Proving once again that the best political coverage in the NYT comes from the business and sports writers, not those soiled doves in the political and foreign-affairs desks:
(via NYT Sports Department:

Maybe the Yankees, so dominant since their last series with the Red Sox, were cowering again. Maybe they would embarrass their principal owner, George Steinbrenner, on a night when he entertained Vice President Dick Cheney, Gov. George E. Pataki and the former mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani in his private box behind home plate.

Maybe not. By the fourth inning, the fans were cheering an eventual 11-3 Yankees victory. In the seventh inning, during Ronan Tynan's "God Bless America," they booed the sight of Cheney on the right-field video screen.

My hardest decisions during baseball season comes during (boo, hiss) "interleague play" when the Yankees are playing the Mets. Who do I want to lose more? is the challenge.

Not this year. I declare as a die-hard Yankee fan until the day they meet the Cubs in the World Series.

Well, besides needing his beauty sleep we mean. Which hasn't been having quite the revivifying effect lately that it used to; he might want to consider adding Oil of Uday, er, we mean Olay, to his skin-care routine. But the REAL reason...(drumroll)...It's so he doesn't have to watch Letterman.

(via Froomkin)

"Top Ten George W. Bush Complaints About 'Fahrenheit 9/11'

"10. That actor who played the president was totally unconvincing.

"9. It oversimplified the way I stole the election.

"8. Too many of them fancy college-boy words

"7. If Michael Moore had waited a few months, he could have included the part where I get him deported.

"6. Didn't have one of them hilarious monkeys who smoke cigarettes and gives people the finger.

"5. Of all Michael Moore's accusations, only 97% are true.

"4. Not sure -- I passed out after a piece of popcorn lodged in my windpipe.

"3. Where the hell was Spiderman?

"2. Couldn't hear most of the movie over Cheney's foul mouth.

"1. I thought this was supposed to be about dodgeball!"

How often in the last ninety years has that been said collectively by humankind? Maybe if it feels like deja vu all over again that's because it keeps on happening.

At the end of the WW2 , there were a lot of "never agains" sworn to. Despite new institutions like the UN, and new treaties like NATO, the world watched impotently as the Hungarian uprising was crushed by Soviet tanks, as colonialism came to a bloody end in Algeria, and Southeast Asia, and the Congo, as Arab countries attacked Israel, and Israel drove Palestinians into refugee camps, and as Idi Amin completed the post-colonial ethnic cleansing of Ugandan citizens of Indian descent; the world community had few answers for the Vietnamese boat people, or the genocide in Cambodia, or China’s cultural revolution, or the death squads in Latin America, or ethnic cleaning in Ethiopia and Somalia, genocidal civil war in the Sudan, proxy wars fought by child soldiers in Angola and Mozambique, the gassing of the Kurds in Iraq, not once, but twice, and in the last decade of the century, we had ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, complete with mass executions and rape camps, Serbian suppression of the most basic human rights of the ethnic Albanians of Kosovo; in Rwanda, an almost classic example of genocide was ignored until too late; North Korea continued to be its own special kind of horror, and now, in the first decade of a new century, we have the Sudan, again, the Darfur province on the border of Chad...the newest challenge to our many oaths of "never again."

We've done better with the nuclear genie than my cold war generation raised on drop drills and nuclear weapons tests in nearby deserts could have imagined, and much less well dealing with those other horrors we thought we'd left behind in the first half of the twentieth century.

We need to think about why. This is an international conversation we need to have. But not now.

Now, all that matters is that the world community acts to prevent the already mainly completed violent ethnic cleansing of black tribal Sudanese Muslims from their villages in Darfu, accompanied by a scorched earth policy that leaves no sign of human habitation, homes and food supplies destroyed, fields left unfit for tilling, does not turn into another of those horror-filled genocides the reality of which we only seem to grasp after it is too late. It is very nearly too late already. But not quite.

I attempted to unthread some of the confusing complexities of the situation in the Sudan in a previous, briefer post here. A decades-long lethal conflict between the Muslim north and the largely Christian south has only recently begun to be resolved, with a north/south peace agreement, brokered, in part, by the Bush administration, working with the UN, and others within the international human rights community.

Darfur is in the west; it's people are Muslim, but they are also ethnically tribal black Africans. The poorest region in the Sudan, marginalized economically by the central government, in recent years, territorial encroachments by marauding militias of nomadic Arab tribesmen proved to be the last straw. The people of Darfur mounted an armed response to the militias and the newly formed Sudanese Liberation Army, in consort with another group known as JEM (Justice & Equality Movement) demanded from Khartoum the end of Darfur's economic isolation, and protection from the increasingly savage raids by Sudanese Arab militias operating out of the north.

Neither negotiating with the rebels, nor engaging with them militarily, the government, instead, encouraged the Arab militias to step up their attacks on the civilian population, and, as we are beginning to be able to verify, it joined in the attacks. Thousands of civilians have been killed. The rest, largely the elderly, women and children have been driven to the border areas between the Sudan and Chad. There they have neither shelter, nor any means to safely dispose of human waste, nor drinkable water, nor food, nor, of course, medicine. And perhaps the final outrage, the government of Sudan denies everything, claims there is no ethnic cleansing, no militias, and has successfully restricted access into Darfur by both the media and humanitarian NGOs seeking to help the refugees.

The most authoritative and up-to-date commentary on the situation I've yet come across was broadcast two weeks ago on Bill Moyers' NOW on PBS. David Branccacio interviewed a British reporter named Julie Flint, who had just returned from an amazingly brave, clandestine trip that took her into the ethnically cleansed portions of Darfur, accompanied by members of the rebel army. What she documents is overwhelming evidence that the government of Sudan is allied with the militias in a deliberate policy of ethnic cleansing, and that to cover their tracks, they are committed to a genocidal policy of refusing to allow humanitarian supplies to reach the refugees stranded in these border areas.

BRANCACCIO: You have been covering atrocities, war zones for 30 years. Where do you place Sudan, the current situation in the Darfur region in terms of the things you've seen in your career?

FLINT: It's as bad as anything I've ever seen. There's no doubt about that. I expected it to be bad when I went there, because of the very sporadic, scattered reports we were getting.

Information was still quite thin when I went in. But to my astonishment, I found a land which had no human life. It was completely empty. And that, in a way is as bad, it's a land which is full of blood and war, it was just an empty land. All human life had been removed. And I found that profoundly shocking.

(edit)

[VIDEO WITH VOICE OVER]

BRANCACCIO: In Chad, Julie Flint interviewed scores of refugees. One after one, they testified to the abuses they had witnessed and experienced.

Twelve-year-old Hussein fled with his family from Sudan after 27 of their fellow villagers were killed in Darfur. He reported that when he and some other kids saw soldiers, they hid behind a tree. The soldiers found them. Hussein was shot three times at close range, in the face, then in the arm, and then his leg. He says soldiers killed three of his friends, and wounded six others.

This man is an imam, a Muslim holy man. He confirms that armed gunmen have been swarming to villages and killing imams, destroying mosques, including his own, and burning copies of the Koran.

And who is attacking the black Sudanese Muslims? Arab Sudanese Muslims, allied with the Arab-dominated government. The government has inflicted harsh treatment for years on the blacks of Darfur, whom it considers inferior.

Last year, some — calling themselves the Sudanese Liberation Army — responded with a rag-tag rebellion, government forces attacked ruthlessly, and the attacks continues to this day. They are accompanied by fearsome allies: an armed Arab militia known as the Janjaweed has been terrorizing villages: swooping in like a murderous, medieval warrior horde.
[END VIDEO]


BRANCACCIO: The Janjaweed, these are Arab raiders, often on horseback, sometimes on camel who are...

FLINT: I wouldn't call them raiders anymore.

BRANCACCIO: What would you call them?

FLINT: Well, the word, "Janjaweed," has been used for a long time. And basically, it referred to a sort of a motley bunch of different groups, camel herders, encroaching on the farming lands of settled, African tribes.

And it was largely economic conflict.

But in the last few years, the Islamist government have harnessed these militias, who they know have pre-existing disputes with the settled, African farmers, and have used them, especially since the rebellion began, as counter insurgency militias. And what I found of which I'm absolutely certain is that the vast majority of these lethal attacks are done by government forces, and the so called Janjaweed forces, working together. These are no longer hit and run attacks by Arab nomads. They're systematic attacks by the government and the militia, often with air support.

BRANCACCIO: So, you saw evidence, and from your interviews, that the government of the Sudan is working in concert with these Janjaweed?

FLINT: Yes. That was the most striking thing. I interviewed scores and scores of people, civilians, as well as rebels of course, and documented 14 instances of large scale killings in a six month period. Those weren't the only instances of large scale killings. But they were the only ones I corroborated in the time I had.

BRANCACCIO: How many people

FLINT: Almost 800 people died that I know of. There will be more. And in all but two of those instances, the Janjaweed and the government attacked together.

And the civilians said, "They're partners now." And I said to the chief of one village, the headman, "Why do you say they're partners?" And he said, he looked surprised that I even asked. And said, "They arrived together. They fight together. And they leave together."

(edit)

BRANCACCIO: If you take a look at more of your film here, we have what are we looking at?

FLINT: You're looking at rebels of the Sudan Liberation. The vast majority of the rebels I met were people who had been burned out of their homes. Men of 30, 40 even 50, plus members of the Sudan Army and police. For example, I met a lovely man, an African, who had been in the Sudanese Army for 22 years. He'd stayed in the Army despite the fact that his Arab colleagues were promoted, got pay raises. He didn't. He stayed as a bog standard soldier, while the Arabs were promoted.

But when the Army came, burned his village, killed a number of people including his brother, he left, and he joined the rebels. Similarly, I found policemen in the same situation. My translator was a lawyer, who had lived in Khartoum, who lost nine members of his family, dead and wounded when the government bombed the town. I met a doctor, whose clinic had been burnt by the government. It was an interesting group of people.

BRANCACCIO: And these members of the Sudan Liberation Army served as your entree into this area?

FLINT: They did. I had no other way to get in. And also, because civilians often know a very small part of the overall picture, and because many civilians would go and meet the commander of the SLA simply to tell him what had been happening in his area, because past possibly, their sons, their relatives would... having been burnt out, were now in the Army. He had a good, overall picture. The rebels had a good, overall picture.

I then verified that picture by going without armed men, to speak to the civilians in Chad. But the civilians in Chad could give me very small pictures. I wanted to try to get the big picture, which I'm sure I got. I have no doubt.

BRANCACCIO: One term being used here is ethnic cleansing. From what you've seen, is that accurate?

FLINT: Oh, definitely. The countryside is empty. There's nobody there. It has been ethnically cleansed.

There’s lots more. I urge anyone who reads this to read the Flint material at NOW. You can find out about Flint with links to video and other of her materialshere, and the transcript of the NOW interview here, scroll down to just about the half way point.

Except for a very few journalists, among whom Nicholas Kristoff deserves credit and gratitude for his insistent reporting from and about Darfur, governments and media around the world have ignored what was happening there; the institutions that have been in the forefront of raising the alarm have been the humanitarian and human rights NGOs, and those same agencies within the UN. Some of the silence about Darfur was due to the fear that focusing efforts there would derail the north/south peace accords. The Bush administration deserves credit for having engaged diplomatically in the Sudan. Secretary Powell is there now. Thus far, however, the administration has refused to called what is happening there "genocide." Some critics have faulted them for that. Personally, I think such criticism regarding labels is likely to be a fairly fruitless path. This is one of the few foreign policy issues, maybe the only one, around which Democrats and Republicans can close ranks. I think we ought to try and do that, although I’m well aware the favor will not be returned.

MoveOn.org has taken note of Darfur and is asking members to call their Senators and Representatives to ask that they lobby the administration to declare the Sudan is engaged in genocide; they also have an online petition to be signed. Take a moment to check it out.

We know from much analysis of what happened in Rwanda a decade ago that it wouldn't have taken that much to stop the genocide in its tracks; a minor military presence, and most of all, an insistent, world-wide gaze trained on what was happening there. Instead, every country pulled out their nationals, including this country, and even the UN looked the other way. The Sudanese government hasn't even pretended to be telling the truth. The leaders in Khartoum know the world is leery of upsetting the peace accords, and they’ve noticed that the world is not noticing. When people around the world insist that their governments start noticing, when people and governments around the world make clear to the Sudanese government that we're watching what they’re doing, that we will remember, by name, who does what to whom and that crimes against humanity will be prosecuted, at that point and that point only, will the dynamic of genocide begin to be thwarted. It is not hopeless, it is not undoable, we have only to marshal the will to start paying attention. A weblog whose sole purpose is to help you do that is called "Sudan, The Passion of the Present," and you can find it here.

Target: that toothless old whore William Safire:

There's a body of sociological literature which shows that when the world does not come to an end on the day prescribed by this or that messianic cult, the cult usually does not fall apart. Rather, their belief only tends to intensify to still greater levels. Safire seems to be an example of the same phenomenon only applied to Iraqi WMD cult.
(via Talking Points Memo)

I wonder, as soon as the new Iraqi President imposes martial law and throws out the foreign press, whether we'll start "finding" more stuff?

And there's good news tonight!

The Canadians rejected their right wing loons. Thank God there's at least one country in North America that hasn't lost its collective marbles.

And a passle of Dems were charged with corruption in Philly today. Excellent. I wouldn't have voted in a Republican under any circumstances, but now that's out of the way, maybe we can clean house and do something about the relentless and petty mediocrity of our city government, by throwing the chisellers out.

Oh, and the sk8ters have taken to skating round the fountains and sidewalks of City Hall. I hope right under Mayor Street's window. Heh.

Here's an excellent article on KoolAid from the Rittenhouse Review: "Are your kids getting enough sugar?".

And speaking of Republicans, their convention, and sweets for the sweet....

We have been banging the drum of danger, ringing the bell of alarm, and generally advocating taking the hammer of outrage to electronic voting machines, on numerous grounds that regular readers know well.

The fact of the matter is that there was vote fraud LONG before electrons came along. The late great saint Mike Royko was ranting decades ago about boxes of ballots turning up in the Calumet Sag Canal in the days after elections in Chicago.

Florida wasn't lost in 2000 because of electronic voting. It was lost in large part because of shenannigans with voter registration rolls, conducted months before election day itself. They have a mess going on in Nashville right now because they haven't updated the registration lists in ten years fer cryin' out loud. People who don't read the paper much may very well show up on Nov. 2 and be turned away because they moved three years ago and never updated their paperwork.

(via Nashville Tennessean)

[County Election Commissioner Lynn] Greer, who told the commission last week he found inaccuracies...There are safeguards, but the situation could give someone a greater chance to fraudulently swing a local election, he said. Some of those races can be decided by a few votes. The issue of the rolls' accuracy could come up if a close election were challenged in court, he said.

''I don't think you could do a massive fraud, but I think you could do enough to sway one of these little legislative elections,'' said Greer, one of two Republicans on the five-member commission. ''I don't think you could sway the presidential election in Tennessee.''

First of all, I think this Greer person is doing a little "move along, nothing to see here folks" routine. I live in Tennessee and I don't care what happened last time, I think this state is in play. The reasons Gore lost it are complex but most of them don't really affect Kerry if he handles it right. (A sprinkle of Clinton here and there and gallons and gallons of Edwards, in case a DNC worker is reading.)

More importantly, no matter where you live, sometime this summer or fall swing by your county courthouse or whatever place the voting registrar's office is. Make sure your registration card is in there, and that the address thereon is the place you're going to be living on Election Day.

As long as you're going anyway, drag along a friend or relative or two. If you get carried away and volunteer for a poll-workers job, you might just save your country while you're at it.

So the chairman of the RNC is worried about preserving voters' rights, and the honesty of elections. Wonderful, we say! What a saint!

Yeah right. When a Bushkevite says he wants to do something "in the public good," remember that's the same thing you told your tomcat before the operation.

(via Kansas City Star (scroll down aways, both stories are on today's page)

The chairman of the Republican National Committee on Monday called for a bipartisan effort to safeguard polling locations in Missouri and other presidential battleground states against voter fraud.

Gillespie ...outlined a “transparent bipartisan solution” that would involve listing, with Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe, precincts in presidential battleground states where problems might surface.

But a group helping Democrat John Kerry's campaign called the proposal as a “very cynical attempt” to suppress black voter turnout in the state by undermining groups that are working to increase black registration.

While visiting Kansas City, Republican Party Chairman Ed Gillespie cited allegations that groups such as America Coming Together were turning in inaccurate voter registration forms and using convicted felons to go door to door. A spokeswoman for the group called both accusations insignificant.

What Gillespie is boo-hooing about is a GOTV program that gave work to a small number of people just out of prison, who, in case he hasn't noticed, often have problems finding honest jobs. Given who he works for, perhaps he should have more empathy for those in this situation.

At any rate, looking down the page, we see a completely separate story which gives us the REAL reason why Grandma was over at Little Red Riding Hood's house that day:

Monday, Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie met with more than 300 GOP Catholic "team leaders" in nearby St. Charles and in Kansas City. He said the Republican Party has enlisted 75,000 Catholic "team leaders" to seek out more Catholic support for Bush.

Monday was the launch of the Republican Party's Catholic Outreach Week, one of several it's holding throughout the year, Gillespie said.

In St. Charles, Gillespie cited Bush's opposition to most abortions and to gay marriage. Kerry supports abortion rights, opposes gay marriage but supports civil unions.

"We are working to build a culture that respects life, where family and faith are the cornerstones of our civil society," Gillespie said.

Wadda chutzpenik. (My new Word for the Day. I recommend it for those with higher standards of language, or at least better taste in vulgarities, than the Vice President displays.)

Say it isn't so!.

Here:

3. Said government has no real power in Iraq, and while Paul Bremer is hightailing it out of Dodge (read this article, as opposed to White House press releases, as to why Bremer's reign was so messy). In effect, we still run things -- only it's John Negroponte and the largest American embassy in the world who are in real control of Iraq

Well put.

From Dana Milbank in WaPo

Didn't Get the Memo?

"The country's culture is changing from one that has said, 'If it feels good, do it.' "

-- President Bush, May 14.

"I expressed myself rather forcefully, felt better after I had done it."

-- Vice President Cheney, on his bracing Senate-floor language, June 25.
(via WaPo)

Hey, let me try! "Dick," Fuck you!

Wow! He's right! I do feel better! (So, use the Cheney Google Bomb for medicinal purposes only....

No, no, not the neocon-enabling Powell named after a body part. His kid, the one who wants to write telecom law to to protect us from Janet Jackson's body parts and if bloated media companies happen to metastasize all over our free speech rights in the process, so be it.

Michael Powell is floating balloons via the business section of the Chicago Tribune while of course officially denying everything. This is of interest to telecom wonks primarily, but keep in mind that it's agencies like the FCC that work in quiet anonymity their wonders to inflict on us.

WASHINGTON — Convinced that Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael K. Powell will step down this winter, lobbyists for media and telecommunications companies are rushing to put their pet issues on the agency's agenda.

The 41-year-old Powell denied that he had any immediate plans to leave. But the former Army officer and antitrust lawyer recently prepared a six-month strategy for resolving the controversial media ownership, indecency and telephone competition issues that have become hallmarks of his tenure.

FCC Chief of Staff Bryan Tramont said Powell "has no plans to leave after the president's reelection," disputing that the chairman would want to depart after a Bush victory. Tramont acknowledged, though, that Powell had done some thinking about wrapping things up in the event of a win by the presumed Democratic nominee, Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts.

Just to show that there are still ways to surprise us:

While many Republicans would like to see the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal go away during this election year, [South Carolina Republican Lindsey] Graham is among those who have pushed to keep the congressional investigation going. Otherwise, he argues, everything good that the United States has done in Iraq could be jeopardized.

"What are we fighting for?" he asked at a recent hearing. "To be like Saddam Hussein?"

[Graham] called the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal "the biggest breakdown of command I've ever seen in my 20 years as a military lawyer."

Graham is one of several Republicans on the committee who have pressed for Congress to aggressively investigate the scandal — or, as Graham calls it,
a "nest of criminal misconduct."

Graham makes no apologies for his aggressive pursuit of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, even if it has brought criticism from conservative friends.

"The people who want this fixed the most are the men and women in uniform," he said. "It's their honor that's been stained."
(via not the poor old New York, but the LA Times)

Wasn't that precious? Condi passing notes to Inerrant Boy, and somehow it all ends up in the papers! "Let freedom reign"... I love it...

The ironies are flowing thicker than crude oil in Iraq these days.

First, the United States surreptitiously turns over nominal control of the country to a government appointed by outsiders while leaving real power in the hands of U.S. military commanders and calls it an exercise in democracy.

And although [Prime Minister Iyad Allawi,] the interim prime minister is a former member of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party who later conducted anti-Hussein terrorist operations on behalf of the CIA — operations in which innocent Iraqi civilians may have been killed — his anointment as leader of a "free Iraq" is being hailed by President Bush as a great victory in the war on terror.

According to several former intelligence officials interviewed by the New York Times this month, the political group run by interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi in the 1990s, but financed by the CIA, "used car bombs and other explosive devices smuggled into Iraq" in an attempt to sabotage and destabilize Hussein's regime.

With such a record, it is perhaps not strange then that Allawi, who built his exile organization with defecting Iraqi military officers, is already proclaiming the need to delay elections scheduled for January and impose martial law. On Monday Bush said coalition forces would support such a call for martial law, presumably enforced by U.S. troops.

In 1996, one of Allawi's top officers and his group's self-proclaimed chief bomb maker detailed the mechanics behind Allawi's murderous actions in a videotape subsequently obtained by a British newspaper, the Independent. On the tape he even expresses annoyance that the CIA had shortchanged him on one job, a car bombing, allegedly paying only half the agreed-upon amount.
(via LA Times)

Meet the new boss....

Freedom is slavery! Ignorance is strength!

Who lost Iraq?

Let's say the obvious. By making Iraq a playground for right-wing economic theorists, an employment agency for friends and family, and a source of lucrative contracts for corporate donors, the administration did terrorist recruiters a very big favor.
(via Paul Krugman, really the only reason to read the New York Times)

What he said.

And a nice pre-emptive strike against the "stab in the back" theory the wingers and their MWs will doubtless propagate over the summer. You know, traitors like Democrats and liberals, etc. Just more winger projection, but some people still believe it....

Philly blog headlines here! And Corrente is there. Must be all that coverage of the sk8ters and Love Park....

And when I say Jello, think Limbaugh.

Atrios nails him.

And again.

Not a pretty sight.

A bag stuffed with money?

It seems that $20 billion is missing:

A new Christian Aid report says the US-controlled coalition in Baghdad is handing over power to an Iraqi government without having properly accounted for what it has done with some $20 billion of Iraq's own money.

'For the entire year that the CPA has been in power in Iraq, it has been impossible to tell with any accuracy what the CPA has been doing with Iraq's money,' said Helen Collinson, head of policy at Christian Aid.

Resolution 1483 of May 2003 said that Iraq's oil revenues should be paid into the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI), that this money should be spent in the interests of the Iraqi people, and be independently audited. But it took until April 2004 to appoint an auditor - leaving only a matter of weeks to go through the books.

Early reports of the audit indicate strong criticisms of the CPA's handling of Iraq's money. But the CPA is not going to be around to be held accountable.
(via Christian Aid)

The full report is here.

But—but—How is this possible?! A bunch of 20-somethings from the Heritage Foundation were in charge!

From the people who brought you Enron...

Paul Bremer is John Denver, and he's singing to the Iraqis:

I hate to wake you up to say goodbye.
But the dawn is breaking, it's early morn.
The taxi's waiting, he's blowing his horn,
Already I'm so lonesome I could cry.

[Chorus]
So kiss me and smile for me,
Tell me that you'll wait for me,
Hold me like you'll never let me go.
'Cause I'm leaving on a jet plane
Don't know when I'll be back again -
Oh Babe, I hate to go.

There's so many times I've let you down,
So many times I've played around,
I tell you now, they don't mean a thing.
Every place I go, I'll think of you,
Every song I sing, I'll sing for you,
When I come back, I'll wear your wedding ring.

[Chorus]

Now the time has come to leave you,
One more time let me kiss you,
Then close your eyes, I'll be on my way.
Dream about the days to come.
When I won't have to leave alone,
About the times I won't have to say ...

Dunno about that "wedding ring" line. Everything else seems to be spot on, though. Readers?

UPDATE Alert reader Eric comments:

Somebody *has* to make a music video or flash with this music and video of Bremer....

Well? Readers?

The Bush junta seems to be feeling the heat. Joe Klein has a nice summary in Time, which also includes new information on The Plame Affair:

The [1] torture investigation is one of four major defensive battles the Administration is facing. In the weeks to come, the White House will also have to deal with the [2] 9/11 commission's final report, the [3] congressional investigations into the CIA's bungled assessment of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and a [4] special prosecutor's hunt for the White House leakers who blew the cover of CIA secret operative Valerie Plame.

And that's not all:

Two other serious, surreptitious—and quite possibly unprecedented—battles are going on: [1] the intelligence community is at war with the White House, and [2]the uniformed military is at war with the civilian leadership of the Pentagon,. The first conflict went public last week with news of the impending publication of Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terrorism, a book by an anonymous author who is known to be a senior CIA official and former chief of the agency's Osama bin Laden station. The invasion of Iraq was "an avaricious, premeditated, unprovoked war against a foe who posed no immediate threat," the author writes. "There is nothing that bin Laden could have hoped for more than the American invasion and occupation of Iraq."

Michael Moore couldn't have said it any better—and this book was vetted by CIA censors. In fact, the views of Anonymous are an accurate reflection of the opinions I've heard from multiple intelligence sources. The spooks seem to believe that outgoing CIA Director George Tenet was strong-armed by Cheney and Rumsfeld into overassessing Iraq's WMD capacity. This may or may not be true, but it is the conventional wisdom in the intelligence community. Furthermore, there is intense anger over the White House's revealing the identity of Plame, who may have been active in a sting operation involving the trafficking of WMD components.

NOTE: This "sting operation" is new information on Plame. Interesting!

Plame was outed in a White House attempt to discredit the finding of her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, that there was no evidence that Iraq tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger. "Only a very high-ranking official could have had access to the knowledge that Plame was on the payroll" of the CIA, an intelligence source told me.

The military has made no secret of its fury with Rumsfeld and his coterie of neoconservatives at the Pentagon. Rumsfeld has been faulted for committing too few troops and too little planning to postwar Iraq. Returning National Guard leaders have been telling their congressional representatives about chaos in the field.

NOTE: If our Army was entirely professional (i.e., a sort of Praetorian Guard), the citizens in the National Guard wouldn't be bringing democratic checks and balances into play, as they are.

There is also some rustling among the brass about General Tommy Franks' memoir, to be published in August. Bob Woodward reported that Franks once called Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith, who was charged with postwar planning, "the [Cheney expletive] stupidest guy on the face of the earth," and some defense experts are wondering if Franks, who has a reputation for candor, will elaborate on that.
(via Time)

Pass the popcorn!

Oh, and "Dick"? Fuck you! There. I feel better already! (back)

Unless you are very, very wealthy, the answer is going to be No. That's because Clinton, unlike Bush, focussed on bringing economic benefits to all Americans. Ron Brownstein of the LA Times runs the numbers:

[T]he Clinton years produced extraordinary gains in the communities that needed help most.

The benefits of the Clinton boom were dispersed far more broadly than the gains under Ronald Reagan, in part because Clinton systematically implemented policies that encouraged and rewarded work for those on the economy's bottom rungs.

Consider the scorecard. During Clinton's two terms, the median income for American families increased by a solid 15% after inflation, according to Census Bureau figures. But it rose even faster for African Americans (33%) and Hispanics (24%) than it did for whites (14%).

The growth was so widely shared that from 1993 through 1999, families in the bottom fifth of the income distribution saw their incomes increase faster than those in the top 5%. By comparison, under President Reagan in the 1980s, those in the top 5% increased their income more than five times faster than the bottom 20%.

Likewise, the poverty rate under Clinton fell 25%, the biggest eight-year decline since the 1960s. It fell even faster for particularly vulnerable groups like blacks, Hispanics and children. Again the contrast with Reagan is striking. During Reagan's two terms, the number of Americans in poverty fell by just 77,000. During Clinton's two terms, the number of Americans in poverty plummeted by 8.1 million. The number of children in poverty fell by 50,000 under Reagan. Under Clinton the number was 4.1 million. That's a ratio of 80 to 1.

Welfare reform pushed more low-income families into the job market, where they could benefit from the rising tide. Then Clinton made work more rewarding with increases in the minimum wage and the earned-income tax credit, the creation of the Children's Health Insurance Program (to cover the children of working-poor families), and expanded funding for day care. He eliminated the deficit while cutting taxes for average families.

And while delivering all these benefits for traditionally Democratic constituencies, Clinton extended the party's appeal up the income ladder.
(via LA Times)

Ever wonder why the wingers hate (yes, hate, not "hate") Clinton so much? And why the want you to hate him as well? Because it's the old Republican shell game, that's why. They want to tear down the good that he did. They don't want you to think of your own interests, that's why.

Again, are you better off today than you were four years ago?

Seems to be favorable. Maybe, just maybe, there are honest Republicans who want to cleanse their party. Let's hope!

During the screening at the Uptown Theatre, I sat next to a newspaper reporter who was raised in an activist Republican party family, whose sister worked previously for the Bush White House and who considers herself moderate. She cried through the second half of the movie, which featured graphic images of injured and killed Iraqi civilians and U.S. soldiers and focused on the U.S. military's efforts to recruit minorities and poor whites.

She and others who don't hew to Moore's hardcore lefty vision of the world gave him credit for, if nothing else, presenting an incredibly cohesive and emotionally stirring piece of work.

"There's no way people are not going to come out of this hating Bush," she said. Which, of course, is exactly what the GOP fears. Conservative opposition is not based on the belief that this is just some commie-pinko rant that'll be ignored by the masses.
(via Terry Neal in WaPo)

Except the feeling isn't, and shouldn't be, "hate". It's outrage (back).

The idea that we "hate" Bush, instead of being outraged by his actions, is one of the great, and almost unnoticed, triumphs of winger meme propagation. Let's not fall for it!

Sounds inspiring!

The United States transferred political authority to an interim Iraqi government in a five-minute surprise ceremony on Monday morning that was conducted two days before the planned June 30 handover date because of security concerns.

The formal transfer came at a hastily arranged ceremony,, held inside the U.S.-controlled Green Zone in Baghdad. U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer handed over a blue portfolio containing a signed document conveying political authority to the chief judge of Iraq's highest court.

Several hours later, members of Iraq's new government took oaths of office, with each stepping forward to place a hand on the Koran.
(via WaPo)

The Iraqis don't seem to think much of it:

There was no noticeable celebratory gunfire, which often occurs at commemorative moments in Iraq.

I wonder how long it will take our puppet government to clamp down on press coverage?

And here's a choice piece of Bushit:

"The Iraqi people have their country back," President Bush declared in Istanbul, where he is attending the NATO summit. "We have kept our word."

Now, if only we could have our country back, eh?

"So, how was Fahrenheit 911?"

"Pretty good. But it was all Bush-bashing. If I want that, I can listen to local news."

Which is kind of a good news, bad news thing. On the one hand, I would have like to overhead that F911 was the best movie ever, brought tears to my eyes, etc. Of course, the speakers were cynical East coasters.

On the other, maybe the local news guys are finally acting like a free press...

I guess there are some things you can't get a Republican judge to do...

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that prisoners seized as potential terrorists and held for more than two years in Cuba may challenge their captivity in American courts, a defeat for President Bush in one of the first major cases arising from the Sept. 11 attacks.

For now, the high court said only that the men can take the first legal step in contesting U.S. authority to hold them.

The men can now presumably take their complaints to a U.S. federal judge, even though they are physically held beyond U.S. borders.

Lawyers for the foreign-born men held at Guantanamo had told the court that unless American courts could look over the military's shoulder, the Cuban camp would be a legal no man's land. Cuban law certainly does not apply within the base, so it must be U.S. law that governs, they argued.

Writing for the majority, Justice John Paul Stevens said that the inmates' status in military custody is immaterial.

"What is presently at stake is only whether the federal courts have jurisdiction to determine the legality of the executive's potentially indefinite detention of individuals who claim to be wholly innocent of wrongdoing," he wrote.

They do, he said, in sending the case back to a lower court to consider the inmates' claims.

In a dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia, joined by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Clarence Thomas, said the decision was "an irresponsible overturning of settled law in a matter of extreme importance to our forces currently in the field."
(via AP)

So, Bush it seems that Bush's acts are still subject to judicial review—even if Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas don't agree. Good!

1 - George W. Bush's favorite food is:
a) soft warm pretzels.
b) newly hatched baby robins.
c) peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
d) turkee neck soup.

The correct answer is:------------------------------------------------------d - TURKEE NECK SOUP!>> If you chose newly hatched babyrobins you are a very scary person.

---

2 - George W. Bush was born...
a) in Crawford Texas.
b) in a fever pitch.
c) in a humble manger in Bethlehem Connecticut.
d)"again" - after overdosing on frozen mojitos and Nembutal.

The correct answer is:------------------------------------------------------c - A HUMBLE MANGER INBETHLEHEM CONNECTICUT>> If you chose 'born again' you aresorta correct, except, it wasn't Nembutal.It was frozen mojitos and jimsonweed.

---

3. Cowboy W's favorite ranch chore is:
a) clearing brush and rakin' stuff.
b) shootin' guns and fetchin' wood.
c) creative napkin folding and counting silver spoons.
d) chasing chipmunks in a golf cart.

The correct answer is:------------------------------------------------------b - SHOOTIN' GUNS & FETCHIN' WOOD>> If you said creative napkin folding and counting silver spoons you are thinking of Karl Rove.And NO, the chipmunks are not driving thegolf cart! - At least I don't think they are.On the other hand, maybe they are.

---

4. George W. Bush's favorite bedtime story is:
a) Little Red Riding Crop.
b) The Hungry Cataclysm.
c) Goodnight Reverend Moon.
d) The Immortal by Jorge Luis Borges.

The correct answer is:------------------------------------------------------d - "The Immortal" by Jorge Luis Borges.>> If you answered Little "Red Riding Crop"you are probably thinking of that Jack Ryan guy.He's that "family values" $$$$ Republican weirdowho used to be married to that TV-show spacechick until she beamed him into hyperspace. $igh.Hey! Maybe Bill Bennett's slot machine pilgrimfriend Mistress Lee will read him bedtime storiesand spank his moneymaker in front of strangers.-----------------------------------------------------------------------I
sure hope so. I love happy GOP endings.


If you can -- win yerself some money or fertile land and or mindless free love -- by wagerin' with this here quiz -- fuckin' do it!

Vice Commando Dick "The Pink Puffer" f#!k youz'self Cheney would fuckin' do it! That venous gobbling sheep ked would wager away all of our fuckin' left ventricle chambers if he thought it would pump one drop of ideological anti-freeze into into his own frozen pulmonary artery! So fuck the Cult of the 'W' and their entire neo-fascist Evangelical Monarchist Franco Way operation.

As they say: don't show up for a hatchet murder with a scalpel.

Meanwhile: Don't forget to celebrate the early debut of "Iraqi Sovereignty" starring the usual "legitimate" news players and appearing nightly at John "Bat.43" Negroponte's "sovereign" hand-over puppet theater. There should be plenty of dancing in the streets, flower tossing, air kissing, and moony-eyed semantic wooing coming from the cosmentic counter sales wowsers at CNN and MSNBC and...well, burble burble. Hand-over! Sacrifices! New beginings! It should be quite another fabulous intoxicated cakewalk parade for at least one more 24-36 hour "news" cycle. Yum yum frosting! Then, like the corporatist trinket worshippers that they are, they'll wake up with a sugary headache, forget any of it ever happened, and go crashing off after the next shiny glazed object dangled before their blinky easily bemused beamers.

You know the drill.

*

Well, the iron wheel turns and it's back to work again. Night all.

Oh, and Dick? Fuck you. Wow, that felt really good. Now I can sleep!

Cheney Google bomb here.

Oh, and Dale Earnhardt, Jr. says go see F911 (Atrios. From drip, drip, drip to splash, splash, splash...

Dana Priest has an article in WaPo that focuses on the chain of custory of the Bush torture memos. However, from the standpoint of restoring constitutional government in this country, it's far more interesting to follow the notion of the so-called "inherent authority" of the occupant of the Oval Office to set aside the law. After all, authorizing torture is one move in the game; Presidential rule of decree is the very game itself. Looking at Priest's story from that angle:

Although the White House repudiated the [Aug. 1, 2002 memo justififying torture and the "inherent authority of the Executive to set aside the law] as the work of a small group of lawyers at the Justice Department...
(via WaPo)

Gee, "bad apples," huh? Handwriting of The Fog Machine, rule #4 (back): "Subordinates are sacrificed to protect superiors".

... administration officials now confirm it was vetted by a larger number of officials, including lawyers at the National Security Council, the White House counsel's office and Vice President Cheney's office.

The memorandum was drafted by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel... The legal opinion was signed by Jay S. Bybee, then head of the office and now a federal judge.

Way to work that confirmation process, Senate Democrats!

The office consists mainly of political appointees and is considered the executive branch agencies' legal adviser. Memos signed by the head of the office are given the weight of a binding legal opinion.

Fox, meet henhouse....

A Justice Department official said Tuesday at a briefing that the office went "beyond what was asked for," but other lawyers and administration officials said the memo was approved by the department's criminal division and by the office of Attorney General John D. Ashcroft.

In the few free moments they can spare from hunting down pornographers.

In addition, Timothy E. Flanigan -- then deputy White House counsel -- discussed a draft of the document with lawyers at the Office of Legal Counsel before it was finalized, the officials said. David S. Addington, Cheney's counsel, also weighed in with remarks during at least one meeting he held with Justice lawyers involved with writing the opinion. He was particularly concerned, sources said, that the opinion include a clear-cut section on the president's authority.

And now comes the money quote:

That section of the memo has become among the most controversial within the legal community that has analyzed the opinion since it was made public by The Washington Post. During Tuesday's briefing, White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales called the commander in chief section "unnecessary."

Not "wrong." "Unnecessary." My God.

Here is an example of exactly what e-voting opponents have always been concerned about: lack of auditability, combined with a process that gives the appearance of corruption:

After years denying theevidence that touchscreen voting machines were unreliable and prone to tampering, the registrar of voters in Riverside County, California, Mischelle Townsend, suddenly announced her retirement - supposedly to spend more time with her family.

