After President Bush’s recent trip to the Middle East, many analysts criticized Bush for failing to live up to his pro-democracy rhetoric. Bush spoke of the importance of freedom in the Middle East, but he praised autocratic Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and didn’t meet with “one Saudi dissident or political activist, much less a democrat.”

Today in Human Rights Watch’s World Report 2008, HRW Executive Director Kenneth Roth argues that Bush’s disingenuous freedom rhetoric has retarded the global spread of democracy. Rather than “support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture” — as Bush promised to do in his second inauguration address– Bush’s policies have convinced “autocrats that mere elections, regardless of the circumstances, are sufficient to warrant the democrat label.”

In a troubling parallel to abusive governments around the world, the US government has embraced democracy promotion as a softer and fuzzier alternative to defending human rights… As such unworthy claimants as the leaders of Egypt, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, and Nigeria wrap themselves in the democracy mantle with scant international objection, the concept of democracy gets cheapened, its human rights component cast aside.

The report also found that the administration’s efforts to rationalize “the invasion of Iraq in terms of democracy promotion,” has also emboldened autocrats “to equate pressure on them to democratize with an imperial, militarist agenda.”

Dictators have learned that conjuring up visions of Iraq can be a useful way to blunt pressure to democratize. And governments that might have defended a more robust vision of democracy are reluctant to do so for fear of being seen as joining the Bush agenda.

Roth argues that “to prevent the appeal of ‘democracy’ from being abused,”there is an “urgent need to reclaim the full meaning of the democratic ideal. Beyond elections, democracies must contain “a meaningful array of political parties, independent media outlets, civil society organizations that give citizens—including minorities—a broad range of opportunities to band together with others to make their voices heard, and a legal system that ensures that no one—and especially no government official—is above the law.” Bush should take note.

Did Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) flip-flop on healthcare? During last night’s fiery debate, Obama claimed that “I never said that we should try to go ahead and get single payer. What I said was that if I were starting from scratch, if we didn’t have a system in which employers had typically provided health care, I would probably go with a single-payer system.”

Today, the Clinton campaign released a 2003 video of Obama in which the senator sounds like a proponent of a single-payer system. “I happen to be a proponent of a single payer universal healthcare coverage… I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world is spending 14%, 14% of its gross national product on healthcare, cannot provide basic healthcare insurance to everybody…. A single payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. And that’s what I’d like to see. And as all of you know, we may not get their immediately.”

Still, it is unclear if Obama ever believed that single-payer was politically feasible. One would have to read a full transcript of his comments; Clinton’s abridged video, which ends in mid-speech, may have cut the nuance. (For the record, the Obama campaign still maintains that he has been consistent. In fact, Obama makes the feasibility argument in a 2007 speech posted on Clinton’s YouTube page.)

But if he did support single-payer, Obama could argue that, like Clinton’s, his views on healthcare have matured. In fact, Clinton openly admits that her current plan is different than her 1994 proposal and even maintains that her ‘evolution’ on healthcare is “invaluable preparation for dealing with the problems in the health care system today.” From the New York Times:

But now, as Mrs. Clinton heads into her re-election campaign and a possible bid for the presidency, she is trying to recast the political disaster of 1994 as something else: as a badge of honor, as a symbol of lessons learned and, perhaps most significant, as invaluable preparation for dealing with the problems in the health care system today…

Mrs. Clinton’s approach to health care is strikingly different this time around, a measure of her evolution from an impatient agent of change to a cautious senator — and potential presidential contender — keenly attuned to the political center.

The consequences of the Bush administration’s stubbornness and political inflexibility should dissuade voters from supporting candidates who are unwilling to adapt their policies to circumstance. In this context, Clinton’s attacks echo the Republican talking points of the 2004 election. The Democrats should stop their bickering and engage in a substantive policy debate about single-payer healthcare.

Talking Points Memo is reporting that Michael Mukasey, President Bush’s nominee for Attorney General, is still refusing to label water boarding illegal, despite indications that the refusal could sink his nomination. From the AP:

President Bush’s nominee for attorney general told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday that he does not know whether waterboarding is illegal. He pledged to study the matter and to reverse any Justice Department finding that endorses a practice that violates the law or the Constitution.

Mukasey should look to history for guidance. According to a 2005 ABC News report, “water boarding was designated as illegal by U.S. generals in Vietnam 40 years ago” and in 1901, during the Spanish-American war.

“The soldier who participated in water torture in January 1968 was court-martialed within one month after the photos appeared in The Washington Post, and he was drummed out of the Army,” recounted Darius Rejali, a political science professor at Reed College.

