House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has announced that the Democrats will send President Bush $50 billion (about a quarter of the $196 billion requested by Bush) for combat operations in Iraq “on the condition that he begin withdrawing troops from Iraq.” The House proposal would set a goal of “ending combat entirely by December 2008″ and would require that troops spend as much time at home as they do in combat, as well as effectively ban harsh interrogation techniques like waterboarding.”

In a private caucus meeting Pelosi told Democrats that the bill “was their best shot at challenging Bush on the war. And if Bush rejected it, she said, she did not intend on sending him another war spending bill for the rest of the year.” Responding to the proposed legislation, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) has called Pelosi’s plan “backward and irresponsible.”

As long as we’re continuing to have success, as long as our soldiers are continuing to move out of harm’s way and have Iraqis more out front, I think that the Congress of the United States will not put these kind of handcuffs on our generals or on our troops.

The only thing that’s “backward and irresponsible” is Boehner’s rhetoric. While violence may have slightly decreased, 2007 has become the deadliest year for American forces in Iraq, the Iraqi government has made no progress towards national political reconciliation, Iraq’s reconstruction efforts have stalled, and “the number of Iraqis killed in insurgent and sectarian attacks rose in October.

Most Americans don’t agree with Boehner’s rose-colored assessment of “continuing” success in Iraq. While 63 percent of Americans believe that the U.S. effort to bring stability to Iraq is going “somewhat badly” or “very badly”, 60 percent of Americans, an all time high, now favor withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq.

Views on progress are unchanged from early September, and they haven’t been positive since December 2005, shortly after the Iraqi elections. […]

All told, 63 percent say the war was not worth fighting, almost exactly its average this year, and a majority, steadily since December 2004. Intensity against the war continues to run high, with 51 percent saying they feel “strongly” that it was not worth fighting, more than double its strong supporters.

In fact, “most Americans do not believe Congress has gone far enough in opposing the war” and 66 percent want Congress to “reduce somewhat” or “reduce sharply” President Bush’s $196 billion request for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ironically, while the Democrats are responding to the wishes of the American people, the self-proclaimed propagators of democracy in Iraq are ignoring the public’s overwhelming desire for a policy change.

Calling criticism of his son “grossly unfair,” President George H. W. Bush attacked critics of President Bush’s Iraq policy.

“Do they want to bring back Saddam Hussein, these critics?” the elder Bush told USA TODAY in a rare interview. “Do they want to go back to the status quo ante? I don’t know what they are talking about here. Do they think life would be better in the Middle East if Saddam were still there?”

In reality, critics of Bush’s policies are “talking about” the repeated, foreseeable and avoidable failures of his Iraq war policies. The war has undermined American security, underfunded national priorities, and increased the threat of terrorism. Rather than “go back to the status quo ante,” progressives have called for a new direction in Iraq and proposed numerous strategies to bring our troops home and stabilize the region. Unfortunately, the former President Bush would rather lash out at straw men than engage the actual criticisms of “these critics.”

UPDATE: ThinkProgress points out that “Bush Sr. has offered the most cogent explanations for why regime change was a poor strategic decision.”

In an article describing MSNBC’s supposed ‘left-leaning’ programming tilt, the New York Times suggests that despite courting controversial talk show host Rosie O’Donnell to host a prime time show, business considerations could preclude General Electric, MSNBC’s parent company, from moving ‘too far’ left.

Having a prime-time lineup that tilts ever more demonstrably to the left could be risky for General Electric, MSNBC’s parent company, which is subject to legislation and regulation far afield of the cable landscape.

This isn’t the first time General Electric has allowed business interests to influence programming. In February 2003, “MSNBC canceled Phil Donahue’s talkshow after an internal memo argued that he would be a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war.”

He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration’s motives.” The report warned that the Donahue show could be “a home for the liberal anti-war agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.”

In October 2004, Donahue revealed that MSNBC executives required the show “have two conservatives on for every liberal. I [Donahue] was counted as two liberals.”

On November 3rd, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, who last year admitted that “the idea of trying to cast blame on Clinton [for the 9/11 attacks] is just wrong,” suggested that President Bill Clinton’s cuts to military and intelligence budgets during the 1990s left the country unprepared for a terror attack.