Ha.

It seems more than likely, however, than her decision was swayed by a looming lawsuit challenging her handling of a recount in a local county race in March, and a flurry of allegations about her own conduct in office and the misleading claims of Sequoia Voting Systems, the company that makes and services the county's voting machinery. Ms Townsend was among the first US election registrars to introduce electronic voting, even before November 2000. Despite initial praise for her farsightedness, her judgment has come under increasing scrutiny.

According to the staff of one candidate, who were present in her office on election night, Ms Townsend inexplicably halted the count for about an hour while two Sequoia employees were observed typing at a computer terminal with access to the ballot tabulation software.

Only authorised county elections officers are supposed to have access to the machines during an election. And making software changes - if that is what happened - would be illegal. Before the counting stopped, candidate Linda Soubirous looked likely to qualify for a run-off with the man she was challenging, county supervisor Bob Buster. When it resumed, she fell steadily behind and eventually failed to qualify for the run-off by less than one-10th of one percentage point.

Ms Soubirous requested a recount, only to have Ms Townsend stonewall almost every request she made for machine data that might show a discrepancy. She is now about to sue the county for failing to respect basic electoral procedures.

Sequoia has denied any wrongdoing. Ms Townsend has refused to be drawn on what happened. Riverside's district attorney, at her request, investigated the accusations and cleared her of wrongdoing. But the district attorney was an overt supporter of Mr Buster's and a client of the same political consultancy firm used by both Mr Buster and Sequoia, casting doubt on his impartiality.

This is exactly the sort of dispute opponents of e-voting fear might erupt across the country in November.
(via UK Independent)

So, we would regard a close Bush "win" in 2004 as legitimate... Why, exactly?

NOTE Story found in American Politics Journal.

This is a two-base hit: it demonstrates both what a fraud the "handover of Iraqi sovereignty" is, and at the same time shows where Attorney Corporal [hell, I demoted the silly twit] John Ashcroft could be devoting his time rather than going after porn movies:

(via Jackson MS Clarion Ledger)

When an interim government takes over from the U.S.-led occupation next week, Iraq will regain its place among the world's sovereign nations - except on the Internet.

The domain assigned to Iraq, ".iq," is stuck in a strange bureaucratic limbo - the company that had administered it is under U.S. criminal indictment - and could remain there for months.

As a result, if Iraq's government, national institutions or regular Iraqis want a Web site, they need to use international domains, such as ".com," ".org" or ".net", which are maintained in the United States.

The Baghdad Museum, which is still trying to recover from its April 2003 looting, could use an ".iq" address to identify itself as Iraqi, just as the Louvre proclaims its Frenchness with www.louvre.fr. Instead, it has registered http://the.iraq.museum .

In 1997, when Saddam Hussein's dictatorship was blocking the Internet, an ICANN body granted responsibility for the ".iq" domain to InfoCom Corp., a Texas-based company that sold computers and Web services in the Middle East. The domain's "technical contact" was listed as Bayan Elashi, InfoCom's chief executive.

In 2002, a grand jury indicted InfoCom, Elashi and four of his brothers on charges that they exported computer equipment to Libya and Syria and funneled money to a member of the Islamic extremist group Hamas. Trial for the Elashi brothers began this month in Dallas.

The case put the ".iq" domain on ice.

Believe it or not this case even outraged a Texas newspaper

Lock 'em up, throw away evidence

Three years after counterterrorism agents sacked their Richardson computer company, five Palestinian-born brothers are getting their day in court. But something's missing: the charges...

Attorney General John Ashcroft announced an indictment in 2002 stating a Hamas leader, Mousa Abu Marzook, laundered money with the company's help. Marzook's wife, the government said, is the Elashis' cousin. InfoCom also ran a Web site for the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, which President Bush called a fund-raising branch of Hamas.

Yet, the brothers are going to trial for black-market computer shipping. The feds won't bring out the Hamas charges until this fall.

The FBI reportedly was investigating the alleged terrorist connections since 1993. Numerous court filings have been sealed. Why not start the trial on the real charges now, and open up this information?

The government's priority ought to be prosecuting terrorism, not low-level shipping fraud. The latter charges, though, would allow Bush and Ashcroft to save face by locking up the Elashis if the now-secret terrorism evidence they touted proves unconvincing.

The Bush Administration is being examined for what it knew before Sept. 11, 2001. For this reason, as well, the Justice Department should come clean on InfoCom. Perhaps investigators did smash a financial pipeline to Hamas.

If they did, their work ought to hold up to public scrutiny in a public trial.

Some snarky folks over at Slashdot had some thoughts on the matter:

www.is-that-your-age-or-your.iq

[Plus, any dissidents there should pick up www.low.iq before USA's Republican Party registers it...:p ]

From America's Finest News Source.

[BREMER]: "As the Coalition's rule draws to a close, the numbers show that we have an awful lot to be proud of," Bremer said Tuesday. "As anyone who's taken a minute and actually looked at the figures can tell you, the vast majority of Iraqis are still alive—as many as 99 percent. While 10,000 or so Iraqi civilians have been killed, pretty much everyone is not dead."
(via The Onion)

And much, much more.

Missed this column from columnist Dimitri Vassilaros it came out. Poor W. Nobody likes him anymore—not even the wingers who own him.

Attorney General John Ashcroft has more tolerance for torture than for adult films.

A couple of adult film producers based in California are being prosecuted in Pittsburgh by U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan. The tapes were purchased through the mail as part of an obscenity investigation. News reports suggest the story lines (what there are of them, anyway) cannot be described graphically in a family newspaper. But the action among the consenting adult actors is scripted. It is not real. Repeat after me: It's only a movie, it's only a movie.

The actors were not tortured to make the films, and the customers were not tortured to purchase them. Yet, Ashcroft's department wants to make a statement about what he must see as moral depravity.

Your federal government will go across the country from Pittsburgh to Hollywood to prosecute the people who hired and directed the actors playing roles. And yet, Justice will to go to any lengths to rationalize using torture against real people.

Say what you will about the two adult film defendants, at least they did not torture anyone and then try to justify it with tortured logic.

Can Ashcroft make the same claim?
(via the Pittsburgh Tribune Review)

Well, no, he can't. But then that would presume that the Bush administration can tell the difference between actors playing roles and real people. Or between images of torture, and real acts of torture. Eh?

Eeew!

Ron Reagan, as interviewed in the Times magazine:

[INTERVIEWER:] How do you account for all the glowing obituaries of [former President Reagan]?

[REAGAN:] I think it was a relief for Americans to look at pictures of something besides men on leashes. If you are going to call yourself a Christian—and I don't—then you have to ask yourself a fundamental question, and that is: Whom would Jesus torture? Whom would Jesus drag around on a dog's leash? How can Christians tolerate it?
It is unconscionable. It has put our young men and women who are over there, fighting a war that they should not have been asked to fight -- it has put them in greater danger.

(via the NY Times)

Good questions.

Of course, these are questions easily answered if the "Christian" right believes that anyone not just like them is going to Hell. What's wrong with creating a little hell on earth for unbelievers?

But the "Christian" right doesn't really think that. Right?

It occurred to me (over at Sadly, No! actually, since he had a line at the end of one post saying "In totally unrelated news: Fuck you") that I had not ever actually, like, clicked on one of these "Fuck you" links . So I did.

And got this:

"Vice President Richard B. Cheney has had a distinguished career as a businessman and public servant, serving four Presidents and as an elected official. Throughout his service, Mr. Cheney served with duty, honor, and unwavering leadership, gaining him the respect of the American people during trying military times."

Eww. Aren't there rules against putting blatant falsehoods on .gov sites?

(Pause for thought)--oh yeah, I forgot all those economic statistics (rated "RNC" for ideological purity rather than any factual accuracy) are on .gov sites too. Never mind.

The truth shall set you free:

Before the movie started, Leslie Hanser prayed.

"I prayed the Lord would open my eyes," she said.

For months, her son Joshua, a college student, had been drawing her into political debate. He'd tell her she shouldn't trust President Bush. He'd tell her the Iraq war was wrong. Hanser, a 41-year-old homemaker, pushed back. She defended the president, supported him fiercely

But Joshua kept at her, until she prayed for help understanding her son's fervor.

Emerging from Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," her eyes wet, Hanser said she at last understood. "My emotions are just…. " She trailed off, waving her hands to show confusion. "I feel like we haven't seen the whole truth before."
(via the Pulitzer-heavy, feisty not-the-New-York Los AngelesTimes)

Surprise!

Readers, those of you who've seen the film: What's the word?

UPDATE From alert reader Patti:

I live in Mobile, Alabama (yes, you can pity me) and all of the showings were sold out so they added another theater and all showings are sold out. This is a red, red state. People were crying and saying they were going to see it twice and bring family members.

And from alert reader GOTV:

Bring a stack of voter registration forms. One commenter suggested it - not my original idea - but a great idea:

Just stand up as ending credits roll and say, Folks, I've got a stack of voter registration forms here if anyone wants one.

Just that. No endorsement. Nothing else—just, Folks, here are some forms. Go ahead and exercise your right to vote in November.

From drip, drip, drip to splash, splash, splash...

As ye sow, so shall ye reap.

This is my third trip to Iraq since the war, and the situation is the worst I've seen. Neither U.S. nor Iraqi intelligence has made much headway in tracking the source of the suicide bombs that paralyze Iraq's recovery. U.S. and Iraqi officials fully expect the violence to get worse after June 30 as insurgents try to influence U.S. elections.

Meanwhile, Iraqi anger increases at the abrasions of occupation. Security is so bad that 130,000 U.S. troops will stay on indefinitely, along with thousands of South African, Nepalese, and other security contractors, causing continuous friction with the Iraqi public. Only $3.7 billion of the $18 billion for reconstruction has been spent, with little trickle-down effect, because most goes to huge U.S. firms. Tales of corruption and kickbacks are widespread.

What's most infuriating about this sorry state of affairs is that it is the direct outcome of the arrogant and blinkered policies of the Bush team.

Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz told me that postwar Iraq would resemble post-World War II France. He expected the London opposition - headed by Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi - to come back and establish a democracy. Like De Gaulle. He believed the likelihood of postwar instability was virtually nil.

Another delicious irony. Not only is Wolfowitz a lover of the reviled French, he allowed his Francophilia to cloud his judgement! What a piece of work.

In a whitewash of history, Wolfowitz told the House Armed Services Committee last week: "Contrary to what I see over and over again in the newspapers, Chalabi was not a favorite of the Pentagon." Excuse me? The Pentagon airlifted Chalabi into southern Iraq early in the war along with his private militia.

Why does this matter now? Because the expectation that liberation would be easy, a la Chalabi, meant the Pentagon never prepared for occupation. The consequences of that blindness are being felt now.

The disarray we see today was shaped by the Pentagon's initial errors. The first 30 days of any occupation are critical, according to Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, former commander of the 101st Airborne in Mosul. He was sent back here this month by President Bush to try to reshape Iraq's hapless security forces at the 11th hour.

From his experience in Bosnia and elsewhere, Petraeus developed a strategy for postwar planning. In Mosul, Petraeus trained new Iraqi security forces and established stability in those first 30 days, and he used Iraqis (not big U.S. contractors) to rehab factories and infrastructure. The Petraeus model brought relative calm to Mosul while he was there.

Bosnia, eh? That was under Clinton, so it had to be wrong!

But in Baghdad, the Pentagon-led occupation did no such thing. Looting and mayhem in Baghdad were left unchecked and infrastructure ruined so badly that much remains unrepaired today. The looters - including thousands of criminals released from Saddam Hussein's jails - have formed a mafia that helps the insurgency. But at the time, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld mocked those who called on him to intervene.

In the biggest mistake of all, Pentagon planners ensured that Iraqis would be unprepared to fight. Ignoring State Department warnings, they abolished the Iraqi army in May 2003. And they deliberately chose not to train new Iraqi forces to combat a domestic insurgency. That would not be necessary, I was told by a top occupation official here last October, because the United States could handle the problem.

So removed from reality was the Pentagon that it sent tens of thousands of U.S. reservists to Iraq without adequate body armor or armored vehicles. They weren't expected to face combat. Tell that to the widows.
(via the Philadelphia Inquirer)

Say, has Bush issued that executive order to repay families for the body armor they had to buy and send their own children because Bush didn't plan? Or to repay the local governments that raised money to armor the Pentagon's flimsy HumVees? Didn't think so.

YABL, YABL, YABL:

Roughly 84 percent of U.S. military fatalities have occurred since Bush declared the end of "major combat" on May 1, 2003.
(via our own Inky)

Remember the "Mission Accomplished" banner? The WhiteWash House Orwelled their way back from that to the end of "major combat"—and even using, as the Inky does, their Orwellian language, it's still a lie! Amazing but true!

And it seems that people are starting to wake up to this:

On the issue of credibility, independents now say that, by 50 percent to 36 percent, Kerry is more "honest and trustworthy" than Bush (despite the Bush campaign's having spent $85 million this year on TV ads to stress the opposite). And 55 percent of independents now believe that the administration "intentionally misled" Americans when it repeatedly claimed that Hussein and al-Qaeda were linked.

And we can especially savor that Bush spent $85 illion and got zip. Makes you think Bush's media buying skills are on a par with his business skills, doesn't it? Lucky for him if he's got OBL on ice, eh?

That would be "the F word"—fascism.

The Republicans seem to get all twitchy and defensive whenever it's used for analytical purposes. I wonder why?

Let's look at the latest: what Manhattan Judge Calabresi said. He's 71 years old and therefore old enough, unlike most of the winger ideologues and their millionaire MWs, to have some historical perspective:

"In a way that occurred before but is rare in the United States ... somebody [Bush] came to power as a result of the illegitimate acts of a legitimate institution that had the right to put somebody in power," Calabresi said. "The reason I emphasize that is because that is exactly what happened when Mussolini was put in by the king of Italy.

"The King of Italy had the right to put Mussolini in, though he had not won an election, and make him prime minister," the judge continued. "That is what happened when Hindenburg put Hitler in."

Calabresi told the lawyers: "I am not suggesting for a moment that Bush is Hitler. I want to be clear on that, but it is a situation which is extremely unusual."

So far, this analysis is entirely unexceptional. What has Calebresi said here that is not useful, insightful, and instructive? Nothing. Here at Corrente, we've been saying for some time that the rise of the National Socialism could provide a useful historical perspective to the seizure of power by the Bush administration (back here). So it's good to see that this analysis is becoming mainstream.

Here, however, is where Calabresi did step over the line (assuming, of course, that the line has not already been erased by the Republican boot):

Calabresi went on to say the public should expel Bush from office to cleanse the democratic system. "That's got nothing to do with the politics of it. It's got to do with the structural reassertion of democracy," Calabresi was quoted saying.

In his letter of apology, Calabresi said he was "deeply sorry" for remarks that were meant as "a rather complicated academic argument about the nature of re-elections after highly contested original elections" -- but that were "too easily taken as partisan."

"That is something which judges should do their best to avoid, and there, I clearly failed," he wrote.
(via CNN)

Of course, it is a little sad, and more than a little absurd, to see a judge admonished for partisan activity after the Supreme Court gave Bush a "good for one day only" free pass to the office He now occupies, in Bush v. Gore.

But nevertheless, it's good to see Calabresi upholding the rules—"the structural reassertion of democracy"—as well as his boss upholding the rules—judges shouldn't tell peple how to vote.

But watch for the wingers to use the F word as a club to prevent serious analysis of the nature of the regime they've put in place, and to make it appear that Calabresi, in apologizing for crossing a line into partisan politics, was apologizing for drawing attention to the disturbing parallels between the Bush administration and the fascist movements of the '30s. He wasn't.

NOTE For further study, be sure to read Orcinus on Rush, Newspeak, and Fascism.

TROLL PROPHYLACTIC Calabresi didn't say that "Bush is Hitler." Neither did I.

Isn't this statement just too damn pitiful?

CHICAGO - Crippled by accusations about sex clubs and losing support from his party, Republican Senate candidate Jack Ryan pulled out of the race on Friday, leaving Republicans searching for a new face to defend a critical Senate seat.

"It's clear to me that a vigorous debate on the issues most likely could not take place if I remain in the race," Ryan said in a statement distributed to reporters at his campaign headquarters. "What would take place, rather, is a brutal, scorched-earth campaign - the kind of campaign that has turned off so many voters, the kind of politics I refuse to play."

The candidacy of Ryan, 44, an investment banker turned teacher in the inner city, imploded when custody papers were unsealed that included statements by his former wife, actress Jeri Ryan, saying he had taken her to sex clubs and asked her to have public sex.
(via our own Inky)

Life's little ironies, eh?

1. The only kind of "brutal, scorched earth" politics I can remember is the Republicans spending $70 million over a blow job, as part of a media-fuelled coup against an elected President sponsored by winger billionaires. So the irony of a Republican candidate being toppled over a sex scandal is just too, too rich.

2. And who was the party doing the "brutal scorched earth" politics? Why, Jack Ryan's own party, the Republicans! All the Democrats had to do was float happily above the fray while the Republicanas eviscerated each other.

3. And of course, the Republicans heaved poor Jack Ryan over the side to appease their SIC base. Never mind reason and logic: As poor Jack Ryan pointed out, there's nothing in the Ten Commandments that prohibits you from having sex with your wife in public.

4. The real issue, of course, lies in the word that neither the SCLM nor the Republicans can bring themselves to utter: non-consensual. Here at Corrente, of course, we found no difficulty (back) in doing so. That's what probably sealed Jack Ryan's fate. A guy with a kink like that isn't likely to appeal to swing voters.

5. And hasn't the whole Jack Ryan affair been wrapped up suspiciously quickly? There are some other words the SCLM and the Republicans can't bring themselves to utter: "cages, whips, and other apparatus" (back). Love the word "apparatus," by the way. Could it be that Republican apparatchiks at the national level have, shall we say, issues about torture?

Strange day. Cheese, Love Park, and now it's chilly. WTF, this is Philly in the summer. The air should feel like wet tissue paper right now. Warm wet tissue paper. What's with the chill? Has the Atlantic Conveyor gone south?

And Blogger outage. First the flaky piecrust stats page dies, now this. And blogger spooge still isn't fixed for Netscape users.

Weirdly, the free blogger still worked. It was paid Blogger that went down. Kinda perverse system of incentives, if you ask me. Is this any way to prepare for an IPO? Google, WTF?

Oh, and "Dick"—Fuck you. Yep, I feel better for it!

I'm printing most of the AP story, since it's so amazing. No, cancel that. What's amazing is that it doesn't raise an eyebrow anymore.

Interrupt President Bush one too many times and he won't let you talk to his wife.

The White House canceled Radio and Television Ireland's scheduled interview of First Lady Laura Bush during her short stay here for the U.S.-European Union summit, the president's spokesman Scott McClellan said Saturday.

He didn't say why, but the reason for the decision was clear: The White House didn't like the news organization's interview with the president at the White House last Thursday.
(via AP)

That was one of the vindictive parts.

During the interview, Bush became exasperated with his questioner, who seemed intent on controlling the discussion.

That was the petty-minded part. What, Inerrant Boy can't handle an interview? The only situation He's comfortable in is one of those fake "conversations" where He's guaranteed a standing ovation? Say it isn't so!

In one exchange, Bush made the point that Saddam Hussein had used weapons of mass destruction against Iraqis.

"Indeed, Mr. President, but you didn't find the weapons of mass destruction," the interviewer shot back.

"Let me finish," Bush said. "Let me finish, please. Please. You ask the questions and I'll answer them, if you don't mind.

That was the ignorant part.

Three more times he scolded the interviewer:

- "Let me finish, please. Please. Let me finish, and then you can follow up, if you don't mind."

- "Let me finish."

- "Please. Please. Please, for a minute, OK. It'll be better if you let me finish my answers, and then you can follow up, if you don't mind."

Sounds like the interviewer wasn't giving proper deference to the Boy Emperor.

You know, if Bush was running for dog-catcher—or goat-catcher—and His local paper published that exchange, He wouldn't get a single vote, Blue or Red, because He'd be laughed out of town for being, well, ignorant, petty-minded, and vindictive.

But Bush isn't running for dog-catcher, He's running for President. And for some reason, he keeps getting a pass on this kind of behavior. Why is that?

I think that sound you hear is the wheels coming off....

These two stories have something to do with each other. Trust me.

First, from the Atlanta Journal Constitution:

NEW DELHI (AP)--The office of the Dalai Lama said Friday that an animal rights group misrepresented the nature of a request by the spiritual leader that fast-food chain KFC not open an outlet in his homeland, Tibet.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, released a document Thursday from the Dalai Lama asking that the Louisville, Ky.-based restaurant chain "abandon its plan to open restaurants in Tibet."

But the Dalai Lama's heading on the document, "APPEAL," was changed to "Dear Mr. Novak"--a reference to David Novak, chief executive of KFC's parent company, Yum! Brands Inc. PETA then issued a statement saying the Dalai Lama had "dispatched a letter" to the company.

"We strongly object to your changing the nature of the appeal without seeking our approval," the Dalai Lama's secretary, Tenzin Geyche Tethong, said in a letter faxed Friday to Ingrid Newkirk of PETA in Norfolk, Va.

And then we have this, also from the AJC

WASHINGTON — Sen. Zell Miller, the veteran Georgia politician who outraged fellow Democrats by endorsing President Bush's re-election, has been asked to speak at the Republican National Convention, an official familiar with the negotiations said Friday.

A second Republican said negotiations with Miller have been going on for some time. That Republican, who is close to the party leadership, said that Bush's top advisers are eager to have Miller appear because they see him as an effective TV presence whose lifelong affiliation with the Democratic Party could help burnish Bush's credentials with moderate and independent voters.

Georgia Democratic Party Chairman Bobby Kahn mocked Miller's appearance.

"Maybe I'll switch to the Republican Party so I can speak at the Democratic Convention and bash Bush," Kahn said. "It would be about as newsworthy."

Despite his support for Bush and his ferocious criticism of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, Miller has refused to drop out of the Democratic Party. And party officials said Friday there was no way to simply kick the former two-term governor out.

So our message here is that it is wrong to "fly false colors," as they used to say back in the Horatio Hornblower days. My old gray cat has more Democratic principles in her left hind paw than Ding Dong Zell has in his whole body any more.

No, I don't advocate "kicking him out of the party"; aside from Mr. Kahn's no doubt wrathful observation that the rules don't allow it, the fact that Zell has a "D" after his Senatorial desk nameplate may, come next January, make Tom Daschle the Senate Majority Leader he should be.

But I don't have to like him or his neocon-theocon-DINO ways. A Democrat In Name Only deserves all the kicking around we can give him, until he repents and returns to the path of righeousness. Or as somebody once said, "We strongly object to your changing the nature of the appeal without seeking our approval."

UPDATE: Esteemed Commentors Tinfoil Hat Boy and Vadranor point out that Zig-Zag Zell (as john notes he is locally known) is in fact not running for reelection and so will not be a factor in the Senate come January. This renders my objections above moot so if anybody wants to go all Abu Ghraib on his ass it's fine with me.

Our new motto: "Philly—WTF!"

One of the reasons that our feckless and indifferent lame-duck Mayor, John Street, gave for turning down $1 million that would return skateboarders to Love Park (back), was that the city was going to install WiFI there, and the skateboarders would get in the way of that lofty civic goal.

So I thought I'd try it out, and I took my laptop over there. And indeed, there is WiFi in Love Park. In fact, Mayor Street's image is right on the log in screen!

And I'm here to tell you that Street's reasoning is a crock. WiFi and skatenboarding don't contradict each other, and in fact would complement each other.

Love Park is not an ideal computing environment in any case. Most of the benches are in the direct sun, and that makes the screen hard to see. Others in shade are within range of the fountain, and if there's a wind, as there is today, I'd worry about getting my laptop wet or even having it short out. So, right now I'm sitting over on a stone embankment, in the shade, blogging, but it's not very comfortable.

So Love Park is far from an ideal place to compute. In fact, there's no one here taking advantage of the WiFi but me!

On the other hand, Love Park is ideal for skateboarding. In fact, people come from all over the world to see it, for that reason. Not only would these people bring in tourist nrevenue the city sorely needs, their exploits would make my neighborhood a more engaging and livelier place.

I'd love to see skateboarders doing their thing right now. It would make my experience of the park better, not worse. Mostly, they skate on the marble rim round the fountain, and I'm not bringing my computer anywhere near the fountain.

There's really no reason for Street not to bring skateboarding back to the park. Except mulishness. Or being on the take. Philly! WTF!

I'm at the Reading Terminal Market in Philly, and I just had a taste of an artisanal cheese from Green Valley Dairy..

Wow.

Organic farming since the 1990s, free range cows—I swear I can taste the grass those cows dined on in the cheese.

Flavor burst!

OK, it's smallscale, and local produce is still too expensiver to live on without thinking twice (readers?), but food that isn't corporate swill sure does taste good, doesn't it? What a difference.

(via Boxofficemojo.com, as cited at dKos)

Friday Estimates of money taken in: 1. 'Fahrenheit 9/11' - $8.2M, 2. 'White Chicks' - $6.8M

Now look at the number of theaters showing these films (two in between, "The Notebook" and "Two Brothers", omitted for clarity):

White Chicks --2,726
Fahrenheit 9/11 --868

On account of a slight deficiency of cash towards the end of the month, I'm not going to be able to go see it till next weekend. I console myself with the thought that, while opening weekend is important, the notion of "legs" for a movie, the ability to keep pulling in cash over time, is even bigger in showbiz.

One more trivia tidbit, from an article in "Variety" somebody quoted (sorry, no link; it's subscription anyway and an expensive one at that): The current record for Most Money Made in Theaters (not counting DVDs, PPV, etc.) for a documentary is circa $21 million, held by "Bowling for Columbine." And it took BfC 25 weeks to achieve that total.

Heh heh heh.

Not an original sentiment, to be sure, but can we google bomb Dick "Dick" Cheney like this:

"fuck you!"

Here's the HTML code for you to use in your own blog:

<a href='http://www.whitehouse.gov/vicepresident/'>Fuck you</a>

The google bomb for Bush, "miserable failure", is working just fine!

Of course, this site is number one in the Google rankings right now for Fuck you but maybe with some effort, we can make Cheney #1!

Isn't it a clear indication of the fundamental unseriousness of today's Republican party that for them, the "F word" is fuck, while for us, the "F word" (see lexicon at right) is fascism?

And while for Republicans, with a dreadful mixture of machismo and coyness, fuck is used only indirectly and with a sanctimonious smirk, for Democrats fascism is the linchpin of a serious effort to use history to understand our current predicament: In fact, we tend not to use the word fascism since it can bring an end to conversation.

Which is, come to think of it, pretty much what fuck did, isn't it?

So, Dick—fuck you, too. Gee, that felt good.

Sheesh, you'd think a billion dollar corporation would be able to fix the blogger spooge for Netscape users, and get stats.blogger.com up and running again in less than two days. In fact, it's remarkable that stats.blogger.com went down at all. I mean, shouldn't it be a redundant system or something? Two days with no numbers! My withdrawal symptoms were getting real bad.

And what to say about Dick "Dick" Cheney? I think we've really, well, looked into his soul:

When pressed on whether the vice president had actually dropped the F-bomb on the Vermont lawmaker, Cheney responded: "That's not the kind of language I usually use."
(FUX)

Does that sound like a "response" to you?

These guys can't give a straight answer to anything, can they?

They're so twisty they've got to use corkscrews to get their pants on in the morning.

This item has been bouncing around sorta just under the waterline for a couple of days now. (Melanie I believe had it, and it's been cited in Billmon's comment thread.)
It comes to us via Asia Times, a paper I know little about. It appears to be based in Hong Kong and cover primarily business matters.

By Alix de la Grange
BAGHDAD - On the eve of the so-called transfer of sovereignty to the new Iraqi caretaker government on June 30, former Saddam Hussein generals turned members of the elite of the Iraqi resistance movement have abandoned their clandestine positions for a while to explain their version of events and talk about their plans. According to these Ba'ath officials, "the big battle" in Iraq is yet to take place.

"The Americans have prepared the war, we have prepared the post-war. And the transfer of power on June 30 will not change anything regarding our objectives. This new provisional government appointed by the Americans has no legitimacy in our eyes. They are nothing but puppets."

Why have these former officers waited so long to come out of their closets? "Because today we are sure we're going to win."

The fact of the matter is (I hope you have read the whole thing at this point) this story is almost too perfect. It reads like a damn Tom Clancy book in fact, and I say that with great respect because I like Tom Clancy books.

Trying to Google the author I wasn't able to find much. Alix seems to have written from some of the nastier trouble spots in the world, but not many from the same ones. Of course he/she seems to write mostly in French, which I read almost as poorly as Google translates, so I could be missing something.

Possibilities include: (1) Every word of this story is completely true (2) parts of it are true (let's say the statements by the interviewees) while others, like the dramatic trip to get to the interview, are fabricated to some degree, possibly at the insistance of the interviewees to (3) it's all fabrication and fabulation, an elaborate attempt to get somebody a movie deal or book contract, or at least to promote a writing career.

Taken at face value it explains a lot. If either (1) or (2) turns out to be accurate at all, our people had better be looking VERY hard at the possible routes out of the country. And be prepared to abandon their baggage.

(via Kansas City Star)

TOPEKA, Kan. - A managing editor at The Topeka Capital-Journal resigned when the newspaper learned that the subject of a lengthy profile had lied about being a survivor of the Bataan Death March during World War II.

The Capital-Journal announced the resignation of Anita Miller, managing editor for special projects, in a story posted Thursday on its Web site. The paper also apologized for its May 2 profile of [a local woman].

In that profile, the 86-year-old [woman] said she was a Navy nurse during the war and that she was among thousands of Americans who surrendered to the Japanese in the Philippines in 1942, only to be forced to march more than 60 miles to a prisoner-of-war camp.

The newspaper confronted [the woman] on Tuesday, after investigating two e-mail tips questioning her story. [The woman] admitted she had lied to the paper, her employer and in speeches she had given on the subject.

Executive Editor Will Kennedy apologized to readers in Thursday's story.

"We did not confirm many of the facts in the story before publication and we did not move with due speed in resolving the situation after we were notified that there were problems with the article."

Miller, who had worked for the newspaper for 28 years, said she was told she could resign or be fired. "I did not resign because of any wrongdoing," she said.

[The] freelance writer who wrote the story said the newspaper informed her it no longer will publish her stories.

[The woman] told the newspaper that she fabricated the story after she arrived in Topeka in the early 1990s. She said she told the story during an interview to make an impression and land [a job].

Just for the record, I gotta say this is a bit... draconian. To sack an editor after a 28 year career, because of inadequate fact-checking on a freelancer's feel-good fluff piece, involving an old woman who made up a story about events 60 years ago to get a job? That's harsh. But it shows that somewhere in this country there is a media outlet that has a fierce dedication to accuracy in journalism. Hint, it's just a little bit on the left side of the Hudson River.

Oh, and I pulled [the woman's] name out because (a) it's not relevant to my abuse of the NYT for failing to take any similar action whatever in a FAR more egregious case and (b) just in case the Lords of Karma are watching and I'm someday an 82 year old who is that desperate for work.

UPDATE You can share your views on how a real newsgathering institution should operate when it catches another "Miller" writing falsehoods with sadly overworked but strangely flaccid Times "public editor" Dan "Bud Man" Okrent.—Lambert

Wouldn't it be a lot easier to chuck him under the chin, and play peek-a-boo, and change his diaper more often? At least more condusive to the dignity of the United States Government? Dickie-Pooh's mommy should have told him that grown-ups can come up with better ways to solve our problems with hurt feelings.

(via Waaah! Pooh-Pooh)

Vice President Cheney today acknowledged that he had a bitter exchange on the Senate floor with a senior Democratic senator, in which Cheney uttered a big-time obscenity, but said he had no regrets and that he "felt better after I had done it."

The Democratic National Committee has declared this to be "Halliburton Week" to portray administration ties to the controversial company. "Sounds like it's making somebody a little testy," Kerry spokesman Chad Clanton said.

Since Dickie-dickie-darling boy is a member of the Executive Branch, rules involving decorum of speech in the Senate do not apply. Although that excuse is redundant in this case, like it is for Jack Ryan's spousal abuse, dope fiends, the RCN's use of Hitler in political ads, the Supreme Court's distaste for "vexatious litigation" against Presidents, people who out CIA agents for political gain, think peace groups are terrorists, are cool with terrorists as long as they're white, flip-floppers and liars, because It's O K If You're A Republican.

This startling phenomenon comes to us courtesy of Brad DeLong. As the good professor points out, the author of this lonely good review of "My Life," Larry McMurtry,(who is also, let me point out, the author of such novels as "Lonesome Dove" and "Terms of Endearment" and "Cadillac Jack" and "Leaving Cheyenne" and "The Desert Rose" and "Texasville" and "All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers" and "The Last Picture Show" and "Moving On" and "Horseman, Pass By," as well as such non-fiction as "In A Narrow Grave, Essays on Texas" and "Film Flam, Essays on Hollywood" and "Sacagewea's Nickname, Essays On The American West" and "Crazy Horse," a biography, and "Walter Benjamin At the Dairy Queen," and those are only the books that I've personally read), not only likes the book, McMurtry doesn't find it necessary to include even a single sneer, at Clinton, or his wife, or at Monica, or l'affaire, or his Presidency, or indeed, at his life.

Here's how McMurtry places Clinton's in the context of American Presidential Memoirs:

William Jefferson Clinton's "My Life" is, by a generous measure, the richest American presidential autobiography - no other book tells us as vividly or fully what it is like to be president of the United States for eight years. Clinton had the good sense to couple great smarts with a solid education; he arrived in Washington in 1964 and has been the nation's - or perhaps the world's - No. 1 politics junkie ever since. And he can write - as Reagan, Ford, Nixon and Lyndon B. Johnson, to go no farther back, could not.

In recent days the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant have been raised as a stick to beat Clinton with, and why? Snobbery is why. Some people don't want slick Bill Clinton to have written a book that might be as good as dear, dying General Grant's. In their anxiety lest this somehow happen they have not accurately considered either book.

Grant's is about being a general, in what Lincoln called a big war. Clinton's is about being a president at the end of the 20th century. Grant's is an Iliad, with the gracious Robert E. Lee as Hector and Grant himself the murderous Achilles. Clinton's is a galloping, reckless, political picaresque, a sort of pilgrim's progress, lowercase. There are plenty of stout sticks to beat Clinton with, but Grant's memoirs is not one of them.

McMurtry approaches Clinton with the rich interest one expects from a first-rate novelist and essayist who has delved for years into the complexities of the American character and how it's influenced by American places, landscape and history. McMurtry makes short work of the tired and ridiculous forumulation of Bill Clinton's "character" as being reflective only of his personal failings, while remaining reflective of none of the admirable aspects of both his public and his personal life.

Bill Clinton spent most of his childhood in the small town of Hope, Ark., which, culturally, is on the western edge of the South or the eastern edge of the Midwest, depending on which way one happened to be looking. His garrulity, which in the book manifests itself as too unremitting a focus on the minutiae of governance, maybe comes from the South, while his loneliness, his slight out-of-placeness, his seeming inability to get himself to really solid ground, comes from the Midwest, where he would have grown up had his father not rolled a car off the road and drowned in a drainage ditch. He died three months before Bill was born.

Some will object to any suggestion that Bill Clinton might be lonely. Look at what he's done, they might say: Rhodes scholar, Yale Law, five times governor of Arkansas, twice president of the United States, wed and kept a smart wife, sired and raised a decent daughter, gregarious, adaptable to any American occasion, from fish fry to cow-chip throw (a sport that flourishes chiefly in Nebraska). Why, he even plays the saxophone!

All true, but he's lonely, and in the quality of his loneliness lies much of his appeal. And he does have serious appeal. Nothing in this book becomes Clinton so much as his gentle, sympathetic treatment of his alcoholic, sometimes abusive stepfather, Roger Clinton, whose name he took and whom he calls Daddy:

edit (quote from the book)

Dreiser is the novelist who would best have known what to do with Clinton, although it was F. Scott Fitzgerald who wrote that "of all natural forces, vitality is the incommunicable one."

Clinton has the vitality, but with it the inwardly angled gaze of a man who sees too clearly the crack in reality, the difference between what is and what might be, a sense born of all those normal things - the Cardinals, fishing, the Christmas tree and the out-of-state vacation - that somehow were never to occur again.

Try and imagine any of the Washington media tribe being able to imagine that the complications of Bill Clinton's personality, specific to him to be sure, but not all that different from most human beings, are the stuff of the great American novels. I've often wondered if any of them have actually read any of the great novels of Western civilization, or in college did they content themselves with reading the cliff notes? Of course, as super busybody top-drawer celebrity journalists, who among them has time for much dabbling in literature, or put another way, much reading of actual, genuine writers.

Yesterday, Richard Cohen, writing in the WaPo, provided some heavy-duty evidence for this theory. From the title of his column, "Good Oprah, Bad History," you should be able to summarize what Cohen has to say about Clinton and his book, else you haven't been paying attention these last twelve years.

The good news for Bill Clinton is that his book, "My Life," sold about 100,000 copies at Barnes & Noble stores the first day it was on sale, a record for the chain. The bad news for Bill Clinton is that the book sold about 100,000 copies at Barnes & Noble stores, a record for the chain. The book may make Clinton rich. It will not rehabilitate him.

On the basis of no evidence, Cohen asserts the ten million price tag of "My Life" obligated its author "to write the sort of book that could be promoted on "Oprah," by which Cohen seems to mean, one with the kind of seamy personal details that would "entice" his readers, rather than the kind of book worthy of Richard Cohen's devoted attention. He does admit the Clintons left the White House oweing millions in legal fees (that were not of their own making, please remember), but he's just as sure Mr. Clinton could have found other avenues to solvency, so the taking of the ten million becomes a moral failing. At least I think that's Richard Cohen's point. (Imagine: personal details in a memoir)

Typical of the Washington elite, Cohen is as out of touch with popular culture as he is with the haute version; never mind that Oprah has undoubtedly read more of the better books produced in the last decade than has Richard Cohen, and never mind, for just one instance, that she introduced to her book club audience one of Toni Morrison's most difficult novels, "Paradise," and never mind that Oprah made a much underappreciated film of Morrison's great "Beloved," producing the film as well as acting in it, and best of all, having the taste to select as her director, the wonderful Jonathan Demme.

