so honing "the message" if we ever figure out what it is, doesn't get us very far.  and showing "spine" when it's merely talk or even voting choices we know won't prevail doesn't do a whole lot except for activists and political junkies.

the reason americans aren't switching over to trusting us in droves as they wake up the the stench of corruption from the right is simple:  they don't trust us either.

the only way to fix that is to start doing things...

WOLF: In a stunning development here in Washington, President Bush has just announced that he will be assuming command of the entire executive branch of the federal government. Here's the announcement, just minutes ago.

BUSH: My decision earlier today to assume limited responsibility for possible oversights in the federal disaster of Hurricane Katrina - any possible federal response to the hurricane - has been proven enormously effective.  And so we've decided to do more for the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.

See, you have all these agencies and departments running around here in Washington, with their bureaucracies and career professionals and stuff.  What is really needed in this time of crisis is someone to exercise authority over all these different agencies.

To the extent that more could be done to cordurate- coordinate the activities of all the many agencies and cabinet departments, I am taking command of the functions of the exacta- the executive branch, exect- effective immediately.