Yes, you read that right. In an interview with conservative magazine
NewsMax1, Lieberman said, "Now, all of a sudden, the
momentum is with the Republicans. And that's — thank God — that's the
way people have spoken, you know? That's our democracy." He also praised
former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, claiming, "I don't know what
her future is, but I'm just saying everybody should listen."
Not surprisingly, Lieberman wants to extend the
Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. (7/28/2010)
Lieberman enabled our current financial collapse by voting for
the repeal of
Glass-Steagle,
the law that separated taxpayer insured deposits from wild speculation.
"The power of our private managers over our public
servants was exemplified by the ability of business lobbyists to
persuade Congress to nullify the 1993 attempt by the Financial
Accounting Standards Board (FASB) to require stock options to be
expensed in corporate earnings statements. In June 1993,
Senator Joseph Lieberman introduced a bill condemning the
FASB’s attempt, which passed the Senate overwhelmingly. He later
introduced a side bill that would have put the FASB out of business if
it implemented its option-expensing initiative. The FASB had little
choice but to retreat, a sad example of legislation interfering in
accounting decisions." John C. Bogle in The Battle for the Soul of
Capitalism pg 39
Lieberman: United States Must Pre-Emptively Act In Yemen 27 Dec 2009 Sen. Joseph Lieberman, (I-Israel)
a renowned hawk and one of the foremost champions of the invasion of
Iraq, warned on Sunday that the United States faced "danger" unless it
pre-emptively acts to curb the rise of terrorism in Yemen. "Somebody in
our government said to me in Sana'a, the capital of Yemen, Iraq was
yesterday's war. Afghanistan is today's war. If we don't act
preemptively, Yemen will be tomorrow's war. That's the danger we face,"
LIEberman said during an appearance on "Fox News Sunday." (From CLG
news)
In an interview with Harper's Magazine, Jane Mayer discusses
the International Committee of the Red Cross report on torture, and
commented:
The reaction of top Bush Administration officials to
the ICRC report, from what I can gather, has been defensive and
dismissive. They reject the ICRC’s legal analysis as incorrect. Yet my
reporting shows that inside the White House there has been growing fear
of criminal prosecution, particularly after the Supreme Court ruled in
the Hamdan
case that the Geneva Conventions applied to the treatment of the
detainees. This nervousness resulted in the successful effort to add
retroactive immunity to the Military Commission Act. Cheney personally
spearheaded this effort. Fear of the consequences of exposure also
weighed heavily in discussions about whether to shut the CIA program
down. In White House meetings, Cheney warned that if they transferred
the CIA’s prisoners to Guantanamo, “people will want to know where they
have been—and what we’ve been doing with them.” Alberto Gonzales, a
source said, “scared” everyone about the possibility of war crimes
prosecutions. It was on their minds. Six Questions
for Jane Mayer, Author of The
Dark Side
"President [sic] Bush, happy Habeas Corpus Day. First thing
this morning, the president signed into law the Military
Commissions Act of 2006, which does away with habeas
corpus, the right of suspected terrorists or anybody else to know
why they have been imprisoned, provided the president does not think it
should apply to you and declares you an enemy combatant... Does
that not basically mean that if Mr. Bush or Mr. Rumsfeld say so,
anybody in this country, citizen or not, innocent or not, can end up
being an unlawful enemy combatant? Jonathan Turley, George
Washington University Constitutional Law Professor: It certainly does.
In fact, later on, it says that if you even give material support to an
organization that the president deems connected to one of these groups,
you too can be an enemy combatant. And the fact that he appoints this
tribunal is meaningless. You know, standing behind him at the
signing ceremony was his attorney general, who signed a memo that said
that you could torture people, that you could do harm to them to the
point of organ failure or death. So if he appoints someone like
that to be attorney general, you can imagine who he’s going be putting
on this board."
"Even after supporting John McCain, Lieberman still holds a
top rank within the Senate Democratic Caucus as chairman of the
Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. The Senate
Democratic Steering Committee needs to know just how much of a conflict
of interest this is. That's why Lieberman Must Go.
Sign the petition at http://BoldProgressives.org/majorityvote"
On Elections
Vote counting cannot be privatized to hard-right partisans if
we are to have real elections. Partisans
have installed machines that are blatantly hackable,
and unauditable. Election rigging is now mostly computer
crime, although there are many imaginative other techniques frequently
used in U.S. elections.
Lieberman was one of the leaders on the HAVA (Help America
Vote Act which perpetuated the problem.) See the Voting Machine and the
Elections pages.
Senator Lieberman was instrumental in approving Michael Brown
to head FEMA with the explanation that Bush should have any appointee
that he wants. No. He shouldn't. He put cronies, Enron refugees,
Iran-Contra felons, corporate lobbyists, ideologues, religious zealots,
and other party hacks and unqualified
operatives in to public positions and the predictable results
were seen in the aftermath of Katrina, the Iraq War, and the
massive debt run-up. It is profitable though. Naomi Klein in her
insightful book "The Shock Doctrine" describes disaster capitalism as a
new paradigm.
Senator Joe Lieberman echoed a GOP talking point by promising
that the new president will be welcomed by a terror attack in 2009,
continuing a disturbing trend of talking heads anxiously relishing
a catastrophic pretext to reinvigorate the Neo-Con agenda.