And how exactly does Richard Cohen know that Bill Clinton wrote "that kind" of book? Do you really need to ask? Michiko Kakutani told him all about it; about how the book was sloppy, self-indulgent, and self-obsessed, just like Clinton's presidency. Cohen calls her review and the rest of the early ones, "eviscerating," and he includes a quote about the book being "dull," but fails to note that the source of that dullness for Kakutani is its heavy emphasis on policy and politics, and boring stuff like that. Nor does Cohen seem to notice the contradiction in decrying the book's tabloid tendencies while quoting with approval complaints about its excessive wonkery. Oh well, not to worry. All the other reviews have said the thing stinks, so Cohen doesn't have to sweat it.

A bit strange, though, the way Cohen emphasizes what other people think about the book, when surely if he is writing about it, he must have read it? Remember, we're dealing with a member in good standing of the elite commentariate, who just as surely must be the laziest occupational grouping in the history of the world.

My own hurried perusal of the tome leads me to support Kakutani.

Cohen's only personally perused example of de trop in the text is a single sentence that describes the Grand Canyon, presented without any sense of its context. Reliably and right on cue Cohen brings up the example of Grant's memoirs and Nixon's post-presidency.

To a large extent, Ulysses S. Grant's presidency was rehabilitated by his memoirs, written as the Civil War general was dying of cancer. Richard Nixon, virtually banished from Washington, wrote book after book from his exurban Elba in New Jersey. Watergate haunted him, as it should have, but slowly we came to realize that he possessed a first-class mind, keenly analytical, occasionally wise. No one could say that Nixon did not have gravitas.

That's a neat trick on the part of Grant, considering that he was writing about the Civil War and not his presidency. As for Nixon's "gravitas," I can't better Professor Delong's take on the matter.

About Bill Clinton's rehabillitation, Cohen expresses doubts that Clinton can ever move beyond "Monica," and taking that ten mil only made it less likely. Obligated by that to include the kind of personal details, like Clinton's sleeping on the couch after his confession to the Grand Jury, or the Clinton's use of family therapy, (swear to God those are the ones Cohen mentions) that would entice Oprah's audience to buy the book, and thus forced journalists to focus on the salicious and the personal in dealing with the book.

As a result, the news that initially came out of the book was mostly about the Monica Lewinsky scandal. If there is something dramatically new about the Middle East, I haven't heard about it. If there is something revealing about why health care reform went down in flames, that has not been reported either. Partly that's because the Clinton administration -- and Clinton himself -- was so bad at keeping secrets, but mostly it's because the public's attention is focused on the salacious and personal. A president who makes history is of interest mostly to historians. A president who makes personal mistakes is of interest to us all.

Larry McMurtry must have read a different book than the one Cohen perused.

It takes Bill Clinton only 69 pages to work through such disorder and early sorrow as he experienced and get himself to Washington and Georgetown University. In my opinion the crucial decision that ultimately got him where he is was his choice of Georgetown over the University of Arkansas. At the latter he would have been assured of booze, girls and football. At Georgetown he was reading Hegel, Kant, Joseph Schumpeter and others of that ilk; he also quickly found his way to Senator J. W. Fulbright's office, where he was put to work.

Dispatching his youth so quickly leaves very nearly 900 pages for Clinton as Political Man. Not only is politics - local, state, national, international and galactic - the heart of this book, it's also its brain, torso, liver and sweetbreads. Hillary and Chelsea visit often, but this narrative is not about family life or sex, in which area Clinton's failings are acknowledged but not extensively dwelt on.

edit

I happen to like long, smart, dense narratives and read "My Life" straight through, happily. I may not know Bill Clinton any better than I did when I started, but I know recent history better, which surely can't hurt.

What seems to most offend Mr. Cohen is what he claims is Bill Clinton's status as a super-star celebrity. It never occurs to him that had JFK lived to enjoy a second term and managed to live another two decades, he'd have been exactly the same kind of celebrity. McMurtry deals with the issue of celebrity as well, and the difference between his take and Richard Cohen's is the difference between the life of the mind and the life of a celebrity journalist.

Most telling in Mr. Cohen's review is his contemptuous attitude toward ordinary Americans.

The people who lined up long before dawn to buy a copy were not drooling to find out about health care or the budget. Instead they were seeking a piece of Clinton -- like a souvenir or an autograph. He has emerged as the uber-celebrity of our times, beloved for his good looks, his charm and, paradoxically, the sex scandal that almost doomed his presidency.

And how does Richard Cohen know this? Well, obviously because that's what everyone else in the commentariate are all saying, at the club, at lunch, in the locker room, on the telly, and in print, so, jeepers, it must be true. (Silly Marxist-Leninists to think they needed gulags to enforce party-line thinking; our pravada-tellers manage to do it all by themselves, for the right price. Damn if it turns out Capitalism does rules)

What's wrong with wanting a piece of contemporary history that you lived through? Isn't it part of paying attention? Isn't that what we want citizens to do in a democracy? The Americans who admire Bill Cinton and/or are interested in what he has to say don't do so because of his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Good Lord, in how many polls did the vast majority of the American public try and get through to the media elite that they didn't want to know more about Monica and the President, and had already decided it was none of their business because it was strictly a private affair and had no implications for the public governance of this nation.

I'd actually decided I wasn't going to do any writing about Clinton's book, but the SCLM is still too much the same as it was in 1998 for me not to.

Next post: How Dan Rather Lied About Clinton's Lies on Sixty Minutes.

In the meantime, Michael Tomasky has a fine but depressing analysis of why the baby boomer press hates Clinton and always will.

Awwww! And I was enjoying it all so much!

Illinois Republican candidate Jack Ryan intends to abandon his Senate bid after four days spent trying to weather a political storm stirred by sex club allegations, GOP officials said Friday.
(via AP)

Hey, if he doesn't use a club, how is he going to drag her back to the cave? Even though that's kinda hard, with the dragging knuckles...

Via Froomkin, who's on fire today. Why the heck doesn't the poor old Times have a column like this? You'd think they were in the tank for Bush, or something.

Lockheed appears to be running like an antelope out of control away from this deal. Even though they cut the purchase price by quite a lot.

(via San Diego Union-Tribune)

Lockheed Martin's billion-dollar-plus buyout of San Diego's Titan Corp., which turned into a roller-coaster ride when allegations of foreign bribes surfaced in February, has been derailed.

In a statement late yesterday, Titan said it does not expect to reach an agreement to end a Justice Department inquiry in time to meet tonight's deadline for completing the merger.

The buyout, valued at $1.8 billion when it was made nine months ago, ran into trouble in mid-February when the two companies disclosed to federal regulators that they had uncovered potential bribes Titan had paid to win overseas business.

Titan's classified work for the Pentagon and intelligence agencies has helped it double sales in the past five years.

Among other things, Ray described Titan's share of a $10 billion contract the Department of Homeland Security recently awarded to Accenture as substantial. "It could end up being one of the largest contracts we've ever had at Titan," Ray said...

Look for this one to maybe fall apart too...Accenture nearly lost this contract altogether for being owned by an office in Bermuda that doesn't pay US taxes. Another headache of Titanic proportions they do not need.

Titan's troubles got more complicated in May, after an internal Army investigation identified a Titan employee, who was working as a translator, as a suspect in the abuse of inmates at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.

Another translator working under contract for Titan was identified in the Army report as "directly or indirectly responsible" for abuses at the prison.

Titan has about 4,200 employees, mostly foreign nationals, working in Iraq under a contract to provide linguists to the Army, Ray said.

"Linguists," eh? Cunning of them to phrase it that way.

Oddly, none of the Republicans seem to be mentioning the word "consensual." (back). Maybe they don't understand what the word means? Given their approach to democracy ("consent of the governed") that seems quite likely.

Anyhow, amid all the heartburning, it looks like Hastert is preparing to give Ryan the old heave-ho.

One Republican official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told The Associated Press that Hastert agreed with fellow Illinois Republicans that Ryan should step down. Another source said on condition of anonymity that Ryan's campaign intended to conduct a poll to gauge whether the campaign was salvageable.

But Fitzgerald said Friday that he had encouraged Ryan to stay in the race, calling the response to the scandal "grotesque."

"I told him that it troubled me greatly that so many party leaders who had no trouble stomaching years and years of corruption and insider deals and scandals under George Ryan were now lining up to throw stones at Jack (no relation to George Ryan)," Fitzgerald said.

"I think the public stoning of Jack Ryan is one of the most grotesque things I've seen in politics," he said.
(via AP)

Oh, dear me. Surely not more "grotesque" than spending $70 million to impeach an elected President over a consensual blowjob, as part of a slow-moving coup that ended up seizing control of the government. Surely not as grotesque as that!

The word here is, of course, schadenfreude. But really, isn't it just too rich? The Republicans run on the idea that they should be elected to public office on the basis of private virtues, and then whine and howl when the private virtues they claim turn out to be fake. (Examples are, at this point, really too numerous to mention, but Limbaugh, Bennett, Gingrich, Livingston, and Haster's fellow Illinois Republican Henry "Youthful Indiscretion" Hyde come at once to mind.)

And the beauty part of it all is, that Ryan is right. Taking your wife to a sex club isn't illegal; and trying "to pressure her to perform sex acts while others watch" isn't prohibited by the Ten Commandments—at least not if you "parse the words." Heh. Juan Cole (back) absolutely has the right of it.

So, we get to see the Illinois Republicans immolate themselves as they pander to their base, trash their own candidate when, by all logic, he's right, and write IOKIYAR in letters a mile high as they try to defend Ryan. And best of all, it's all happening in a "leaner" state (see here) that Democrats must win.

Pass the popcorn!

I didn't think so.

Revised economic figures show economy cooling, and inflation worsening.

You've been reading all commentators wringing their hands about how people don't percieve the economy improving? Remember all those stories about "blistering growth"? Turns out that people were right, and the commmentators were wrong. Surprise!

The U.S. economy grew much more slowly than previously thought in the first quarter while inflation was higher, a government report showed on Friday.

The surprise downward revision to gross domestic product -- which measures total output within the nation's borders -- cut growth to a 3.9 percent annual rate in the first three months of 2004 from the 4.4 percent reported a month ago and below the 4.1 percent pace in the final quarter of last year.

The government also ratcheted up a key gauge of inflation, confirming an acceleration in price rises, that has fueled expectations the Federal Reserve will begin raising interest rates from 1958 lows next week to head off inflation.
(via Reuters)

Heh. Don't you love surprises? This news comes as surprising only to those who don't remember, throughout the Wecovery, how month after month the job figures would suck, and then the commentators would be "surprised."

In fact, the real story on the economy, wages, and inflation is here:

A 2.2 percent rise in wages in the 12 months through May has been more than offset by a 3.1 percent gain in consumer prices.
(via Bloomberg

In other words, you're worse off today than you were a year ago. The reason people aren't seeing a recovery is because, from their perspective, there isn't one.

And Bush wants to run on the economy? When are the Dems and Kerry going to take it to Him on this?

The WhiteWash House is now in full stonewall mode on the torture memoes it commissioned, and is now working the cover story hard: Doing the usual managed relesae of "all" (ha) the documents, which in this case turn out to be full of loopholes ("military necessity"). The amazing thing will be, as usual, that Bush will think his maneuvers to shirk responsibility are subtle and secretive, when in fact they are amazingly clumsy and obvious. Oh well. Nobody ever went broke—even the blogosphere—by underestimating the crassness of the Bush administration.

Here at Corrente, we've argued that although torture will probably not be shown to have been ordered through the official chain of command (that would be the cover story, right), it is extremely likely that it was ordered (and managed, and concealed) by an apparatus we've called The Fog Machine. Kinda like discovering a new, hitherto unseen planet, by looking at the motion of the planets we know, eh? After all, we know these guys (good former Trots all) set up back channels whenever the official ones get in the way (exhibit 1: The Office of Feith-based intelligence).

And we've also argued that the orders for torture were conveyed through "nods and winks"—much as the orders for the Final Solution were conveyed to Hitler's willing executioners. (There. I've used the H word.) The lack of a clear chain of command, the removal of military insignias, the confusion between contractors, the military, and "other agencies", is by design: The chaos enables the operation of the Stanford Effect, where people given power over others surrender their scruples.

But where do the "nods and winks" come from? Bush himself, of course, and also Rumsfeld. But I think we've been ignoring the biggest torture meme propagator of all: Rush Limbaugh:

[Limbaugh called the torture] "a brilliant maneuver" and compared it to a college fraternity prank: "This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation," he said.

[Limbaugh] excused the actions of our soldiers this way: "You know, these people are being fired at every day. I'm talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You ever heard of need to blow some steam off?"

One full hour of "The Rush Limbaugh Show" is broadcast [by AFRTS] every weekday directly to our soldiers in Iraq and around the world — to nearly 1 million U.S. troops in more than 175 countries and U.S. territories. Moreover, it is the only hourlong partisan political talk show broadcast daily to the troops.

AFRTS provides stateside radio and television programming, 'a touch of home' to U.S. service men and women.

Why should American taxpayers pay for the broadcasting of such inexcusable views to U.S. troops? Why, at a combustible moment like this one, would we be funneling Limbaugh's trivializations to our men and women at the front? Does Limbaugh's pro-torture propaganda really qualify as "a touch of home"?

Limbaugh's comments, and their tacit endorsement by the U.S. government, send a message to U.S. servicemen and servicewomen that torture is not a subject to be taken seriously and that these are actions that can be excused. Nothing could be more wrong than that.
(via LA Times)

Another piece of the For Machine puzzle falls into place. The genius of the Bush administratior has been to privatize the "nods and winks" process.

Limbaugh's willing torturers....

"With a mind like yours, you'll probably want the land crab."

Well, yes.

Eesh.

Rebels unleashed attacks across Iraq against police and U.S. forces in Baghdad, Mosul, Ramadi, Fallujah and Baqubah, the U.S.-led coalition said. At least 100 people died, according to a Pentagon official.
(via Blooomberg)

Well, at least we are counting the Iraqis, now.

Great. Guess this is why we pulled back from the North Korean border? Oh yeah, it was a two-fer—we need the troops for the Iraq quagmire. This would be funny if it weren't so horrible:

North Korea has threatened to test a nuclear device if the United States does not accept its proposal to freeze its nuclear programs in exchange for compensation, Bush administration officials said on Thursday.
(via Reuters)

It's everything else these guys do: so massively and intricately screwed up that it's almost impossible to suggest how to improve the situation. That's why they call it a clusterfuck. It's always important to use the right technical term....

My God.

They're planning a lottery where winning can mean life, and losing could mean death. Could anything make more clear that health care should be a right, enjoyed by all citizens, as it is in every other Western nation but ours? Get this:

Medicare is planning a lottery later this year for people with cancer, multiple sclerosis and several other diseases. For the 50,000 winners, the government will start helping pay for their medicine, but more than 450,000 others must wait until 2006.
(via AP)

You know, Shirley Jackson wrote a short story called The Lottery where losers were stoned to death. It gave me quite a chill when I read it in junior high. I just never expected to see it used as blueprint for national health policy.

Unbelievable. Just unbelievable. Oh, if you're rich, you get to live as a matter of course, since you can buy as much medicine as you want. If there is a God in heaven, He will rain down fire on the Republicans for setting up a system where the rich purchase life, while the poor have a 1 in 10 chance of winning it.

Take the quiz!

so this is what desperation looks like.

Just go watch the advertisement the Bush-Cheney campaign have displayed so prominently on the Bush-Cheney campaign website.

The advertisement ultimately doesn't even make much sense -- and the use of Hitler in the ad (I'm not kidding folks, go watch the ad) reeks of the panicked flopsweat of desperation. And the use of the clip in which Kerry uses the word "ass" is apparently supposed to shock us but it pales in comparison to Dick Cheney's profane slip of the tongue earlier this week. This ad certainly makes it obvious that the Bush campaign guys are way off their game now.

This is a perfect anti-Bush ad that, paradoxically, is being paid for by the Bush-Cheney campaign. It's like they're cutting their own throats but don't know it.

Weird.

They're on the precipice folks. It may get even weirder from here.

While this exchange admittedly makes no sense whatsoever, it is still the most comprehensible statement Cheney has made in his entire term in office:

via WaPo, the story in its entirety:

WASHINGTON -- Vice President Cheney cursed at Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy during a confrontation on the Senate floor while members were having their annual group picture taken earlier this week, Leahy and Senate sources said Thursday.

Senate aides with knowledge of the encounter Tuesday said the vice president confronted Leahy about some of the Democrat's criticism about alleged improprieties in Iraq military contracts awarded to Halliburton Co. Cheney, who as vice president is president of the Senate, is a former CEO of Halliburton.

Leahy responded by saying the vice president had once called him a "bad" Catholic.

Cheney then responded, "F--- off" or "F--- you," two aides said, both speaking on condition of anonymity.

Leahy, D-Vt., confirmed that the confrontation took place but would not provide details.

"I think he was just having a bad day," Leahy said. "I was kind of shocked to hear that kind of language on the floor."

Cheney's office also wouldn't go into detail, but confirmed the two men traded remarks.

"That doesn't sound like language that the vice president would use, but there was a frank exchange of views," said Kevin Kellems, a spokesman for Cheney.

Hmm, Dick "Dick", a little testy when the subject of our old (?) employer comes up, are we? Wonder why THAT might be? Hey, what kind of mileage you getting on that pacemaker anyway?

When it comes time to protect a Republican administration, that is:

The president is not above the law, Kennedy wrote, but there is a "paramount necessity of protecting the executive branch from vexatious litigation that might distract it from the energetic performance of its constitutional duties."
(via WaPo)

If it's "vexatious litigation" resulting from a $70 million winger investigation of a blow job when the President is elected and a Democrat;No problemo!

But if it's "vexatious litigation" about governmental secrecy in an administration that wants to rule by decree when the President is appointed and a Republican—well, let's think twice! Especially in an election year!

Never has a double standard been so clear. IOKIYAR!

Remember "Baghdad Bob"? The Iraqi Minister of Information, real name Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf? He was widely made fun of at one time, like when he said:

"These images are not the suburbs of Baghdad. From what I glimpsed, these gardens with rows of palm trees on the side, which you saw in the images, are located in the south of Abu Ghreib, where we have surrounded the Americans and British."

We're not laughing any more.

(via WaPo)

BAGHDAD, June 24 -- The company commander of the U.S. soldiers charged with abusing detainees at Abu Ghraib prison testified Thursday during a legal hearing that the top military intelligence commander was present the night a cover-up was hatched to deal with the death of a detainee who apparently died during an interrogation.

Capt. Donald J. Reese, commander of the 372nd Military Police Company, said he was summoned to a shower room in a cellblock at the prison one night in November, where he discovered a group of intelligence personnel standing around the body of a bloodied detainee discussing what to do. He said Col. Thomas M. Pappas, commander of military intelligence at the prison, was among those who were there.

Reese testified that he heard Pappas say, "I'm not going down for this alone." Reese said an Army colonel named Jordan sent a soldier to the mess hall for ice to preserve the body overnight.

Reese said no medics were called, and the detainee's identification was never logged...

Reese's testimony came during the first day of an investigative hearing for Spec. Sabrina Harman, one of seven Army reservists from the 372nd,which is based in Cresaptown, Md., charged with abusing detainees at the prison. During investigations of alleged abuse at Abu Ghraib, statements by other witnesses have described the death of the detainee, and the corpse appears in photographs documenting abuse at the prison. But no testimony or evidence had previously indicated Pappas was in the shower room the night the detainee died...

"My MPs, they were directed by the MI people for what they wanted and how they wanted it," he [Reese] said.

UPDATE Remember the Hersh photo of the corpse on ice in the plastic bag? This corpse is it.

Um, I thought we were the goood guys? The fish rots from the head.... —Lambert

For the juicy bits, see "Prurient turmoil," back here. Juan Cole says this, and I think he has it exactly right:

[Illinois Democratic candidate for Senator Barack] Obama has taken the high road, and is refusing to attack Jack Ryan on the sex clubs issue.

The lesson for the Republicans of all this is that the wages of Puritanism are hypocrisy. Henry Hyde, Newt Gingrich, and many other Republicans who tried to nail Clinton had also tried to nail women not their spouses and were no better than Clinton morally. In fact, no one is better morally than anyone else as a matter of ontology or being. Some deeds are better than others, and some people achieve better deeds more often than others. Some people are capable of higher ethical standards than others. But human beings are not in the nature of the case morally perfect beings. Since that is so, it is crazy for the American public to want its politicians to be saints (they aren't), and the desire merely produces hypocrisy, which in turn corrodes ideals and the moral order.

I therefore agree with Jack Ryan that the visits to [sex] clubs should not in themselves disqualify him from public office. Why should we care where he takes his wife? Note that business travelers who stay in nice hotels are known to rent enormous amounts of porn. The travelers, the hotels, and the cable companies involved are all heavily Republican. What is the difference between watching it on celluloid and watching it at a club in Paris?
(via Informed Comment)

Yes, payback is a bitch, isn't it?

But we should defeat Jack Ryan because we need to take back the Senate from the Republicans, not because he goes tosec clubs. Even though it's so delicious that he does. Same with Bush. What do I care what Bush does with goats?

Yawn! And what's with the missing eyebrows?

Not in your pocket. Kevin Drum has an excellent chart.

Not that putting Bush under oath would make any practical difference, of course. But least they story doesn't say Bush "visited" with them!

President Bush met for an hour on Thursday [with the U.S. attorney, Pat Fitzgerald. in charge of] probing the Bush administration's alleged leak of the identity of a CIA operative, the White House announced.

Spokesman Scott McClellan also said Bush had retained an attorney, Jim Sharp, to represent him in all matters involving the case.

Gee, was Sharp present? The story doesn't say. [But see below.]

"No one wants to get to the bottom of this matter more than the president of the United States," McClellan said.
(via Reuters

Right. And OJ wants to find the real killer...

And from WaPo's coverage, a splendid non-answer from Scott "Sucker MC" McClellan:

Asked if Bush had answered every question, McClellan said, "The president was glad to do his part to cooperate with the investigation. The president was pleased to share whatever information he had with the officials in charge and answer their questions."

I take it that's a No? And from Bloomberg we learn this:

The interview in the Oval Office lasted about one hour and 10 minutes, McClellan said. [Bush] wasn't under oath. Bush was accompanied by his private attorney, Jim Sharp, a former U.S. attorney who heads his own firm in Washington.

"Pleased to share..." I bet.

The administration prevails (for the moment) in the lawsuit over the president's energy task force. The lawsuit sought to make this ultra-secretive administration tell the American taxpayer just what they were doing with our money with regards to the task force and thus make the Bush administration a bit more accountable.

And don't you love it when this situation is described as an "election-year problem" for the White House rather than as a transparent attempt to hide what this administration is doing from the American people?

The irony is that all of this is going to be drowned out by the horrible explosions and carnage from the ongoing (never ended) IraqWar Part II, a monumental disaster which, despite their best efforts, Bush and Cheney are apparently going to be held accountable for in November.

One more thing. If BushCo sends 25,000 more troops into Iraq, that will be W's tacit admission that things are going terribly wrong in Iraq -- and there's no way they can spin their way out of it folks.

The Heathers trashing the book didn't make a bit of difference, did it?

Bill Clinton's "My Life" broke first-day sales records for a nonfiction book and for an adult audiobook, Sonny Mehta, president of Knopf Publishing Group, said yesterday.

The book is No. 1 at Amazon.com in the United States, England, France and Japan, according to Knopf. It is also No. 1 at Barnesandnoble.com, which also reported increased interest in Hillary Rodham Clinton's paperback "Living History," at No. 5 yesterday.
(via Newsday)

Here's hoping Clinton can pay off the legal bills he incurred fighting off the winger coup of the Starr was the willing tool.

If you are planning tomorrow's breakfast (or this morning's, depending on when you read this) you might want to consider the cold pizza from last night, or maybe look under the couch for some old Halloween candy. In any case hold off on the milk for the Wheaties or cream for the coffee until you decide how safe you feel in George Bush's America(tm), where we fight terrorists Over There rather than Here:

(via USA Today)

An attack in which Washington state cows were coated with a toxic substance went unreported to federal officials for 10 days, a performance that local and national officials say is unacceptable when there are concerns about the safety of the nation's food supply.

The incident involved 10 dairy cows in Enumclaw, 35 miles southeast of Seattle. The animals were painted June 5 with a sticky red substance that caused welts, oozing sores and internal bleeding.

Three of the cows died; seven are recovering. Food and Drug Administration testing later identified the substance as chromium, used in dyes and as a wood preservative. No milk from the cows entered the food supply, the FDA said Wednesday.

..Officials say the incident represents a failure to take potential agriculture contamination seriously, particularly in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. There has been no cohesive homeland-security plan involving agriculture, and funding has been haphazard.

Before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal authorities likely wouldn't have been involved until the toxic substance was identified, says Ehart. "Washington state is a long way from the East Coast. And while you may think you're doing your job, you may not be in tune with the new issues," he says.

Um, WTF does that have to do with anything? Oh yeah, Washington's a blue state, isn't it?

Officials say the incident is particularly disturbing because Washington state has been ground zero for other food safety issues in the past 15 years, including the E. coli outbreak in 1993 and last year's discovery of the nation's first case of mad cow disease.

Yeah, having "Sadaam in prison rather than in power" has just had SUCH an impact on our daily lives, hasn't it? THAT was worth spending $187 billion and 800-plus lives on. Now drink your milk and shut up, Billy. Those who live on Kool-Ade don't care about some stupid cows, it's just Washington State anyway.

Say, there wasn't anything in the Times today about AP's suit to get the Great State of Texas to disgorge the microfilm that should have Bush's entire military record on it (back, assuming that it hasn't been filleted like the paper records have).

I wonder why? You'd think it would be worth a graf. The war Preznit's own military record, and all.

(via WaPo)

UNITED NATIONS, June 23 -- The Bush administration on Wednesday dropped its plan to seek renewal of a resolution shielding U.S. personnel serving in U.N.-authorized peacekeeping missions from prosecution by the International Criminal Court, citing fierce opposition to the initiative.

The exemption for U.S. officials has been a source of resentment since the Security Council first granted it, in July 2002, but Security Council diplomats said the detainee abuse provided a rallying point for supporters of the court.

Others, however, noted that the detainee abuse scandal, combined with Washington's need for international support for its Iraq policy, had undermined the U.S. policy of threatening to shut down U.N. peacekeeping missions if the council failed to grant U.S. officials immunity.

The court was established by a 1998 treaty to prosecute individuals responsible for the most serious crimes, including genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

On Thursday, Secretary General Kofi Annan appealed to the council to oppose the resolution, saying that it would "discredit" the United Nations and undercut its promotion of the rule of law.

I didn't know they could do that. Fresno

Thumbing through the Fresno Bee last year, Camille Russell came across a story about a traffic fatality accompanied by a photo of a familiar face.

She knew the dead man as Aaron Stokes, a new member in her antiwar organization, Peace Fresno. But the newspaper story listed him as Aaron Kilner, a 27-year-old Fresno County sheriff's detective who died in a motorcycle accident while off duty.

She copied the photo and showed it to other members of Peace Fresno. "Don't say anything, just look at the picture and see if you recognize this man," she said.

They did.

Now, the activists are accusing the [Fresno] Sheriff's Department of infiltrating their group with an undercover detective. After months of lobbying by the group, California Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer's office said this week that it was investigating their claim.

Fresno County Sheriff Richard Pierce won't confirm or deny that Kilner was spying on Peace Fresno. But he said in a prepared statement that his department reserved the right to conduct surveillance as part of its anti-terrorism efforts.
(via LA Times)

Oh, now I get it. Being against the war is the same as being a terrorist. It all hangs together, doesn't it?

Of course, this is only the Fresno PD. We don't have to worry about this happening in other cities. Or at the Federal Government. Attorney General Ashcroft would never stand for it. Right?

And the Republican National Convention is months away....

...go out in the Noonday sun, Noel Coward once told us. John Ashcroft, on the other hand, wants to keep stories out of Noonday buried in the midnight pit of public obscurity.

David Niewert over at Orcinus has been following this story for months. Now it finally hits major-league (well, if the NYT can even be classified as "major league" any more) public notice from Paul Krugman a couple of days ago, and I am irked that it is not growing legs on its own. Go read. Here's a start...and a finish, just because it is so cruel, while still not HALF the kicking around Crisco Johnny deserves:

In April 2003, John Ashcroft's Justice Department disrupted what appears to have been a horrifying terrorist plot. In the small town of Noonday, Tex., F.B.I. agents discovered a weapons cache containing fully automatic machine guns, remote-controlled explosive devices disguised as briefcases, 60 pipe bombs and a chemical weapon — a cyanide bomb — big enough to kill everyone in a 30,000-square-foot building...

Incidentally, if Mr. Ashcroft's intention was to keep the case low-profile, the media have been highly cooperative. To this day, the Noonday conspiracy has received little national coverage.

At this point, I have the usual problem. Writing about John Ashcroft poses the same difficulties as writing about the Bush administration in general, only more so: the truth about his malfeasance is so extreme that it's hard to avoid sounding shrill.

In this case, it sounds over the top to accuse Mr. Ashcroft of trying to bury news about terrorists who don't fit his preferred story line. Yet it's hard to believe that William Krar wouldn't have become a household name if he had been a Muslim, or even a leftist.

Was Mr. Ashcroft, who once gave an interview with Southern Partisan magazine in which he praised "Southern patriots" like Jefferson Davis, reluctant to publicize the case of a terrorist who happened to be a white supremacist?....

After my last piece on Mr. Ashcroft, some readers questioned whether he is really the worst attorney general ever. It's true that he has some stiff competition from the likes of John Mitchell, who served under Richard Nixon. But once the full record of his misdeeds in office is revealed, I think Mr. Ashcroft will stand head and shoulders below the rest.

Quibbler alert: Noel Coward fans, should any chance to read here, will write to say that the lyric is actually "..go out in the midday sun." If the story had been about events in Midday, Texas, things would be easier. It is only that Sir Noel was writing about the ignorant foibles of an earlier empire than our own.

This is so much of a piece with the Bush approach to Iraq. Well, everything, really, but especially Iraq. Bull-headed right-wing ideology replaces actual policy - fuck the UN; the CPA will be managed by unqualified but connected 25-year-old Heritage Foundation wannabes, Ahmad Chalabi is just like George Washington, blah blah blah. And then, when it predictably goes to hell, we do what we should have done in the first place, except that by now it's too late. And then try to bluff your way out of the political mess.

Worst. President. Ever.
(via Poorman)

Indeed.

Heh.

Jack Beatty has a great editorial in the (generally, sadly) rightist Atlantic:

[Bush continued to read] My Pet Goat to schoolchildren even after an aide has told him that a second plane has struck the twin towers.

Leaders show what they are made of in a crisis. Bush hid in plain sight with those kids. Later, hiding twice over, he used them as an excuse, saying he did not want to frighten them by ending the reading before finishing the book. Later still, and repeatedly, he said he saw the first plane strike the tower that morning (in fact, no one saw that live; the film was not available until the evening) and that he remarked, "That's some bad pilot"—pure strut. As the Wall Street Journal reported, he also magnified his role in managing the crisis, claiming he gave orders others gave. Conflicting accounts of Bush's communications documented by the 9/11 Commission now raise doubts whether, as he and Cheney told the commissioners, he ordered Cheney to shoot down any hijacked planes still in the air, or whether Cheney, in the White House bunker, acted on his own. Maybe Cheney persuaded Bush to stay away from Washington that day less for Bush's safety than for the country's.

[W]hatever his personal weaknesses, Clinton performed competently, even prudently. His controversial decisions—raising taxes to balance the budget, NAFTA, the China trade deal, less so welfare reform—were largely policy-driven, outraging various elements of the democratic base. Competence, prudence, policy over politics: these are not the words to describe George W. Bush's conduct of government. If we doubted Clinton's character, we were reassured by his intelligence and command of the scene. Bush lacks these compensations. His vaunted "moral clarity" is as much strut as conviction. He achieves certainty by arresting thought. The "befuddled-looking president" caught in that video is an emblem of his presidency.
(Read The Whole Thing)

Bingo!

"Prurient turmoil"... I love it. And of course, it's Republican prurient turmoil, so it isn't A1 (or even "Inside") material for the in-the-tank Times. But it's super-delicious all the same. Jack Ryan is a millionaire Republican running for the Senate in Illinois, whose wife is the actress Jeri Ryan:

This week, however, disclosure of Ms. Ryan's claims that her ex-husband [Ryan] took her to sex clubs over her objections have filled the front pages of Illinois newspapers, throwing his campaign for a United States Senate seat here into prurient turmoil.

The documents suggest that Mr. Ryan insisted that they have public sex but that Ms. Ryan angrily refused, and the issue led to the breakup of their marriage.

Ms. Ryan, who appeared in "Star Trek: Voyager" and is a star of the television series "Boston Public," said in a declaration dated June 9, 2000, that when she and her husband were in New York, she refused to enter one club with him because "it had mattresses and cubicles," and that he then took her to "a bizarre club with cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling."
(via NY Times)

And not only apparatus hanging from the ceiling, but apparatchiks, eh?

Just a few points, starting with the obvious ones:

1. The phrase that leaps out to me is "over her objections." I seem to remember other members of Ryan's party spending $70 million dollars promoting a slow motion coup against an elected President, and all over a consensual blowjob. So you'd think that Hastert (also from Illinois) and Henry "Youthful Indiscretion" Hyde would be falling all over themselves clean up their party and get Ryan out of the race. But n-o-o-o-o-o! Is this a humongous case of IOKIYAR, or what?

2. Ryan says he wanted to keep the divorce papers that revealed his wife's claims sealed to protect his son. I seem to remember other members of Ryan's party—like Rick "Man on Dog" Santorum, now raising money for Ryan—publishing the most salacious details possible over that consensual blowjob during their slow motion coup, even though there were children involved in that case too. IOKIYAR yet again, eh? Isn't payback a bitch?

3. There's also that weird detail about "cages, whips and other apparatus." Remind you of anything? Say, Abu Ghraib torture, and the photos?

Remember Limbaugh's bizarre reaction to Abu Ghraib? Not the fraternity one—I mean the one that said the torture photos were no worse than pornography.

Well.... How about—as so often we don't, being ourselves reasonable individuals—we take the wingers at their word? And why not make the assumption that Limbaugh was speaking from experience, not hypothetically? If so, we've got two data points here: Limbaugh and Ryan. Could there be more?

Do Republicans—especially powerful, winger Republicans—have a tendency to be turned on by "cages, whips and other apparatus"? Given the effects, both foreign and domestic, of their policies, it looks like they not only have the fantasy—they're living it. Readers, thoughts? Especially, more data points?

UPDATE Alert reader edgewise reminds us of the Bill Bennett data point back here. Calico Cat is the source in the blogosphere (google the Cat on "Bennett"). The Las Vegas Mercury has more on the "rumours."

UDPATE
Also that weird detail about "cages, whips and other apparatus." Remind you of anything?

farmer: The Opus Dei Club in Manhattan?

Thanks for sharing!

Yes, once again, the public transportation giveaway, The Metro (Philly version) gets the story right, while the insider-coopted, flaccidly reported, and increasingly irrelevant New York Times does not. From the Metro (I type it in):

Explosive revelations on Bush and Rumsfeld

Bush claimed the right to waive anti-torture laws and treaties... The Justice Department disavowed a memo written on Aug. 1, 2002, that appeared to justify the use of torture... The memo also argued that the president's wartime powers superseded anti-torture laws and the Geneva convention. Bush said in a Feb. 7, 2002 memo that he accepted the conclusion by the attorney general and the department, but "I decline to exercise that authority at this time."
(AP, via The Philadelphia edition of the Metro)

So, here we have Bush claiming that he has the "inherent authority" (back) to set aside the law whenever he chooses.

That's rule by decree.

That's also the end of Constitutional Government.

Bad as the torture story is, Bush's claim to be above the law is far worse. He could, for example, postpone or set aside the 2004 elections, eh?

And does the Times cover this? I defy you to find a single mention of Bush's outrageous and unconstitutional claim in the Times. Try for yourself. You saw the headline from the Metro. They read the same story the Times did. And what is the Times headline? "White House Says Prisoner Policy Set Humane Tone." Is the Times in the tank on this one, or what? You may share your well-reasoned views with the sadly overworked Daniel "Bud Man" Okrent.

Bush claims to be able to rule by decree, and the newspaper of record doesn't give it a mention. Where's the outrage?

UPDATE The Post has copies of the documents. Smart of the WhiteWash House to keep using a manual typewriter; no pesky electronic copies!

Corrente—now with trackback!

I guess this new-fangled technology is good for something. Maybe.

Sorry for letting the machine-gun posting fall increasingly silent—the work I must do sometimes interferes with the work I ought to be doing.

Especially frustrating since it feels like after a lot of work, it's no longer drip, drip, drip with Bush but splash, splash, splash....

The other day (geez, was it only yesterday?) Lambert pointed out back here that Honest Republicans were starting to turn on Bush, not just in their hearts but with their voices, out in public where others can hear and be influenced and know they're not the only ones with qualms.

Today we have Juan Cole, whose politics as a whole I do not know, saying things like this:

"After all, a lot of Republicans could not be at all happy to see the US Department of Defense become the major purveyor of sensational internet pornography to the world...

"This brings us to the issue of Bush's flip-flops. He tried to hang the charge of flip-flopping on Kerry. But Bush said he wanted heads to roll at Fallujah, and then had to bring in the Baath to run the city. Bush said he wanted Muqtada al-Sadr dead or alive, and now Muqtada is set to be a prominent parliamentarian. Bush said he would bring decency to the White House, and now his DoD is purveying pictures of Arab men being made to masturbate in front of prancing servicewomen.

"The American public knows flip-flops when they see them. It is Bush that is engaging in them."

Finally there's Froomkin's WaPo column today, which contains a link to a graph. You've been seeing these figures for awhile now but you have GOT to see them in graphic form to see why this rarest of sentiments, hope, has take root in my bosom.

Aside from a twitchy paranoid feeling that the WashPo legal department may take a dimmer view of swiping their graphics than they do stories, this really has to be seen in its full size to be appreciated. It would blow up the room to do that and I'm not good enough with graphics to shrink it. Just go click here and gaze for awhile and let it all soak in.

Buck up, and be of good cheer, and all that rot. This thing is doable. It isn't done yet, and God knows we can't back off an inch. But we can get our country back.