“And now as I said, I don’t pretend that he (Clinton) could predict September the 11th. People are not prophets, even presidents,” said Giuliani. “But he did have his head in the sand. He was cutting those military budgets and intelligence budgets while Islamic terrorists were killing Americans.”

In reality, “the Clinton administration poured more than a billion dollars into counterterrorism activities across the entire spectrum of the intelligence community, into the protection of critical infrastructure, into massive federal stockpiling of antidotes and vaccines to prepare for a possible bioterror attack, into a reorganization of the intelligence community itself.” Here is more:

- From 1993 to 2001, the proposed budget of the National Foreign Intelligence Program – which funds the departments and agencies that make up the national intelligence community – rose by 20 percent.”

- Between 1996 and 2000, “the budget of the Counter-Terrorism Center – which seeks to anticipate and prevent terrorist attacks – doubled.”

- According to the New York Times, “the FBI’s counterterrorism budget increased annually between 1999 and 2001 by an average of 14.5 percent.”

- In 1997, former CIA Director George Tenet said: “We have spent the last seven years rebuilding our clandestine service. As Director of Central Intelligence, this has been my highest priority.”

Moreover, as the Body Politik’s Jordan Grossman pointed out in June, “a June 1995 Presidential Decision Directive issued by Clinton for the first time emphasized concern about terrorism “as a national security issue,” not just a matter of law enforcement.”

Clinton’s directive declared that the United States saw “terrorism as a potential threat to national security as well as a criminal act and will apply all appropriate means to combat it.” For the last three years of his presidency, Clinton “raised the issue of terrorism in virtually every important speech he gave.”

Ironically, Giuliani admitted that it was he who had “his head in the sand” about the threat of terrorism before 9/11. According to Wayne Barrett, a reporter for New York’s Village Voice and author of Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11, leaked memos describing Giuliani’s private testimony before the 9/11 Commission suggest that he knew nothing about Al Qaeda.

Giuliani acknowledged that even though he had received information on threats between 1998 and 2001, “At the time I had no idea it was al Qaeda.” He further told the commission that after 9/11, “we brought in people to brief us on al Qaeda. … We had nothing like this pre 9/11, which was a mistake.”

This Sunday, after Pakastani President Pervez Musharraf “imposed emergency rule and suspended the constitution in a bid to save his job,” an adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice “saw a silver lining in the rapid turn of events”

“Thank heavens for small favors,” the official said. Compared to Pakistan, “Iraq looks pretty good.”

In reality, Musharraf’s “crackdown on the political opposition, the media and the courts” is no ’small favor,’ and the situation in Iraq is a mess. Manan Ahmed of Global Affairs blog suggests that the ’small favor’ of Pakistani chaos was partly the result of President Bush’s failed foreign policy.

Pakistan needed our help a year ago. It needed a genuine push for democratic processes back in March. We left unchecked, and unhindered, a megalomaniac “enlightened moderator”. We keep insisting on our own interests ahead of the interests of the people of Pakistan. We remain steadfast in our belief that those people are not as developed nor as functional as we would like them to be. Pakistan needs a strong dictator. The fallacy … the gross oversight … has always been that he was never in control.

Meanwhile, in Iraq, while violence may have slightly decreased, the Iraqi government has made no progress towards national political reconciliation, Iraq’s reconstruction efforts have stalled, and “the number of Iraqis killed in insurgent and sectarian attacks rose in October.” As ThinkProgress pointed out, “this recent reduction in violence should be taken with a grain of salt, as it coincides with increased sectarian cleansing and a massive refugee displacement.”

According to a recent Pew Research Center for the People & the Press survey, 51 percent of Americans believe that the war in Iraq is going “not too well” or “not at all well.” Unfortunately, the Bush administration is more concerned with perceptions, than dealing with its significant, repeated, and avoidable foreign policy blunders.

On Thursday, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) returned to her all-female alma mater, Wellesley College, “after being buffeted by male Democratic rivals” in Wednesday’s Democratic Presidential Debate in Philadelphia. At Wellesley, Clinton launched her new youth initiative, Hillblazers, and reminisced on how her days as a “student activist at Wellesley College in the 1960s had helped pave her path to a White House bid.”

