...Senator Kit Bond: The Constitution says nothing of the subject of filibuster and it says nothing of the power of a minority to defeat the president's judicial nomination....
....It is the product of a rule of the Senate, passed many years after the ratification of the Constitution. This rule does not derive from the authority of the Constitution....
"...This rule does not derive from the authority of the Constitution...."
...Each House may determine the rules of its proceedings, punish its members for disorderly behavior, and, with the concurrence of two thirds, expel a member....
At Thursday's White House press briefing Robert Gibbs took a question about Senator Kit Bond's (r) continuing temper tantrum over briefings concerning the underwear bomber. The White House is not curling up in the corner and saying, "Please. Don't. Hurt. Me." on this one:
....Q Senator Bond accused the White House of using JohnmBrennan for political purposes, saying that he was being -- doing the role, your role. This economic report --
MR. GIBBS: Let me just address that. Let's understand this: John Brennan has been working in counterterrorism for more than 25 years -- right? First as a CIA agent hired by President George W. Bush to work at the CIA, and then to stand up the National Counterterrorism Center. Okay? We asked him to stay on. I don't have the slightest idea what political party John Brennan is a member of. I've never had a political conversation with John. I know this: John is there each and every day working in his office to try to do everything he can to keep the American people safe.
And I would suggest, whether it's to Senator Bond or others on Capitol Hill, that these are decisions best left to people that have an understanding of counterterrorism, experience in counterterrorism and law enforcement, rather than to politicians on Capitol Hill.
Q But his specific accusation was that he was being used in a way that a press secretary is supposed to -- I mean, that he was enunciating Obama's policy.
MR. GIBBS: I think Kit Bond didn't -- I don't think Kit Bond liked to hear what he already knew, which was he'd been told that Abdulmutallab was in FBI custody after what happened on Christmas Day.
Now, I'll let you, Jonathan, ask Kit Bond whether he understands the protocols of how the FBI deals with suspects enough to understand that at that point it would have been obvious he would have been read his Miranda rights. I don't know whether Kit Bond was confused or whether he just doesn't want to admit the facts....
The Eric Cartman of lame duck republican senators is continuing to petulantly pitch a fit and is escalating his rhetoric. The White House is pushing back:
As you may have heard, Senator Kit Bond is calling for Obama counter-terror chief John Brennan to step down, largely because Brennan has taken the lead in pushing back against GOP efforts to paint Obama as weak on terror.
The White House is now dismissing Bond's efforts as "pathetic," and pointing to Brennan's lifetime of professional intelligence experience as proof that Bond is putting politics over our national security. Asked for comment on Bond's broadside, White House spokesman Nick Shapiro emails over a brief and dismissive comment:
"Through his pathetic attack on a counter-terrorism professional like John Brennan who has spent his lifetime protecting this country under multiple Administrations, Senator Bond sinks to new depths in his efforts to put politics over our national security."
The conventions of political journalism for some reason discourage doing this, but it's worth pointing out that the White House is right....
I wonder if there's a podium around that he can pound on while he's at it.
...Earlier in 2009, Johnson was unanimously approved by members of the Senate Homeland Security Committee. But a single senator, Republican Kit Bond from Missouri, has used his symbolic 'privilege' to hold up consideration of Johnson's nomination since last summer...
WASHINGTON, D.C. - U.S. Senator Kit Bond, R-Missouri, spoke on the floor of the Senate on Thursday, saying the General Services Administration has "apparently been unresponsive to the ongoing health concerns of their employees and tenants at the Bannister Federal Complex...."
...Bond made the comments while defending his efforts to block the appointment of the GSA's top executive...
Yeah, the republicans woke him up when they assumed their 41-59 majority in the Senate. Only they forgot to feed him any coherent talking points.
Do you suppose maybe if the General Services Administration would have actually had an administrator to head the agency, you know, and administer it instead of being subject to the petulant temper tantrums and whims of a particular senator that the GSA might have been more "apparently responsive" to the problems at the GSA's Bannister complex in Kansas City? Just asking.