But finally! AP is suing to get them. (Say, that court is in New York, isn't it? Where's the sadly irrelevant New York Times on this?) Anyhow:

There are questions as to whether the file provided to the news media earlier this year is complete, says the lawsuit, adding that these questions could possibly be answered by reviewing a copy of the microfilm of Bush's personnel file in the Texas archives.

The Air National Guard of the United States, a federal entity, has control of the microfilm, which should be disclosed in its entirety under the Freedom of Information Act, the lawsuit says.

The White House has yet to respond to a request by the AP in April...

Delay, delay. Slime and defend...

asking the president to sign a written waiver of his right to keep records of his military service confidential. Bush gave an oral waiver in a TV appearance that preceded the White House's release this year of materials concerning his National Guard service.

The government "did not expedite their response ... they did not produce the file within the time required by law, and they will not now estimate when the file might be produced or even confirm that an effort has been initiated to retrieve a copy from the microfilm at the Texas archives," the lawsuit says.

In the absence of any privacy objection by the president and in light of the importance of the file's release in advance of the November election, says the lawsuit, AP seeks a court order to compel the release of records "that are being unlawfully withheld from the public."

The released records were from the Texas Air National Guard at Camp Mabry and the Defense Financing Accounting Service in Denver.

Under Texas law, a copy of military personnel files of those serving in the Texas Air National Guard must be retained on microfilm at the Texas archives.

The lawsuit says that no one has looked at any of the Texas Air National Guard records maintained at the state archives since 1996.
(via AP)

But, but... I thought Bush released "all" the records?! Heh. Pass the popcorn!

Oh, and nobody has ever come forward to The $10,000 reward for an eyewitness account of Bush doing his duty in Alabama during his "missing months." I wonder why?

Remember Bush's mysteriously sudden discovery ("Ah, the old cptured enemy documents trick") that a member of Saddam's security services was also an AQ member—because they both had the same name? Well, it does turn out there's a lot of Shakirs in the middle east, and this story is already going onto the same trash heap as all the WMD stories, no surprise here:

A U.S. intelligence official expressed skepticism Monday that a member of Al Qaeda had served as an officer in Saddam Hussein's Fedayeen militia, contradicting a claim made the day before by a member of the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks.

The intelligence official said the CIA had investigated the matter this year after documents recovered in Iraq listed an officer in the Fedayeen Saddam militia whose name was similar to that of a known Al Qaeda operative.

The agency determined that the militia member and the terrorist operative were not the same person, the official said. "We think that it is not the same guy," said the intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
(via the Pulitzer-heavy Los Angeles Times, not the when-weill-they-fire-Wilgoren New York shadow of its former self.)

Honestly, the Bush team needs to work on the shelf life of its lies. They're starting to fall apart in days now, not in weeks or months. I thought Karen was supposed to fix all this? Is she still on her book tour, or what?

Of course, we could have predicted this. Cooking the books is a Bush speciality, always has been.

Correcting an inaccurate report, the State Department announced Tuesday that acts of terror worldwide increased slightly last year and the number of people wounded rose dramatically.


The department also reported a decline in the number of people killed -- to 625 from 725 during 2002. But in April, the department reported 307 people had been killed last year -- a much bigger decline.

The findings had been used by senior Bush administration officials to bolster President Bush's claim of success in countering terrorism.

Powell said, "I can assure you it had nothing to do with putting out anything but the most honest, accurate information we can."
(via WaPo)

Poor old Colin Powell I hesitate to use a word like, well, "shuffle," but why on earth would anyone who was watched this administration over the last four years believe that Powell is capable of assuring anyone of anything?

And I love the little qualifying sting in the tail of "the most honest, accurate information we can", which should be amended to read "we can, given that we are ideologically driven Rapture-heads who wouldn't know what the truth is if it walked up and hit us with a 2 by 4."

Harrumph.

We are shocked, shocked to hear that all is not well in Jeb Bush's Florida. Would you believe they are still jacking around people with felony convictions even after they have served their time and been restored to society?

We didn't think so. Neither is the Palm Beach Post:

As many as 22,000 Floridians will be able to vote, serve on juries or do state-licensed work because Gov. Bush and the state Cabinet restored their civil rights last week. They committed felonies, did their time and deserve to rejoin society.

But estimates are that at least another 580,000 men and women in Florida remain disenfranchised because of the state's archaic law that denies full participation as citizens to people who have served their sentences. Florida is one of only six states that do not automatically restore rights to ex-felons who have completed their punishment. The 136-year-old law was written and passed after the Civil War to discriminate against freed slaves, and the Legislature made slight changes in 1968 to mitigate the discrimination. African-Americans continue to be affected disproportionately, accounting for up to 47 percent of the disenfranchised ex-felons. The law has no place in a state that considers itself progressive.
...
Florida's anachronistic approach to ex-felons also needlessly complicates elections. Last month, state officials said they had found 47,000 registered voters who might be ineligible because of felony convictions. County elections supervisors must try to verify identities and records. Forty-four states don't have this problem and avoid the intrusion of politics because they restore voting rights automatically.

Of the 125,000 ex-felons in the lawsuit, Gov. Bush and the Cabinet made those 22,000 eligible for automatic restoration; of the remaining 103,000, about half will have to go through a hearing process, and about half won't be eligible; some, for example, are dead or back in prison. The state is still telling 50,000 ex-felons that they must apply, then wait months for hearings, ensuring that they won't be voting in this year's elections. The governor and Cabinet are bringing relief to only a fraction of the disenfranchised.

Alas, after this excellent start, the Palm Beach editorialistas wimp out with a call for a complete rewrite of the election law, which can't be done until next spring. But they've made a good start. Round up the usual suspects, gendarmes.

Although it has been clearly established that it is not worth reading for anything resembling political coverage, we must admit that the No Yux Times (link fixed) still has merit for scientific and technical items. Therein we find the following discussion of G-mail, which does not pertain to scanty female undergarments (that's "g-strings") but rather to a new email system Google is preparing to roll out, to much hype.

A great deal of the hype relates to the fact that Google's system, while free to the user, is supported by advertising. This is done with software which reads the mail messages in search of words which will render the advertising "relevant" to the user:

Google is trying not only to analyze the content of messages, but also their tone. A message that said "I love Orlando" was accompanied by ads for resorts at Disney World. But the same message, with the word love replaced by hate, prompted no ads.

The company has built a negativity filter that is like the "tragedy filter" it built into its system that places ads on Web pages of many publishers (including The New York Times). The tragedy filter is meant to keep ads off pages describing catastrophic events.

Frederick Marckini, the chief executive of iProspect, an advertising agency that specializes in search ads, praised this approach. "There is no commercial application for hate," he said. "There are some words that advertisers are not going to want to be associated with."

So, should you decide to use Gmail once it's available, but do not wish to be pestered with ads, try this: Add a sig line, which goes out automatically with each email sent. (Most mail programs support this; check your specs.) We humbly suggest the following, which is morally uplifting, displays a bipartisan attitude, and works in the word "hate" not less than three times:

"Always remember, others may hate you. Those who hate you don't win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself." --R. M. Nixon

Donald Rumsfeld approved the use at Guantanamo of a technique known as "waterboarding." This is not a surfing-related program activity, it's a technique popularized in American history in Salem, Mass., circa 1692.

He wrote a memo about it. CNN (and apparently ONLY covered) the story yesterday.

Except when you try to find it, even with a link from a Google search which confirms the stories existed, they're mysteriously gone. The link above is to a "cache" site, proving that trying to hide ANYTHING once it's been posted to the Net just makes you look like a cat trying to bury a turd on a tile floor. Rummy has made Nixon's Mistake. It ain't the crime that'll get ya, it's the coverup.

Atrios nails him on both the story and the coverup.

The lead to the story, by CNN's Senior Pentagon Correspondent Jamie McIntyre, who should stay out of small planes for awhile:

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Pentagon has declassified and will release as soon as Tuesday memos signed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that critics argue authorized torture of detainees at the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

But Pentagon officials strongly disputed the contention that the aggressive techniques, including the use of dogs to induce fear, constituted torture.

Among the memos, Pentagon officials said, is a directive signed by Rumsfeld in October 2002 authorizing a technique called "water boarding," in which a prisoner is strapped down, immersed in water, and made to feel as if he is going to drown.

But officials insisted the technique was never used and that the authorization for it was rescinded in January 2003 following an internal review of interrogation techniques and objections from military lawyers who said the practice would violate the Geneva Conventions.

UPDATE: Looks like the Yahoo cache link has been killed too, although I checked this just before posting it. Go to Atrios, look in the comments thread on this story, they've got the whole thing copied. If Haloscan suddenly doesn't work either, start getting nervous.

UPPERDATE: Bobo notes in Comments that CNN's stories are back up at the links cited before...but Atrios says this is a sanitized version:

The senior defense official who provided the original information to CNN now says Rumsfeld only approved "mild, noninjurious physical contact" with a high-level al Qaeda detainee at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and specifically did not approve a request to use water boarding.

The tactic involves strapping a prisoner down and immersing him in water and making the subject feel as though he is drowning.

The memos to and from Rumsfeld are expected to be released later Tuesday, and will show that while the water boarding technique was on a list of requested aggressive tactics, Rumsfeld did not approve it, officials say.

UPPEST DATE:
The invaluable MJS has had Deep Thoughts on this matter. With apologies noted to all Beach Boys fans everywhere--

Arab prisoner, you're the one
Who will make this torture fun
Will you ride this, ride this water board
Water board, my little water board
There's more....

Maybe someone can explain to me how, when He lied His way into the wrong war, He restored honor and dignity to the White House. I sure don't get it.

Here.

Read (yech) the Howler. Every day.

Via Pandagon:

Thomas B. Griffith, President Bush's nominee for the federal appeals court in Washington, has been practicing law in Utah without a state law license for the past four years, according to Utah state officials.
(via WaPo)

Um.

Say, doesn't the chair of the Senate Judiciary Commmittee, Orrin Hatch, come from... it'll come to me... Utah? Do you think he knew about this? Or could it be that he already knows all he need to know?

Griffith, 55, is a member of the Republican National Lawyers Association and was the lead counsel for the Senate during the [failed] impeachment trial of [our last elected] President Bill Clinton. Married and the father of six, he is a former partner at the D.C. firm of Wiley Rein & Fielding, whose partners served in prominent positions in past Republican administrations.

Payback is a bitch, isn't it?

That would be sweet!

Defense attorneys made clear today that they hope to show that responsibility for the alleged maltreatment [torture!—Ed.] at the [Abu Ghraib] detention center rests at the highest levels of the government, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and President Bush, whom they say set the stage for loosened rules of interrogation as part of the war on terrorism.

"We will ask to call the President of the United States as a witness," Paul Bergrin, a New Jersey attorney representing Davis told reporters outside the courtroom.

The judge granted defense attorneys access to Abizaid, Sanchez and their subordinates to "flesh out anything you want to flesh out." But he said attorneys would need to demonstrate the relevance of interviewing higher-level officials.
(via the Pulitzer-heavy Los Angeles Times)

"No, Mr. President, your right hand. No, you can't cross your fingers behind your back. No, your mother's not here. No, no! Leave that goat alone. Come here, George! Now!"

But I think it's important to use the right technical term (closely allied, in the military, to FUBAR).

Words matter, eh?

Should I be family friendly, stop saying "clusterfuck" and start using the euphemism "Charlie Foxtrot"?

Readers?

The first of many:

A longtime Minnesota Republican and former Supreme Court justice, Ed Stringer, is backing Democrat John Kerry in this year's presidential election.

An Associated Press review of campaign finance reports found that Stringer, who also worked for President George H.W. Bush, has contributed $2,000 to Kerry.

Reached Monday, Stringer said he didn't make the contribution as any kind of public statement.

"This is really just a very personal feeling on my part that the current administration simply did not represent the direction of the country that I would like to go," said Stringer, 69, a former chief of staff to Gov. Arne Carlson.

Stringer, a lawyer in the Minneapolis law firm of Briggs & Morgan, cited Bush's policies on issues ranging from Iraq to the environment.

"There's hardly anything that this current administration has done that I would stand up and salute, including tax cuts and right down the line," Stringer said.
(via AP)

A lot of us share these "very personal feelings" ....

Here.

Thank God for The New Yorker (and alert reader Julian).

The Israelis are supporting and Kurdish separatists. Plus, they think we lost the occupation a year ago, and told us then.

Oh, heck, the new Iraqi regime will probably throw all the foreign journalists out as their first official act, at midnight on June 30, and then there won't be any bad news at all until the election! So, no problem.

That is, until a civil war, aided and abetted by Israel, breaks out. Eesh.

And then there's sociopathically inappropriate:

[BUSH] I call upon all nations to do everything they can to stop these
terrorist killers.

Thank you.

Now watch this drive.

(via WhiteWash House transcript)

WTF?

Funny ha ha? Or just .... Funny? Maybe not so funny?

Duh. We've been saying that in the blogosphere for months. Anyhow, it's now emerging into the CW:

A senior US intelligence official is about to publish a bitter condemnation of America's counter-terrorism policy, arguing that the west is losing the war against al-Qaida and that an "avaricious, premeditated, unprovoked" war in Iraq has played into Osama bin Laden's hands.

Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror, due out next month, dismisses two of the most frequent boasts of the Bush administration: that Bin Laden and al-Qaida are "on the run" and that the Iraq invasion has made America safer.

In an interview with the Guardian the official, who writes as "Anonymous", described al-Qaida as a much more proficient and focused organisation than it was in 2001, and predicted that it would "inevitably" acquire weapons of mass destruction and try to use them.

As we've said over and over again: Bush's fecklessness with loose nukes is going to cost us a—Blue state, yawn—city.

[Anonymous] said Bin Laden was probably "comfortable" commanding his organisation from the mountainous tribal lands along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The Pakistani army claimed a big success in the "war against terror" yesterday with the killing of a tribal leader, Nek Mohammed, who was one of al-Qaida's protectors in Waziristan.

But Anonymous, who has been centrally involved in the hunt for Bin Laden, said: "Nek Mohammed is one guy in one small area. We sometimes forget how big the tribal areas are." He believes President Pervez Musharraf cannot advance much further into the tribal areas without endangering his rule by provoking a Pashtun revolt. "He walks a very fine line," he said yesterday.

The fact that [Anonymous] has been allowed to publish, albeit anonymously and without naming which agency he works for, may reflect the increasing frustration of senior intelligence officials at the course the administration has taken.

Anonymous does not try to veil his contempt for the Bush White House and its policies. His book describes the Iraq invasion as "an avaricious, premeditated, unprovoked war against a foe who posed no immediate threat but whose defeat did offer economic advantage.

"Our choice of timing, moreover, shows an abject, even wilful failure to recognise the ideological power, lethality and growth potential of the threat personified by Bin Laden, as well as the impetus that threat has been given by the US-led invasion and occupation of Muslim Iraq."

In his view, the US missed its biggest chance to capture the al-Qaida leader at Tora Bora in the Afghan mountains in December 2001. Instead of sending large numbers of his own troops, General Tommy Franks relied on surrogates who proved to be unreliable.

"For my money, the game was over at Tora Bora," Anonymous said.
(via the Why-the-heck-do-I-have-to-get-this-from-a-UK-paper Guardian)

Unless Bush has OBL on ice for an October surprise, of course.

Readers, we've had fun with Inerrant Boy's time management skills before—things like He can find an hour to exercise every day, but couldn't find an hour to spend with the 9/11 commmission. But it isn't just hours, it's minutes:

For the White House, the most devastating segment of "Fahrenheit 9/11" may be the video of a befuddled-looking President Bush staying put for nearly seven minutes at a Florida elementary school on the morning of Sept. 11, continuing to read a copy of "My Pet Goat" to schoolchildren even after an aide has told him that a second plane has struck the twin towers. Mr. Bush's slow, hesitant reaction to the disastrous news has never been a secret. But seeing the actual footage, with the minutes ticking by, may prove more damaging to the White House than all the statistics in the world.
(via Pulitzer-light, not-the-Los Angeles Times)

Incidentally, I don't buy the line that it would have been really bad if the kids he was reading to started crying, or something. Heck, these guys owned the SCLM at that point, so the footage probably never would have been shown. And it makes no sense to me to put image over substance—the substance, in this case, doing whatever needed to be done to protect the nation.

Readers, seven minutes can seem like a really long time. What can you do in seven minutes?

In an otherwise reasonably balanced article on Bush's "Seven Minute Silence," Joel Achenbach writes:

When professional baseball resumed play, [Bush] courageously walked to the mound in a crowded stadium and threw out the first pitch.
(via WaPo)

Have we come to this? Courage is Bush throwing a baseball? Getting shot at in Iraq, that's courage. Not this nonsense. Sheesh.

Hey, I guess that means we can't raze it, huh. Gee, another forgettable Bush idea!

But The Fog Machine continues to work unquestioned:

A U.S. Army judge on Monday accepted a request by attorneys of soldiers accused of abusing detainees to question the commander of U.S. military forces in the Middle East as well as top commanders in Iraq and their subordinates.

The order effectively compels Gen. John P. Abizaid, head of the U.S. Central Command, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the top U.S. general in Iraq, and their subordinates to participate in a deposition with defense attorneys and Army prosecutors unless they invoke their rights against self-incrimination. Among the other top officers named in court as affected by the order were Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz, the U.S. deputy commander in Iraq; Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, the officer in charge of US. military detention centers in the country; and Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast, the chief of U.S. military intelligence in Iraq.

The judge, Col. James Pohl, rejected defense requests for memos between Justice Department attorneys, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other Pentagon officials regarding the use of interrogation tactics.

"Quite frankly what they do in Washington, D.C., you have to connect it," Pohl said.

The whole point of The Fog Machine was and is to confuse the chain of command so that those responsible for the torture are not held accountable. Pohl's faith that the defense can, in fact, "connect," is touching, but probably not justified.

Pohl also ordered that the Abu Ghraib prison, where the abuse occurred, be preserved as a crime scene, and he rejected defense requests to move the proceedings out of Iraq.
(via WaPo)

Still, it seems like the military justice system has not yet been utterly corrupted. Too bad Pohl thinks The Fog Machine guys play by the rules.

Way back when, in the early Jurassic maybe (actually May 16, back) the Washington Post ran a gorgeous interactive graphic called "Spheres of Influence" which noted in great and lavish detail how fundraisers for the House of Bush were interconnected, both across the generations, through several iterations of failed businesses (i.e. Arbusco, Harken Energy, the Texas Rangers, etc.) and also noting the extensive rate at which the said bribery artists were later rewarded with government posts, often in the agencies supposed to regulate their particular fields.

Well, here today pops up "Spheres of Influence" again. Why might this be, you wonder? Turns it it was for the purpose of running this:

Correction: An item that is part of this interactive graphic incorrectly reported that Southern Co. was a client of Roger Windham Wallace’s when Wallace worked at Public Strategies Inc., a lobbying group. The item also incorrectly said that Wallace ran the International Trade Commission during the George H.W. Bush administration; he was actually a deputy undersecretary of commerce for international trade. And it said he is a member of the Inter-American Foundation; he has been nominated for membership but has not been confirmed.

So this Wallace person, or else somebody from the Bushco/RNC Complex, spent an entire month scrutinizing this chart and finally managed to come up with ONE miniscule item to cry about. And the result of this grand accomplishment? The post gets to run this chart again for anybody who might have missed it the first time.

Go read it. Search hard for any item which you know, or even suspect, might be in error--it could be a mistake about the Texas Rangers AAA farm team's collective ERA for the years of Bush ownership--and note it in Comments. We'll keep the list and send one to the Post every month until the election. If we get enough we'll kick it up to one a week in October. Great art cannot be seen too often.

This week—Fahrenheit 9/11! I love it that those loons at "Move America Forward"—honestly, isn't the "Move On" rip-off just a little too obvious?—are saying that Moore's documentary will help AQ recruiting. Like the Abu Ghraib torture photos weren't doing that already, and thousands of times more effectively. Idiots.

Our dilemma: What to give the Islamist militant who has everything? A nice recruiting poster from Abu Ghraib? Naah, got that. How about evidence that Israel's helping dismember Iraq by supporting the Kurds? Wow! Just what I wanted! Anyhow, Seymour Hersh is at it again (though this story is not yet published on the New Yorker site):

Israeli military and intelligence operatives are active in Kurdish areas of Iran, Syria and Iraq, providing training for commando units and running covert operations that could further destabilise the entire region, according to a report in the New Yorker magazine.

The article was written by Seymour Hersh, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who exposed the abuse scandal in Abu Ghraib.

By supporting Kurdish separatists, Israel also risks alienating its Turkish ally and undermining attempts to create a stable Iraq. "If you end up with a divided Iraq it will bring more blood, tears and pain to the Middle East and you will be blamed," a senior Turkish official told Mr Hersh.

According to Mr Hersh, Israel decided to step up its role in Kurdistan last summer after it was clear that the United States incursion into Iraq was failing, principally because it feared the chaos would strengthen Iran.
(via The Guardian)

"Failing"?! How come we didn't hear about this? And "last summer"? This has been going on for a year?!

In the autumn the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak told the US vice president, Dick Cheney, that America had lost in Iraq. Israel "had learned that there's no way to win an occupation," he told Mr Cheney, and the only issue was "choosing the size of your humiliation".

Thanks for sharing, Ehud. And thanks for tipping the American people off, Dick. Oh. You didn't?

If the June 30 transfer of sovereignty does not go well, "there is no fallback, nothing," a former National Security Council member tells Hersh. "The neocons still think they can pull the rabbit out of the hat in Iraq," a former intelligence official says. "What's the plan? They say, 'We don't need it. Democracy is strong enough. We'll work it out.'"

"[BULLWINKLE:] Hey Rocky!...." "[ROCKY:] And now for something you'll really like!"

One Turkish official told Mr Hersh that Kurdish independence would be calamitous for the region. "The lesson of Yugoslavia is that when you give one country independence everybody will want it. Kirkuk will be the Sarajevo of Iraq. If something happens there, it will be impossible to contain the crisis."

Translation: You think it's been bad so far?

Eesh.

Seems to me an Army that's engaged in a "war on terror," and is keeping its strength only through stop-loss orders, could use all the help it can get. But n-o-o-o-o. Not if you're gay:

Even with concerns growing about military troop strength, 770 people were discharged for homosexuality last year under the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy, a new study shows.

The study, which analyzed discharges between 1998 and 2003, found the majority of those let go under "don't ask, don't tell" were active duty enlisted personnel in the early stages of their careers.

Of the nearly 6,300 people discharged during that six-year period, only 75 were officers. Seventy-one percent of those discharged were men.

Hundreds of those discharged held high-level job specialties that required years of training and expertise, including 90 nuclear power engineers, 150 rocket and missile specialists and 49 nuclear, chemical, and biological warfare specialists.

Eighty-eight linguists were discharged, including at least seven Arab language specialists.

Brian Muller, an Army bomb squad team leader who had advanced training on weapons of mass destruction and served on a security detail for President Bush, said he was dismissed from duty after deciding to tell his commander he's gay.

"I didn't do it to get out of a war - I already served in a war," Muller, 25, said in an interview. "After putting my life on the line in the war, the idea that I was fighting for the freedoms of so many other people that I couldn't myself enjoy was almost unbearable."
(via AP)

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

And the people who dragged the Army into the Iraq qWagmire and then planned and implemented the Abu Ghraib clusterfuck burble about "unit cohesion." Cohere this unit, you wingers...

And how convenient that they show up now! From the Moonie wire service:

The commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks has received new information indicating that a senior officer in an elite unit of the security services of deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein may have been a member of al-Qaida involved in the planning of the suicide hijackings, panel members said Sunday.

John F. Lehman, a Reagan-era GOP defense official told NBC's "Meet the Press" that documents captured in Iraq "indicate that there is at least one officer of Saddam's Fedayeen, a lieutenant colonel, who was a very prominent member of al Qaida."

The lieutenant colonel, Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, has the same name as an Iraqi thought to have attended a planning meeting for the Sept. 11 attacks in January 2000, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Lehman said that commission staff members continued to work on the issue and experts cautioned that the connection might be nothing more than coincidence.

"Shakir is a pretty common name," said terrorism analyst and author Peter Bergen.
(via UPI)

Yawn....

This is quite appalling. Here's just a bit of it:

For such a big book, there are a lot of things curiously missing. Clinton denies sexually harassing Paula Jones, but doesn't give his account of what did, and didn't, happen during that infamous hotel encounter. He goes on at length about the enemies who whipped the Whitewater flap into a major scandal, but doesn't explain his and Hillary's role in the mess. He is silent about Johnny Chung and Indonesian billionaire James Riady, who funneled vast sums in questionable contributions to Clinton's campaigns.

Doesn't all of this seem like real chickenshit stuff now?

I mean, come on folks, any one of the lies told to get us into the fool's errand called Iraq War Part II dwarfs all of this silly shit, doesn't it?

What moron at Newsweek let Michael f-ing Isikoff review this book?

Surely someone over there, um, had sort of a major problem with that?

So Lambert says Google News isn't working, and I hit it just to check, and lo and behold, what do I find but a WaPo item I never noticed all day mentioned on their front webpage.

Apparently a column called "Inside the A Section" by John Harris and Brian Faler, it has a number of insider-type items, headed by this little number:

With voter anxieties about Iraq shadowing this year's campaign, pollster Frank Luntz has some advice for fellow Republicans: Mind your language.

Luntz, according to a strategy paper that fell into the hands of Democrats, says minor changes in language used by politicians can lead to major differences in voter perceptions -- turning a potential liability into an asset.

Among his suggested talking points, in the nine-page section on Iraq and terrorism:

• It's not the war in Iraq -- it's the war on terror. "You will not find any instance in which we suggest that you use the actual word 'preemption' or the phrase 'the War in Iraq' to communicate your policies to the American public. To do so is to undermine your message from the start," it said. "Your efforts are about 'the principles of prevention and protection' in the greater 'War on Terror.' "

• Remember: better there than here. " 'Prevention at home can require aggressive action abroad' is the best way to link a principle the public supports with the policies of the Administration," it said. " 'It is better to fight the War on Terror on the streets of Baghdad than on the streets of New York or Washington.' "

• Don't forget the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. " '9/11 changed everything' is the context by which everything follows. No speech about homeland security or Iraq should begin without a reference to 9/11."

• Don't forget Saddam Hussein. " 'The world is a better place without Saddam Hussein.' Enough said."

• And don't forget the troops. "Nothing matters more than Americans in the line of fire," it said. "Never, ever, EVER give a speech or issue a press release that makes no mention of our troops."

In an e-mailed response, phrasemaker Luntz declined to comment on his paper.

*Snort, snark* Why does that last line fail to provoke astonishment?

Anyway, here's my thought. We here at Corrente are unrelenting in ferreting out truth, justice and restoration of the American Way, activities which by definition require the ouster of Bush. But we are not into nuts-and-bolts politics as such, the sort which is the lifeblood of a place like dKos.

But here's our opportunity to let slip the dogs of democracy. With the above examples from the Dark Side, what can we come up with as Talking Points for the forces of Justice and Light?

I'll throw out the blatantly obvious to get you started: "We support our troops in Iraq so much that we want to give them their dearest wish, transport home by the fastest means possible. We also support our troops fighting the true War on Terror in Afghanistan, who need a lot more help than they're getting from the current administration."

He who controls the discourse wins the argument. The points above show where they KNOW they're weak. If lies repeated often enough start to be believed, just imagine how constant reiterations of TRUTH can really kick ass.

Hit that comment button! Words you might want to think about include "Haliburton," "contractors," "impeachment," "national debt," "my grandchildren," "energy independence," "treason," "Osama bin Forgotten," and "quagmire." I'm sure you'll come up with more.

Sheesh, seems like both Google and Yahoo are down. Sluggishness of WiFi at my Saturday evening hot spot of choice, or some attack on those two hubs in the scale free network that is the Internet?

UPDATE I forgot to say that there is no truth to the vile rumor that Bush fucks goats. Nor is there any truth to the even more vile rumor that his average time is, oh, seven minutes.

From Neil Pollack (and be sure to read the whole thing):

"Dear [Higher Power of Choice], give us the will to restore religion in this country, as our Founding Fathers intended, to an abstract guiding principle, not the theologically unsound justification for a twisted foreign policy. Let us fight our enemies with peace and wisdom, not anger and indiscriminate force. Allow our country to serve as a symbol of what's good in humankind, not what's corrupt. Most of all, grant us the strength and wisdom to remove President George W. Bush from office. In your name, we say: Amen."

Indeed.

Slightly edited, as you see.

Go read this. Now.

You're still here. Why?

Oh all right, I guess I must explain. The Pulizer Prize committee can just save some time and print up another award now for the Washington Post, this time for Rajiv Chandrasekaran.

He got the CPA people to talk. Had to give them anonymity--although he got Bremer on the record for comments that blew my mind, and I bet he is going to really regret--but this is huge. And it's just the first installment of a three part piece. Which is running the Sunday, Monday and Tuesday of the week which, on Friday, will see the opening of "Fahrenheit 9/11."

You're still here. I sigh at your obstinacy. Okay then, here are tidbits:

BAGHDAD -- The American occupation of Iraq is formally ending this month having failed to fulfill many of its goals and stated promises intended to transform the country into a stable democracy, according to a detailed examination drawing upon interviews with senior U.S. and Iraqi officials and internal documents of the occupation authority.

Discussion of the things which are still broken: The army. The police. Reconstruction. The electrical system. Back to you, Rajiv...

In an interview last week, Bremer maintained that "Iraq has been fundamentally changed for the better" by the occupation... Among his biggest accomplishments, he said, were the lowering of Iraq's tax rate, the liberalization of foreign-investment laws and the reduction of import duties.

Bremer acknowledged he was not able to make all the changes to Iraq's political system and economy he had envisioned , including the privatization of state-run industries...

Despite the scale of their plans, and Bremer's conclusion by last July that Iraq would need "several tens of billions of dollars" for reconstruction, CPA specialists had virtually no resources to fund projects on their own to create much-needed local employment in the months after the war. Instead, they relied on two U.S. firms, Halliburton Co. and Bechtel Corp., which were awarded large contracts to patch Iraq's infrastructure.

The CPA also lacked experienced staff. A few development specialists were recruited from the State Department and nongovernmental organizations. But most CPA hiring was done by the White House and Pentagon personnel offices, with posts going to people with connections to the Bush administration or the Republican Party.

Was I kidding? Yes, yes, we have known all these things for months if not longer. But this is the story that brings it all together for the rest of the world, the folks who have been increasingly uneasy but are still clinging to the notion that "the price has been high but we're doing good there, it will be worth it in the end."

Yes it has, no we're not to any measurable degree, and no it won't. Now stop reading my blather and click the link already.

After all, we all could all use a little more fantasy in our lives, right? And Dave "I'm Writing as Bad As I Can" Brooks must certainly lead a dull, drab existence. Get a load of this:

Over the past several months, Kerry and his advisers have signaled that they would like to take American foreign policy in a more "realist [Boo!]" direction.
(via the Pulitzer-light, heavy-moving, flaccidly reported, and sadly declining New York Times)

Nice work, simultaneously seeming to report on what Kerry said and shrouding it in shudder quotes.

You can see why Kerry thinks that's a clever shift...

Nice work here, too: A little work with the shiv—we all know Inerrant Boy isn't "clever," but then "moral clarity," which Kerry so clearly lacks, doesn't require cleverness. OK, now that we've got that...

after the arduous efforts to promote democracy in Iraq.

Welcome to Tomorrowland!

With realism, you avoid humanitarian interventions.

Which the wingers and Brooks were all vehemently opposed to when Clinton intervened to stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo (incidentally protecting Muslims, a fact which, for some reason, the Bush administration has never made use of in its wartime propaganda, I suppose because they'd have to mention The Big Dog if they did).

But if we are going to turn realist, let's be clear ...

With a winger, "Let's be clear" == "Bend over, this won't hurt a bit."

...about what that means in practice. It means worrying less about the nature of regimes and dealing with whoever happens to be in power. It means alienating people who dream of living in freedom while we luxuriate in ours. It means doing little to confront crimes against humanity;

Uh, like Clinton's intervention in Kosovo?

realism gives a president a thousand excuses for inaction. It means betraying people like Oswaldo Payá — again and again and again.

(Payá, yawn, is the surrogate for winger Cuban votes in Florida 2004, which is the script Brooks is reading for his handlers today.)

No. That's not what realism means. As many children of six know, there's a difference between what we want to do, and what we can do[1]. Say that we want to bring democracy to Iraq. Can we? What would it take to do so? A realist would have insisted on real, not faith-based evidence, when making the case for war. A realist would have made sure that we had enough troops to hold Iraq, once having taken it, and would have made serious plans for the occupation. A realist would have seen that even an international figleaf is better than going naked. Above all, a realist would have seen that the Iraq adventure was a diversion from the campaign against fundamentalism that is truly in the national interest.

If this be realism, let us make the most of it!

Bush, unlike our child of six, only considered what he wanted to do. He didn't ask himself what we could do. Neither did Brooks, the other service providers in his brothel, the Republican party, and most of the media outside the liberal blogosphere. We not only took the realist perspective immediately, but were proved right to do so by events.

But let's go back to "Burbling" Brooks:

There's a reason Carter, Reagan and George W. Bush all turned, in different ways, against this approach. They understood that democracy advances security, kowtowing to dictators does not.

Oh my Golly. What a farrago. Carter: The Shah of Iran. Reagan: Pinochet. President Bush: Saddam himself. Inerrant Boy: Whichever dictator du jour in the pipeline rich 'stans. They all did it, and they're all going to do it.

Why? Alas, great powers sometimes do what they must—and that sometimes includes supporting dictators, as Reagan's good old Jean Kirkpatrick said. Should we minimize this? Sure. Especially if we want to keep our own democratic institutions strong.

What Bush needs to do, and doesn't, is walk the walk, not just talk the talk. He could start at home, if he wants to walk the walk and support democracy, and put a hold on electronic voting machines until they're auditable. He could walk the walk, and stop his brother from purging Democrats from voter rolls in Florida. But walking the walk is realistic.

And Bush could have walked the walk in Iraq. Besides planning the war and the postwar realistically, He could have held early local elections in Iraq. His failure to do so, since elections might not have created a compliant Iraqi government, may yet result in an Iraq run by theocrats. (See the essential Juan Cole here and in the linked original article). Of course, it's hard to claim that any genuine transfer of sovreignty has taken place, which is a prerequisite for democracy, if we won't even hand over Saddam for trial to the supposedly sovreign Iraqis.

A little more posturing from Brooks:

Most of all, they didn't want to conduct a foreign policy that would make them feel ashamed.

After Abu Ghraib, I can't see how Brooks can bring himself to write that sentence. Perhaps he has numbed himself to what he must do for his clients even more than I thought. Too bad. And to think I once thought he was a sane Republican columnist...

Whoever Dave's handler is over at the RNC should get him a new script. He needs one badly.

Notes
[1]. If Bush had gone to AA or AlAnon, he would have learned the Serenity Prayer: "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference." From this spritual perspective, Inerrant Boy's Iraqi adventure can be viewed as a massive failure of "wisdom to know the difference." A realist would take into account what can, and what cannot, be changed.

"Spiritual leader" (back)

Of course, there aren't a whole lot of letters to play with in "spiritual leader", so the results aren't really spectacular (unlike our previous effort (back).

However—coincidence? You be the judge—"liar" and "lie" figure largely in the results. Here are some of my favorites from the server I use:

Rude, ill parasite
Sillier, pure data
Details? Pure liar!
A surreal, idle pit
A sillier ape turd
Repair adult lies

But my favorite is:

Raised up literal

As in "doesn't do nuance"....

As in the delusion that many of Inerrant Boy's followers share that the Bible—I forget which text—is the literal word of God....

As in the opposite of "beat down literal," which, if there is any justice in the world, is what will happen to Him come November...

And of course there may be other naunces and better anagrams that you, readers, can suggest!

UPDATE Looks like "sillier ape turd" is coming up fast on the outside.

What happened to Mr. Johnson and to his family is surely the true meaning of terrorism. His executioners picked him at random, his presumed extra-legal guilt was contained in the fact of his being an American who was working on the Apache helicopter in Saudia Arabia. These self-made monsters, (whatever the root causes of terrorism, they each made the choice to be one), who claimed the blessing of God even while they appointed themselves the true aribters of life and death, acted, in the end, against the religious entreaties of leaders of their own faith. That they themselves have been executed, which deserves explanation, changes nothing about the deathly horror that surrounds their own actions.

Mr. Johnson's family has shamed these executioners by the profound humanity with which they have received the terrible news of his death and of the existence of a tape purporting to show him being beheaded.

After a day in seclusion, relatives of executed American hostage Paul Johnson Jr. released a statement. The statement was read by an FBI agent speaking on behalf of relatives.

Special Agent Joseph Billy said the family wanted everyone to know that they "understand the Saudi government and the U.S. government did every thing they could to rescue Paul under very difficult circumstances." The statement comes after Saudi officials did not bargain with the militants, who said they would spare Johnson's life in exchange for the release of imprisoned al-Qaida terrorists.

Speaking outside of a home in Galloway Township where the family was staying, Billy also said, "Paul considered Saudi Arabia his home. He loved the people and the country. They also know this act of terrorism was committed by extremists and does not represent the Saudi Arabia that Paul often spoke and wrote about to his family."

Nick Berg's father, Michael, has released a statement on behalf of the Berg family, that similarly refuses the invitation of these terrorists to nullify the essential humanity shared by all humankind everywhere. It's worthy of quoting in its entirety.

"We, the family of Nicholas Berg, extend our sympathies to the families of Paul M. Johnson, Robert Jacobs, Kenneth Scroggs, Bassam Salih Kubba and Kamal al-Jarah. We hope they will find the strength to endure the pain of their losses. We also extend our sympathies to all the families and friends of all the victims of this war, including United States military, other coalition military, contractors, and the 11,000-plus innocent Iraqi victims. We have been silent until now to avoid for the Johnson family any association our son's death may have had."

No doubt the NR Cornerites will be outraged at both families lack of outrage, and in particular, at the Berg family's inclusion of all victims of "this war," which will be decried as the usual exercise in moral equivalency.

Both of these families renew my pride in being an American.

So the WashPoodle runs a hagiographic piece of crap miserable excuse for a story today about "Bush's Seven Minutes" reading about the goat to the schoolkids as planes are falling out of the sky in multiple places.