Earlier in 1901, the United States had taken a similar stand against water boarding during the Spanish-American War when an Army major was sentenced to 10 years of hard labor for water boarding an insurgent in the Philippines.

Similarly, in 1947 “the United States charged a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, with war crimes for carrying out another form of waterboarding on a U.S. civilian. The subject was strapped on a stretcher that was tilted so that his feet were in the air and head near the floor, and small amounts of water were poured over his face, leaving him gasping for air until he agreed to talk.” Asano was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor.

Despite being historically ignorant, Mukasey’s indecision leaves the United States on the wrong side of international law. Just today, a new U.N. report on human rights expressed concern about “enhanced interrogation techniques reportedly used by the CIA,” saying that under international law, “there are no circumstances in which cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment may be justified.”

According to Manfred Nowak, the UN Special Rapporteur on torture, the administration’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” is not without international repercussions.

[Other countries] say why are you criticising us if the US, the most democratic country with the oldest history of human rights, if they are torturing you should first go there. It has a negative effect because the US is a very powerful and important country and many other countries take the US as a model.

Unfortunately, Mukasey’s refusal to outlaw water boarding will continue this trend. As Andrew Sullivan points out: “In seven years, the US has gone from being a beacon of human rights to an enabler and legitimizer of torture in regimes not even Cheney would find savory.”

On Tuesday, fearing that they will be perceived as weak on terror, the Democrats in the House will propose a bill that “would maintain for several years the type of broad, blanket authority for N.S.A. eavesdropping that the administration secured in August for six months.”

The new bill, the RESTORE Act of 2007, clarifies “that no court orders are required for the government to conduct surveillance on communications outside the United States even when the surveillance is conducted on U.S. soil” and “allows the attorney general and the director of national intelligence to request an “umbrella warrant” to conduct surveillance of foreign targets” for up to one year.

The New York Times notes that the new bill does include some oversight provisions:

In an acknowledgment of concerns over civil liberties, the bill would require a more active role by the special foreign intelligence court that oversees the interception of foreign-based communications by the security agency…the House bill would not give retroactive immunity to the telecommunications utilities that participated in the eavesdropping. That has been a top priority of the administration. The temporary measure gave the utilities immunity for future acts, but not past deeds.

The House bill would also require the administration to disclose details of the program. Democrats say they plan to push the administration to turn over internal documents laying out the legal rationale for the program, something the administration has refused to do.

The extension comes on the heals Mike McConnell’s, the Director of National Intelligence, attempts to intimidate Congressional Democrats into extending blanket NSA eavesdropping authority by falsely claiming that “the new expansive FISA legislation passed by Congress prior to the August recess — the so-called Protect America Act — had helped to thwart a an alleged terror plot in Germany.” McConnell, who had previously claimed that “Americans are going to die “if Congress publicly debated wiretapping, later “acknowledged that he lied to the Senate.”

Congressional Democrats should not reward the administration’s scare tactics. Rather than allowing Republicans to frame the debate, the Democrats, recalling the consequences of unchecked surveillance, must demand adequate oversight. For the most part, the public is on their side. According to a AP-Ipsos poll released in January of 2006, when asked:

Should the Bush administration be required to get a warrant from a judge before monitoring phone and internet communications between American citizens in the United States and suspected terrorists, or should the government be allowed to monitor such communications without a warrant?

Fifty-six percent of respondents said “the administration should be required to get a warrant; only 42 percent of those polled said it should proceed without one.” And while the RESTORE Act of 2007, may be an improvement over the August bill, the new legislation “still authorizes the interception of Americans’ international communications without a warrant in far too many instances, and without adequate civil liberties protections.” Americans deserve better.

UPDATE: Glenn Greenwald makes a good point:

It is important here to recall that there is actually an amendment to FISA that is at least arguably justifiable. Even the original FISA law never required warrants in order to eavesdrop on (a) foreign-to-foreign calls or (b) calls involving a U.S. citizen where the target was a non-citizen outside the U.S. (who just happened to call into the U.S.). But recently, technological developments resulted in such calls, even foreign-foreign calls, being routed through the U.S. via fiber optics, and a FISA court ruled this year that the language of FISA requires warrants for such calls.

Even civil libertarian stalwarts such as Russ Feingold agree that it was never the intent of FISA to require warrants for those categories of calls and that amending FISA strictly to fix that problem is justifiable.

UPDATE II: A summary of the RESTORE Act can be found here.