...Q One last -- one question on security -- one question, it's important. Senator Bond wrote a letter to the President today about a conversation that we had here in the briefing room yesterday and Bill gave a couple of answers -- many answers, really -- on there was no political nature to the White House explanation of the dealing with Abdulmutallab. What Bond says in his letter is that the senators on the Intelligence Committee were briefed specifically earlier this week that the disclosure of Abdulmutallab's cooperation should not be revealed because it was -- he says in this letter -- "Doing so would threaten ongoing efforts to stop operations the intelligence community thought were possibly happening against the United States." He writes in this letter, "Distortion of the congressional notification process suggests that other considerations are taking precedence over keeping timely and sensitive information away from our enemies" -- I know a charge you would fundamentally reject, but I want to get your response to that.
MR. GIBBS: Well, first and foremost, I don't want to speak for Senator Bond, who, if the timeline you outlined -- a Monday briefing for a Tuesday hearing -- why he would in his Tuesday hearing use the statement that the subject refused to cooperate after he was Mirandized.
So I don't want to speak for the senator who didn't certainly use any of that information to correct what he said in public in a hearing that happens a day after.
I would say this, having read the letter. During a hearing on Tuesday, information was released that clearly showed that Mr. Abdulmutallab was indeed talking again to interrogators. For those of you that participated in the background briefing, you know that was not something that was timed purposefully.
Q Were they not supposed to reveal it?
MR. GIBBS: It was not timed purposefully. Soon after that -- soon after that, media reported -- we felt it important to contextualize, because many of you were e-mailing us, what this testimony meant.
I would say, again, having read the letter, no briefing is done here or anywhere in this administration where classified information is used in a place where it shouldn't be. And I would suggest that somebody that alleges that when they know it doesn't happen owe people an apology.
Any briefing that's done here in order to ensure that the information that's in the public is correct is done in conjunction with many agencies and done so so that information that is classified and shouldn't be released isn't released. And in this case obviously it was not.
Q So Bond owes you an apology? Bond owes the President an apology?
MR. GIBBS: No, I don't think Bond is alleging that the President was in the briefing.
Q On the -- on the -- two questions.
MR. GIBBS: Hold on, hold on -- just hold on, just -- this is an important question, Lester.
Q Oh, sure, okay.
MR. GIBBS: The notion that somehow the White House, in conjunction with agencies involved in this interrogation, gave out classified information -- yes, I think an apology on that is owed because it's not true. And I think anybody that was involved in knowing in the Senate Intelligence Committee what was briefed and what was reported would know that that wasn't violated.
Again, Major, I don't want to speak for Senator Bond in why, if he was briefed on Monday, why on Tuesday, why does he say that Abdulmutallab -- the result of his refusal to cooperate after he was Mirandized? Why does Senator Bond continue to knowingly not have information curb what he's saying, or is this a bunch of politics?
Q So he owes an apology to whom?
MR. GIBBS: I think he owes an apology to the professionals in the law enforcement community and those that work in this building, not for Democrats and Republicans, but who work each and every day to keep the American people safe and would never, ever, ever knowingly release -- or unknowingly release -- classified information that could endanger an operation or an interrogation.
Again, I think that the reason that charge is made is only to play politics. I actually don't believe that that -- that he thinks that's a serious allegation. I think that is -- I think if you look at the letter, it's clearly -- this is about politics....
Given his position as the ranking minority member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, it was probably too much to expect that Kit Bond would refrain from joining the chorus of what David Brooks, in an unexpectedly excellent column, called the "rabid denunciation and cynicism" that has characterized the right's response to the Christmas bomber incident. On the topic of the bomber, Omar Abulmutallab, Bond holds, along with the rest of his party, that treating terrorist crimes in the criminal justice system is to privilege terrorists in some inappropriate way:
This is not a case for a series of criminal trials, ... . We should have held him as an enemy combatant and tried him in a military commission.