Patti Solis Doyle, Clinton’s campaign manager, described Clinton as “one strong woman” and observed that “on that stage in Philadelphia, we saw six against one” as Clinton’s “opponents tried a whole host of attacks on Hillary.” Clinton stressed the importance of her alma mater:

In so many ways, this all-women’s college prepared me to compete in the all-boys club of presidential politics.

But unfortunately, Clinton’s great pride in Wellesley women was not reflected in the students who stood on the stage behind her. Male students from surrounding schools were imported, while Wellesley students active in the Clinton campaign and the College Democrats were denied seats on stage.

If Clinton believes that Wellesley prepared her for the tough battles against sexism, why were Y chromosomes featured so prominently behind her at Thursday’s event?

Editor’s note: Ona Keller is the co-president of the Wellesley College Democrats.

On Wednesday, Fox News’ Sean Hannity argued that Halloween was a “liberal holiday” because “we’re teaching kids to knock on other people’s doors and ask for a handout.” From Media Matters:

On the October 31 edition of Fox News’ Hannity & Colmes, co-host Sean Hannity claimed that “Halloween is a liberal holiday” and “is teaching our kids to be liberals.” Hannity explained that “we’re teaching kids to knock on other people’s doors and ask for a handout.” Co-host Alan Colmes responded by asking if that meant that Christmas is a “liberal holiday.” Colmes asserted that Halloween represents “the act of giving,” and asked: “Isn’t that a Christian thing, to give, to share with your community?” Hannity replied: “Not to teach your kids to beg for a handout.” [Watch the video here.]

But on the September 9, 2007 edition of Fox News’ Hannity’s America, Hannity made the opposite argument. A little more than a month ago, Hannity argued that in their quest to ’secularize America,’ liberals wanted to “get rid” of Halloween.

There’s a lot to learn from liberal Massachusetts, the bluest of blue states, in terms of it’s not working in terms of helping economic activity for poor Americans or the poor people of Massachusetts. So it’s failing in that respect. Poverty is growing there for people.

But also a lot of what happens in Massachusetts when you start with it’s no longer a Christmas tree it’s a Hollywood tree get rid of Valentine’s Day and Halloween is removed, et cetera. We wish you a Merry Christmas to we wish you a swinging holiday. I don’t know how to quite take that.

While “thirteen million toys have been recalled in the last two months due to unsafe levels of lead,” Nancy Nord, the head of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) — the agency responsible for protecting Americans from faulty products– has “taken dozens of trips at the expense of the toy, appliance and children’s furniture industries” and other industries regulated by the CPSC.

“This is a blatant violation of the ethics code,” said Craig Holman, an expert on governmental ethics law for the nonprofit consumer advocacy group Public Citizen. The rules allow nonfederal sources to pay for trips, “but not if you’re a private party with business pending before the agency,” he said.

Rather than regulate industry, Nancy Nord has allowed herself to be coddled by it. The agency, operating under a “budget [that] is half of what it was in the 1970s,” has resorted to encouraging businesses to voluntarily recall lead-laced products and currently employs “exactly one full-time toy inspector and only 15 inspectors who oversee all of the imports under the agency’s jurisdiction — a $614 billion market.”

While President Bush’s FY 2008 budget proposal cuts CPSC’s funding and reduces the number of staff from 420 to 401, Nord has resisted Congressional proposals to expand the CPSC. Calling such efforts “unnecessarily burdensome,” Nord sent two letters to Congress opposing legislation to double CPSC’s budget to $141 million, increase its staff by 20 percent, “require pre-market testing for children’s products,”protect industry whistle-blowers and help prosecute companies that violate safety regulations.”

Earlier this week, the Campaign for America’s Future, House speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senator Sherrod Brown and Congresswoman Rosa DeLaura called for Nord to step down. Pelosi:

Any commission chair who [says] … we don’t need any more authority or any more resources to do our job, does not understand the gravity of the situation. I call on the president of the United States to ask for the resignation.

UPDATE: But as Steve Benen points out, House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel put it best: “Now we know why Nancy Nord opposes efforts to give the Consumer Product Safety Commission more resources: Who needs more resources when the industries you regulate will pay your expenses for you? After taking dozens of trips on the industry dime, it is now time for Mrs. Nord to take a permanent vacation from her post.”