The piece offers up all the standard Rove revisionisms like "Da Preznit did not want to scare the children" by shrieking like Janet Leigh in the shower and stampeding out of the room, as if that was his only alternative. You would think anybody with as much practice in lying as Bush has had could think up a line like "Aw shucks...kids, ya know how you hate it when you're having fun and your mom yells that it's time to come in and do your homework? Well even the president gets yelled at like that sometimes." Exit stage left, pursued by a bear but with a smile and a wave. Instead..

The commission report portrays a discombobulated government that can't even keep track of the hijacked planes.. Everyone's flying blind. The president borrows a cell phone to try to get through to the White House.
Symbolically and substantively, the ship of state was foundering.

But the line that's setting everybody off was this:

But even the harshest critics concede that the nation's spiritual leader rallied in the days thereafter.

Maybe the WaPo writer's children are being held at an Undisclosed Location and he can't be held responsible. But just for the record, down in Comments (via Atrios) is a WAY better description of what some real "spiritual leaders" did that day:

Bush leads our country in the same sense that a hood ornament leads a Buick.
For 9/11, the turn-out here was close to 100%. People you wouldn't think had any community feeling at all offered their services. Bike messengers spontaneously organized themselves into runners between Ground Zero and the hospitals. My super (and I expect, every super in town) head-counted the building and asked me to get on the horn and chase down every tenent who wasn't snug in bed come Tuesday night, then got together with his Ecuadorian londsmen's group to figure out a way to account for every Ecuadorian in town. Dog-owners who use the dog run down the street figured out who among them was missing, walked their dogs and had new homes for them by the next day. I worked the am shift in a hospital kitchen (a lot of workers were stuck in the bouroughs). Little girls across the street sold lemonade for the Red Cross. And that's not counting all the people who practically ran downtown (no cars or subways) to dig it out with their bare hands.

And immediately after that, the whole rest of the country came to help. Then the rest of the planet.

And Bush is taking credit for this? He claims to have led this? He contributed to this in any fucking way? I know the Secret Service gets antsy if anyone says they want to kill the president. But what if you just think he should be slapped?
Molly, NYC |

We know what this is about, of course. While purporting to be about the 9-11 Commission report that shows what a clueless clown Bushco was that day, it does double duty immunizing against Fahrenheit 9/11's opening Friday. I don't think it's going to work, but we can all discuss it next weekend after we've seen the movie.

It's beautiful, isn't it?

In publishing a report that cited no evidence of a collaborative relationship between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, the Sept. 11 commission actually meant to say that Iraq had no control over the network, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said on Friday.

As the White House strove to curb potential damage to President Bush's credibility on Iraq, his closest aide on international security denied any inconsistency between the bipartisan panel's findings and Bush's insistence that a Saddam-Qaeda relationship existed.

"What I believe the 9-11 commission was opining on was operational control, an operational relationship between al Qaeda and Iraq which we never alleged," Rice said in an interview with National Public Radio.

"The president simply outlined what we knew about what al Qaeda and Iraq had done together. Operational control to me would mean that he (Saddam) was, perhaps, directing what al Qaeda would do."

Intelligence reports of links between Saddam and the group blamed for the 2001 attacks formed a cornerstone of Bush's rationale for the invasion and occupation of the turbulent Arab country, where 833 U.S. soldiers have died after 14 months of violence.

The chairman and vice chairman of the Sept. 11 commission differed with Rice's characterization of their panel's findings in separate interviews with Reuters.

"We don't think there was any relationship whatsoever having to do with 9/11. Whether al Qaeda and Saddam were cooperating on other things against the United States, we don't know," Commission Chairman Thomas Kean said.
(via Reuters)

Some real serious parsing of words going on here, eh?

Somehow, Condi just can't allow Kean or the Commission to speak for themselves, and has to explain what they "meant." Since Inerrant Boy cannot—being sent of God—err, the Commission therefore cannot have implied that He did. So they could not have meant what they seemed to mean to say. Oh, these people. They just won't lie down. They make my head hurt.

And no doubt co-operated fully.

The White House's top lawyer was questioned by a federal grand jury Friday in the criminal investigation of who in the Bush administration leaked the name of a covert CIA operative last year.
(via AP)

I blame gay marriage.

Yech.

An Al Qaeda group said today it killed American hostage Paul M. Johnson Jr, posting three photos on the Internet showing his body and severed head.
(via LA Times)

I guess AQ really does want Bush re-elected.

Besides the Dallas location, it's the knuckle-dragging part that tips you off it's a Texas Republican:

[N]o one expected a stocky, knuckle-dragging 340-pound gorilla to leap across a 12-foot-wide moat and a wall that separated him from visitors at the Dallas Zoo.
(via AP)

Gee, I don't know what he could have seen—a "pastor" to suck up to, maybe?

Early on in his administration, Bush met with Premier Putin, eyeball to eyeball, each to take the measure of the other. What Bush saw in Putin's eyes was a fundamentally good heart. That vibrant connection, two good hearts at the helm of vast and powerful countries, survived even Russia's apostasy on Iraq.

The first blush of romance may have warn off, but Putin still sees something kindred in George W.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, in comments sure to help President Bush, declared Friday that Russia knew Iraq's Saddam Hussein had planned terror attacks on U.S. soil and had warned Washington.

Putin said Russian intelligence had been told on several occasions that Saddam's special forces were preparing to attack U.S. targets inside and outside the United States.

"After the events of September 11, 2001, and before the start of the military operation in Iraq, Russian special services several times received information that the official services of the Saddam regime were preparing 'terrorist acts' on the United States and beyond its borders," he told reporters.

Saddam must have been worried that President Bush might not really invade, so it made sense to him to put his fingerprints on a terrorist attack just to make sure.
Oh, and by the way, the Russians were never able to report intelligence about any specific planned attack. The lack of specifics must be why no one in the Bush administration ever mentioned this Russian intelligence. And Bush would probably have considered it pandering to a press determined to do him in to bring it up now that the 9/11 Commission has given a minimalist interpretation of what relationship there might have been between Saddam and Osama. Which is probably why Putin took it upon himself to speak up for a kindred good heart.

The Kremlin leader's comments were certain to bolster Bush, whose campaign for re-election in November is under pressure from the Iraq crisis.

The U.S. leader has been on the defensive at home for insisting -- against the findings of an independent commission -- that Saddam had links with al Qaeda, the militant group behind the 2001 airline attacks in the United States that killed 3,000 people and prompted the U.S. war on terrorism.

Putin's remarks were all the more unusual since Russia had diplomatic relations with Saddam's Iraq and sided with France and Germany in opposing the invasion.

No, he hasn't changed his mind about that opposition; Putin couldn't support the invasion because it hadn't been sufficiently respectful of international law. Perhaps what might seem an almost excessive reverence for the rule of international law is made possible by the absence of any genuine rule of law to revere within Russia. Still, we have Mr. Bush's good word that Mr. Putin has a good heart. Perhaps it's this emphasis on "goodness" that seems to have tipped Mr. Putin toward the Republican party.

It is not the first time that Putin, who has forged a strong personal bond with Bush despite opposing him diplomatically over Iraq, has come to his defense on the issue.

At a summit of G8 world industrialized powers at the U.S. resort of Sea Island last week, where he met Bush separately, Putin stepped into the U.S. campaign by chastising U.S. Democrats for attacking the Republican president on Iraq.

He said they had "no moral right" to do so since it had been the Democratic administration of Bill Clinton that had authorized the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia by U.S. and NATO forces.

Early this morning, I heard a debate of sorts on CNN or MSNBC between Jamie Rubin, and a young woman from the Hoover Institute regarding this question of exactly what were the justifications for the Iraq invasion, and which ones were true. The young woman proferred the most extraordinary version of the human rights raison d'etre for the war; Saddam's link with terrorism was contained in the fact that he was a brutal dictator and commentators have continually overlooked that part of the Bush doctrine which asserts this "root causes" rationale, that from such dictatorships doth arise both terrorism and terrorists.

I have to admit that I missed that myself. Wow, we have our work cut out for us if the answer to the terroristic potential of brutal dictatorships is a policy of prophylactic invasion.

Aware as we all are that irony has been alternately banished and cheapened in the post 9/11 universe, forgive me for pointing out that Putin made his statement regarding the brutal dictatorship of Iraq and its ties to the stateless Al Queda from the capital city of Khazakhstan; you can find how human rights are doing in that ex-Soviet Republic here.

Go USA Today!

The officer who oversaw interrogations at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad testified that he was under intense ''pressure'' from the White House, Pentagon and CIA last fall to get better information from detainees, pressure that he said included a visit to the prison by an aide to national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.

Army Lt. Col. Steven Jordan, in a sworn statement to Army investigators obtained by USA TODAY, said he was told last September that White House staffers wanted to ''pull the intelligence out'' of the interrogations being conducted at Abu Ghraib. The pressure stemmed from growing concern about the increasingly violent Iraqi insurgency that was claiming American lives daily. It came before and during a string of abuses of Iraqi prisoners in October, November and December of 2003.

While the documents obtained by USA TODAY do not answer questions about how high approval of the abuses went...

That's because The Fog Machine was designed to provide Bush with "plausible deniability" and shield Him from responsibility.

... they show there was intense interest in the Abu Ghraib operations at the highest levels of the Pentagon and the White House staff.

How much the White House knew -- or wanted to know -- about the interrogation techniques being used at Abu Ghraib remains unclear. The documents reveal no explicit approval by Bush administration officials of harsh treatment.

Just like His Dad. "Not in the loop." Ha, right.

UPDATE Digby has a nice post on how the "pressure" from the WhiteWash House led to a numbers game. Heck, you can't manage what you don't measure, and what better metric for a prison than, say, the number of interrogations? Sounds just like the ol' "body count" in Viet Nam, to me. Do we never learn?

And why is this day different from all other days? Anyhow:

The aide needed to know: Did Cheney want to give warplanes scrambled over Washington orders to shoot it down?

Cheney did not hesitate. He authorized fighter aircraft "to engage the inbound plane."

Perhaps in his haste to act — President Bush was in Florida at the time — Cheney might have shortcut White House protocol, the report said. The normal chain of command for military "engage" orders goes from the president to the secretary of Defense, and not through the vice president, it said.
(via LA Times)

They've messed up the chain of command again! More Fog Machine! For 9/11, just like Abu Ghraib, nobody can really be sure where the buck stops.

Although Cheney said he conferred with [Bush] before giving the order, the commission staff could not confirm that a phone call took place in that time frame. Several minutes after giving the order, Cheney informed Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that he had done so.

I guess this is why Bush and Cheney had to do their Mary-Kate and Ashley act before the 9/11 Commission (as Froomkin speculates).

"So we've got a couple of aircraft up there that have those instructions at the present time?" Rumsfeld asked.

"That is correct," Cheney replied. "And it's my understanding they've already taken a couple of aircraft out." That understanding turned out to be mistaken.

And Cheney's wrong about weapons systems again...

CHENEY TO BUSH: Isn't it bliss, don't you approve?

Sigh.

Yes, He certainly does know how to make the hard choices:

"I had a choice to make: to trust the judgment of a madman or to defend America. Given that choice, I will defend America every time," Bush said.
(via Newsday)

Sure, but isn't it a little harsh to call Dick "Dick" Cheney a madman?

Hey, my flight's leaving! Gotta go...

Ashcroft, too. So, show trials for privates and specialists aren't enough—now they're indicting the civilian little guys too—and in Afghanistan, too, not Iraq.

An interrogator working for the Central Intelligence Agency was indicted on Thursday over the death of a detainee at a US camp in Afghanistan, making him the first private contractor to face criminal charges in connection with the prisoner abuse scandals.
(via Financial Times)

And gag me with a spoon on this piece of sanctimoniousness from Ashcroft:

"The American people are familiar by now with the images of prisoner abuse committed in our detention facilities overseas," he said. "Today, a wholly different - and more accurate - picture of our nation emerges. Today we see a nation dedicated to its ideals of freedom, respect for human dignity, to its insistence for justice and the rule of law."

Heh. "Rule of law" from a Republican? That's rich. So they are going to be indicting Rummy for perjury (back when? Oh, wait... It wasn't a blowjob. What could I have been thinking?

Oh, note The Fog Machine here:

It was unclear yesterday whether Mr Passaro was employed by a private company or was working for the CIA under one of the individual contract arrangements the agency has struck with numerous veterans to bolster its forces following the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Still the game of concealing those responsible goes on. "Plausible deniability" for Bush.

Back here on June 6 Lambert noted this story:

The top U.S. commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, issued a classified order last November directing military guards to hide a prisoner, later dubbed "Triple X" by soldiers, from Red Cross inspectors and keep his name off official rosters.

Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba .. blamed the 800th Military Police Brigade, which guarded the prison, for allowing "other government agencies"--a euphemism that includes the CIA--to hide "ghost" detainees at Abu Ghraib. The practice, he wrote, "was deceptive, contrary to Army doctrine, and in violation of international law."
(via US News)

Yesterday the following broke: (via CNN):

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld last October ordered the high-value Iraqi prisoner held in secret at the request of CIA Director George Tenet, Pentagon officials disclosed. Some soldiers dubbed the prisoner "Triple X."

Officials say the Pentagon was asked by the CIA to take custody of the prisoner and to hold him incognito because he had been involved in ongoing military operations against the United States and the disclosure of his capture would compromise his intelligence value. The prisoner... remains at the U.S.-run "Camp Cropper" detention facility.

The prisoner was not assigned a number, nor was his presence disclosed to the International Committee of the Red Cross, but officials say his secret status was supposed to be temporary and deny he was a "ghost detainee."

At his press conference today Rumsfeld essentially acknowledged the above. Now let's go to the Wayback Machine all the way to May 7. When Rummy-tum-tum held up his hand before the Senate Armed Services Committee and went under oath and said, first to John McCain:

MCCAIN: ... that's a very simple, straight-forward question. 

RUMSFELD: ...The Geneva Conventions apply to all of the individuals there in one way or another. They apply to the prisoners of war, and they are written out and they're instructed and the people in the Army train them to that and the people in the Central Command have the responsibility of seeing that, in fact, their conduct is consistent with the Geneva Conventions. ...

And then he said, to Joe Lieberman of all people..

LIEBERMAN: Are these detainees, do you assume, members of Al Qaida -- that is, the thousands that have been held in Iraq? Or are they in another status? 

RUMSFELD: Oh no, the president announced from the outset that everyone in Iraq who was a military person and was detained is a prisoner of war, and therefore the Geneva Conventions apply.

Yes the above is heavily edited. Anyone who goes and reads the transcripts and feels it was edited unfairly is asked to note details in Comments.

At the press conference Rumsfeld--who appears to be ever closer to the brink of nervous breakdown, or possibly just having his head spontaneously explode--was reduced to near babbling as he tried to keep track of which denial went to which atrocity, at which time, in which theater, in keeping with what Constitutional abrogations by which legal staffs at which time were then in force.

My conclusion? Rumsfeld lied. Under oath. To Congress.

UPDATE: Of course after slaving away for hours on this I find the basic concept is now blazingly obvious all over the better part of the blogosphere, as for instance at Atrios. Digby and Billmon have their own takes on it. All are worth reading as others use different quotes and sources to come to the same conclusion. Like the bumper sticker says, Always Question Authority.

In honor of Ronald Wilson Reagan, the 40th President of the United States of America. Our national Camp Cock-n-Bull canoe ride instructor, bear in the bunkhouse bellwether, and gaslight mystic, I mean!... well, i don't know what i mean... and friend to lunatics, I mean leaders!, from around the world - or wherever. I've designed a nice postage stamp for the occasion, I mean tribute! Yes, a tribute, a tribute to Ronald "Big Voodoo" Reagan. What a guy.

Backtrack info and inspirational input here



The postage stamp depicts the Ronald Reagan National Monument which sits high atop Mount Reagan in the Carbon Monoxide Tree National Forest where Gipper Creek runs fast and clear from the wellsprings of Amnesia.

Not too far from where the deer and the cantaloupe play. (Really, take my word for it, I've been there.)

With apologies to Big Boys everywhere.

*

See, the Coalition authorities are tired of not only taking flak for Cheney's incessant war whoring via Haliburton/KBR, they're tired of having to clean up after his incompetent mercenaries as in Fallujah. This time, while still keeping it in-house Coalition-"partner" wise, they've got the Real Deal. Rambo on steroids.

(via The Standard(UK)

Jun 16 - The US-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) has awarded a $293 million security contract to a British company led by a former commando who has been investigated for arms smuggling and has long been in favor of using private mercenaries to intervene in civil wars on behalf of mining, oil and gas interests. The contract is the largest of its type awarded by the CPA’s Program Management Office (PMO), effectively making Aegis Defense Services, a company run by former British commando Tim Spicer, the world’s largest private army.

Aegis will provide armed bodyguards for PMO employees and high-level staff of companies that are running the oil and gas fields, electricity, and water services in Iraq. The "cost-plus" contract also calls on the company to coordinate security operations for the coalition throughout Iraq with thousands of other private contractors.

Spicer has a long history of leading private armies in civil wars, according to CorpWatch. In 1998, a company run by Spicer, was reportedly contracted to sell 30 tons of arms to the forces of the former leader of Sierra Leone, in violation of a UN arms embargo. The year before, Spicer was involved in a civil war in Papua New Guinea during which Sandline was reportedly paid $36 million to battle local citizens who had shut down a profitable copper mine to protest environmental damage it had caused and to assert their case for independence.

That'll teach those damn brown sand rats to love their liberators, all right. Cheerio.

UPDATE--Link to The Standard fixed thanks to alert reader KellyB. The Curse of the Sneaky Line-Break Command strikes again. Don't tell my boss Mr. Cheney what a lousy proofreader/factchecker I am or I'll lose this cushy job.

Isn't that they way they say it goes, IOKIYAR? Via abcnews wire

John Ramsey greets voters at his campaign office with a handshake, a free hot dog and a book that declares he didn't kill his daughter.

The father of JonBenet Ramsey, the 6-year-old beauty queen strangled in her Boulder, Colo., home, is running for the Michigan House, despite the suspicions that continue to hang over him and wife.

The 60-year-old Republican campaigns as an anti-abortion, pro-gun, anti-gay-marriage conservative and a savvy businessman. He founded Access Graphics, a billion-dollar software company later acquired by Lockheed Martin.

"We can't just hold our breath and hope the killer will be found and then go on with our lives," Patsy Ramsey said. "We have to move ahead now. We can't let evil win."

Rich Adams, editor of the Cheboygan Daily Tribune, said that he has received no letters about the JonBenet case, and that most of the reaction has been of the "sick humor variety."

Oh gee, you mean something along the lines of "You think we could get OJ as campaign manager?"

So I just saw my first "Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry" bumpersticker. First laugh--this was the layout:
Vietnam Veterans Against

John Kerry


Second laugh: how pathetic is an incumbent's campaign when even their bumperstickers are ashamed to mention their guy?

Well, I was all set to cite Dan Froomkin's invaluable White House Briefing column (headline of which is reprinted above) to point out that "unsupported assertion" is a delicate, diplomatic way of saying "baldfaced, God-damned, low-down dirty stinking lie", but checked just in time to see that the esteemed Lambert had the first subject covered in this article handled nicely here.

So we will skip the Unsupported Assertion about links between Sadaam and Osama Bin Forgotten and go straight to the OTHER Unsupported Assertion from the Dear Leader yesterday, in the Rose Garden appearance before the press:

"PRESIDENT BUSH: I'm very mindful about saying, you know, oh, vote for me, I'm more religious than my neighbor. And I think it's -- I think it's perfectly -- I think it's important for people of religion to serve. I think it is very important for people who are serving to make sure there is a separation of church and state."

Sounds good, right? And it would be, except that on the very same day Dear Leader said:

Speaking from the White House via satellite to the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention, Bush said: "Life is a creation of God, not a commodity to be exploited by man."

Guess he's never heard that fertility clinics charge for their services. Or that the 16-cell embryos he's so anxious to "save" from the fight against Alzheimers, diabetes and other afflictions are routinely flushed down the sink by said clinics.

And while our last Froomquote does not technically fall into the category of "unsupported assertion," it seems relevant on the general subject of character (lack thereof):

Thomas M. DeFrank writes in the New York Daily News: "White House aides [preparing for] President Bush's Normandy visit ordered the Pentagon to erect a $100,000 platform for his entry into a U.S. military cemetery, well-placed sources told the Daily News.

"American taxpayers picked up the six-figure tab for the red carpet, walkway and artificial island hurriedly built over a memorial pool so that Bush...could walk in style to the dais for last week's ceremony commemorating the 60th anniversary of the D-Day landings."

Remember, the Emperator's feet must never touch the common soil.

UPDATE: link to Froomkin fixed. Blogger sometimes sneaks in "br" commands that *I* sure didn't put there....thanks to commenter for tip.

Not so bad, actually. I won't be forced—I hope—to use the Reagan stamp.

A postage stamp honoring Ronald Reagan will be issued nest year, the Postal Service announced Wednesday.
(via AP)

But I wonder what the artwork should be ... Readers?

Who knew?

Bluntly contradicting the Bush administration, the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks reported Wednesday there was "no credible evidence" that Saddam Hussein had ties with al-Qaida.

The Bush administration has long claimed links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida, and cited them as one reason for last year's invasion of Iraq.

On Monday, Vice President Dick Cheney said in a speech that the Iraqi dictator "had long established ties with al-Qaida."

President Bush has said there is no evidence that Saddam was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks.

Fred Fielding, a Republican member of the commission, prodded witnesses on the relationship between al-Qaida and Saddam, noting a 1998 indictment of the terrorist leader that alleged ties.

The Iraq connection long suggested by administration officials gained no currency in the report.

"Bin Laden is said to have requested space to establish training camps, as well as assistance in procuring weapons, but Iraq apparently never responded," the report said. "There have been reports that contacts between Iraq and al-Qaida also occurred" after bin Laden moved his operations to Afghanistan in 1996, "but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship," it said.
(via AP)

Of course, Cheney will never admit he is wrong, so he'll just keep repeating the lie.

William Pfaff hits the nail on the head:

All of this is a ghastly scandal, one of the worst in American history. It is evident cause for impeachment of this president, if Congress has the courage to do it, and for prosecution of cabinet figures and certain commanders. However in view of the partisan alignment in Congress, quite possibly nothing will happen before the November election.

What then? It also is quite possible that George W. Bush will be elected to a second term. In that case, the American electorate will have made these practices its own. Now that is something for our children to think about.

(via Eschaton)

About the only thing that's made the last 3 1/2 years bearable has been knowing that, well, we didn't actually elect the incompetent thugs running our country. And indeed, it's been almost pedantically instructive to verify how people willing to seize power illegally will invariably proceed to exercise it in the same abusive manner. So we've been in the fortunate position of getting a free pass to the spectacle of seeing just how precarious democracy is, and how implacable are its enemies.

The real horror show will come this November, if, having lived through everything that's gone before, we turn around and ratify it. There will then be no excuse. There will be no one in the world who will sympathize with us. Our self-abasement will be complete. We will have effectively told our abusers that we won't fight back, that we deserve it. And you can bet on it, they will not miss that message.

The fact that the outcome in November is even in doubt, however--that there is still substantial support for these criminals even after everything we know, that honest journalists like Pfaff are a tiny minority in his profession, that the nominal opposition party has only meekly and intermittently protested this sustained assault--is itself an indictment of our country and its claim to represent the best of Enlightenment ideals. That itself is, or should be, cause for serious national soul-searching. Yet far from leading us in that long-overdue encounter, our institutions have instead (to pick only the most recent example) led us in a weeklong veneration of a Presidency nearly as lawless as this one. This tenacious refusal to confront our situation forthrightly, to tell ourselves hard truths instead of dangerous lullabies, has been an increasingly ominous symptom of what is becoming, in my view, a national pathology. We may already be seeing the consequencesof this neglect.

Changing Administrations this November is only one albeit necessary step to getting well again. If we stop there, we'll only be in remission.

None of you will remember my earlier 3700 word essay titled "How to remove this muculent nasty from your garden" (see photo at left). That's because once it reached 4000 words I deleted it and checked myself into a exhaustive babble detoxification program in The Cape Breton Islands. The weblog community does not need that kind of wordy windy bullshit battering its sleek sails! This ain't the Atlantic Monthly circa 1915 for Christ's sake.

But, in any case, the essay explained in great detail how to remove the White Rove Grub Worm from infested garden soil or from around the base of your average tree of liberty. Essentially this involved little more than a small garden trowel (which you can purchase from any Saks Fifth Avenue farm equiptment holiday discount catalog), and a pair of old golf shoes. The kind with those little metal grub stompin' punji spikes screwed into the soles. Which you can purchase new or used from leading BDS&M outfitters, suburban yard sale yokels, and/or any number of middle aged Southern Baptist Convention ministers in Texas who own green polyester sports coats and tinted eye-glasses.

And soon, as a future public service of your local weblog community agricultural extension, I will explain in less than 3000 words for all future generations how to remove a dangerous Shrub which threatens to poison your children, strangle Grandma Millie, and destroy the foundation of your home. Good old fashioned common sense home improvement advice if ever there was.

But first you will need to purchase or assemble the following items and tools.

1- A shovel
2- A pick axe
3- A 16 inch chainsaw (sharpened)
4- One machete (sharpened)
5- Six gallons of jellied gasoline
6- One F-16 Bushmaster Viper squadron from Shaw Air Force Base.
7- A decent pair of outdoor work gloves which you can purchase from Barneys of New York for under $1200.

Thats about it. There are a few more details and folksy homegrown tips that may aid the effort but for the most part that's what you'll need. As soon as I get done digging in this years bumper crop of frozen batter-coated french fries I'll be back with more valuable extermination -- I mean landscape and garden maintenance! -- suggestions.

Don't forget to protect your fresh grade A pre-pitted colossal ripe black olive can trees from squawking parasite riddled wild birds and crazy thieving neighbors.

*

Alert reader Liam Yore writes:

So I read this blog on occasion, not too much, and I don't get the "Goodnight Moon" reference. I have a toddler, so I know the book. I just don't get the relevance to anything.

Well, one night I had to make a final post, and I couldn't think of anything to write, so I wrote that headline. After all, I was saying goodnight, eh? And that night, or maybe the next night, farmer put up a truly loathesome image of Karl Rove as a maggot (here, if you don't mind losing sleep), under the headline "Goodnight, Rove," so I kept writing the headline every night in the hopes that farmer would post some more images like that. Just the straight man feeding the real comedian the line, eh?

And then I got in the habit of trying, every night, to write the last post of my day, on any old thing, under that heading. Like a miniature newspaper column. I have fun writing it, and some readers, at least, seem to enjoy reading it. I like the certainty of it, too; it's a nice ritual to perform. Here, at least, is something stable.

So, there you have it. Relevance is there if you want it.

(via Reuters)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush on Tuesday defended his policy of strictly limiting stem cell research, despite pressure to reconsider after former President Ronald Reagan died of complications from Alzheimer's disease.

Reagan's death on June 5 has galvanized an effort to allow stem cells to be used to seek a cure for Alzheimer's, a brain-wasting illness. His widow, Nancy, has become a powerful spokeswoman for the push to broaden the use of stem cells in medical research.

Bush, speaking to an audience of [hard] core conservative Christian supporters,* underscored his opposition to most embryonic stem cell research.

"Life is a creation of God, not a commodity to be exploited by man," Bush told the Southern Baptist Convention via satellite. The group's convention was held in Indianapolis.

A stem cell line is a reservoir of stem cells derived from a single human embryo.

*The group in question is the annual convention of the Southern Baptists, whose meeting in Indianapolis Bush addressed by video. This is the same group which just pulled out of an international Baptist organization because they were "theologically lax" and "anti-American," and is looking into encouraging all their members to remove their children from public schools in favor of homeschooling or "Christian academies."

C'mon, Nancy, Ron Jr.--your Kerry endorsement NOW would count for a lot more on the heels of the recent Reagasm.

Gotta admire the way the man plays the cards he has...

But I thought that Iraq was now, like, a real country? Sovreign? So why hold up transferring Saddam, anyhow? Well, anyhow, here's the tortured reasoning:

President Bush said on Tuesday he will not hand over former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to the interim Iraqi government until it has secure facilities in place to ensure he does not escape trial.
(via WaPo)

Say, I've got an idea! Put him in Abu Ghraib!

As an intermediate step, officials said the Bush administration was prepared to transfer "legal custody" of Saddam to the new government. But the U.S. military would continue to hold him physically until Washington is satisfied a secure Iraqi-run facility and Iraqi security forces are ready.

Assuming, of course, that the CPA is legal....

The administration would not commit to handing over Saddam and other prisoners by the June 30 transfer of power, as asserted by interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi.

So that would mean that Iraq isn't sovreign, right?

The White House said a U.N. Security Council resolution passed last week gave U.S. forces the authority to hold prisoners deemed to be security threats after June 30.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said international law allows prisoners of war to be detained "as long as the hostilities continue ... (and) it is quite clear at this point that hostilities continue."

But... But.... Major hostilities are over!

President Bush said the United States would not allow "lax security" to jeopardize plans for Saddam to be tried by a special tribunal -- comments that underscored the administration's lack of confidence in Iraqi security forces.

"He (Saddam) is a killer. He is a thug. He needs to be brought to trial," Bush said in a Rose Garden news conference with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

Well, it would be up to the Iraqis, now that they are sovreign, heh, to determine what "needs" to happen, eh?

"We want to make sure that he (Saddam) doesn't come back to power. And so therefore, it's a legitimate question to ask of the interim government: 'How are you going to make sure he stays in jail?' And that's the question I'm asking. And when we get the right answer, which I'm confident we will -- we'll work with them to do so -- then we'll all be satisfied," Bush said.

As Tonto said to the Lone Ranger, "What do you mean "we," white man?

If (heaven forfend) Bush v. Kerry goes to the Supreme Court, Rehnquist needs to recuse himself. Get a load of this, from the judgment in the pledge case:

[REHNQUIST] Although the Court may have succeeded in confining this novel principle almost narrowly enough to be, like the proverbial excursion ticket--good for this day only--our doctrine of prudential standing should be governed by general principles, rather than ad hoc improvisations.
(via the New York Times)

Gee, the only "good for this day only" case that I can remember is Bush v. Gore, where Rehnquist voted for exactly this "novel principle."

Can these clowns really imagine that we don't keep close track?

And a cheap, low-grade hooker, at that. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan today downplayed inflation concerns just hours after a government report showed consumer prices rose in May at the fastest monthly rate in more than three years.
(via WaPo)

Sillies! Don't you understand that there's a Republican President to elect?

But in the short term, there's looting to be done!

In its latest report, in March, the Bush administration said the Social Security trust fund would be exhausted in 2042. By contrast, the Congressional Budget Office said it would not be depleted until 2052.
(via Times)

I think the Republican party is like a shark.

Just as a shark has to keep swimming or else it sinks and drowns, so the Bush administration has to keep offering new ways for its owners to loot the public Treasury, or else it loses their "loyalty." So, after the looting Medicare with that phony prescription plan that nobody's buying, they have to move on to loot Social Security. Or else they'll drown and die.

So, let's protect Social Security and send the Republicans to the bottom.

In fact, you've got to deliver on the oil whether you go to war for it or not. Which Bush isn't doing.

nsurgents cut nearly all of Iraq's oil exports, with two acts of sabotage shutting the main export gateway and stepping up pressure on Tuesday on Iraq's new government two weeks before a formal end to the U.S. occupation.
(via Reuters)

More proof that we're winning.

Woe to you, hypocrites, Pharisees!

Mr. [Ron] Reagan was not quite so pointed on Friday night. "Dad was also a deeply, unabashedly religious man," he told mourners gathered at sunset at the Reagan presidential library. "But [President Reagan] never made the fatal mistake of so many politicians - wearing his faith on his sleeve to gain political advantage. True, after he was shot and nearly killed early in his presidency he came to believe that God had spared him in order that he might do good. But he accepted that as a responsibility, not a mandate. And there is a profound difference."

The remarks caused jaws to drop in California and Washington.
(via New York Times)

Gosh, which "politician" could he be talking about?

Jaws dropped a lot when Dean was running—because he said the emperor had no clothes. Same thing here, eh?

It was Dwight Eisenhower who warned us of the danger of the "military-industrial complex" that was sucking the blood of the nation because there was just so much money to be had. Various and sundry efforts to Do Something about this problem have come to naught in the two score and four years since he spoke--but this one could stick.

Best to go read the long version, it's only two pages at NYT Business section (suggestion, could we switch this writer to the political beat?) so I'm cutting all but the good parts.

The Boeing Company is undoubtedly celebrating its victory this week over its archrival, the Lockheed Martin Corporation, snatching a multibillion-dollar contract to build a new generation of submarine-chasing aircraft, a role Lockheed has held for more than 40 years.

But as Boeing savors this bit of good news, a quieter drama is taking place behind closed doors in Washington that could dampen this joy.

Darleen A. Druyun, a former top Air Force official who later joined, and was fired, from Boeing, is meeting with federal prosecutors to tell them all she knows about possible misconduct at the company, the nation's second-largest military contractor behind Lockheed.

Once one of the toughest negotiators at the Pentagon, with a reputation so fierce she was nicknamed the Dragon Lady, Ms. Druyun had held sway for years over billions of dollars in contracts for fighter jets, cargo planes and other hardware. But after leaving the Air Force in 2002 to work at Boeing, she was found to have illegally negotiated her Boeing job contract while still working at the Pentagon.

Snip. They've got her on the Pentagon end and the Boeing guy who hired her, Michael M. Sears, on the other. Oh, and a Congressional committee is gearing up to look into some matters along this line too. Cases include:

--a $2.5 billion contract to build a new generation of bombs called small diameter bombs, one of the biggest munitions contracts in decades.

--the $1.32 billion contract awarded to Boeing to upgrade 18 NATO early-warning radar planes, which Ms. Druyun worked on a month before leaving the Pentagon.

--the $20 billion aerial refueling tanker contract, has been put on hold by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld until after the election.

--Boeing has already been barred from some $1 billion in rocket launches and other Air Force business after the Air Force discovered that Boeing had stolen over 25,000 proprietary documents belonging to Lockheed, which was bidding against Boeing. Three former Boeing employees have been charged, and others are being investigated by the Pentagon and by the United States attorney in Los Angeles over possible further thefts related to NASA contracts.

The name to watch here is Paul J. McNulty, the United States Attorney who prosecuted Ms. Druyun.

Is this going to bring down the military-industrial complex? Hell no. Only a saner foreign policy, which would require a saner electorate, will eventually do that, or else we'll "spend ourselves into oblivion" as a certain other superpower of late memory did. But it's a start.

Remember Steven Stefanowicz? That caca from CACI, our "civilian contractor" friend at Abu Ghraib? From an unlikely source we now get a peek at his first comments in his own defense.

The short? He didn't do anything excessive, and didn't do anything wrong, and anything wrong would have had to be carried out under military orders, which he didn't get, so he can't be blamed for anything.

The really short? "I know not-TEENG!" And heavens, he never saw anybody taking pictures! Let's just call him Sgt. Schultz from now on, it's a lot easier to spell. Read down to see how the Fog Machine works.

(via Allentown (PA) Morning Call)

In a sworn statement he gave Army investigators in January, a Telford area man accused of allowing Iraqi prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison said he did not order guards to assault detainees and was unaware of photos showing abuse.

Steven Stefanowicz told investigators about one incident of mistreatment and detailed some of the aggressive interrogation tactics he carried out as an employee at the prison in Baghdad.

In his two-page statement, which offers some of the first details of his role as a civilian contractor in Iraq, Stefanowicz says he did not stray from interrogation rules without approval from top U.S. military officials. On one such occasion, he deprived a prisoner of sleep.

The statement was released Monday by attorney Henry Hockeimer of Philadelphia in an effort to portray his client as a whistle-blower.

Stefanowicz, 34,..is named in an Army report as one of the men who might be responsible for prisoner abuse because he allowed or instructed soldiers to aid in interrogations by ''setting conditions.''

''The Taguba Report makes vague statements against Mr. Stefanowicz which are not substantiated or supported in any way. During his time at Abu Ghraib, Mr. Stefanowicz did nothing wrong and, in fact, reported several incidents of wrongdoing to the appropriate channels,'' Hockeimer said in a news release.

Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, who led the initial investigation of prisoner abuse in Iraq, accused Stefanowicz of making a ''false statement to the investigation team regarding the locations of his interrogations, the activities during his interrogations, and his knowledge of abuses,'' and writes ''he clearly knew his instructions equated to physical abuse.''

Taguba recommended Stefanowicz be fired, an ''official reprimand'' be placed in his employment file and his security clearance be revoked.

Hockeimer said his client is still employed by CACI International Inc. of Arlington, Va., but is no longer in Iraq. Hockeimer said Stefanowicz is not charged or in custody and is cooperating with ''any military investigation.''

Stefanowicz' Jan. 22 statement was taken after a December incident in which ''unusual sounds'' were heard coming from the prison's ''segregation hole.''

Stefanowicz told investigators he and two members of an interrogation team had returned a detainee to two military officers, who then placed the prisoner back into the segregation hole as part of an ''approved interrogation plan.''

As the team members walked away, they heard the ''detainee falling or possibly being struck …,'' Stefanowicz said in his statement. He said he felt ''very uncomfortable'' with what he heard and confronted the two officers afterward in their office.

Investigators asked Stefanowicz about the protocol an interrogator must follow when approval is needed for an interrogation plan outside the ''approved Interrogation Rules of Engagement.''

The rules were posted at Abu Ghraib and list several harsh techniques that supposedly required the approval of Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez before they could be used. Sanchez is the senior U.S. military official in Iraq.

The list, which was given to the Senate Armed Services Committee last month, includes hooding prisoners to create sensory deprivation for 72 hours, sleep deprivation and using dogs to intimidate prisoners at interrogations, United Press International has reported.

Stefanowicz said an interrogation plan outside the rules of engagement had to be approved by Col. Thomas M. Pappas, who was in charge of military intelligence at the prison, and the Judge Advocate General officer. Sometimes, Sanchez had to give ''direct approval.''

In the release, Hockeimer said Stefanowicz followed approved military methods in his interrogations and ''never strayed from the Interrogation Rules of Engagement unless he received explicit, written approval by Gen. Sanchez.''

Asked to detail special treatment of a detainee, Stefanowicz told investigators about an ongoing interrogation in which he placed a detainee on an ''approved Sleep Meal Management Program.'' He allowed the detainee four hours of sleep over 24 hours.