While the Supreme Court delivered many 5-4 decisions last term that dealt blows to women’s rights, the environment, and minority rights, perhaps no decision was more stunningly illogical than that of Ledbetter v Goodyear. Lilly Ledbetter was a manager at a Goodyear Tire plant in Alabama who received smaller pay raises than her male co-workers. After 19 years of discriminatory pay practices, Lebetter was making 15-25% less than her male co-workers — even those with far less experience. In 1999, Ledbetter sued Goodyear for violating Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which allows employees to file suit within 180 days after their employer commits an act of racial or sexual discrimination.

In Ledbetter v Goodyear, the Supreme Court decided that employees may sue employers “within 180 days of the original discriminatory action — not within 180 days of their last paycheck.” However, employees may not even know about the pay discrimination until long after the first discriminatory paycheck is cut. The Supreme Court’s ruling means that if a woman learns 181 days after her first paycheck that she is being paid less than a male co-worker, she cannot sue her employer.

In order to remedy this situation, the House passed the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which treats “each and every discriminatory paycheck as a new discrimination, thus re-starting the 180-day clock” after every paycheck. The Senate version of this bill, the Fair Pay Restoration Act, will be coming to a vote later this month.

Please contact your Senator and tell him or her that you support equal pay for women!

Equal pay for men and women still has a long way to go; women are paid 77 cents for every dollar a man is paid. The Fair Pay Restoration Act will give women the tools they need to get the money that they deserve.

A few weeks ago, the Yale Daily News featured an article announcing the formation of a group of students supporting Rudy Giuliani’s presidential bid on the front page. As a member of Yale for Obama, I was a bit taken aback by what I saw as unfair publicity. Then I remembered the school paper had run a front page story on the Obama group when it formed - nearly six months ago. It’s a telling sign of where students’ support lies in the 2008 election when three months before the first primary, student groups supporting nearly every Democratic candidate - Gravel supporters are taking their time getting off the ground - are up and running, while just one group has formed backing a GOP candidate and they have yet to meet.

One could argue this has less to do with students in general and more to do with students at Yale, where the student body is overwhelmingly liberal. Yet, in a Democracy Corps poll, 61 percent of all young voters said they would likely vote for a Democratic candidate compared to 34 percent who said they’d vote for a Republican; that 27 point lead stretches to 32 points in “battleground” districts. Rock the Vote’s sixth volume of their bimonthly summary of polls examining young voters’ “level of interest in the 2008 elections, political party identification, and preferences for president and Congress in 2008” is filled with more revealing figures. Senators Obama and Clinton continue to be the frontrunners among young voters and still come out on top in head-to-head matchups against Giuliani, the most popular Republican among 18-29 year olds. This is not, as some conservative pundits like John Stossel allege, because young people are uninformed voters who don’t bother to learn about the candidates or the issues. A survey from the Pew Research Center found that Millennials are paying attention to the presidential campaigns and debates as much as the general electorate and at a higher rate than 30-49 year-olds.

It comes as little surprise that young voters are leaning Democratic after earlier polls like the often-cited New York Times/CBS News/MTV poll showed that Millennials lean left. Indeed, young voters’ values are generally better aligned with those of the Democratic candidates than of the Republicans. Poll after poll confirms that young people care about protecting the environment and our civil liberties, about supporting gay and women’s rights and winning back respect for America through a multilateral foreign policy. These values are embraced, with a rare exception here or there, by the Democratic Party and disregarded by Republicans with similar frequency. Perhaps that’s why Democracy Corps also found that young people believe Democrats do a better job than Republicans handling every policy issue, from health care to Iraq to energy independence to the war on terror to managing the budget.

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At work in the Yale Admissions Office today, I spoke with a prospective student about some of my favorite parts of college life. “Every week it seems there’s another prominent figure or great mind speaking on campus,” I said, recalling one week last year when I had a chance to hear Antonin Scalia and Howard Dean. What makes those events so special and such an integral part of a college education is that students have a chance to ask questions that matter to them, not some talking head conducting a television interview.

I still remember seeing John Bolton engage in heated debate with a student who challenged Bolton’s views on international law at a forum my first month on campus. So when I saw the video of a University of Florida student manhandled, tasered and arrested by police for asking Senator John Kerry a series of questions about the 2000 election, the footage hit close to home.

Watch it:

I watched in disgust as Andrew Meyer, 21, was dragged by police through the auditorium and tasered repeatedly after he pleaded, “Don’t tase me!” while Kerry did nothing to intervene. Every time the taser’s shock caused Meyer to shriek, I didn’t just hear a defenseless young man screaming in pain, I saw a fellow student becoming the victim of police brutality and unconstitutional censorship. Sure, Meyer’s rant was getting a little long-winded, but while his verbal diarrhea may have deserved the ire of the audience, it certainly did not justify the violent arrest that prompted one onlooker to shout, “This is Rodney King all over again.”