Earlier, on the issue of the Gitmo detainees, he had this to say:
The Obama Justice Department has prioritized political correctness over protecting the citizens of this country.
Apart from seizing an opportunity to ring the proverbial Pavlovian bell with phrases like "political correctness" applied to Obama and terrorism, one wonders why would-be tough guy politicians like Bond fail to remember the equal determination of one of their close allies, Margaret Thatcher, to deny IRA men "special status". This status would have accorded IRA members a prisoner of war status not too dissimilar to that accorded to those held in the military system of detention and justice that Bond and his pals prefer.
We hear a lot about what will happen in the future if nothing is done to stop anthropogenic climate change, and we also regularly witness the on-going efforts of the big corporte stakeholders and their tame politicians to pretend that it isn't so, or, when that line won't wash, that the "anthropogenic" part can't be proven. However, deny it until the cows come home, there is no way to avoid the fact that increased CO2 results in warming, and that humans have been pumping historically unprecedented amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. Nor is there any way to avoid the fact that we are experiencing the catastrophic effect of escalating climate and weather changes right now:
* Many citizens of the island nation of Kiribati have relocated to New Zealand because the rising sea level has washed away their villages.
* The President of the Maldives Islands is making desperate plans to forestall the effects of rising water levels, and to relocate thousands of Maldives citizens if his endeavors prove futile - if nothing is done and palliative measures come too late, "we will die" he says.
Kit Bond wasted no time before joining the Republican attack dogs frothing about the decision to bring Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four of the 9/11 cospirators to New York to stand trial. Spouting what seems to be the agreed upon Republican rhetorical figure, he characterized the decision as prioritizing "political correctness over protecting the citizens of this country." (Compare John Boehner's similar statement that the decision "puts the interests of liberal special interest groups before the safety and security of the American people.")
In regard to this line of attack, Glenn Greenwald gets it absolutely, spot-on right:
As always, the Right's tough-guy leaders wallow in a combination of pitiful fear and cynical manipulation of the fear of their followers. Indeed, it's hard to find any group of people on the globe who exude this sort of weakness and fear more than the American Right.
Bond's fearfulness is so extreme that it leads him to an implied repudiation of constitutional values:
...it an insult to the memories of those who were brutally murdered on September 11th that the perpetrators of these cowardly acts of terrorism will sit in a courtroom blocks away from Ground Zero and reap the full benefits and protections of the U.S. Constitution.
Strange sentiments indeed from a man who claims to value the principles embodied in the Constitution. When push comes to shove, Bond, clearly thinks that we can't trust our form of government or our system of jurisprudence. Or maybe he just thinks that it's in bad taste to insist that justice be served when you don't like the folks it's being served upon - that might be why he thinks that real justice, rather than unproven allegation and torture, would "insult" the memories of those who died on 9/11.
Perhaps Bond could take a lesson from the 9/11 victims' family members who speak out about the promised trials in the ACLU video below:
Missouri's Republican politicians are are working overtime to kill cap-and-trade. They insist that taking rational steps to move the U.S. off fossil fuels will cause the economy to crater. Even some Missouri Democrats who ought to know better, Claire McCaskill, for instance, voice concern about the economic impact of cap-and-trade on "Missouri families."
Given all this wailing over the economic ruin that we face if cap-and-trade is enacted, it is instructive to learn, via FiredUp, that according to a new survey economists who have looked at the numbers conclude that
...the "significant benefits from curbing greenhouse-gas emissions would justify the costs of action," . .. In fact, the survey of economists finds 94% believe the U.S. should join climate agreements to limit global warming.
This information should be especially reassuring to Sentor Kit Bond who explained his boycott of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee markup of cap-and-trade legislation by declaring:
Missouri families and workers expect me to know what this 1,000-page bill will cost them before I start voting on it ...