The program is written out by the interrogator for each day and approved through the chain of command, in this case Pappas, Stefanowicz said.

The plan is carried out by military police, who during the wake period ''are allowed to do what is necessary to keep the detainee awake … as long it adheres to the proper rules of engagement and proper treatment of the detainee,'' Stefanowicz said.

Stefanowicz also told investigators the detainee ''does not like to conform to grooming standards.'' He told MPs to ''give the detainee his special treatment.''

''This is to include showering of the detainee (not excessively) daily if necessary, having the detainee brush his teeth and the maintaining of short hair and no facial hair,'' he said.

''Hence the MPs are not directed when and how this is to be administered, but that it can be used to keep the detainee awake when the detainee is more prone to sleep.''

See, it was Sanchez who had to approve. Or maybe it was Pappas. And civilian interrogators would give orders to military people, except they weren't "orders." The "chain of command" appears to have morphed into the "wet noodle of ass-covering" when over-exposed to the exudations of the Fog Machine.

(via Reuters)

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Filmmaker Michael Moore and distributors of his anti-Iraq War documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11" are contesting the restrictive rating it received from the Motion Picture Association of America because of its strong language and violence.

The MPAA, which represents major studios and administers its classification system, gave the film an R rating due to "violent and disturbing images and for language," a spokesman for the Washington-based organization said on Monday.
"I think that the R rating is wrong and inappropriate, and we're going to do everything we can do to get it overturned and make it a PG-13 rating so we can bring 'Fahrenheit 9/11' to the widest possible audience," Lions Gate Films Releasing president Tom Ortenberg told Reuters.

"It is sadly very possible that many 15- and 16-year-olds will be asked and recruited to serve in Iraq in the next couple of years," Moore said in a weekend statement. "If they are old enough to be recruited and capable of being in combat and risking their lives, they certainly deserve the right to see what is going on in Iraq."

IFC Entertainment President Jonathan Sehring speculated that the R rating stemmed in part from graphic images of war causalities in the film. But Ortenberg added: "There's nothing in this film that is any more disturbing than what people see on the nightly news."

An appeal review has been set for June 22 in Los Angeles. Ortenberg said Moore alone would to decide whether to edit the film to achieve a PG-13 rating if the appeal fails. Otherwise, the movie will be released with an R rating, he said.

Although documentaries are routinely shown without ratings, and neither Lions Gate nor IFC Films belongs to the MPAA, Ortenberg said "Fahrenheit 9/11" is going through the ratings process because of its wide release.

"We certainly don't want to give theaters any reason not to play this picture," he said, noting that (back) a newly formed organization opposed to the film was lobbying exhibitors to boycott it.

Purely for informational purposes we note how other countries have dealt with another controversial film, Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ." Although described by many as "a three-hour snuff film" the movie, originally rated NC-17 (the rating formerly known as "X" which forbids attendance by those under 17 even with a parent) it was later up-rated to R, permitting young people accompanied by an adult.

Via WorldPressNews:

Mexico: The government slapped an adults-only C rating on the film, which restricts anyone under 18 from viewing it.

China: The government has reportedly banned the film due to its spiritual nature. But an avalanche of English-language pirated copies of the film is spreading across China.

Israel: BBC News reported that Israeli distributors turned down the film because of the controversy and concern that they would not recoup their investment.

Italy: With a thumbs-up from a Catholic Church association, the Pope’s endorsement of Jim Caviezel, a G rating, and high demand, the film opened on 650 screens, roughly one-third of Italy’s 2,000. Italian newspapers Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica criticized the film for its violence. Parents’ groups were outraged when The Passion received a G rating. The film was rated R in the U.S.

Poor Inerrant Boy. First Reagan sucks all the oxygen out of His campaign, then His own Father upstages Him by jumping out of an airplane. And to top it all off, He has to make nice to Clinton and that lesbian wife of his. Damn pitiful, if you ask me. Look for something exceptionally vicious in the next few days. And if there are any frogs on the White House grounds, my advice to them would be to hide, or stay very still.

Something to tell the children about, eh?

Since He is the chosen of God to be Our Leader, what could be more natural, or more appropriate, than enlisting the Vicar of Christ in an election campaign?

How liberal!

The League of Women Voters rescinded its support of paperless voting machines on Monday after hundreds of angry members voiced concern that paper ballots were the only way to safeguard elections from fraud, hackers or computer malfunctions.

About 800 delegates who attended the nonpartisan league's biennial convention in Washington voted overwhelmingly in favor of a resolution that supports "voting systems and procedures that are secure, accurate, recountable and accessible."

Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., who introduced legislation last year that would require a paper trail for all types of voting systems, praised the league's change of heart.

"There's a grassroots groundswell across the country to make sure our elections are auditable this November," Holt said in an e-mail. "The decision by the League of Women Voters is just another sign of its growing strength."
(via AP)

Now if only we could clean up Florida, and prevent thousands of likely Democratic voters from being disenfranchised there....

The ever essential Orcinus has the details. It seems that the owners of movie theatres willing to show Fahrenheit 911 are receiving death threats. How very Weimar. And the The Mighty Atrios has more. You can call the people funding this noxious effort and share your views.

Who knew? Thanks heavens Cheney isn't associated with this in any way! I'm sure he would be the first to condemn this sort of behavior!

Those former employees contend that the politically connected firm:

-Lodged 100 workers at a five-star hotel in Kuwait for a total of $10,000 a day while the Pentagon wanted them to stay in tents, like soldiers, at $139 a night.

-Abandoned $85,000 trucks because of flat tires and minor problems.

-Paid $100 to have a 15-pound bag of laundry cleaned as part of a million-dollar laundry contract in peaceful Kuwait. The price for cleaning the same amount of laundry in war-torn Iraq was $28.

-Spent $1.50 a can to buy 37,200 cans of soda in Kuwait, about 24 times higher than the contract price.

-Knowingly paid subcontractors twice for the same bill.

Halliburton is already under fire for allegations of overcharging the Pentagon for fuel and soldiers' meals. The latest accusations center on whether Halliburton properly keeps track of its bills from smaller subcontractors, Pentagon auditors said in a month-old report released Monday by Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif.

The 36-page report by the Defense Contract Audit Agency said that Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root had a billing system that was "inadequate," had numerous deficiencies and billing misstatements and that KBR didn't follow laws and regulations relating to spending and recordkeeping. Its contracting practices are so bad, the auditors said, that KBR shouldn't be allowed to bill the Pentagon directly without the government poring over every detail in advance.

Statements by the whistleblowers - five of whom were identified - and the government's audit report "portray a company and a contracting environment that has run amok," Waxman wrote in a letter to Government Reform Committee Chairman Tom Davis, R-Va., on Monday.
(via the San JoseMercury News)

What's interesting here is that the whistleblowers take their courage in both hands and allow themselves to be named—unlike the Beltway-types the media whores service. The whistleblowers are willing to be named here, just as they were in the Abu Ghraib stories. They are heroes!

Froomkin quotes what he calls a "lame joke" from Inerrant Boy:

"You're probably wondering how I got to be the family spokesman. (Laughter.)

"Well, we polled the family. And rumor has it, somewhere in our large family, the tiebreaking vote for tonight's speaker was cast by a fourth cousin by the name of Chad. (Laughter and applause.)

"While holding his son above the crib, Chad's father reports that the lad burped, and it sounded like, "George W." (Laughter.)

"Once again, my life was affected by a dangling chad. (Laughter and applause.)"
(via WaPo)

Ha ha.

Just as only Bush would joke about (back) missing WMDs—a lie that sent hundreds of Americans and thousands of Iraqis to their deaths—so too does Bush joke about the theft of American democracy.

And the audience lauggs and applauds.

What sick puppies.

What took so long?

A Democratic congressman plans to file a wide-ranging ethics complaint today against House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), shattering the remnants of a seven-year-old, unwritten ethics truce between the two parties and possibly nudging the House back toward a brand of political warfare that helped topple two speakers.
(via WaPo)

As if there weren't any political warfare going on now.

Westar: Officers of Kansas-based Westar Energy wrote memos in 2002 citing their belief that $56,500 in campaign contributions to political committees associated with DeLay and other Republicans would get them "a seat at the table" where key legislation was being drafted. Bell's complaint says DeLay "illegally solicited and accepted political contributions in return for official action," but DeLay has said he did no such thing.

TRMPAC: [back] Bell repeats earlier claims that the Texans for a Republican Majority Political Action Committee, created by DeLay, laundered $190,000 in corporate donations through the Republican National Committee, which sent $190,000 to Texas GOP candidates. State law bars such candidates from using corporate donations. DeLay and other Republicans deny the charges.

Federal Aviation Administration: Bell's complaint says DeLay "improperly used his office" when it asked the FAA to help locate a private plane last year. The plane was thought to be carrying Texas Democratic legislators who were preventing a quorum that Republicans needed in Austin to pass their contentious redistricting plan. DeLay has denied any wrongdoing.

Ah, memories. I thought it was the DHS, not the FAA, but what do I know?

"You know, most the people I've known in this business, Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, were good people, honest people, and they did what they thought was right. And I hope that I'll live long enough to see American politics return to vigorous debates where we argue who's right and wrong, not who's good and bad."

My experience is, most the people I've known in this work are good people who love their country desperately.And I am profoundly grateful that for a brief period I had a chance to be one of them.

Thank you very much.

President William Jefferson Clinton, two-term, popularly elected Democrat

(via The Washington Post, which gets the dignity of their full and proper name in honor of some damn fine reporting lately.) (And as long as you're there you really oughta read Froomkin too.)

WaPo here (and thanks to WaPo for some actual reportage. Too bad the Pulitzer-light, flaccidly written, and sadly irrelevant New York Times is falling way, way behind WaPo on this story.)

And whose desk did the memo end up on? Why, none other than that of Alberto Gonzeles, the author of the infamous (back) Texas death penalty memos! The scum also rises...

UPDATE Alert reader Ken Ashford points out the Gonzales didn't write the memo, it just ended up on his desk. The scum rises anyhow.

Ultra-light blogging from me today—deliverables.

Talk amongst yourselves.

Is Bush giving new meaning to the old phrase "tortured reasoning"?

Discuss.

This mysterious solicitation, discovered in Robert Novak's email inbox, was forwarded to me here at the Corrente News Network (CNN) via a reliable undisclosed source who lives above a rototiller repair shop in Georgetown. I have removed the original date of the correspondence and other header information for national security purposes. Mind you, it's probably nothing at all, ok! Nothing at all! You probably got one just like it yourself! Just so much unsolicited SPAM chatter. And we all know how annoying that can be.

ATTN: TRANSMITOR

Sir,
I CRAVE YOUR INDULGENCE AS I CONTACT YOU IN SUCH A SURPRISING MANNER, BUT I HAVE RESPECTFULLY INSIST THAT YOU READ THIS MAIL CAREFULLY AS I AM OPTIMISTIC THAT IT WILL OPEN DOORS FOR UNIMAGINABLE FUTURE REWARD FOR BOTH OF US. THERE IS NO DOUBT THAT THIS INFORMATION TRANSACTION MIGHT NOT FALL WITHIN THE WIDE SPECTRUM OF YOUR PROFESSIONS ETHICAL ACTIVITIES, BUT I PLEAD YOUR ASSISTANCE AS YOUR FLAIR FOR PROFITABLE POLITICAL INSIDER PATRONAGE IS HIGHLY APPRAISED

I am K ROV SOTUA from island nation of IVORY TOWER COAST and I am the personal driver to an important leader of my country till now when SPIES come striking and make recent situation uncomfortable.

On earlier date, I informed my leader of the need for less discomforting influences in certain sensitive ongoing supranational policy matters. Needs which might allow me to open a window where some unwelcome tension might be allowed to escape and send a particular message to others that discomfort is not welcome within my office and will not be tolerated when it makes tension for the designed purposes of my peoples and office.

Upon opening this window even slightly I might help particular significant insights to find a way to escape and visit themself upon those who bring tension to my family and organization. These particulars then being allowed to flow freely where they might and therefore deliver a valuable corrective educational lesson to those in need of such correction.

To my utmost amazement I suddenly find that I am in possesion of such valuable secret corrective educational particulars and insights! Which, should they be delivered effectively, provide exciting future career enhancing $opportunities$ to anyone willing to help me distribute such valuable secret knowledge through established high profile channels. Whats more I will speak to you on how you share with me in all advantages in future personal member enhancement remedies and provide taxing weight loss solutions.

That given. I would like to manage to find my way to a desirable future confidence location and share this valuable secret information in secure company with a coded professional consignment. Hopefuller therefore to target my valuable message to New York or London or especially select home address locations in Virginia USA. I need to distribute with you this important relevant confidence information so that it may impress itself upon any discomforting extraneous influences as soon as possible. Hence I am soliciting for your assistance. I trust you understand my offer.

Your compensation for further assistance will be lucrative, while the whole sum will be mapped out in future good-will installments which will continue well beyond November 2004.

Furthermore, you must keep this secret to the end and assure me of loyal representation on your part. I really require an ideologically sound partner who must be a GOD FEARING person and reliable. Again, I don't know much about your current personal needs, so I seek YOUR assistance.

I beg for the few following favours:

(1) Accept to be my secret partner.
(2) Advice me on the best way you feel this valuable knowlege can be conveniently invested for maximum impact and profitable return.
(3) Assist me to secure an anonymous persona and a safe network of communication.
(4) I request that you take a two days working visit to contact me for further clarifications and faster safer transactions.
(5) Assist me to make contact for us to disseminate this valuable secret knowlege and information I will give to you.

I stop here for now, Hope to hear from you soon by phone or return e-mail or disposable runaway teenage prostitute.

your frend KARLA SOTUA
You may reach me on: K_rov_1600@subrosa.gov

Still, it's weird ain't it? I don't know what it means. I guess I should probably just delete it. Afterall, I work for CNN, I really don't have time to listen to this kind of stupid shit.

*

Yawn. Gnarf. Snaffle.

I am no good at posting images. Elementary level html is one thing, and even junior-high level I can usually manage, and links to pages I do often enough to have learned (most of the time, unless something goes wrong.

But I spent a fair amount of time between thunderstorms this afternoon making up an image to go with a big story later, so before posting that I wanted to do another one for practice just to see if I got the hang of it. You can use this for your moviegoing excursions. Provided it works of course. My apologies to whoever made it, I think it was a Tshirt site, but I forgot to grab the source. My bad.

UPDATE: Esteemed Reader Kyle L tracks down the source: a webcomics/Tshirt/blog site called Goats.com. Click over and take a look, they have this image in shirt form posed upon a model who has, ahem, the assets to show it to its best advantage. Enjoy their latest offering "Jesus Loves Dick" too.

This is good—but I don't want a better Republican, I want a Democrat. So here's hoping fratricidal strife leaves Bush damaged, but still at the top of the greasy pole.

A group of 26 former senior diplomats and military officials, several appointed to key positions by Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, plans to issue a joint statement this week arguing that President George W. Bush has damaged America's national security and should be defeated in November.
(via LA Times)

Pass the popcorn!

We all know the theory of how vaccine works, right? You give a little tiny bit of the real disease, or else a watered-down version of it, and all yer little immune system cells whomp it up good. Then when you get exposed to a full dose of the real disease in all its awfulness, it doesn't bother you a bit. You're immune.

My guess is that the videos Sy Hersh talked about, the photos of Abu Graihb guards "having sex" with Iraqi women prisoners, should be coming out in the next few days. Here's the vaccine you're being given ahead of time. It's a two-stage dose:

(1) It's no big deal, the women were whores. Can't rape a whore, right?

(2) It's even less of a big deal because the guys were drunk. We've all done stupid things when we're drunk, right? Peered at the person next to us in the harsh early morning light and gnawed off our arms to escape? Wink wink, nudge nudge, know what I mean? Awful things happen in wartime. Boys will be boys. Frathouse pranks.

That's not what I was thinking when I first saw this story from the LATimes). I'm sure Greg Miller had no idea he was being set up to provide cover for worse things to come.

Greg Miller, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — Weeks before U.S. military investigators began uncovering evidence of mistreatment of detainees, commanders at the Abu Ghraib prison launched a crackdown on alcohol abuse and told intelligence troops that guards were suspected of soliciting sex from Iraqi prostitutes, according to soldiers and officers who worked at the compound...

Five military intelligence soldiers who worked at the prison said they learned of the crackdown during an impromptu meeting with an irate Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, one of the senior officers at the prison and the leader of the interrogation operation. In telephone and e-mail interviews, the soldiers said that Jordan told them he had recently learned of an outbreak of alcohol abuse and that members of MP units on base had been seeking sex with Iraqi prostitutes. The soldiers said Jordan warned that he intended to put a stop to the illegal behavior.

Several members of military police units assigned to Abu Ghraib disputed the prostitution claims, saying they saw no evidence of such behavior during their time there. They acknowledged that alcohol use was a recurring problem.

Despite the denials, there are indications that prostitution may have been an issue at the prison. Among them is a cryptic note taken by a military investigator during an interview with an MP at Abu Ghraib, Cpl. Matthew Bolinger. A copy of the note was obtained by The Times.

In the note, the investigator wrote that Bolinger said he had seen computer images of one of the MPs having sex with an unidentified woman. The MP is identified as Cpl. Charles A. Graner Jr., a guard who has been portrayed as a ringleader of the abuses and now faces a court-martial.

According to the note, Bolinger "observed Garner [sic] having sex with female in video." The next two lines read, "possible in cell" and "possible prostitute."

Other soldiers familiar with the photos have said that they include images of Graner having sex with Pfc. Lynndie England, another MP who has been charged in the abuse case. England is now pregnant with Graner's child, and is at Ft. Bragg in North Carolina.

Weeks later, when officers at the site were confronted with pictures showing abuse of prisoners, some wondered whether alcohol had played a part. A military intelligence lieutenant colonel from a National Guard unit who worked at the prison and asked not to be identified said that the MPs appeared to be drunk and that the atmosphere on the cellblock was "like a fraternity party."

Gee, wonder where he got THAT particular line? Armed Forces Radio perhaps?

Our second story suggests a possible reason why this stuff may be coming out right now. Via the Pittsburg Post-Gazette

By Cindi Lash and Michael A. Fuoco, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Defense attorneys preparing for Pfc. Lynndie England's upcoming hearing on charges she abused detainees at Abu Ghraib prison have compiled a list of 100 potential witnesses stretching from the halls of power in Washington, D.C., to the sand-swept vistas of Iraq.

The wished-for witness list, obtained by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, includes, in addition to Cheney, other high-ranking officials such as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Defense Undersecretary for Intelligence Stephen Cambone; Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, and other high-ranking Army officers; White House General Counsel Alberto Gonzales; and Justice Department officials.

Among the group are Spc. Joseph M. Darby, the Somerset County native who turned in the others and is not facing charges, and Spc. Jeremy Sivits of Hyndman, Bedford County, who pleaded guilty May 19 at a special court-martial in a plea bargain with prosecutors in which he promised to testify against England and the six other MPs charged thus far.

The five other charged MPs -- Staff Sgt. Ivan "Chip" Frederick II, Sgt. Javal S. Davis, Spc. Charles Graner Jr., Spc. Sabrina Harman and Spc. Megan Ambuhl -- remain in Iraq where they are performing tasks other than jail guard duty. They are not expected to be ordered to testify because they almost certainly would invoke their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination if ordered to do so.

Unlike the other charged MPs, England was transferred to the United States because she is pregnant. She told investigators that Graner is the father.

Also on the witness list are 12 Abu Ghraib detainees, although what assistance they could provide in England's defense is unclear, other than if they would say she wasn't involved in any incidents involving them.

One of them, Abdou Hussain Saad Faleh, is identified in CID documents obtained by the Post-Gazette as the inmate in the iconic photo of the abuse scandal -- hooded, standing on a box and with wires attached to his fingers, toes and penis -- after MPs told him he would be electrocuted if he stepped off.

The witness list also includes:

Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, Maj Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, Maj. Gen. George Fay, Brig. Gen. Janis L. Karpinski,Col. Thomas M. Pappas..and Other soldiers who were witnesses to abuse, according to CID documents obtained by the Post-Gazette.

We conclude this episode of As the Stomach Turns, brought to you by Fog Machine Media, with a rerun. A blast from the past. Because one of the essential components of fog generation is TIME. A story that was horrifying two weeks ago is old news now. A story from a month ago? Gee, we say, I remember hearing something about that, but what were the details again?

The ticking of the time bomb started here, in this item from the indispensible Guardian:

The scandal at Abu Ghraib prison was first exposed not by a digital photograph but by a letter. In December 2003, a woman prisoner inside the jail west of Baghdad managed to smuggle out a note. Its contents were so shocking that, at first, Amal Kadham Swadi and the other Iraqi women lawyers who had been trying to gain access to the US jail found them hard to believe.
The note claimed that US guards had been raping women detainees, who were, and are, in a small minority at Abu Ghraib. Several of the women were now pregnant, it added. The women had been forced to strip naked in front of men, it said. The note urged the Iraqi resistance to bomb the jail to spare the women further shame.

Late last year, Swadi, one of seven female lawyers now representing women detainees in Abu Ghraib, began to piece together a picture of systemic abuse and torture perpetrated by US guards against Iraqi women held in detention without charge. This was not only true of Abu Ghraib, she discovered, but was, as she put it, "happening all across Iraq".

In November last year, Swadi visited a woman detainee at a US military base at al-Kharkh, a former police compound in Baghdad. "She was the only woman who would talk about her case. She was crying. She told us she had been raped," Swadi says. "Several American soldiers had raped her. She had tried to fight them off and they had hurt her arm. She showed us the stitches. She told us, 'We have daughters and husbands. For God's sake don't tell anyone about this.'"

Astonishingly, the secret inquiry launched by the US military in January, headed by Major General Antonio Taguba, has confirmed that the letter smuggled out of Abu Ghraib by a woman known only as "Noor" was entirely and devastatingly accurate. While most of the focus since the scandal broke three weeks ago has been on the abuse of men, and on their sexual humilation in front of US women soldiers, there is now incontrovertible proof that women detainees - who form a small but unknown proportion of the 40,000 people in US custody since last year's invasion - have also been abused. Nobody appears to know how many. But among the 1,800 digital photographs taken by US guards inside Abu Ghraib there are, according to Taguba's report, images of a US military policeman "having sex" with an Iraqi woman.

In Iraq, the existence of photographs of women detainees being abused has provoked revulsion and outrage, but little surprise. Some of the women involved may since have disappeared, according to human rights activists. Professor Huda Shaker al-Nuaimi, a political scientist at Baghdad University who is researching the subject for Amnesty International, says she thinks "Noor" is now dead. "We believe she was raped and that she was pregnant by a US guard. After her release from Abu Ghraib, I went to her house. The neighbours said her family had moved away. I believe she has been killed."

UPDATE Children, too. From notes from a Hersh talk posted at Brad DeLong:

[Hersh] talked about how hard it is to get the truth out in Republican Washington: "If you agree with the neocons you're a genius. If you disagree you're a traitor." Bush, he said, was closing ranks, purging anyone who wasn't 100% with him. Said Tenet has a child in bad health, has heart problems, and seemed to find him generally a decent guy under unimaginable pressure, and that people told him that Tenet feared a heart attack if he had to take one more grilling from Cheney. "When these guys memoirs come out, it will shock all of us."...

He said that after he broke Abu Ghraib people are coming out of the woodwork to tell him this stuff. [Hersh] said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, "You haven't begun to see evil..." then trailed off. He said, "horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run."

Eesh. The good guys aren't supposed to act this way. —Lambert

It's dark under the table, and I'm going to bed. Wonder if we're going to be able to nail that slippery little scut on torture? Well, we can dream.

But everybody should bookmark Juan Cole. He's great. Keep reading down: One analytical gem after another. And The Rittenhouse Review gives the good news that the Freeway blogger made Le Monde

Hey, and maybe I'll have a Yeungling to help me drift off! Seriously, folks, I'm a fan of things Chinese, and for the first few weeks I was in Philly, I kept asking myself, "Why the Chinese beer?" The name Yeungling kinda reminded me of one of those pandas, don't you know.

Yes, the leaks are coming fast and furiously. Since the show trials of the privates and specialists in Baghdad didn't work, The Fog Machine (original post) is looking for sacrificial victims further up the chain of command: the ol' "modified limited hangout" trick.

Not that Sanchez is a blushing innocent, but it's clear that the whole situation isn't of his making, any more than it's the fault of the "few bad apples." Anyhow, let's watch Sanchez being hung out to dry:

The top U.S. commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, issued a classified order last November directing military guards to hide a prisoner, later dubbed "Triple X" by soldiers, from Red Cross inspectors and keep his name off official rosters.

I like the name "Triple X." Kinda makes you wonder exactly how he was tortured, and where the photos and videos are, doesn't it?

The disclosure, by military sources, is the first indication that Sanchez was directly involved in efforts to hide prisoners from the Red Cross, a practice that was sharply criticized by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba in a report describing abuses of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.

Taguba blamed the 800th Military Police Brigade, which guarded the prison, for allowing "other government agencies"--a euphemism that includes the CIA--to hide "ghost" detainees at Abu Ghraib. The practice, he wrote, "was deceptive, contrary to Army doctrine, and in violation of international law."
(via US News)

"Ghost prisoners," eh? Fog Machine material, for sure.

Sanchez, in his directive to the 800th MP Brigade--Fragmentary Order (FRAGO) No. 1099--identified [ghost prisoner "XXX"] by name, said he was a terrorist, and told the brigade not to put [ghost prisoner "XXX"]'s name in any electronic roster of detainees. He instructed the brigade not to disclose his whereabouts to the Red Cross pending further notice, military sources say.

Hmmm... So the important roster isn't electronic. I wonder where it is and who keeps it, then? And do any of our alert readers know what the heck a "Fragmentary Order" might be? Sounds like another loose link in the chain of command, to me. Fog Machine handwriting!

And to confirm the active operation of the Fog Machine, at the very end, we get this very interesting sentence:

Beginning last November, the military sources say, [ghost prisoner "XXX"] was kept alone, under guard in his own room, at the High Value Detention facility near the Baghdad airport.

Well, well, well. Guess that means the guys we were torturing and setting dogs on at Abu Ghaib weren't even really important, right? Since they aren't "high value."

The High Value Detention Facility

Here's information on the High Value Detention Facility. And guess what! There's Fog Machine handwriting all over it:

About 100 high-ranking Iraqi prisoners held for months at a time in spartan conditions on the outskirts of Baghdad International Airport are being detained under a special chain of command, under conditions not subject to approval by the top American commander in Iraq, according to military officials.

The unusual lines of authority in the detainees' handling are part of a tangled network of authority over prisoners in Iraq, in which military police, military intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, various military commanders and the Pentagon itself have all played a role.
(The Times, amazingly enough, via the Dallas Forth Worth Star Telegram.)

Funny, though, that the civilian contractors aren't mentioned. I wonder why that is?

And it looks like the High Value Detention facility is a second Abu Ghraib, and for all the same reasons. Fog Machine handwriting:

On 09 June 2003 there was a riot and shootings of five detainees at Camp Cropper [the High Value Detention (HVD) Site], operated by the 115th MP Battalion) Several detainees allegedly rioted after a detainee was subdued by MPs of the 115th MP Battalion after striking a guard in compound B of Camp Cropper. A 15-6 investigation by 1LT Magowan (115th MP Battalion, Platoon Leader) concluded that a detainee had acted up and hit an MP. After being subdued, one of the MPs took off his DCU top and flexed his muscles to the detainees, which further escalated the riot. The MPs were overwhelmed and the guards fired lethal rounds to protect the life of the compound MPs, whereby 5 detainees were wounded. Contributing factors were poor communications, no clear chain of command, facility-obstructed views of posted guards, the QRF did not have non-lethal equipment, and the SOP was inadequate and outdated.
(via GlobalSecurity.org)

The Fog Machine

Here again, we have the handwriting of a Fog Machine operation. (To review, back)

1. Deliberately confused chain of command. Both in the handling of Triple-X and at the HVD/Camp Cropper facility.

2. Deliberately vague policies. Separate books for high value detainees like Triple-X, and inadequate SOP (Standard Operating Procedures) at HVD/Camp Cropper.

3. Statements from high officials that encourage torture. That would be Bush, Rumsfeld, and by the act of signing the Fragmentary Order (surely not the only one?) Sanchez himself.

4. Subordinates are sacrificed to protect superiors. That would be Sanchez, eh?

The fifth feature:

5. Secret records kept on digital media there seems to be no evidence for. However, as we said, the name "Triple X" is suggestive both of the type torture he underwent, and the medium on which it might have been stored: video.

Sanchez just a fall guy

Reading between the lines, it seems clear that Sanchez didn't have real, operational control over any of the prison facilities, whether at Abu Ghraib or at the HVD site at Camp Cropper. The chain of command would have been too confused for that—and deliberately so. The torture was being done by uniformed military personnel without insignia, military intelligence, civilian constractors, the CIA, and God knows who. Sanchez couldn't have been responsible. It seems like Sanchez got tripped up by the "seam" between legal, Constitutional Army activity and illegal, unconstitutional Fog Machine torture operations. He needed to hand over a prisoner to the Fog Machine, but being in the Constitutional chain of command, he had to write an order to do so—the order that has now been leaked[1].

And who runs the Fog Machine? The White House, obviously (see the first quote back here).

Follow the bytes!

The interesting question—yet to be asked, let alone answered—is how information flowed from the Fog Machine in Iraq to the WhiteWash House. My money is on the civilian contractor->RNC/CPA->Pentagon Office of Special Plans->West Wing route, only because those are the usual suspects.

Hopefully, Seymour Hersh has been absent from the pages of the New Yorker because he is running this story down.

Notes
[1]. It seems unlikely to me that the person who leaked Sanchez's order would have been a whistleblower. As a rule, the true heroes of the Abu Ghraib story, the whistleblowers, have been very willing to give their names. So my theory is that someone higher than Sanchez is throwing him to the wolves. "It's expedient that one man die for the sake of the people."

NOTE Michael from Reading A1 has an excellent timeline of Sanchez's actions through the slowly exploding torture scandal. And yes, he is being hung out to dry.

To the tune of Jingle Bells:

Blogger spooge
Blogger spooge
Blogger spooge today
Oh what fun it is to Stop
Mozilla loading page

s, and then hit the Refresh button.

Over and over.

Wish they'd fix this.

Gee, I wonder if Oklahoma City bomber and mass murdurer Terry Nichols had become an Episcopalian in jail—or, perhaps, converted to Islam—the holdouts on the jury would have reacted the same way. Somehow, I don't think so.

Oklahoma City bombing conspirator Terry Nichols may have been spared the death penalty for a second time because a jailhouse conversion to Christianity gained him sympathy from the jury, lawyers in the case said Saturday.

"Terry Nichols' belief in God is so firm that he believes if the [R]apture occurred today he is going to heaven," defense attorney Creekmore Wallace told jurors.
(via AP)

Tell me it's not a great country... And FTF.

NOTE What on earth does these people's belief in the Rapture have to do with God? I don't get it.

Remember how long it took to get body armor for every soldier in Iraq? (I think it was last week that some general schmuck proudly announced that all were so outfitted.)

But see, sometimes the government is right on the ball:

(via "Fighting All who Rob or Plunder" NYT)

WASHINGTON, June 12 - The Bush administration said Saturday that it would rescind a federal policy that threatened to cut food stamp benefits for several million low-income elderly and disabled people who save money on their medicines by using the new Medicare drug discount cards.

Medicare officials said on Tuesday that they were unaware of the Agriculture Department policy and were surprised to learn about the imminent cuts in food stamps.

Dr. Mark B. McClellan, administrator of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said the drug card, which carries a $600 subsidy for low-income people, was not supposed to "take away any existing federal benefits."

The Senate Democratic leader, Tom Daschle of South Dakota, said he received a telephone call this week from a constituent stating that her food stamp benefits were being cut because of the savings she would get with her discount card.

We do not know for a fact that Sweet Polly Pureheart lives in South Dakota, but maybe she retired there after leaving show biz, moved into an old missle silo and is now heavily armed and into the survivalist movement.

The operations of The Fog Machine continue: First, the privates and the specialists; now a general. Of course, Bush has only so many subordinates to blame....

Of course, as we suggest (at great length below), the real story isn't who gave the orders for torture; the real story is the chain of custody for the interrogation reports, photographs, and videos. Who in the West Wing was reading them? Who was viewing them?

In any case, R. Jeffrey Smith and Josh White report that it now looks like Sanchez gave orders that authorized some kinds of torture. And though that is bad enough, the story is just as noteworthy for what it does not say:

Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior U.S. military officer in Iraq, borrowed heavily from a list of high-pressure interrogation tactics used at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. ... The U.S. policy, details of which have not been previously disclosed, was approved in early September, shortly after an Army general [Miller] sent from Washington completed his inspection of the Abu Ghraib jail and then returned to brief Pentagon officials on his ideas for using military police there to help implement the new high-pressure methods.
(via WaPo)

Great euphemism, that—"high pressure methods."

What the story doesn't say: Who, higher up in the chain of command, gave Sanchez his order?

One of the documents, an Oct. 9 memorandum on "Interrogation Rules of Engagement," which each military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib was asked to sign, sets out in detail the wide range of pressure tactics approved in September and available before the rules were changed on Oct. 12. They included methods that were close to some of the behavior criticized this March by the Army's own investigator, who said he found evidence of "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuse" at the prison.

What the story doesn't say: Anything about the civilian contractors and "other agencies" (CIA) who were also present and the interrogations.

Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman did not defend these tactics. He said "there are a number of investigations that are looking not only into interrogation procedures and processes, but how they were implemented. The baseline standard for all interrogation as well as the security procedures for holding detainees has always been humane treatment."

What the story doesn't say: Whether Whitman believes that the Geneva Convention, a treaty signed by the United States, has the force of law. This goes to the heart of Bush's claim to have the "inherent authority" (back)to set aside the law. A simple claim of "humane treatment" sidesteps this question neatly (or could even be said to answer it, since the "baseline standard" is something other than the Constitution or the law).

For example, Spec. Luciana Spencer, a member of the 66th Military Intelligence Group who was removed from interrogations because she had ordered a detainee to walk naked to his cell after an interview, told investigators that the military police did not know their boundaries. "When I began working the night shift I discussed with the MPs what their SOP [standard operating procedure] was for detainee treatment," Spencer said in a statement. "They informed me they had no SOP. I informed them of my IROE [interrogation rules of engagement] and made clear to them what I was and wasn't allowed to do or see."

What the story doesn't say: Whether the lack of an SOP was deliberate. I believe it was: the operation of The Fog Machine.

A civilian contractor, Adel Nakhla, an interpreter for military intelligence, told investigators he was briefed on interrogation rules only after being implicated in an abusive event.

What the story doesn't say: Who briefed the civilian contractor? Who implicated him? And how many civilian contractors were never "implicated"? Note again the confusion of the chain of command; the operation of The Fog Machine.

when intelligence officers arranged for military police to help impose some of the more severe tactics, they often failed to specify how to do so, leaving wide latitude for potentially abusive behavior.

What the story doesn't say: Whether the "wide latitude" was deliberate. I believe it was: the operation of The Fog Machine.

Some of the rules for U.S. military personnel at the prison made it easy for people to duck responsibility for their actions, a factor that may also have opened the door to abuse.

The acronym MI "will not be used in the area," according to an undated prison memo titled "Operational Guidelines," which covered the high-security cellblock. "Additionally, it is recommended that all military personnel in the segregation area reduce knowledge of their true identities to these specialized detainees. The use of sterilized uniforms is highly suggested and personnel should NOT address each other by true name and rank in the segregation area."

Here is the crucial evasion in this story: "All military personnel in the segregation area reduce knowledge of their true identities to these specialized detainees". (I note, in passing, the curious use of the euphemism "special," which again suggests the operation of the Special Access Program (back).) But the real point, I suggest, was not that the interrogators hide their indentities from the prisoners; it was to hide them from each other. Here again, in the minutest of details, we see the operation of The Fog Machine, which seeks always to confuse the chain of commmand so that responsibility can be diffused.

So, what the story doesn't ask: How any policy directed only by Sanchez could have effect when soldiers, out of uniform, are mixed together with civilian intelligence personel, and civilian contractors?

The answer: It couldn't. Clearly, Sanchez—though no innnocent—is the fall guy here. And here again is the operation of The Fog Machine, which always seeks to protect superiors by sacrificing subordinates. Abu Ghraib, like the Iraq war itself, is a quagmire that the military was placed in by Bush.

And, again: Who saw the reports, videos, and photographs from Abu Ghraib? Follow the bytes!

Hey, finally a WaPo story on intelligence that isn't bylined "Walter Pincus"! (Memo to R. Jeffrey Smith: Don't go up in any small planes. And have no communication with your brother, Winston.) Readers, sorry I missed this one; I can only plead that pressure of work kept my blogging light. Now, however, there's time to really dig in.

Summarizing: The Abu Ghraib story has all the features of what we've elsewhere called The Fog Machine (back): An extra-constitutional program that Bush authorized (back), parts of which have been uncovered by Seymour Hersh, that targets perceived enemies of the United States for torture and assassination. So let's read Smith's story through that lens.

[Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, an Army reservist was head] of the interrogation center at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq told an Army investigator in February that he understood some of the information being collected from prisoners [at Abu Ghraib] had been requested by "White House staff," according to an account of his statement obtained by The Washington Post.
(here via The Mighty Atrios)

Ah. So I guess some of the "bad apples" were in the West Wing. Who knew?

The reference by Jordan to a White House link with the military's scandal-plagued intelligence-gathering effort at the prison was not explored further by Taguba, whose primary goal at that time was to assess the scope of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. The White House was unable to provide an immediate explanation.

I bet. And somehow, in all the foo-fraw about G8 and Reagan's funeral, they still haven't found time to respond.

But no reference has previously been made in the publicly available Abu Ghraib investigative documents to a special interest by White House staff.

Translation: Hitherto, subordinates have been blamed. The coverup and the stonewalling has worked. That is, The Fog Machine has operated as it was designed to do; Bush has maintained "plausible deniability."

The precise role and mission of Jordan, who is still stationed in Iraq and through his attorneys has declined requests to speak with the news media, remains one of the least well understood facets of the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal.

Translation: The visible chain of command has been deliberately confused. That is, The Fog Machine has operated to shield superiors from the acts committed by their subordinates.

