Blogs: Real Security

Every Friday in our Weekend Watchdog feature, we post suggested questions for scheduled Sunday guests. You can add your own questions in the comment thread. We'll also include contact information for the shows, so we can let them know what their viewers want asked.

And on Sunday at 4 PM ET, tune in to Air America Radio's "Seder on Sundays" program, where I'll offer the Weekend Watchdog Wrap-Up.

We're still waiting on the Sunday shows to announce their guest lineups before posting our suggested questions. And who they book can be quite telling.

Will they book any environmental advocates to respond to Bush's "greenwash" global warming proposal?

After the release of Sen. Barack Obama's health care plan, will they have folks who can have an informative discussion about how to achieve universal health care, or will they focus on tax increases without mentioning what those taxes would pay for?

Will they have anyone who can knowledgeably react to Bush's comparison of Iraq to Korea -- where US troops are still present after 50 years?

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Once again, the Sunday shows strike out on Weekend Watchdog.

Despite widespread disappointment at Congress' capitulation to the White House on Iraq, Sen. Carl Levin was not asked on Face The Nation about his prominent role -- publicly caving in to President's Bush demands even before the veto was issued.

Despite a Sunday Boston Globe expose on how the leading Republican candidates continue to inaccurately connect Iraq to Osama bin Laden in painting a oversimplified "worldwide war" picture, '08 hopeful Mike Huckabee was not asked on Fox News Sunday about his claim that "we are in the midst of a World War III."

And despite one of ABC's own guest pundits last week calling out Washington for ignoring the underlying cause of illegal immigration -- "no attention to economic development assistance to Mexico or Central America" -- ABC's This Week failed to bring it up with Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez.

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Every Friday in our Weekend Watchdog feature, we post suggested questions for scheduled Sunday guests. You can add your own questions in the comment thread. We'll also include contact information for the shows, so we can let them know what their viewers want asked.

And on Sunday at 4 PM ET, tune in to Air America Radio's "Seder on Sundays" program, where I'll offer the Weekend Watchdog Wrap-Up.

For Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich. (CBS' Face The Nation): Three weeks before Bush's veto of the Iraq bill, you offered an early concession, saying you would certainly remove any timetable for withdrawal if Bush demanded it.

Did conceding to Bush so early damage your ability to put public pressure on wavering senators and challenge the White House's Iraq strategy?

For Mike Huckabee (Fox News Sunday): You have said that "we are in the midst of a World War III." Isn't that the kind of oversimplified worldview, casually lumping Al Qaeda in with Iran and Syria, that President Bush did to take the country to war in Iraq?

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Congress has just voted to fund the war for another year — $100 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan.
How could that happen when two-thirds of the public are opposed to the war and the Democrats just gained the majority of both houses in the Congress with a mandate to bring it to a close?

Curbing a rogue president intent on sustaining a failed war is not easy. Public opposition is not enough. The mandate of the 2006 elections is not enough. A slim Democratic majority in both houses of Congress is not enough. Daily evidence of the deepening debacle is not enough. more »

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In one of Sen. Harry Reid’s first radio addresses after the Democratic victories in November 2006, he said the new majority’s first guiding legislative principle was “bipartisanship”; Democrats “intend to reach out to President Bush and our Republican colleagues in Congress.” The Democrats’ last guiding principle would be “results,” because “it's time Democrats and Republicans worked together to achieve results.”

Four months into the new Congress, how’s that game plan working out? more »

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President Bush forced Democrats to “fold,” the press reports. He vetoed the Iraq funding bill that set a deadline for getting U.S. troops out of the war. The Republican minority blocked any effort to overturn the veto. Now Congress is about to vote on a funding bill the president will accept, one that doesn’t offer a path out of the mess. Bush wins, the Republicans exult, the Democrats “flinch.”

But this isn’t poker. This is life and death. more »

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Stop it, stop it right now. Stop pretending Islamicists—or environmentalists or animal rights activists (which are, ridiculously, federal law enforcement and non-governmental terrorism-watchers' next most obsessive concern)—are the only imminent terrorist threats to our nation. We now know that students at Liberty University were ready to use homemade bombs against protesters at Jerry Falwell's funeral. One of the suspects is a soldier at Fort Benning. (Falwell had given the suspect a scholarship.)

If the media does not start connecting some dots, they will have abdicated their citizenzship duties. How many times has the nation potentially come within a hair's breadth of suffering a right-wing terrorist attack this spring? As of today, three, or possibly six times—at least that we know about.

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Once again, the Sunday shows go 0 for 3 on our Weekend Watchdog questions. Here's the questions we were hoping to get answered.

• For Newt Gingrich (NBC's Meet The Press): You're one of the intellectual architects of the current foreign policy strategy in the Gulf, and President Bush is following your advice on Iraq by naming a "war czar."

Yet in May 1999 during the NATO campaign in Kosovo, you said that:

...the elite news media, the liberal academic elite, the liberal political elite: I accuse you in Littleton, and I accuse you in Kosovo, of being afraid to talk about the mess you have made, and being afraid to take responsibility for the things that you have done, and instead foisting on the rest of us pathetic banalities because you don't have the courage to look at the world you have created...

...I don't know why none of the Joints Chiefs have resigned because this campaign is a violation of every rule I know of in how you design a campaign...

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UPDATE: Listen to the Weekend Watchdog segment from yesterday's "Seder on Sundays" Air America Radio show.

Once again, the Sunday shows go 0 for 3 on our Weekend Watchdog questions.

On NBC's Meet The Press, die-hard Iraq war supporter Newt Gingrich was not asked about his 1999 speech that called for the "liberal political elite" to take "responsibility" for the "mess" in Kosovo that made America look like a "violent, helpless, pathetic country."

Not being pressed to take any responsibility for the mess in Iraq, he was able to articulate his flawed, dark view that we are currently in a "worldwide war" -- an attempt to set the stage for an expanded war beyond Iraq's borders -- without being challenged on his foreign policy inconsistencies. more »

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Every Friday in our Weekend Watchdog feature, we post suggested questions for scheduled Sunday guests. You can add your own questions in the comment thread. We'll also include contact information for the shows, so we can let them know what their viewers want asked.

And on Sunday at 4 PM ET, tune in to Air America Radio's "Seder on Sundays" program, where I'll offer the Weekend Watchdog Wrap-Up.

For Newt Gingrich (NBC's Meet The Press): You're one of the intellectual architects of the current foreign policy strategy in the Gulf, and President Bush is following your advice on Iraq by naming a "war czar."

Yet in May 1999 during the NATO campaign in Kosovo, you said that:

More »»