Now that there is a consensus among economists, perhaps Bond can get back to work. Of course, he and his fellow Republicans weren't willing to accept the numbers offered in a study of the economic impacts of the legislation carried out by EPA economists, so maybe they don't really care what most other economists think about cap-and-trade either.
After Todd Akin's recent diatribe - the one in which he trashed the CIA along with the rest of the "big government" bogeymen that worry him so much - we chided his fellow Republicans, including Kit Bond, for their inconsistency. Bond, if you remember, had gone ballistic when Nancy Pelosi asserted that the CIA had lied to the Congress, but seemed content to hold his peace about Rep. Akin's remarks.
Now it seems that perhaps Senator Bond might have learned something that led him to decide, however belatedly, that discretion really is the better part of valor. Rep. Jan Schakowsky, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, has confirmed five instances in which the CIA lied to Congress since 2001, including the situation cited by Pelosi. Schakowsky is pretty unequivocal about what she expects from the Republicans who ganged up on Pelosi earlier:
Schakowsky was asked on MSNBC whether Republicans now owed Pelosi an apology. "I certainly think they do," she said.
Will Senator Bond be big enough to step up and offer a public apology? I don't know about you, but I'm not holding my breath.
Say what you will about the current Republican strategy in their ongoing war against reality, but they are disciplined. Give them their cue and they respond right on time with the set pieces they have committed to memory and to which they will will hear no dissent, or, God forbid, any competing facts.
Missouri's Todd Akin (R-2nd) and Kit Bond are no exceptions. Today, they both mounted their favorite hobby horses, respectively health care reform (a.k.a. "big government") and energy policy, especially cap-and-trade legislation.
I know lots of people who consider "politician" a dirty word. They figure it describes someone who'll utter whatever contradictions it takes to please different voters. In that respect, I'd consider Claire McCaskill a politician. On her website, she pretends she understands the seriousness of global warming:
Global warming threatens our health, our environment and our national security. In Missouri, warmer average temperatures could increase heat-related deaths in the summer months and infection of insect-born diseases, such as West Nile Virus. It will also contribute to droughts and floods that lead to property damage. Over time, these higher temperatures are expected to alter the state's environment -- changing the trees in our forests, the fish in our rivers and further reducing the state's vanishing wetlands.
Then she opposes the cap and trade legislation.
I expect that kind of behavior from Kit Bond. Senator Briggs & Stratton says, oh sure he says, that global warming is a problem, but three years ago he opposed lawn mower emissions reform. A lawn mower can emit as much air pollution in an hour as a car does in 13 hours, but Bond stopped Feinstein's legislation because Briggs & Stratton had two plants in Missouri.
Someday, he'll be saying, "Well, we would have saved the planet, but we figured it would cost too much." Or maybe, in a rare fit of honesty, he'll be more specific: "Well, we would have saved the planet, but it would have damaged the bottom line for Briggs & Stratton and Peabody Coal."
"This is being pushed, absolutely, by the people of California and the people of New England who don't rely on coal for electricity," he said.
San Francisco flower children did not dream up this legislation. And the maddening part is that cap and trade will not cost coal dependent states more. As Clark pointed out here:
Yesterday on Fox News Sunday, Kit Bond appeared with Senator Diane Feinstein, Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, to discuss the disclosure of a second, secret Iranian uranium enrichment facility:
Bond's demeanor during this interview illustrates the dilemma that faces erst-while moderates in the age of radical fringe Republicanism. On the one hand, he is not a total ideologue so he strives for the appearance of rationality:
... I think that the election riots and the continuing unrest in Iran shows that there's a significant body of Iranian people who don't like the direction that they're going.
And that's why I think that strong economic sanctions, which have to be applied by the world community, not just us - we can make an impact - are the best way to go.