[Other] military personnel [have described Jordan as] playing a key role at Abu Ghraib in overseeing interrogations; they have described him as being deeply involved in an incident on Nov. 24, 2003, when a detainee was confronted in his cell by snarling military dogs[1], which Taguba deemed a violation of the prisoner's rights.

I liked "deemed": It's a fine example of falsely "balanced" reporting. Still, the Post is to be commended for writing this story.

In a March 9 report on the abuse scandal, Taguba listed Jordan as one of four military intelligence officers he suspected were "directly or indirectly responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib." [But] Col. Thomas M. Pappas, the chief military intelligence officer at the prison, said in his statement to Taguba that Jordan was working on a special project...

"Special," eh? Very special? Sounds a lot like the Special Access Program discovered by Seymour Hersh (back, again).

... for the office of Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast, the top U.S. intelligence official in Iraq. He also described Jordan as "a loner who freelances between military intelligence and military police" officers at the prison. But Jordan, in the statement to Taguba, described himself as more of a functionary than a rogue operator.

Translation: Again, we see the deliberate confusion of the visible chain of command.

[Jordan] said he was aware of the "rules of engagement" approved by commanders for interrogations, which have been a topic of controversy. But the rules changed several times, and he did not clarify which set he relied on.

Translation: The rules of engagement and policies have been deliberately confused. That is, The Fog Machine is once again in operation. In the absence of clear directives, two things are possible: (1) the Stanford Effect (MTV (!!), here) comes into play, where the deepest impulses all humans share to mistreat those seen as "the other" can be managed and harnessed to implement a regime of torture, and (2) nods and winks[2] from those in positions of authority—Rumsfeld Bush—substitute for orders and regulations; "Do what you have to do," becomes the lawless norm.[3]

[Jordan] also said that an "OGA" team -- or Other Government Agency, a euphemism for the CIA -- known as Task Force 121 had caused problems by bringing detainees they had captured to Abu Ghraib and essentially dumping them without conducting any
follow-up.

Well, "follow up" (a euphemism for torture, no doubt) that we know about. Probably the "follow up" was left to civilian "contractors" outside the visible chain of command.

"It's a very cowboy kind of affair," he said of Task Force 121.

"Cowboy," eh? As in "Cowboy from the Great State of Texas"? Thanks for the hint....

One of [Jordan's] civilian attorneys, John Shapiro, described Jordan last night as "a fine soldier who was serving his country and is cooperating in every way with the investigations" into the abuse.

"Investigations," plural. I like that. Let's hope there's a Congressional investigation, too. Perhaps run by McCain? (Who, if he wimps out on this, will show that there's no decency left in the Republican party at all.)

The Fog Machine: Its handwriting

Summing up, we can dimly discern, as through a glass, darkly, the workings of The Fog Machine through its handwriting. Here are the features of its operation:

1. A deliberately confused chain of command

2. Deliberately confused rules of engagement and policies

3. Statements from high authorities that enable and encourage torture, in the absence of clear rules

4 .Subordinates are sacrificed to protect superiors, in the absence of a clear chain of command

The purpose of The Fog Machine is, of course, to protect Bush from accountability by providing him with "plausible deniability" for authorizing ad enjoying the fruits of an extra-constitutional and illegal system for torturing and assassinating percieved enemies[4].

Corrente's marketing department insists that I engage on criticism/self-criticism in that we (kinda) called this story a month ago:

The intelligence produced by The Fog Machine would [flow] from from civilian contractors/military intelligence people out of uniform to.... Where? Nobody will say. [Still true] My guess, FWIW, is that information flows through operatives at the RNC/CPA [Not known] right to the West Wing [Now known to be true] (that is, it's Iran-Contra all over again, just a thousand times worse).[Readers?] In consequence, it's highly unlikely that there are orders for torture flowing down from the West Wing; with the chain of command replaced by the fog machine, specific orders would not be needed. [Jordan says not true, but I'd be very surprised if there's anything on paper]It's highly probable, however, that information--in the form of digital photos, interrogation reports, perhaps voice--flowed up to the West Wing [Now known to be true—"information collected"]and is stored there, even today.[A question Smith does not ask] Over the top? Think: It seems that the abuses, though present since Afghanistan, became much worse during the hunt for Saddam. Can anyone seriously believe that interrogation results, and methods, for the Saddam hunt didn't flow up to the West Wing?

The Fog Machine: Follow the bytes!

Seymour Hersh has shown (back that the Abu Ghraib photos were not taken by the few "bad apples," but as a matter of policy. This gives us one final feature of The Fog Machine

5. Secret records kept on digital media.

Remember the photos Bush keeps in his desk? (back) The photos of (percieved) assassinated terrorist? Where, we might ask, do these photos come from? Thus, the question is, as it was ("Hersh: More units involved, photos part of process "):

Where were the photos stored, what was the chain of custody, and who has them now?

As in Watergate, the mantra was "Follow the money," so for Abu Ghraib the mantra should be "follow the bytes." Restoring Constitutional government in the United States demands on less.

Notes

[1] The use of dogs shows ("Who Let the Dogs Out") that the Abu Ghraib torture could not have been the work of a "bad apples"; there is an elaborate and well-documented process for when dogs may be used, maintaining their kennels, and so on.

[2] Bush's prejudicial statement, in the Plame Affair, that he didn't think the leaker would ever be found, was one such "nod and wink." His consistent use of religious language is another.

[3] In Germany, this style of leadership was known as Furherprinzip. That is, The Leader would set general guidelines, commit little to paper, and give few explicit orders. Subordinates, through a process known as "working toward the Fuhrer", were expected to known what He wanted, and take action on their own. Auschwitz was built on a foundation of nods and winks. Since we, in this country, have hitherto lived in a Constitutional democracy under the rule of law, we have had little opportunity to experience this style of leadership. Bush, however, seems determined to train us in it.

[4] Most of the discussion about the Bush administration's use of torture has focussed on the pragmatic issue of whether it is a useful intelligence tool (it isn't). However, one possibility goes unmentioned: That, for Bush, torture and assassination are simply tools of war, as rape and murdur were recently for the Serbians and the Hutus, as massacre was for the Nazis in World War II. These tactics for terrorizing enemies have a long history, going back to the Mongols, the Assyrians, etc. Of course, this would imply that Bush has already committed us not to a "war on terror" but to a true war of civilizations against Islam as such—as indeed His religious beliefs might impel him to do—but that is a prospect too dreadful to contemplate.

UPDATE Alert reader Brian Boru comments:

The key words from the Terror Q&A and the G8 press conference: "The authorization I issued." This is a document that must be brought out into the light of day (by way of a subpoena from Sen. Warner's committee?).

Unless, of course, the document doesn't really say anything. If the administration really is operating on fuhrerprinzip, it won't.

Blogging from Appalachia. Since I grew up for a good deal of my cranky and disheveled existence in erin's neck of the regional wood I'm more 'en happy to point you here: BlueGrassRoots

BGR is a group blog with an emphasis on national/international issues as well as issues (labor/politics/history...), relevant to Kentucky and neighboring locales.

Friday, June 11 - Politics: Getting Out the Labor Vote in Depressed Battleground States
Hundreds of thousands of jobless Ohioans, West Virginians, and Pennsylvanians may call on Bush to put his mouth where his money is this fall. ~ erin

And where else can you help pass...

...a constitutional amendment officially renaming all Americans "Ronald Reagan."

Eh? So, visit Kentucky, and liberals in "Red States" (who are tougher because they gotta be), and women who can play fiddles and know a lot of Hazel Dickens songs...

Oh listen and you'll hear, theres changes in the air and a rumbling underground - we're marching hand in hand voices joined to take a stand and we'll sing the whole world round. We've come to plant the seeds of human rights and dignity and we won't be turned aside. And with Spring comining in with an Appalachian wind we are destined to arrive. ~ The Reel World String Band / Bios

Ok, thats it for me. I gotta go to the post office.

*

Too much Reagan for me. You know, the endless repetition really does get to you. Like Reagan winning the Cold War—which was in fact the result of a bipartisan strategy, and one put in place by Democrats.

There's a term for the endless repetition of untruths, too... What is it... Can't think... Too... much... Reagan...

And the Rittenhouse review send us a sad story about Philly, and a Philly neighborhood. It's not all cheese steaks and Yuengling down here, you know.

Gee, sounds a lot like this guy was fired because he wasn't "politically correct," doesn't it:

A college disc jockey who put on a radio show celebrating Ronald Reagan's death was fired Friday from his position as the station's business manager.

Scott Hornyak, a 28-year-old undergraduate student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, had been suspended indefinitely from his disc jockey job at KSUA-FM after the Sunday show.

"They're firing me because of what I said, and the public's reaction to what I said," said Hornyak, who goes by the call name "Spider Bui."

H.B. Telling, the station's general manager, said he could not comment on whether Hornyak lost his job because of the broadcast. The university has a policy against discussing personnel issues.

No tape of the show was available. But according to Hornyak, he berated Reagan, who died June 5, for his foreign policy in Latin America, Iraq and Afghanistan, and for his response to the AIDS epidemic.
(via AP)

And it sounds to me like this guy got fired for speaking nothing more than the truth. Of course, in Bush's America, that's the ultimate transgression.

Here's the contact information for KSUA. Feel free to share your views on whether it's OK to tell the truth about Reagan with them; in a nice way, of course:

KSUA Radio/TV
PO Box 750113 • Fairbanks, AK 99775
PH: 907.474.7054 • FX: 907.474-6314
FM: fyksua@uaf.edu • TV: fytv21@uaf.edu

Hey, they've already got a want ad up for a new DJ. They want someone who can "push all the right buttons." Emphasis on right, eh?

Take the poll!

According to a post over at dKos some talented but tastleless winger is playing little games with the algorithms over at the Biggest Search Engine Named After A Very Large Number.

If you go looking for information about the Democratic National Convention via this search engine, somebody has done what's known as a "g**glebomb" which takes you to a very, very fake "official convention" page.

The way Gargle works, it ranks pages on similar topics by how many links from OTHER sites go to that page. Most times this works and the cream rises to the top. However, there are other biological products that float as well, and this fake site is one of them.

Rumor in the comment thread over there is that Guppie has a system to weed out links that appear within so many words of the word "G00gle," which is why all the creative misspellings here.

So accept no substitutions. Go click on the REAL DNC Convention Page. Heck, bookmark the thing and hit it every time you are bored. Spread the word. Defuse the bomb.

UPDATE: Mr. Toad in comments very kindly noted that the dKos link was bad. I *think* it's fixed now but if not, the Gugglebomb post is still near the top so a visit to the dKos main page should do well enough.

Thanks to alert reader MJS:

It just occured to me: We could lobby Pfizer to put Reagan's likeness on a ten dollar pill.

[Rimshot. Laughter. "Thank you—you're a great audience."]

Take Out an Entire Old Growth Forest in a Single Afternoon!

I was just reflecting on the cherished legacy of Ronald Reagan and his vision for America when I came across this actual item in an old copy of Popular Reaganics magazine. Except, back then, it was still called Popular Mechanics magazine.

"Mow down a forest like a field of wheat? Not even the legendary Paul Bunyan could do that. But wait - up in northern Montana a couple of ingenious engineer-contractors have built mowing machines that slash through timber just the way a threshing machine moves through a grain field. Trees 100 and 150 feet tall topple over like straws. Between breakfast and lunch two men and their equiptment can mow down as much as 100 acres of virgin forest." - Popular Mechanics, August 1950


Wow. I can barely locate a pair of clean socks between breakfast and lunch. That just sends fond nostalgic chills up my spine. It also reminded me of one of my favorite old Ronald Reagan "Wise Use" land management documentary films titled:

"The Big Stupid Trees".
Starring Ronald Reagan as Slim Talent the charismatic twinkle eyed timber baron "outsider" and James "Second Coming" Watt as Slash Burns his trusted hatchetman. Together they set out to clearcut northern California's entire Trinity National Forest and sell it to NY Post newpaper publisher Dominique Franco, who, many of you will remember from Ayn Rand's classic paranoid melodrama the "The Showerhead". Things go astray when Slim falls for the beautiful Alice Schadwickski, a Polish Jewess from White Plains, New York, who converts to Christianity and convinces Slim to instead harvest the big wood and construct a forty five thousand acre multi-media Pentecostal mega-church and resort convention center at the top of Big Bar Mountain. Romance and religious hanky-panky among the carbon monoxide spewing ferns and fauna ensues. There is even a thrill filled whiteknuckle bulldozer chase across a rope bridge which delivers several minutes of hair mussing tension. Love, unshakeable moral conviction, boundless optimism, and steely strength of character conquer all in the end when Slim Talent confronts a fanatical deep Quaker pine cone worship cult with a hewing axe and Slash Burns tells Dominique Franco, "they kill good trees to put out liberal newspapers," and "I have converted a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple. And we have dominion!" At which point he hurls himself into a misty gorge rather than allowing himself to be captured by angry Ku Klux Klansmen, betrayed Georgia-Pacific Plywood & Lumber Company executives, and a posse of drunken Florida real estate developers representing the US Chamber of Commerce.

Its a fabtastic adventure thriller for the entire family and one of Ronald Reagan's finest performances. Rent it on DVD today! Or purchase the entire set of Ronald Reagan film memorabilia from the Ronald Reagan Historic Legacy Story Project. Furthermore, in honor of the beloved former Governor, President and world leader, the RRHLSP will donate a portion of each purchase to The Ronald Reagan Legacy National Memorial Theme Park Restoration Project on behalf of efforts to rename northern California's entire national forest region - from Happy Camp to Clear Lake - The Ronald Reagan National Sawdust Wilderness.

*

It's been three days, right? Is Reagan still dead?

Couple o' stories here that are, I think, five and three days old respectively. I doubt in any case that they have "aged out" or that the circumstances they describe do not still obtain.

So you thought maybe the slacking off in Awful News out of Iraq--as opposed to "awful news ABOUT Iraq but coming from Washington"--actually meant what the Chimp in Chief wanted you to think it meant, that "violence is dying down" and "things are getting better there"?

Ha. This turns out not to be the case (a phrase that is a useful alternative to yelling "BULLSHIT!" on such occasions when that would not be tactful). If you have entertained such a thought, take your brain out for a quick washing, because it has been stained from excessive exposure to Reaganecrophilia, however inadvertent.

(via WimpPo) (as in Kipling, "The Elephant's Child" and the "great gray-green greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever trees"):

Good reporting is as urgently needed as ever, with lives and the political futures of perhaps two countries at stake. But it has never seemed more dangerous. Kidnappings and ambushes have driven most foreign civilians out of the country, or into bunkers guarded by U.S. soldiers. For journalists, the familiar rules of engagement have been stripped away. Gone is the assumption that correspondents are more valuable as witnesses than as targets, and that they share only the risks that all civilians face in wartime. To insurgents, foreign journalists are foreigners first, just another element of an occupying force to which we don't belong.

An atmosphere of particular menace has diminished independent reporting about the conflict, especially since the Sunni and Shiite uprisings began in April. Original and courageous work is still coming from the best journalists. But the overall effect has been to separate correspondents from the story they're in Iraq to cover....

Foreign journalists in Baghdad live outside the Green Zone...but an unintended consequence of the Green Zone's creation is to have transformed the rest of Iraq into the Red Zone, presumably hostile.

Correspondents try to keep a low profile. Post reporters and photographers do not conduct interviews with armed escorts, as do some media organizations. Journalists do not wear body armor in most settings so as not to appear to be government contractors or paramilitaries.

But there are areas where firsthand, independent reporting is not possible. This has made us more reliant on official sources, especially on American authorities.

Most profoundly, the threat of violence has distanced us from Iraqis. In a narrow sense, it has left unanswered critical questions about the forces opposing the occupation. Who is the enemy? What does its religious and political identity say about the future of the country and the U.S. presence there?

Reporting Iraqis' views and aspirations seems more critical today than at any point since the invasion. This is a story waiting to be told.

And now from AP, I lost the name of the paper it was in:

YOUSEFIYA, Iraq (AP) -- American soldiers liberated this village from the subjugation of Saddam Hussein, but you wouldn't know it by the way townspeople look at those soldiers — with utter contempt.

Friday, as a column of three Humvees, three Bradley Fighting Vehicles and two M-1 tanks rolled through the Yousefiya market, Iraqis along the streets either turned away, gave the soldiers dark sidelong glances or just sneered at them unabashedly. Nobody waved.

The MPs have grown accustomed to the evil eye they get in Yousefiya. They ignored the townspeople, watching out for roadside bombs and snipers instead.

[On patrol,] one of the soldiers tripped over a fuse and some wire and followed it to a 250-kilogram aerial bomb buried in the roadway just around the corner from the station.

More explosives had been packed around it, and the whole device weighed between 400 and 500 pounds. The ordnance disposal unit dispatched to disarm the bomb did not want to detonate it in place, fearing it would level the whole block

Many soldiers of the 1165th believe planting such a large bomb had to be a veritable public works project, that some Iraqi police at the station, less than 200 yards away, had to know the bomb was there, that half the town had to know as well.

"I told the [Iraqi police the unit was training] that the whole village knew they were working with us, that this was not a secret to anyone, but they wouldn't budge from the station," said Lewis.

The patrol was scrubbed. Whereas fear held this fractious part of Iraq together under Saddam, hatred for the United States holds it together today..

OK, psychoanalysis of a public figure from written sources and the media is just a parlor game. But hey! Inerrant Boy might take us all down with him, so we'd better analyze Him with the tools that we have, however inadequate. And Georgetown psychoanalyst Justin Frank has done just that in a new book:

• Bush's false sense of omnipotence, instilled within him during childhood and emboldened by his deep investment in fundamentalist religion
• The president's history of untreated alcohol abuse, and the questions it raises about denial, impairment, and the enabling streak in our cultures
• The growing anecdotal evidence that Bush may suffer from dyslexia, ADHD, and other thought disorders
• His comfort living outside the law, defying international law in his presidency as boldly as he once defied DUI statutes and military reporting requirements
• His love-hate relationship with his father, and how it triggered a complex and dangerous mix of feelings including yearning, rivalry, anger, and sadism
• Bush's rigid and simplistic thought patterns, paranoia, and megalomania -- and how they have driven him to invent adversaries so that he can destroy them

(via Bush on the Couch)

Not to mention narcissism (back).

Funny how the well-documented story about Bush torturing small animals as a child makes it, shall we say, entirely reasonable that Bush not only condoned but encouraged a policy of torture as an adult, even if with winks, nods, and "plausible deniability."

Eh?

I hear dodgeball is the sport of the moment. Maybe Inerrant Boy could give lessons:

Bush said Thursday he ordered U.S. officials to follow the law while interrogating suspected terrorists, but he sidestepped an opportunity to denounce the use of torture.

Bush's comments came as a 2-year-old State Department document surfaced warning the White House that failing to apply international standards against torture could put U.S. troops at risk.

"What I've authorized is that we stay within U.S. law," Bush told reporters at the close of the G-8 summit in Savannah, Ga.

Asked if torture is ever justified, Bush replied, "Look, I'm going to say it one more time. ... The instructions went out to our people to adhere to law. That ought to comfort you."
(via AP)

"That ought to comfort you?" WTF??!?!

Right. It does sound comforting—until you remember that under the Bush theory of divine right, Bush, ruling by decree, defines what the law is (back). Suddenly I don't feel so comforted.

And since when do American citizens—I love the casual sense of ownership implied by "our people" (i.e., the help)—need "authorization" or "instruction" to obey the law? That says more about the lawlessness of the Bush administration than anything I've heard so far.

Did they really think they were the only people who might be counting?

WASHINGTON — The State Department is scrambling to revise its annual report on global terrorism to acknowledge that it understated the number of deadly attacks in 2003, amid charges that the document is inaccurate and was politically manipulated by the Bush administration.

Politically manipulated? No way. Just because the Bush administration hailed it as objective proof that "we're" winning the war on terror? (Was there ever a less winnable war, as opposed to, say, confronting the issue of international terrorism with an eye to protecting ourselves against it, combating it, and most of all, looking at what might just be causing it?) Of course the State Department knows better than to use a word like "winning."

"Indeed, you will find in these pages clear evidence that we are prevailing in the fight" against global terrorism, Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage said during a celebratory rollout of the report.

Not so fast, even with the "prevailing," Richard. At least one other person was countring.

On Tuesday, Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles) applauded the State Department for deciding to reissue the report, a step he requested in a letter to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell three weeks ago. But Waxman said the Bush administration so far had refused to address his allegation that it manipulated the terrorism data to claim victory in the U.S.-declared war on terrorism.

"This manipulation may serve the Administration's political interests," Waxman wrote in his May 17 letter to Powell, "but it calls into serious doubt the integrity of the report."

Several State Department officials vehemently denied their report was swayed by politics. "That's not the way we do things here," said one senior official.

Another senior official characterized the errors as clerical, and blamed them mostly on the fact responsibility for the report recently shifted from the CIA (news - web sites) to the administration's new Terrorist Threat Integration Center.

No wonder the National Review folks refer to Representative Waxman as "despicable."

Several U.S. officials and terrorism experts familiar with that revision effort said the new report will show that the number of significant terrorist incidents increased last year, perhaps to its highest level in 20 years.

Read more about how and what Waxman noticed here.

If I understand this latest Republican brainstorm correctly, allow me to make the following the suggestion. If the law passes, every liberal advocacy group should immediately reincorporate as a church. NARAL could become Our Lady of the Inviolate Uterus, for example, and MoveOn PAC could become the Church of the Postponed Apocalypse. Tenets would be simple: followers would have to speak in complete sentences and renounce torture and kleptocracy. From then on, every ad and political endorsement would carry the disclaimer from the Rev. Zack Exley or St. Kate Michelman that they are "acting as a private citizen and not on behalf of his religious organization." Voila! Every donation would become tax deductible. No more pesky sec. 527 lawsuits either. Hallelujah!

Introducing the Ronald Wilson Reagan Heroic Legacy Story Project.

Many Americans won't remember the great contributions Ronald Reagan made to our nation. Many were too young to remember. Many were too old. Many were either too old or too young but won't remember in any case because they simply can't remember much of anything in the first place. They couldn't even tell you, to this very day, who it is that straddles the coin operated horsy ride in the current White House. "George W. Bush?" they will ask, "why he's that feller who sells that cheap canned beer, ain't he?" Sigh.

But I remember Ronald Reagan, the great legacy, the heroic derring do, the swashbuckling naval sea battles off the coast of Grenada, adventurous safaris spent pursuing the woolly mammoth herds across the Great Plains of Indiana, balmy tropical mornings devoted to clearing trumpet vine with beloved world leaders such as General Efrain Rios Montt, or sharing a ketchup sandwich and a bowl of chewy colorful jellified candy beans with a needy mujahideen freedom fighter. Oh yes, those were hallelujah days my fellow citizens, days of moral clarity and chivalrous regal splendor. Lacquered bygone days of yesteryear that I'd like to return you to once more.

Therefore I have prepared a retrospective of bold and resolute leadership moments from the life and times of Ronald Wilson Reagan. I myself was raised by devout Christian conservative Republicans and larn'd in Wyoming where I attended a humble one room homeschool located at the bottom of a Christian uranium mine just north of Whiskey Gap and southwest of the Rattlesnake Hills. So I know a lot about stuff that they won't tell you about in the cultural Marxist public schools.

One of the most well known of the little known facts about Ronald Reagan is this: He was one of the American heroes who helped liberate the islands and quaint fishing villages of Southern California's Gulf of Catalina coastal waters. Isles and towns and hamlets liberated from ferocious Sandinista Naval forces and PFAW leftist insurgents commanded by the brutal anti-American way strongman General Norman "Sitcommunist" Lear. If it hadn't been for Ronald Wilson Reagan and his trusted allied war buddy Col. Rhett Ralston III (depicted lower left in the historic PR magazine cover painting), many of the major defense contractors and excellent beach front real estate small mom and pop business investment opportunities now flourishing in freedoms splendor along Southern California's God fearing freedom loving Protestant shores would not be with us today.

Few have heard of Col. Ralston but he was one tough marble and a fearless defender of western Christian values and the honor of chaste young women. In this painting we are captivated by that moment, in the late afternoon hours, just prior to the full scale beachhead landing and liberation of San Clemente, when Col. Rhett Ralston III unzips his pants fly to pee upon one of the many thirty foot long man eating sharks circling the very spot where he and his buddy Commander Ronald Reagan wade in four and a half feet of dangerous man eating shark infested waters off Onofre Beach. Thats how tough he was. He could pee on the Devil underwater.

Commander Reagan is depicted, at right, signaling the pilot of the resupply plane (Ace fighter pilot Bob Dornan, aka: 'Beverly Hills Bob'), as it drops red personal assault pool noodles to the special forces assault commandos waiting to move ashore. Highly absorbent, yet buoyant, and weighing nearly seventy pounds each when fully saturated with sea water, these stealthy and flexible space age polymer enemy personnel battering batons could be easily floated ashore with a man and then used to force open the doors of beachside bungalows harboring liberal funded reefer crazed National Endowment for the Arts supporters or to break up feminazi eco-terror environmentalist networks operating clandestinely up and down the coast from Laguna Beach to Oceanside.

A young homosexual immigrant from old Europe remembers the liberation of Onofe Beach. That young immigrant is today none other than author, journalist, weblog giant and respected conservative homosexual foreigner Andrew Sullivan. Listen in as Andrew recounts for us those historic events on that fateful day in Southern California those many many years ago:

[Onofre Beach | the Gulf of Catalina | many many years ago] It was just before sunset and a group of us gay blokes had assembled at a residence along the beach to listen to loud thumping subversive music and exchange unnatural sexual favors with an aging French costume designer from Sherman Oaks. Then, just before dusk, we heard a low guttural groan from the direction of the ocean. Several of us scampered onto the deck overlooking the sand and what we saw left us frightened and distressed, yet, at the same time, utterly enthralled. For striding straight ahead in our direction, up the beach from the waters edge, were perhaps a half dozen large strapping virile men, dark khaki weekender shirts open to mid abdomen, heaving muscular chests and hairy backs straining against the weight of their soaking garments and gear, each cradling his own huge wet red personal assault pool noodle before him as he advanced toward us in the quickening twilight. It was an ungodly sight to see, let me tell you, and one young man to my left began muttering "oh mercy me, oh mercy me!" and then fainted in a heap on the deck planks. Others began frantically rushing about arranging chaise loungers and lighting bayberry candles and fussing with the Japanese lanterns that swung from the arbors above the fray. It was very confusing and events were unfolding rapidly and the last thing I can recall before the swaggering marauders overran our position was Mr. 'Sherman Oaks' appearing in the doorway wearing nothing but a pair of women's' circa 1960's white go-go boots and a tangerine bolero jacket with little round silver bells sewed to the sleeves. Then, all manner of chaos broke loose.

As I said, it was very confusing and there was a great deal of noise and yelling and general altogether excitement as the invaders clamored up the boardwalks and onto the patio. The thumping subversive music and overpowering odor of cocoa oil, suntan lotion, Mennen skin bracer, and burning bayberry scented wax filled the air with a sickly madness. Screeching feminazi environmentalists were fleeing across the dunes in the distance and sweaty deeply tanned men were running here and there and some were squealing and some screaming like little girls do when a spider crawls up their stocking and others were grunting savagely as the scary handsome men from the ocean poked and prodded them with their huge swollen red assault noodles and the music went thump thump thump and the waves in the sea went crash crash crash.

At some point I was thwacked up side me coinkidink with a fully engorged noodle and rolled over onto a rubber air mattress where I lay exhausted and panting like a swamped tuna. The last thing I recall hearing was the jingling of little bells moving farther and farther off into the din. Then I passed out. When I awoke I had been moved, carried inside, and splayed out upon a sofa. Our captors were interrogating members of the group and the thumping music was gone, replaced by a recording of Gene Autrey singing "Let Me Call You Sweetheart", and the sound of a lone mans voice filled the room. He was charming his listeners with old memories of General Electric Theater days and the wonders of the Walker Bulldog T-41 lightweight tank. As I became more coherent I realized that the interrogation was more like a get together and someone was moving around the room with a tray of finger sandwiches and filling snifters from a bottle of Cognac. 'Sherman Oaks' was nowhere to be seen and I was told some years later, from undisclosed senior sources familiar with the events of that evening, that he had been whisked away in a black sedan, driven to the border, and eventually sold to a Mexican crime family in Tijuana. But I can't verify that.

But thats not important. What really captured my attention that evening was the overwhelming physical and emotional attraction I felt to the charismatic leader who had led the invasion of our humble beach on that evening so long ago. And that man was Ronald Wilson Reagan, the man behind the voice that stood above the rest.

Commander Reagan told us of his romantic lifelong love affair with his wife Nancy and of his fondness for horses and Barbara Stanwyck's performance with Robert Young in "Runaway Daughter". And he explained to us his plan to shift a greater proportion of the property tax burden to lower and middle income Americans so that they too can once again feel as though they are making a valuable contribution to the American dream. He spoke of great shining cities high on hill tops and filled with shimmering durable consumer goods purchased on limitless credit; and rocket ships that fire spacebased laser beams at commie spy machines zooming wildly about in the heavens above; and he told us how he and Nancy and Barry Goldwater had each won gold medals at the summer Olympic games in Innsbruck Austria in 1954, soundly defeating the Soviet gymnastics team once and for all and for evermore. Uh, I don't think that last part was entirely accurate, but who cares, he was such a nice guy, and so optimistic. Does it really matter if any of it really happened exactly like that or not? No, I don't think it does, because, he was soooo optimistic. And he could tell a funny joke and then just fall asleep on a dime. He had complete command of the world around him and everyone in it. Especially me. And he was sooo optimistic. I never did learn if he was the one who thwacked me in the coinkidink with his red pool noodle that night but I like to think he was. Even if I have to pretend.

Isn't history something? Of course, if you were not homeschooled inside of a Ferrolum lead clad steel air filter in East Texas like I was then you probably have little knowledge of the many many true facts which constitute the Reagan Legacy. And that's why I'm here. To help you learn.

NEXT ISSUE: The Contras. So misunderstood, yet sooo optimistic.

End Notes:
Col. Rhett Ralston later went on to be a successful partner in a cat food canning and manufacturing company located near Vail, Colorado. Sadly he was gunned down by a crazy woman from Bradenton, Florida brandishing an assault weapon who claimed she was reduced to eating cat food to survive and ultimately driven mad by the experience. She also claimed to be the illegitimate love child of Mathew Cvetic - but no one believed her. The 'Col. Rhett Ralston III Catamaran Marina' on Catalina Island was so named in his honor.

General Norman Lear and his leftist insurgents were eventually driven from Southern California and forced to retreat to a small island off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts where they remain in hiding to this day.

Gene Autrey went on to record many more cowboy songs and appear in movie pictures with his little darlin' Mary Lee.

On August 3, 1959 - Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev debated each other on the set of a model American kitchen during an exhibition in Moscow.

Ace pilot Bob 'Beverly Hills' Dornan went on to crash three military jets, one helicopter, and a 150HP Simplicity ride on lawn mower and was subsequently driven from political office by angry mobs and sold to a crime family in Fairfax county Virginia.

On March 7, 1974 - Ronald Reagan, responding to the Symbionese Liberation Army's ransom request of free food for the poor, remarked: "Its just too bad we can't have an epidemic of botulism" (whatever that means), which further angered the crazy woman from Bradenton, Florida, and made many people at the Ralston Cat Food Company very nervous.

June 2004 - 'Popular Mechanics' magazine was officially renamed 'Popular Reaganics'.

On August 26, 2004 - Andrew Sullivan, following a desperate unsuccessful search for a French costume designer from Sherman Oaks, was devoured by sharks while peeing in the ocean off the coast of Cabo San Lucas.

To this very day you can still purchase red pool noodles for your children to play with in the swimming pool or backyard. Now made of harmless atomic age Styrofoam-like stuff these red pool noodles are a pleasant reminder of a bygone era as well as remarkable facsimiles of the very same red pool noodle assault weapons Ronald Reagan and Col. Rhett Ralston carried onto that beach in Onofre, California those many many years ago.

*

Florida Today ran an editorial yesterday. They called it "Defending the Ballot" which is a noble title.

I'm not feeling noble. Nobility is what cost us the theft of Florida last time, failing to protest the purge of voter lists ahead of time, failing to defend the recount, backing down in the face of goons and thugs and mob violence. We knew something crooked was going on, but we let our voices be drowned out by cries of "Let the process work."

Well, drowned was what we got all right, and now we're floating around in this world that none of us would have recognized in that November of 2000. And they're setting up to do it again

There's a line, I suppose it's from an old song. James Baldwin used it to express some of his own rage, but I don't imagine he'd mind if I used it too:

And God gave Noah the rainbow sign:
No more water, but the fire next time

I'm posting nearly the whole thing, but I would encourage readers to click through the link anyway, for one reason: at the bottom of the page is a nice, easy "Comment on this story" link. Go there. Comment. Commend them.

Encourage good behavior, as we say. Let them know that far beyond the shores of Cocoa Beach, thousands of people are watching and remembering and cheering them on.

Defending the ballot

Hiding voter information undermines confidence in the democratic system

Florida and the nation must not endure another presidential election disaster.

With five months to go before the Nov. 2 vote, time is running out to restore trust in the ballot and the confidence of the public in the democratic process.

That's why Gannett newspapers in Florida, including FLORIDA TODAY, are joining CNN, other news organizations, the Tallahassee-based First Amendment Foundation and Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Tallahassee, in a suit seeking public access to state voter lists.

Set for a hearing today, the suit asks a Leon County circuit judge to throw out a 2001 law passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature that shuts off public access to lists of voters.

Even more critical, the law refuses public access to a list of those the state says are felons to be removed from the rolls.

Mistakes on the list mean qualified voters would be rejected at the polling place, with no defense against being refused their most basic rights as citizens.
Think it's not a problem?

Before the 2000 election, a private company hired by the state named thousands of people felons, purging them from voter rolls.

Later reviews showed more than 1,000 voters were wrongly purged. George W. Bush won by 537 votes.

In Florida, which has a long record of open government under the Sunshine Laws, keeping voting lists virtually secret is absolutely unacceptable.

Even worse, this wrongheaded law does the opposite of what a democracy should do, which is accommodate -- not frustrate -- every possible oversight of voting procedure...

So far, 47,000 voter names are set to be purged, as gathered by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. And already, a review in Leon County shows problems with 10 percent of the records.

Secretary of State Glenda Hood claims allowing public access to voters lists would be "an invasion of privacy."

Tell that to the candidates who bombard voters with campaign mailings matched to voters' parties, neighborhoods, voting records, use of absentee ballots and other information available through databases.

Hiding lists only undermines voter confidence, and Nelson is right when he says the public must have access, "to check and doublecheck" that the lists are not wrongly slamming the door on qualified voters.

One more day of Reagan, right? It is just one more day? Tell me it's one more day...

Say, I wonder if we could bring some of those embalming experts over from the former Soviet Union, so they could give Reagan the same kind of wax job they gave Lenin...

Kind of a "Reagan under glass" concept, you know? The glass being necessary to protect even the most well-preserved of corpses from the corrosive effects of winger drool.

Or maybe load the casket onto a humongous refrigerated catafalque and just leave it there in the Rotunda as a permanent exhibit...

Or ship the casket to Inerrant Boy's ranch in Hellmouth, TX, and have the TV guys use it for a backdrop instead of that stupid tractor or bale of hay or whatever they're using this week...

Or maybe just drag the casket on over to the WhiteWash House family quarters and dump it in the middle of the Bush double bed—give Him a new kind of lump to crawl over (or not) on His way to the goat He keeps in the closet...

Endless possibilities, eh?

And no, we're not talking about Elvis.

We've been writing (back) that American is in a death spiral of Constitutional Government, started by Nixon, intensified by Reagan, and culminating with Bush. Here's that bad seed, ol' Tricky Dick, stating the case for an American monarchy on David Frost:

[FROST] So what in a sense you're saying is that there are certain situations . . . where the President can decide that it's in the best interests of the nation or something, and do something illegal.
[NIXON] Well, when the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.
[FROST] By definition.
[NIXON] Exactly.
(quoted the fine blog Balkinization)

Exactly.

Exactly like Bush's so-called "inherent authority to set aside the law" (back).

L'etat, c'est moi!

Here.

NOTE Then again.....

More proof that we're winning.

Saboteurs blew up a key northern oil pipeline Wednesday, forcing a 10 percent cut on the national power grid as demand for electricity rises with the advent of Iraq's broiling summer heat.

The U.S.-run coalition had made its ability to guarantee adequate electricity supplies a benchmark of success in restoring normalcy to Iraq. However, sabotage and frayed infrastructure have impeded efforts to eliminate power outages, especially in the capital.

More than a year after the occupation began, power cuts are common nationwide, in some places topping 16 hours a day. Demand is rising with the advent of summer, with temperatures already topping 100 degrees.
(via AP)

And I thought Philly was bad...

The Pentagon “Working Group Report on Detainee Interrogations in the Global War on Terrorism: Assessment of Legal, Historical, Policy and Operational Considerations”, from the Center for Constitutional Rights.

While it's always gratifying to see the Washington Post finally get a clue, it's less so when it replaces one set of Official Lies with another in the process:

For decades the U.S. government has waged diplomatic campaigns against such outlaw governments -- from the military juntas in Argentina and Chile to the current autocracies in Islamic countries such as Algeria and Uzbekistan -- that claim torture is justified when used to combat terrorism.
(via Eschaton)

One needn't review the sordid history of Nixon Administration's complicity in Pinochet's overthrow of democracy in Chile (9/11/1973, appropriately enough), the Carter Administration's reliance on the Argentinian junta to provide asylum to Somoza and the Nicaraguan National Guard after the Sandinista triumph, or the Reagan Administration's cynical distinction between good "authoritarian" regimes, whose human rights abuses were excusable, and bad "totalitarian" ones.

Consider instead a more proximate nexus between today's national disgrace and yesterday's conveniently forgotten crimes. Writing last month in Online Journal, Chilean activist Tito Tricot notes that the U.S. was using many of the same people in Abu Ghraib that tortured his people under Pinochet:

Allow me ... to express my scepticism regarding Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt`s statement saying he was "horrified" at the abuse committed by his troops on Iraqi prisoners of war. Because the use of torture is nothing new for US troops, in fact, back in 1996 it was discovered that the School of the Americas, that had then been moved to Fort Benning, Georgia, included torture manuals in their academic syllabus. These manuals recommended the utilization of intimidation, executions, beatings and kidnappings, among other torture techniques, to obtain information from the enemy.

