Today, when President Bush proposed a $145 billion economic aid package, he “called again for Congress to make permanent the tax cuts that were enacted several years ago and are to expire in the next three years.”

Passing a new growth package is our most pressing economic priority. When that is done, Congress must turn to the most important economic priority for our country, and that’s making sure the tax relief that is now in place is not taken away…So it’s critical that Congress make this tax relief permanent.

Bush’s cynical attempt to seize the current economic downturn and press Congress to make his tax cuts permanent was recently rebuffed by Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke. As Kevin Drum pointed out, extending Bush’s tax cuts wold have “no effect on the economy right now, but it would likely make future economic problems even more intractable.”

Bernanke is saying, as clearly as he can, that a temporary economic downturn shouldn’t be used as a cynical excuse to pass new long-term tax cuts or to make existing tax cuts permanent. Not only would that have no effect on the economy right now, but it would likely make future economic problems even more intractable. In other words, Bernanke isn’t nuts: he thinks tax cuts reduce revenue and make long-term deficits worse.

According to the Washington Post, “Bernanke explicitly and repeatedly urged Congress not to conflate policy changes that might make sense in the long run with those that would provide immediate help for the economy.”

In an interview with Beliefnet.com, former Arkansas governor and Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee “clarified his view that the Constitution should be amended to be brought in line with God’s will — and he directly equated homosexuality with bestiality.”

QUESTIONER: Is it your goal to bring the Constitution into strict conformity with the Bible? Some people would consider that a kind of dangerous undertaking, particularly given the variety of biblical interpretations.

HUCKABEE: Well, I don’t think that’s a radical view to say we’re going to affirm marriage. I think the radical view is to say that we’re going to change the definition of marriage so that it can mean two men, two women, a man and three women, a man and a child, a man and animal. Again, once we change the definition, the door is open to change it again. I think the radical position is to make a change in what’s been historic.

At first glance, Huckabee’s argument sounds homophobic, on closer examination it betrays the former governor’s willingness to place his private religious creed above rational decision making– the very basis of a secular democracy– and a personal inability (or unwillingness) to make logical and rational distinctions within law.

As Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick points out, polygamy, pedophilia, and bestiality “are illegal because, [unlike gay marriage], they cause irreversible harms.”

…there are sound policy and health reasons to ban sex with animals…one can plausibly argue that there is a rational basis for states to ban polygamous and polyamorous marriages in which there has been historical evidence of an imbalance of power, coercion (particularly of young girls), and an enormous financial burden placed on the state. None of these arguments can be made against gay marriage.

Similarly, Andrew Sullivan highlights the importance of distinguishing between rational decision making and Huckabee-style hysteria.

The precise challenge for morally serious people is to make rational distinctions between what is arbitrary and what is essential in important social institutions…If you want to argue that a lifetime of loving, faithful commitment between two women is equivalent to incest or child abuse, then please argue it. It would make for fascinating reading. But spare us this bizarre point that no new line can be drawn in access to marriage–or else everything is up for grabs and, before we know where we are, men will be marrying their dogs. It is intellectually laughable.

Huckabee’s demeaning and intellectually dishonest answer trivializes, patronizes and demeans homosexual relationships and reveals that the governor is more than willing to insert his personal religious interpretation into government. More alarming still, is his inability to make the obvious distinctions between gay marriage (a union between two consenting adult men or two consenting adult women) and a union between “a man and three women, a man and a child, a man and animal.”

Because Huckabee is unable to make the kinds of rational distinctions necessary to govern America, he is unfit for office.

In his second inauguration address, President Bush committed the United States to spreading democracy and freedom throughout the world.

It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture…Today, America speaks anew to the peoples of the world: All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you.

And while Bush spoke of the importance of freedom in the Middle East during his recent eight-day tour of the region, he nevertheless excused political “oppressors” in a failed attempt to win greater backing for a Middle East peace deal and convince America’s Persian Gulf allies to isolate Iran. The president even awarded Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait, all of which received a “not free” or “partly free” rating from a recently released Freedom House report, with a $20 billion arms deal and avoided publicly criticizing the regimes’ poor political rights and civil liberties records.

But Bush saved the bulk of his admiration for Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, “an autocratic leader in power since late 1981.”

President Bush lavished praise on President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt on Wednesday, emphasizing the country’s role in regional security and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process while publicly avoiding mention of the government’s actions in jailing or exiling opposition leaders and its severe restrictions on opposition political activities.

Bush’s praise, like the arms deal, undermines his lofty inaugural rhetoric. According to the Freedom in the World 2008 Report, “Egypt received a downward trend arrow due to the security forces’ ruthless suppression of political dissent.”

President Hosni Mubarak postponed municipal elections, fearing a large showing by the Muslim Brotherhood, and extended the 25-year-old Emergency Law despite earlier pledges that it would be replaced with specific antiterrorism legislation. Security services ruthlessly suppressed dissent by political activists who protested the government’s reversals. Extremely limited reforms related to judicial independence and press freedom were enacted for the sole purpose of deflecting criticism and consolidating state control.

As Newsweek’s Michael Hirsh wrote of Bush’s rhetoric,  “Don’t plan a major democracy speech when you know you’re not going to act on it, with not even a symbolic move of any kind to accompany it. There’s a word for this kind of thing. It’s called hypocrisy.”

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.”

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.”

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.

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.”

After tonight’s Democratic presidential debate in Philadelphia, MSNBC analyst and Newsweek editor Howard Fineman, who has previously claimed that American voters find male candidates “reassuring,” observed:

Hillary glaring at these other guys, I thought that was significant.

For a presidential candidate to be frustrated by political attacks is certainly not unusual. But unfortunately, rather than comment on the substantive differences between the Democratic contenders, the mainstream media remains obsessed with superficial appraisals of body language and fashion. 

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.”