Seems Kit Bond, in his best huffing and puffing style, has thrown a noisy little tantrum and resigned from the Senate Intelligence Committee panel charged with reviewing CIA Interrogation policies. He claims that the appointment of a federal prosecutor by Attorney General Eric Holder might bias the hearings and lead to a general unwillingness on the part of CIA officers to be forthcoming about their possible, past misdeeds:
"Had Mr. Holder honored the pledge made by the President to look forward, not backwards, we would still be active participants in the Committee's review," the ranking Republican on the intelligence panel, Sen. Christopher S. Bond of Missouri, said in a statement. "What current or former CIA employee would be willing to gamble his freedom by answering the Committee's questions? Indeed, forcing these terror fighters to make this choice is neither fair nor just."
Bond's resignation doesn't seem to bother panel chair, Dianne Feinstein, who has indicated that the panel will complete its task with or without bipartisan contributions. Perhaps one reason for her equanimity might be relief that she won't have to deal with the overt bias that Bond himself displays when he speaks about the temerity of the DOJ in investigating individuals whom he salutes as "terror fighters."
Bond might just be worried, good Republican soldier that he is, that when faced with hard evidence about what the CIA actually did, he could find himself in a very hard place. He himself might be forced to condemn his beloved terror fighters. Can't somebody please explain to the senator that there is a word for governments that allow secret intelligence agencies to run amok, and that word is "dictatorship"?
Monday, Senators Kit Bond, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and John McCain will be the featured guests at a "Health Care Reform Forum" at Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City.
The 75-100 guests invited to the event have reportedly been "hand-picked" by Bond's office to hear about Republican plans for obstructing real health care reform.
The forum is closed to the public.
Heh. Maybe they're afraid the great unwashed would try to hold them accountable for Medicare Part D.
It's one thing to not do town halls because they've been going badly, it's quite another to hold a fake one and hand pick your crowd.
That's the upshot of Bill Lambrecht's St. Louis Post-Dispatch article on Blunt's role in shaping GOP "policy" on health care reform. (I'm not sure you can call it "policy" when you can only produce a slim four page brochure chock full of slogans and devoid of numbers.)
Voters fed up with insurance companies' red tape and denials of claims seem to favor a public option: 70 percent or more endorse the government's entry into the health care competition, recent polls show.
But Blunt has been unstinting in denouncing a public option. He uses the phrase "government-run" to describe a shift that he sees as dangerous both to the health care system and to its clients.
"If there's a government competitor, in the very short term, you wind up with no competitors," he said in an interview. "When voters begin to understand that the government takeover of health care is really the end result of a government competitor in the marketplace, they're not going to like that."
Um, Roy, you might want to take a look at the level of competition among health insurance companies in Missouri. In your own district, 94% of Joplin's citizens are insured by a single insurance company.
In any case, the article cites polling that shows an overwhelming majority of Americans as supportive of a public option, which Blunt opposes. Guess who also opposes the public option?
Not surprisingly, insurance companies are fighting to squelch a public option. Echoing Blunt, Robert Zirkelbach, director of strategic communications for America's Health Insurance Plans - which represents virtually all of the nation's health insurers - said government involvement would "dismantle" the current system and destroy corporate innovations that aid consumers.
"He (Blunt) is certainly very thoughtful on health care issues, and I think he showed that by the proposal they put forth," Zirkelbach said.
Yup. Health insurance companies are ready to stand side by side with Roy Blunt in the battle against the public option and preserve a broken system of rapidly rising premiums and insurance company profiteering.
Yet another reason to contact Sens. Bond and McCaskill right now to ask for a strong and specific stance in favor of the public option. Pressure on McCaskill and Bond is necessary to make sure we have a strong public option and viable health care reform, which is anathema to Blunt and insurance executives.
[Senator Bond] That will cause a change in the regime's attitude, or a regime change, because they're short of refined petroleum.
Iran is indeed short on refined petroleum, and there's been some congressional support for trying to cut off refined petroleum exports to Iran in order to exert pressure on the Iranians to stop their nuclear program. But I can't imagine a more direct way of "proving" to those Iranian people sitting on the fence that the reformists are American puppets than to threaten a US-led blockade on the Iranians in order to effect "regime change".