Therefore, what happened at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad cannot come as a surprise....

There is another frightening connection between Chile and Iraq, for the United States' partial privatisation of the war has reached our continent too. The US Blackwater Security firm has recruited at least 135 Chilean mercenaries to travel to Iraq to perform security duties. Needless to say they hired former members of the dictatorship's repressive apparatus and Special Forces. They were trained at a company installation in Moyock, North Carolina, but they also underwent training on Chilean soil. Indeed, at a secret location in El Arrayan, eastern Santiago, they organised their own paramilitary training camp. This, of course, is prohibited under Chilean law, but for some unknown and strange reason, Chilean authorities seemed to have turned a blind eye to the activities of "Red Tactica" Consulting Group, the local subsidiary of Blackwater. Thus, the first hundred of an expected total of 800 Chilean mercenaries left for Iraq.

Many would like to think that the unfolding disaster that is the Bush Administration is something sui generis in our country's history, but it's not. The difference is quantitative, not qualitative. Our national culture has been dysfunctional for decades, at nearly every level. And as any student of dysfunctional relationships knows, an essential component is self-deceit. The groundwork for the current Administration's usurpation was laid by years of complacent, self-regarding crap like this from the media, punctuated only by brief spasms of fake self-scrutiny when the official lies can no longer be sustained.

Daddy doesn't get like this because he's had a bad day, or because Mommy did something wrong. Daddy is like this because he's sick, and has been for a long, long time. Moreover, he acts like this because we let him. The rest of the family needs to confront this truth, if it's to put a stop once and for all to its long, sad, downward slide.

NOBODY expects the Texas Inquistion!

Our chief weapon is surprise...surprise and fear...fear and surprise.... Our two weapons are fear and surprise...and ruthless efficiency.... Our three weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency...and an almost fanatical devotion to [Dear Leader].... Our four...no... Amongst our weapons.... Amongst our weaponry...are such elements as fear, surprise.... I'll come in again.
(via Here)

Except it isn't really funny, is it?

Isn't it time to admit that the religious fanaticism of the Republican base, and the Bush administration's willingness to use torture against non-Christians, are one and the same thing?

That is, JeeboFascism? FTF...

Though it would be interesting to see if this was applied to any churches that gave Democrats money:

Republicans in the House of Representatives have quietly introduced a measure to make it easier for churches to support political candidates, just days after the Bush campaign came under fire from liberal groups for inviting church members to distribute campaign information at their houses of worship.

As usual, when the Republicans are caught, they just intensify their wrong-doing.

The provision, called Safe Harbor for Churches...

Love the Orwellian language!

would allow religious organizations a limited number of violations of the existing rules against political endorsements without jeopardizing their tax-exempt status. The bill, now proceeding on a fast track, is scheduled to move from committee to presentation on the House floor next week. I

Just in time lawmaking! And here comes the best part!

It would greatly reduce the tax penalties for either one or two deliberate political endorsements in a calendar year and would also allow a church to make as many as three "unintentional" political endorsements in a calendar year without penalty. It does not define "unintentional.''
(via NY Times)

Wow! What a novel theory of law enforcement!

STATE TO CHURCH: You broke the law by giving the Republicans money!

CHURCH TO STATE: But I didn't mean to! It was unintentional!

STATE TO CHURCH: Oh, OK. [strike 1]

STATE TO CHURCH: You broke the law by giving the Republicans money!

CHURCH TO STATE: But I didn't mean to! It was unintentional!

STATE TO CHURCH: Oh, OK. [strike 2]

STATE TO CHURCH: You broke the law by giving the Republicans money!

CHURCH TO STATE: But I didn't mean to! It was unintentional!

STATE TO CHURCH: Oh, OK. [strike 3]

Can you imagine any greater incentive for nudge-nudge-wink-wink lawbreaking than what these supposedly conservative Republicans have built into this bill?

After lying and looting, lawbreaking is what Republicans do best!

Since Bush is a Godly man, who are we, mere citizens, to question His ways? Get a load of this transcript from Knight Ridder:

Attorney General John Ashcroft flatly refused requests from Congressional Democrats on Tuesday to turn over memos that reportedly justified the use of torture in some instances against terrorists.

"This administration rejects torture," Ashcroft told lawmakers.

Then there should be no problem turning over the memos, right? Since the paper trail would, naturally, support Ashcroft's assertion.

He said Tuesday that President Bush never violated international treaties or U.S. law governing the treatment of prisoners but refused to provide the memos written to the CIA and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

"No, I will not, Ashcroft responded when Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., asked him to provide the documents. Ashcroft explained that the Justice Department's legal guidance to the executive branch and the president must remain confidential.

Then Ashcroft should assert executive privilege—but, see below, he won't do that either.

He also said that Bush has not given blanket immunity to any U.S. agent interrogating al-Qaida captives.

Great! Then release the memos, since, naturally, the paper trail would support this assertion

"Let me completely reject the notion that anything this president has done or the Justice Department has done has directly resulted in the kinds of atrocities which were cited," [Ashcroft]said.

Naturally the memos, were Ashcroft to release them, would support this assertion. So it's curious that Ashcroft won't release them. And the memo WhiteWash Counsel Gonsalez wrote calling the Geneva Convention "quaint"—when it is an international treaty, ratified by the Senate, with the force of law—would have had no effect whatever. Uh huh.

"You are not allowed under the Constitution to not answer our questions," said Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del. "You all better come up with a good rationale because otherwise it's contempt of Congress."

Well, do it then!

Asked by Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch. R-Utah, whether the memos were classified, Ashcroft conferred for a long moment with an aide sitting behind him.

"Some of these memos may be classified in some ways for some purposes," he began.

Ashcroft doesn't answer the question.

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., interrupted him.

"Mr. Attorney General, with all due respect that is a complete evasion," Durbin said. Durbin said the president either had to invoke executive privilege or Ashcroft had to cite a statutory provision allowing him to withhold the memos.

And Ashcroft still doesn't answer the question.

Ashcroft steadfastly refused to do either Tuesday.

"I am refusing to disclose these memos because I believe it is essential to the operation of the executive branch that the president have the opportunity to get information from his attorney general that is confidential," he said.

And still Ashcroft doesn't answer the question, since if he "believes" that is true, that would be the claim of executive privilege he refuses to make.

Republicans on the committee largely ignored the torture issue.

Since all good Christians are for torture?

Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee suggest that the Bush administration is secretly reinterpreting U.S. law and the Geneva Convention.

No! They would never do that!

A tight-lipped Ashcroft ...

Just the lips?

.... refused to discuss the memo or even confirm its existence. He said to reveal information about the U.S. interrogation techniques could help members of al-Qaida and other terrorist groups.

Well, uh, the terrorists can't read the newspapers? Or talk to innocents, later released, who have been tortured? WTF?

Biden persisted.

"If such a memo existed, do you believe that is good law? Do you think that torture might be justified?" he asked.

"I condemn torture," Ashcroft responded. "I don't think it's productive, let alone justified."
(via Kansas City Star)

And yet again, Ashcroft still doesn't answer the question "is it good law?" Isn't an Attorney General supposed to be able to render that sort of judgement? Or have we gotten to the point where the law itself it secret, a mark of all tyrannies?

The executive branch is careening out of all Constitutional control. Does anyone on the Hill recognize this? Is anyone going to call them on it?

After lying and looting, lawbreaking is what Republicans do best!

I hate to steal entire posts, especially from another blog, but this is one of those kinds of things you just can't not.
(via Juan Cole)

Professor Cole says: "A friend in Baghdad sent me this. It is to laugh, it is to weep."

Why Did the Chicken cross the Road?

Coalition Provisional Authority:

The fact that the Iraqi chicken crossed the road affirmatively demonstrates that decision-making authority has been transferred to the chicken well in advance of the scheduled June 30th transition of power. From now on the chicken is responsible for its own decisions.

Halliburton:

We were asked to help the chicken cross the road. Given the inherent risk of road crossing and the rarity of chickens, this operation will only cost the US government $326,004.

Muqtada al-Sadr:

The chicken was a tool of the evil Coalition and will be killed.

US Army Military Police:

We were directed to prepare the chicken to cross the road. As part of these preparations, individual soldiers ran over the chicken repeatedly and then plucked the chicken. We deeply regret the occurrence of any chicken rights violations.

Peshmerga [the Kurdish militia]:

The chicken crossed the road, and will continue to cross the road, to show its independence and to transport the weapons it needs to defend itself. However, in future, to avoid problems, the chicken will be called a duck, and will wear a plastic bill.

1st Cav:

The chicken was not authorized to cross the road without displaying two forms of picture identification. Thus, the chicken was appropriately
detained and searched in accordance with current SOP's. We apologize for any embarrassment to the chicken. As a result of this unfortunate incident, the command has instituted a gender sensitivity training program and all future chicken searches will be conducted by female soldiers.

Al Jazeera:

The chicken was forced to cross the road multiple times at gunpoint by a large group of occupation soldiers, according to eye-witnesses. The chicken was then fired upon intentionally, in yet another example of the abuse of innocent Iraqi chickens.

Blackwater:

We cannot confirm any involvement in the chicken-road-crossing incident.

Translators:

Chicken he cross street because bad she tangle regulation. Future chicken table against my request.

U.S. Marine Corps:

The chicken is dead

UPDATE: The Teeming Masses (so far represented only by Ken Ashford and Pansypoo, but we note it is early yet) have come up with some further expressions of revolutionary solidarity with the beleaguered chickens of New Iraq (tm):

Don Rumsfeld

There are known chickens and unknown chickens and known roads and unknown roads . . .

Robert Novak:

The chicken is an undercover CIA operative.

Chalabi:

Pssst, Ayatollah! I have it on very high authority that the chicken crossed the road. [*Wink*]

[Chickenhawk in Chief George] Bush:

The chickren, uh, chicken . . . uh . . it . . it crossed the road. [*smiles like a toddler in a Pampers Pull-ups commercial*] Because the road is evil, you know?

Instapundit:

. . . and yet the liberal media hasn't mentioned a word about the chicken crossing the road.

NewsMax:

Recently discovered documents, revealed to us here at Newsmax, confirm that, indeed, at least twelve chickens have crossed the road.

Crawl on Fox News:

Thousands Mourn Reagan . . . Reagan Beloved by Millions . . . Reagan Responsible For Fall of Soviet Union . . . Chicken Crosses Road . . . Nancy Said To Be "Doing Fine" . . . Reagan Known as "The Great Communicator" and "The Gipper" . . . Thousands Mourn Reagan . . .

[Consiglieri General John] Asscroft:

The chicken was a bad chicken. It was involved in pornography, so therefore I found it neccessary to annoint said chicken in Crisco [tm] and then it was executed by frying and then it was a GOOD chicken.

Yes, the boing-eyed wingers are going to try to put Reagan's portrait on the $10 bill, replacing Alexander Hamilton:

"Hamilton was a nice guy and everything, but he wasn't president," says Grover Norquist, who heads the [Reagan] legacy project. But Hamilton was also a Revolutionary War hero, George Washington's chief of staff, an author of the Federalist Papers and a Treasury secretary who created many of the financial and economic systems that survive today.
(via USA Today)

Yes, it's completely in character for the wingers busily tearing up our Constitution in favor of a Presidential rule by decree (back would try to stuff an author of The Federalist Papers down the memory hole. Let's look at Hamilton's chapter, "The Real Power of the Executive," to see how far down the road to what Hamilton called tyranny we've come under the Nixon-Reagan-Bush death spiral of the Constitution:

The President of the United States would be an officer elected by the people for four years; the king of Great Britain is a perpetual and hereditary prince. The one would be amenable to personal punishment and disgrace; the person of the other is sacred and inviolable. The one would have a qualified negative upon the acts of the legislative body; the other has an absolute negative [if the President has the "inherent power" (back to set aside the law, that's an "absolute negative" and Bush is indeed a monarch]. The one would have a right to command the military and naval forces of the nation; the other, in addition to this right, possesses that of declaring war, and of raising and regulating fleets and armies by his own authority [In practice, whether through lies or a fait accompli, Bush has this power of a monarch as well]. The one would have a concurrent power with a branch of the legislature in the formation of treaties; the other is the sole possessor of the power of making treaties. [Bush, by abrogating the Geneva Convention, rules as a monarch here as well. Status of Forces agreements, made by the executive, could also be considered as important as treaties.] The one would have a like concurrent authority in appointing to offices; the other is the sole author of all appointments. [In National Security, then, Bush rules as a monarch.] The one can confer no privileges whatever; the other can make denizens of aliens, noblemen of commoners; can erect corporations with all the rights incident to corporate bodies. [Bush, by declaring that he can take citizenship away from US citizens, rules here as a monarch as well.] The one can prescribe no rules concerning the commerce or currency of the nation; the other is in several respects the arbiter of commerce, and in this capacity can establish markets and fairs, can regulate weights and measures, can lay embargoes for a limited time, can coin money, can authorize or prohibit the circulation of foreign coin. The one has no particle of spiritual jurisdiction; the other is the supreme head and governor of the national church [As Bush, who often tells us he is a Godly man, would like to do.]!
(via The Federalist Papers)

Yes, it's no wonder the wingers and the Reagan hagiographers would like you to forget Hamilton. And reading Hamilton's words remind me of the ripe irony that the wingers organized the coup against Clinton in part using the "elves" of the (so-called) Federalist Society.

One obvious remedy to this winger hoo-ha would be to boycott the Reagan $10 bill. One easy way to stand up to all this winger nonsense.

Ronald Reagan rides the great woolly mammoth off into the sunset and America mourns. Yes fair subjects of the monarchy, it's mourning in America again.

Mourning for the man who made the heroic leadership personality cult, once more, a salable suckers sinkhole of maudlin sentimentalist claptrap, gaudy romanticized westward-ho the wagons bromide, and the simple minded pretext that what you don't know won't hurt ya.

Catchalls of a more innocent bygone era where a right thinking lad could get by on a half gallon of A&P ketchup and a smooch from a pretty girl on the run from the red actor menace.

Ronnie W. Reagan, White Knight of the Golden Poppy State. Our national prom king. A good natured merry-andrew who could deliver a cheesy stand-up yuck at the drop of a social services program. -- I'm so old Thomas Jefferson kept a photo of me on his mantel piece! - Big deficit, I think the deficit is big enough to look out for itself! -- (Bwahahaha...applause applause... oh god stop, yer killin' me!), to enraptured throngs of fluttering Beltway press corp porchlight moths, bewitched voodoo economics worshiping Wackford Squeerians, Jesus shoutin' Elmer Gantry's, military industrial complex pickpockets, Wall Street junk bond thieves, banana republic bagmen, flat-taxer legerdemains, card carrying culture war canardians, Hollywood cowboy boot-polishers, boing-eyed Birchers sniffing a commie crouched behind each and every schoolhouse door, and any other number of besotted blue nosers, Babbitts, and backwash bigots formerly lost to the four winds of progressive civil rights change like so many autumn leaves set adrift in a November squall.

Yup Ronnie, you was a reg'lar shelter in the storm ya was. A cheery good natured quipster with a quick step for the camera, a hardy handshake, and a way out there in the blue glint in the eye. A drug store truck divin' man. A real backlot he-row. Mayor of the Shining Zenith City on the hill.

So goodbye Mr. former President. And if ya don't mind I'd like to sing you out with a couple of stanzas from an old Jean Ritchie song. So here goes. Ahem:

In the coming of springtime we planted our corn. In the ending of springtime we buried our son. In the summer come a nice man saying everything's fine, my employer just requires a way to his mine. Then they tore down my mountain and covered my corn. Now the grave on the hillside 's a mile deeper down and the man stands a talking with his hat in his hand, while the poison black waters rise over my land.

Well I ain't got no money, not much of a home. I own my own land, but my land's not my own. But, if I had ten million, somewheres thereabout, well, I'd buy Perry county and throw them all out - and just sit down on the banks with my bait and my can, and watch the clear waters run down through my land.

Well, wouldn't that be just like the old promised land? Black waters, black waters - no more in my land.

OK, thats it. You da man Ronnie. The man who stood a talkin' with his hat in his hand - and a twinkle in his eye. Off ya go now. Bye! Thanks for the memories. Don't forget to say howdy to Ferdinand Marcos and the Daughters of the American Revolution for me.

*

Or at least one town in it.

(via abcnews.com)

KENNEDALE, Texas June 4, 2004 — Patrons of the XXX Super Store and the Fantasy Foxx strip club have been getting a souvenir in the mail recently: an I-know-where-you've-been postcard emblazoned with a photo of the customer's car parked outside one of the adult businesses.

The card reads: Observed you in the neighborhood. Didn't know if you were aware there is a church in the area."

Oakcrest Family Church pastor Jim Norwood and his followers have been snapping the pictures and mailing out the cards, a campaign that helped Norwood get elected mayor of this Fort Worth suburb last month with 66 percent of the vote.

Norwood said porn and drugs were part of his "wild days" in the 1960s and '70s but that his lifestyle hurt his relationship with his children, so he became a Christian.

He and a few church members, digital camera in hand, take turns staking out the businesses about once a week. Then they go online to find the owner's name and address from license plate records, which are public in Texas.

Mark Wright, who served as mayor for six years, does not dispute he lost the election, in part, to Norwood's crusade.

FTF and their crusades. Is there any possible way in which this "campaign" would not constitute stalking and harassment at the very least, misuse of the mails (a Federal rap), blackmail, and terroristic threats?

But this is Texas. And he's a "Christian" and a "pastor" besides. And since he "found Jeeeezus" his two decades of indulging in drugs and porn himself is miraculously forgiven. Instead of throwing him in jail as a public nuisance, and possibly arranging a psych consult, they elect him to civic office. Remind you of anybody?

Only four more days to go of Reagan week, and already I'm tired of it. I never have seen the attraction of circle jerks.

Of course, Bush makes me long for the days of Reagan, or even, God knows, for the days of Nixon. There were giants in those days....

Bush:

[T]he memo [back] advised that Mr. Bush issue a "presidential directive or other writing" that could serve as evidence, since authority to set aside the laws is "inherent in the president."
(via Wall Street Journal)

The Constitution, Article II, section 3:

[H]e shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.
(via Tom DéLay)

Case closed.

The justification for torture is bad enough. But, as usual with Bush, it's far worse than you could possibly have imagined. Presidential rule by decree? WTF?!? Knowing what we know now about winger projection, we could have predicted that Republican prating about the "rule of law" during the coup against Clinton portended the abolition of the rule of law; now we have the evidence. And as we wrote earlier (back), Nixon's Plumbers, Reagan's Iran-Contra, and now this from Bush are points on a death spiral for Constitutional government in the United States, driven by Republican power seeking. "Lesser breeds without the law," indeed.

NOTE See Bradford DeLong quoting Phil Carter.

A secret Pentagon report calls for Presidential rule by decree:

To protect subordinates should they be charged with torture, the memo advised that Mr. Bush issue a "presidential directive or other writing" that could serve as evidence, since authority to set aside the laws is "inherent in the president."
(Wall Street Journal via Talking Points Memo)

For those of you who don't know what the Enabling Act is, here's a link. I love the Orwellian language of the title of the Enabling Act: Gesetz zur Behebung der Not von Volk und Reich (Law in order to remedy the misery of the people and the Reich). Seems familiar, somehow...

Am I worrying too much? Oh? Tell me why.

UPDATE Here is the complete WSJ story, from behind the green door.

UPDATE Oddly (or not) AP's coverage omits the "inherent" authority material.

UPDATE. Funny thing, the Times omits the "inherent" authority material as well. I wonder why?

UPDATE Billmon!

Froomkin:

There is no doubt that the White House will be HQ for Reagan week. Bush not only woke and dressed to make a statement on Saturday...
(via WaPo)

Amazing but true, eh? Greater love hath no man...

No, that's not a sentence in the imperative—just an excuse to show that Scumbuster had us covered on this one way back in 2003.

...As Glen pithily put it in comments, but I have to note that my prediction was borne out.

Now, for my next prediction... I see.... John Kerry compared to Walter Mondale. (Interestingly, Kerry's face still appears more often on GWB's main page than Dear Leader's.)

Anyone else feeling psychic?

You are entering the 'Twilight Zone'"

This one I can't help following up on because of the timing. What with the gushing spring tide of hero worship, fawning personality cult inspired bathos, and wafting billows of flowery historically challenged gah-gah in general (de mortuis nil nisi bonum), issuing forth from the spellbound company store media Pollyanas' as it applies to the corporeal exit stage Right of our sanctified former national hood ornament Ronald Wilson Reagan. Caveat emptor.

Xan, writing below ~ see: Cracked Pottery, Sunday, June 06, 2004 ~ points to a Daily Kos item regarding one Vernon Robinson who, it would appear, perhaps, fluttered from the same incubated nest which managed to hatch such exotic whippoorwills as "born-again Confederate" H.K. Edgerton.

In any case, that's beside the point. What really interested me was rebel Vern's "liberal" use of Rod Serling's distinctive "voice" to advance his own excitable boing-eyed lost cause. And, as Xan points out:

[simulated on account of Mr. Serling has been dead for some time now, and would no more have done an ad on behalf of this bozo than the man in the moon]

Which is certainly dead on accurate. Vernon's ad rips off Serling's "voice" to advance such xenophobic fright night excerpts as this beauty below:

[NOT] ROD SERLING: "They filled our criminal court rooms and invaded our schools. They sponge off the American taxpayer by clogging our welfare lines and our hospital emergency rooms. They've even taken over the DMV. These aliens commit heinous crimes against us like Maximiliano Esparza who raped a nun and strangled her with her own rosary."

They, they, they, "these aliens". You know how it goes. I don't suppose that Vernon Robinson is aware that Serling was Jewish, and grew up in an era when antisemitism and the lynching of off-color "they" types among many "Confederate Southern Americans", including many of the pork barbeque gobbling morons inhabiting the Dogwood State, was considered fine family values sport. No seh, I don't suppose he does. Because, I suspect Vern is also himself a pork barbeque gobbling moron. Not that I have anything against pork barbeque, or gobbling, or the Dogwood State, or even morons for that matter, but when ya get em all together at one picnic and begin waving the flag of "Confederate Southern Americans" around, well, you've got yourself another gobbling moronic pork stuffed monster altogether. The kind of bigoted low-bred moronic monster state Rod Serling loathed, and spent his career impaling on the barbeque spit of the public imagination.

Vernon Robinson's scurry for moronic monsterdom in North Carolina's 5th district, and his bastardization of Serling's legacy, is just one more small example of the kind of dismembered fraudulent chop shop historical reality that attempts to confuse and strangle any honest observation or discussion of cultural and socio-economic progress on today's mainstreet American political stage. And the simple minded corporate brewed moonshine being currently pimped to the American public by the corporatist cheap labor conservative plantation-state romancers in TVNews-o-mercial-land, especially as it applies recently to Ronald Reagan's cheerily defrosted pied piper personality cult legacy program, is just one more pathetic sad and absurd example of the kind of escape from critical journalism and honest analysis that threatens to deliver us all back to the days of George Creel's cooked-book propaganda Committee. And or worse. (Hell, what am I saying - we may already be there.) Oy.

Ironically, Rod Serling was once Ronald Reagan's next door neighbor. I'll bet Boss Vern "Rebel Yell" Robinson didn't know that.

Rod and Carol Serling were neighbors to Ron and Nancy Reagan way back when Ron and Nancy were feathering their all electric nest in Cally-forn-i-ay's Pacific Palisades. Listen:

Serling, a World War II paratrooper, had long since been persuaded of the futility of the war in Vietnam when I talked to him that day in January.

[...]

Serling, at the time, was a member of Dissenting Democrats of California, a group that supported Sen. Eugene McCarthy's bid for the party's presidential nomination.

[...]

Serling was living in Pacific Palisades, California at the time. His next-door neighbors were a Hollywood couple, Ron and Nancy Reagan. The Serlings and Reagans shared a properly line and not much else.

"He waves," Serling told me five years later during another visit.... Not the kind of wave, Serling hastened to add, that meant, "Gee it's great to see you."

The woman who would, less than a decade later, run the White House with an iron hand and the help of an astrologer, was even less tolerant of Serling’s liberal views.

"Nancy Reagan would have blown up the battleship Maine if she'd been around," he said.

In any event, the Serlings removed to Interlaken on Cayuga Lake in 1973. Two years later, Rod, a chronic cigarette smoker, died during open heart surgery in Rochester. He was 50. [Source: Congress remains in the Twilight Zone, by David Rossie. (July 31, 2000)]

Golly, I wonder if Vernon Robinson's 'Lost Cause' cousin fucker Congressional campaign will reproduce that slice of historical heritage for the benefit of their "born again Confederate" twilight zone denizens?

Heh! I don't think you'll need an astrologer to figure out the answer.

*

Bartcop (especially on long-forgotten scandals like the Iranian hostage situation)

Atrios (especially on polls and popularity; Clinton, of course, had better ratings than Reagan).

On the first day of Reagan, my true love gave to me....

Anyhow, I picked up the USA Today outside my hotel room door, and that's what they tell me they're giving him.

Eesh.

I wish they'd stop calling Reagan "beloved." Or at least they could qualify it: "Beloved by many, grudgingly tolerated by some...."

And it looks to me like that "optimistic" meme is really taking off—it's seen as Reagan's primary virtue. I hope the RNC wasn't smart enough to try to position Inerrant Boy as optimistic, as opposed to those pessimistic Democrats, in anticipation of Reagan's death—that would be scary smart. Anyhow, the optimistic meme might be one way the ghouls at the RNC could hijack Reagan's body on its way to the grave, to use for Campaign 2004.

Really, the wingers are into magical thinking, aren't they?

Saying the magic words, makes it so. "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall." And then—when Reagan is no longer in office—the wall comes down, and therefore Reagan caused the wall to fall. Not a generation of bipartisan foreign strategy, implemented over many administrations, of course. Oh no.

Same deal with the neo-cons: If they say the Iraqis will greet us with flowers, that will cause it to happen. Magical thinking. And if the spell doesn't work the first time, they pronounce the magic words again, but louder. That works just fine in the ideological world of winger Beltway thinktanks, but it doesn't work so well in the real world, does it?

I'm with Clinton: Governance should be evidence-based. Not based on supernatural, magical powers.

Nice to see Dean in full voice again:

In the face of well-documented voting irregularities throughout [Florida], the U.S. Supreme Court's decision [in Bush v. Gore] created enormous cynicism about whether the votes of every American would actually be counted. Although we cannot change what happened in Florida, we have a responsibility to our democracy to prevent a similar situation from happening again.

This November, as many as 28% of Americans - 50 million people - will cast ballots using machines that could produce such unreliable and unverifiable results.

Without any accountability or transparency, even if these machines work, we cannot check whether they are in fact working reliably. One way or another, every voter should be able to check that an accurate paper record has been made of their vote before it is recorded.

There is nothing partisan about the survival of our democracy or its legitimacy.
(via the Dodge City (!) Globe from Alice Marshall)

Of course, some might quarrel with that word "survival." But Dean is absolutely right to indentify the crisis of legitimacy that electronic voting is bringing to the fore.

Let us remember that Bush was put in the position where the 537 votes made the difference because thousands of likely Democratic voters had already been illegally purged from the voting roles.

Viewed in that light, the crisis of legitimacy of the Bush regime is not a future possibility, but a present reality.

Well, too late for that. But Alice Marshall has a refreshing antidote here.

And guess what! It's the ol' bait and switch! Krugman:

Before Greenspan became Fed chairman, he headed a commission that recommended changes in Social Security to secure its future. The most important recommendation, adopted by Congress, was for an increase in the payroll tax -- a regressive tax that falls much more heavily on lower- and middle-income families than it does on the well-off. The ostensible purpose was to generate a surplus within the Social Security system, building up a trust fund to pay benefits once the baby boomers retire.

That was the bait; now Greenspan has pulled the switch. The sequence looks like this: he pushed through an increase in taxes on working Americans, generating a Social Security surplus. Then he used the overall surplus, mainly coming from Social Security, to argue for tax cuts that deliver very little relief to most people but are worth a lot to those making more than $300,000 a year. And now that those tax cuts have contributed to a soaring deficit, he wants to maintain the tax cuts while cutting Social Security benefits. [Greenspan] never said, ''Let's raise taxes and cut benefits for working families so that we can give big tax cuts to the rich!'' But that's the end result of his advice.
(via NY Times)

After lying, looting is what Republicans do best!

You know, if there was anybody running as a Democrat anywhere in America, who was as far to the left as these guys are to the Right, we'd never hear the end of it.

First, we present Mr. Robinson. He is, we are told, black, but he has come up with a creative solution to our racial problems: blame everything on those BROWN guys:

(via dKos)

Intro from dKos person: "Vernon Robinson is running for Congress in North Carolina's 5th district. Whoever wins the GOP primary wins the race, as it's a heavy (R) district." What follows is from a transcript of Mr. Robinson's radio ad:

JOVIAL VOICE: "Vernon Robinson, conservative."

ROD SERLING VOICE [simulated on account of Mr. Serling has been dead for some time now, and would no more have done an ad on behalf of this bozo than the man in the moon]: "The aliens are here, but they didn't come in a spaceship. They came across our unguarded Mexican border by the millions."

CREEPY: "Illegally."

[NOT] ROD SERLING: "They filled our criminal court rooms and invaded our schools. They sponge off the American taxpayer by clogging our welfare lines and our hospital emergency rooms. They've even taken over the DMV. These aliens commit heinous crimes against us like Maximiliano Esparza who raped a nun and strangled her with her own rosary."

Mr. Robinson has some more complaints about these evil brown guys; apparently besides the nun-raping they ruin North Carolinian's lives by screwing up their orders at McDonalds. And they speak languages other than English, the fiends!

Our second example of wingnuttery comes from The State newspaper of Columbia, South Carolina:

The most unusual candidate for S.C. Senate this year may be Ron Wilson, the national commander of the 30,000-plus-member Sons of Confederate Veterans.
Running as a Republican for an Anderson County seat in Tuesday’s primary, Wilson openly promotes the right of secession. He also wants to have “Confederate Southern Americans” designated a specific minority group, like Hispanics or African-Americans.

“Confederate Southern Americans are a separate and distinct people,” Wilson said in a statement posted on the Internet. “As a people, Confederate Southern Americans are tired of being the ‘whipping boy’ for the rest of the country’s racial problems.”

If I were a bad person (no comments from the peanut gallery please!) I would hope these two gentlemen would win their respective primaries, because it would be so delicious to have to watch the RNC from Bush on down (up?) have to figure out what to do with them. Plus, these two would just make such a hell of a team.

NOTE Atrios has more on the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

From an Op-Ed by Chris Satullo of our own Inky:

"A pimple on an elephant's hide."

With that elegant phrase, Philadelphia's managing director dismissed the issue of whether to restore skateboarding in LOVE Park. Thus, Philip Goldsmith rejected an offer from DC Shoes Inc. to give the city $1 million over 10 years to maintain LOVE.

"Pimple" by the side of the coming "pay to play" indictments, perhaps. But please! What other city do you know of that would turn down an offer of $1,000,000? With an insult?

In return, the city would allow street skaters to regain their mecca for a limited time every day, minimizing the annoyance their rebellious, riveting sport would cause. This smart compromise was crafted by skaters working with a group called Young Involved Philadelphia.

But no, serious adults such as Mayor Street and Goldsmith can't be bothered with such trifles. They're too burdened by the demands of running a major, dying city. As they struggle to balance a city budget larded with favors to the politically connected ...

Who knew?

... they must spend their energy to poring over spreadsheets looking for recreation centers to close. Who has time to bother about the one recreation spot in the city that has become an international youth icon?

Not to mention millions of dollars from the X Games, which came here because of LOVE Park, before Street, in an act of "motiveless malignity," trashed a national landmark.

This is important. LOVE Park is a test case of whether this city can do the things that cities must do to thrive. Smart cities don't spit on serendipity. They open themselves to spirit, creativity, happy accident, and innovation - with all the messiness they entail. They don't just tuck in the coverlet and try to keep things peaceful while they die.

The mayor and his top aides are talented people who do their best as they see it. But they just don't get it. They don't get how cities save themselves. It's enough to make you cry.

Don't listen to me. Listen to people who know infinitely more than I about what makes cities work, people such as Jane Jacobs, Edmund Bacon, Robert Venturi and Richard Florida.

Jacobs is one of the greatest living thinkers about how cities thrive, and how they fail. To her, healthy cities are organic, messy, various and spontaneous. They hum with the energy of ordinary people making decisions at street level about how to exploit the density and diversity that cities offer. To impose order and neatness on a city from on high, she argues, is to kill it.

It's ironic, I admit, to enlist Edmund Bacon, the famous urban planner who designed LOVE Park, in the same cause as Jacobs. She has warred against the type of grand planning of which Bacon is an exemplar. Wasn't it amazing, though, to see Bacon in his wheelchair at LOVE Park last Tuesday, there to salute the DC Shoes offer? Bless his unsinkable curmudgeon's heart, Ed Bacon celebrates how skaters' discovery of LOVE breathed life into his design.

Venturi is as great an architect as any person alive, and a Philadelphian. A passing remark he made once unlocked for me what makes Center City such a vibrant place. William Penn's street grid, Venturi said, bequeathed something priceless to the City of Brotherly Love. It provided all the sharp-edged order any city needed. Inside the grid, a glorious riot of uses, styles and shapes can flourish.

So at LOVE, where the stately angle of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway meets the central square, a variety of pursuits - skating, lunching, playing chess, taking snapshots - can coexist. You don't have to outlaw rambunctiousness; with a touch of collaborative thought, you figure out how to include it without chasing away the rest.

That's exactly what Young Involved Philadelphia did - and rounded up cash to make the idea work. A smart city would kiss these people's feet. Goldsmith scolded them for holding a press conference without his permission, told them to get lost.

Such hostility would make Richard Florida groan. The Carnegie-Mellon professor wrote one of this decade's most influential books, The Rise of the Creative Class. Updating Jacobs for the high-tech era, Florida says that cities' economic health hinges on their skill at attracting young, creative people (people just like the members of YIP). Such citizens, he says, are not lured primarily by jobs or weather; they pick cities for the liveliness of their culture, their diversity and tolerance. Cities should invest in the amenities that appeal to this class. Think skateboarding, that is, before baseball stadiums.

So here sits Philly, a city the creative class tends to shun. Then serendipity smiles. Gumby-like skateboarders doing what they do - videotaping their flips, spins and swerves to be savored by other skaters around the world - turn an unlovely spot at the city's heart into a legend, a sacred space and holy name to a slice of youth culture. In Austin, in Phoenix, heck, in New Zealand, kids dream of going to Philadelphia, just to skate LOVE. (Can you say: Tourist dollars?)

And jobs for the hurting Center City hotels.

Do we rejoice at this stroke of luck, nourish and expand on it? No, we criminalize it; we propose to exile skaters out of sight to a "skate park" down by the Schuylkill - a park, by the way, they'll have to pay for themselves. (City Hall is clueless that the "street" skating of LOVE is as different from "vert ramp" skating as downhill skiing is from cross-country.)

We choose imposed order over rambunctious energy. We choose the habits of the old over the innovations of the young.

As a city, we choose death.
(via The Inky)

Go on, Chris! Say what you feel! (And this was before Smarty Jones lost!)

Readers, this is important to you, too (see back here for the detail). Even if you're not from Philly. Maybe you don't have this exact issue, but is local government where you live doing things are equally irrational (except for the insiders) and destructive (except for the insiders) as Street is doing in Philly?

I'm betting Yes. "All politics is local," remember?

It would be really nice if The Inky, or even one of the weeklies, did a little digging on this one. "Follow the money," would be my mantra. Rip open that seam, and who knows what we'd find?

Who owns Street on this issue? One of the real estate developers on the condo buildings round LOVE Park? The restaurateur who's going to (maybe, someday) rehab the shuttered Information booth? The WiFi company that (maybe, someday) is going to wire the park? Mayor Street's brother has the contract to water the cheesy pink stucco planters they put in to foil the skateboarders? Some hot dog vendor in a cart? Make no mistake, that's how this city works. Crude, venal, and petty as that. Hey Chris! Maybe we could get some reporting on it, as part of the city "choosing life"?

It's enough to make me vote Republican!

NOTE There's an online poll here. The vote is 87% in favor of freeing LOVE Park, right now. There is also a discussion forum, notable for the cluelessness of the winger-esque opponents, who apparently don't know how to reason using evidence. Same everywhere, eh?

Oh, wait. I forgot. We aren't talking about Mars anymore. Never mind.

And goodbye, Ronnie. Though I wouldn't wish Alzheimer's on my worst enemy.

Funny how Nixon, Reagan, and Bush form points on a death spiral of Constitutional government in the United States.

With Nixon, we had Watergate and the Plumber's Squad—illegal, domestic covert action in support of Nixon's election campaign.

With Reagan, we had Iran-Contra—an "off the shelf" covert action program arguably a lot worse than the Plumbers, since it was meant to circumvent Congressional oversight in matters of war and peace, and to prosecute a war that Congress had legislated against. And although Nixon was impeached for Watergate, Reagan didn't suffer for Iran-Contra at all, as an increasingly toothless Democratic party caved.

With Bush... Well, we don't even have mere episodes like "Watergate" or "Iran-Contra" anymore, since a complete lawlessness and extraconstitutional goverment-by-clusterfuck is their modus operandi, and an every day affair that doesn't even raise an eyebrow.

You might say that Nixon, in retrospect, cracked Constitutional government, Reagan drove a wedge into the crack, and Bush shattered Constitutional government entirely, ruling, in the matters He considers essential, by decree.

A sad legacy for a "conservative" movement, wouldn't you say?

Aaugh!

So I'm coming out of the bar, and what do I hear but a woman on her cell saying "Well, it's Philadelphia...."

And it's cold, miserable, and rainy.

To paraphrase Dorothy Parker: there, but for a typographical error, is the headline for practically everything that ever came out of Reagan's mouth. Republicans in general for that matter.

Speaking of which, you better lock up your parks, your airports, your stadiums, libraries, and dog pounds from now until Doomsday. None are going to be safe so long as the Reagan Zombie Cult stalks our monuments. (I would let them rename the prisons though. That would be fitting.)

Meanwhile, I give the Bush campaign 48 hours to start feasting on his corpse in its campaign ads. Any takers?