Obviously an overstatement, but the police’s use of force was undoubtedly unwarranted.The media has flocked to this story because of the shocking footage of campus police attacking one of the students they were hired to protect. But what alarms me and the classmates I spoke with on campus today is the crackdown on students’ free speech rights. You can argue that the police tried to get Meyers off the mic simply because he was hogging the stage too long, but it’s unlikely that they’d have arrested him if he were asking Kerry about the Gators rather than questioning his actions during the election.

Watching the police silence Meyers was particularly worrisome after a summer in which the Supreme Court limited students’ rights in the Bong Hits 4 Jesus case. As David Horowitz and Co. continue their campaign to restrict free exchange of ideas on campus, I can’t help but fear for the future of students’ rights to question authority and express dissenting opinions, exercises that are fundamental both to students discovering what values are important to them and to the vitality of our democracy.

When politicians address college students, they constantly return to the same theme: “Be an active member of your community, be politically engaged and speak up for what you believe.” John Kerry’s lecture at the University of Florida predictably delivered this message. What a shocking disgrace that when Andrew Meyers took Kerry’s advice, he ended up getting electrocuted.

In a new book entitled, Dead Certain, Bush attempted to absolve himself of responsibility for dismantling the Iraqi Military after the 2003 invasion of Iraq — a mistake “widely regarded” to have “stoked rebellion among hundreds of thousands of former Iraqi soldiers.” Bush is quoted “as saying that U.S. policy [in 2003] had been ‘to keep the army intact‘ but that it ‘didn’t happen.’ Bush said further that he “can’t remember” how he reacted to the decision to disband the Army, but added, “I’m sure I said, ‘This is the policy, what happened?’”

Subsequently, former head of the Provisional Authority in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer released an exchange of letters to the New York Times proving Bush had been informed and signed off on his intention to disband the Iraqi military.

Today, in an op-ed in the New York Times entitled, “How I Didn’t Dismantle Iraq’s Army,” Bremer goes further. He attempts to absolve himself — as the senior-most civilian leader in Iraq at the time — of nearly all responsibility for the disbanding of the Iraqi Army. Instead, he blames the Defense Department, the State Department and, most ironically, the other post-war Iraq calamity: widespread, unchecked looting. He writes, “to recall the former army was a practical impossibility because postwar looting had destroyed all the bases.”

Previously, Bremer blamed the “horrid” post-war looting on low troop levels. While in Iraq, however, Bremer repeatedly affirmed that troop levels were “adequate” enough to provide needed security.

And while Bremer attempts to shirk responsibility for the part he played in failing to stabilize post-war Iraq, former Secretary of State Madeline Albright looks for solutions. She argues in the Washington Post that the U.S. must stop pointing fingers and finally admit that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was misguided and ill-concieved:

The president is beseeching us to fear failure, but he has yet to explain how our military can succeed given Iraq’s tangled politics and his administration’s lack of credibility. …

President Bush could do his part by admitting what the world knows — that many prewar criticisms of the invasion were on target. Such an admission would be just the shock a serious diplomatic project would need. …

A coordinated international effort could help Iraq by patrolling borders, aiding reconstruction, further training its army and police, and strengthening legislative and judicial institutions. It could also send a unified message to Iraq’s sectarian leaders that a political power-sharing arrangement that recognizes majority rule and protects minority rights is the only solution and is also attainable.

Robert Greenwald, producer of Outfoxed, Iraq for Sale, and other outstanding progressive movies, is now working on a movie about Rudy Giuliani. On a promotional website for the film, Greenwald asks visitors to vote for Rudy’s Biggest Mistake. Watch the video.

Unfortunately, the video fails to mention aspects of Giuliani’s record that are much worse than a love for lipstick, wigs, and marrying close relatives. Giuliani has a troubling record on one of the most important issues the next president will face: the war in Iraq. Giuliani resigned from his position on the Iraq Study Group after he failed to attend a single meeting of the ISG. His absences from the ISG meetings were due to lucrative speaking engagements that ” garnered him $11.4 million in 14 months.” Giuliani’s lack of interest in or knowledge about Iraq is reflected in his misguided Iraq plan. He does not support any time-table for withdrawal and would actually support a further escalation of troops.

Hopefully, the full movie will include more about Giuliani’s policy than his personal life. Instead of focusing on Giuliani’s estranged children, the usually impressive Greenwald should be focusing on Giuliani’s estrangement from the 70% of Americans who disapprove of the war in Iraq.