Yesterday, I posted about some questions Chris Bowers composed to nail down our senators' position on the public option. I e-mailed McCaskill and Bond, and while I've not yet received an official response, I'm told by a McCaskill staffer that they will get back to me.
The questions, again, are as follows:
Do you support a public healthcare option as part of healthcare reform?
If so, do you support a public healthcare option that is available on day one?
Do you support a public healthcare option that is national, available everywhere, and accountable to Congress?
Do you support a public healthcare option that can bargain for rates from providers and big drug companies?
Now, just because I sent my questions in, that doesn't let you off the hook. It's important that Sens. McCaskill and Bond hear from us and respond specifically to our questions. Please ask for specific responses. Don't assume that just because Obama is president and that he has thrown his support behind a public option that a viable public option will automatically come out of the process.
For example, just today Obama's first pick to head the health care reform effort and become Secretary of Health and Human Services, Tom Daschle, came out against a public option.
But we were concerned that the ongoing health reform debate is beginning to show signs of fracture on the public plan issue, so in order to advance the process of developing bipartisan legislation and to move it forward, it's time to find consensus here," Daschle said.
"We've come too far and gained too much momentum for our efforts to fail over disagreements on one single issue," he said.
This despite the fact that 76% of Americans believe that a choice of a public plan offered by the federal government is either extremely important or very important to health care reform. That's a result that surprised even the pollsters who conducted the survey. It looks like the only people insisting on the "consensus" that Daschle describes is the conservative Republicans he's teamed up with to offer a watered down compromise plan.
Still, politicians don't respond to generic polls. They respond to constituents and to people who contribute to their campaigns. The only way we are going to have more of an effect than the donors is if more of us constituents write in support of a public option.
Fortunately, Chris Bowers has teamed up with grassroots group Democracy for America and the Health Care for America Now! coalition to develop some tools and make it extraordinarily easy to ask our representatives these questions, and to collect their answers.
To write a letter, use DFA's Whip Count tool. It's got a sample e-mail you can edit, and it will automatically send the e-mail to the correct senator for you. http://www.standwithdrdean.com...
I'm pleased to know that at least one of our US Senators here in Missouri, namely Claire McCaskill, supports a public option for health care reform. Now, as we've seen with the Third Way nonsense, one can "support" a public option in about the same way George Bush supported "fixing" Social Security, with so many caveats and triggers that the ultimate aim is really pulling the whole thing down. I'm not accusing McCaskill of anything of the sort, but I would like to know a little more about what she thinks a public option should look like.
Chris Bowers over at OpenLeft has come up with a series of questions aimed at getting some more basic information about what kind of public option our senators will put their support behind.
The aim is to get answers from all 59 Democratic senators and some of the swing Republicans (in other words, the two senators from Maine.) And since our elected officials are responsive to constituents first and foremost, the questioning needs to come from us Missourians.
So will you write Senator McCaskill, ask her the following yes or no questions, and find out where she stands on the public option? (Since she has already professed support for the public option, instead of asking her about that, you might want to thank her.) Her e-mail contact form is here: http://mccaskill.senate.gov/co...
1--Do you support a public healthcare option as part of healthcare reform?
2--If so, do you support a public healthcare option that is available on day one?
3--Do you support a public healthcare option that is national, available everywhere, and accountable to Congress?
4--Do you support a public healthcare option that can bargain for rates from providers and big drug companies?
Once you've received a written response (that's the reason we're asking you to e-mail McCaskill instead of calling her office) post it in comments here.
Given his position as the ranking minority member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, it was probably too much to expect that Kit Bond would refrain from joining the chorus of what David Brooks, in an unexpectedly 
We hear a lot about what will happen in the future if nothing is done to stop anthropogenic climate change, and we also regularly witness the on-going efforts of the big corporte stakeholders and their tame politicians to pretend that it isn't so, or, when that line won't wash, that the "anthropogenic" part can't be proven. However, deny it until the cows come home, there is no way to avoid the 
