What Will Scooter's Defense Be?

Memory loss.

From The Daily Nightly via Talking Points Memo:

Scooter Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, has hired a renowned memory-loss expert to assist him with his legal defense. Harvard psychology professor Daniel L. Schacter tells NBC News he has been retained by Libby as a consultant. An official familiar with the Libby defense team confirms the news.

Schacter, who has been at Harvard since 1991 and who has a 29-page resume, is the author of "The Seven Sins of Memory" and "Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind and the Past." His books offer explanations for the "vulnerability of memory." Schacter writes that if we are distracted as an event unfolds, "we may later have great difficulty remembering the details of what happened." Time, of course, often weakens our memory. And, he writes, it is easy to "unwittingly create mistaken -- though strongly held -- beliefs about the past."

Libby's lawyers hinted in court filings last week that memory loss will be "central themes" of Libby's defense. Libby's lawyers write: "...any misstatements he made during his FBI interviews or grand jury testimony were not intentional, but rather the result of confusion, mistake or faulty memory."

Libby's lawyers say that, during Libby's hectic days handling sensitive national-security matters, "it is understandable that he may have forgotten or misremembered relatively less significant events. Such relatively less important events include alleged snippets of conversations about Valerie Plame Wilson's employment status."

Libby has been charged with lying to investigators about his role in the disclosure of Valerie Wilson's role as a CIA operative. His trial is scheduled to begin in January 2007.

Scooter should send a copy of one of Schacter's books to each of his friends so that they don't forget to contribute to his defense fund.

No WMD In Iraq? Blame It On God

This is pretty funny:

[S]ome of the president's allies are still out there, arguing creatively that the WMD are real and may still be found. Last week, it was Fox News military analyst Thomas McInerney, a retired Air Force Lt. Gen., who insisted that Russian Special Forces entered Iraq before the invasion and moved the WMD to Syria.

Oddly enough, as The New Republic reported, around the same time, another White House ally had an even more imaginative idea about the missing weapons.

Bill Tierney, who served as a U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq in the late '90s, told National Review Online this week that he would look to God to direct him to possible WMD sites. "God is my intel," Tierney told NRO. His belief in the existence of a uranium-enrichment plant near Tarmiyah was supported, he said, by the fact that a friend had seen it in a dream.

Indeed, Tierney is quite the theorist. He also said that Iraq was behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and the 2001 anthrax attacks. In time, Tierney believes, all of his ideas will be vindicated.

It Gets Uglier

It looks like the Katrina Catastrophe, the "Uranium From Africa" Prevarication, the Tora Bora Mishap, PlameGate, the Terri Schiavo Blunder, the Jack Abramoff Scandal, the Iraq Misadventure, the Medicare Disaster, the Dubai Debacle, and the host of other BushCo malfeasances are finally starting to take their toll on Bush's poll numbers:

The latest CBS News poll finds President Bush's approval rating has fallen to an all-time low of 34 percent, while pessimism about the Iraq war has risen to a new high.

Americans are also overwhelmingly opposed to the Bush-backed deal giving a Dubai-owned company operational control over six major U.S. ports. Seven in 10 Americans, including 58 percent of Republicans, say they're opposed to the agreement. * * *

Mr. Bush's overall job rating has fallen to 34 percent, down from 42 percent last month. Fifty-nine percent disapprove of the job the president is doing.

For the first time in this poll, most Americans say the president does not care much about people like themselves. Fifty-one percent now think he doesn't care, compared to 47 percent last fall.

Just 30 percent approve of how Mr. Bush is handling the Iraq war, another all-time low.

By two to one, the poll finds Americans think U.S. efforts to bring stability to Iraq are going badly – the worst assessment yet of progress in Iraq.

Even on fighting terrorism, which has long been a strong suit for Mr. Bush, his ratings dropped lower than ever. Half of Americans say they disapprove of how he's handling the war on terror, while 43 percent approve.

Unfortunately for Bush, the two things that are really hurting him right now -- the Dubai Port Deal and the Civil War in Iraq -- will probably remain big stories for quite a while.

William F. Buckley On Iraq: "It Didn't Work"

Last week it was Francis Fukuyama and Bill O'Reilly. And now it is William F. Buckley who has admitted failure in Iraq:

Our mission has failed because Iraqi animosities have proved uncontainable by an invading army of 130,000 Americans. The great human reserves that call for civil life haven't proved strong enough. No doubt they are latently there, but they have not been able to contend against the ice men who move about in the shadows with bombs and grenades and pistols.

It's time to get out of there. Unfortunately, Bush has staked his entire presidency on his Iraq policy, so I'm not expecting an American withdrawal anytime soon.

Dems Now Competitive On National Security Thanks To BushCo's Port Deal

From Rasmussen Reports:

From a political perspective, President Bush's national security credentials have clearly been tarnished due to the outcry over this issue. For the first time ever, Americans have a slight preference for Democrats in Congress over the President on national security issues. Forty-three percent (43%) say they trust the Democrats more on this issue today while 41% prefer the President.

The preference for the opposition party is small, but the fact that Democrats are even competitive on the national security front is startling. In Election 2002, the President guided his party to regain control of the Senate based almost exclusively on the national security issue. On Election Day that year, just 23% rated the economy as good or excellent, but the President's Party still emerged victorious.

In Election 2004, national security was again the decisive issue as the President won re-election. Voters consistently expressed a preference for George W. Bush over John Kerry when it came to issues surrounding the War on Terror.

That 41% number for Bush is indeed startling. Is this just merely a short-term slide based on the outcry over the Port Debacle, or are Americans finally abandoning their "Only Bush Can Protect Us From The Terrorists" delusion and finally coming to the realization that Bush is himself a threat to national security? If the latter is true, then Bush and the Republicans are in big trouble, because the national security issue has been their bread and butter for the past few years.

Sad But Inevitable

From The Christian Science Monitor:

An attack Wednesday that destroyed the soaring gold dome of one of ShiiteIslam's holiest shrines is being interpreted by most Shiites here as a direct attack on their faith - and has sharply raised sectarian tensions.

It's unclear if any people were killed in the massive explosion in Samarra, about 60 miles north of Baghdad. But the destruction of the shrine may be the most emotionally charged of attacks on Shiite targets thus far in the war, and could set back already hamstrung efforts to form a government of Shiite and Sunni unity.

As citizens deserted the streets of Baghdad in the wake of the attack, many said they feared this could be a seminal moment in Iraq's low-intensity civil war.

"The war could really be on now,'' says Abu Hassan, a Shiite street peddler who declined to give his full name. "This is something greater and more symbolic than attacks on people. This is a strike at who we are."

UPDATE: You know things are bad in Iraq when even Bill O'Reilly wants us to get the hell out, which is an interesting flip-flop given that just last November on NBC's Today, O'Reilly "called those advocating immediate withdrawal from Iraq 'pinheads' and compared them to Hitler appeasers."

It Begins

From Reuters:

South Dakota became the first U.S. state to pass a law banning abortion in virtually all cases, with the intention of forcing the Supreme Court to reconsider its 1973 decision legalizing the procedure. The law, which would punish doctors who perform the operation with a five-year prison term and a $5,000 fine, awaits the signature of Republican Gov. Michael Rounds and people on both sides of the issue say he is unlikely to veto it.

Enough Is Enough

Even Tom DeLay is opposing Bush's port sale:

U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay said Wednesday that President Bush is making a big mistake backing a sale of shipping operations at six major U.S. seaports to a state-owned business in the United Arab Emirates.

The former Republican majority leader said the administration's approval of the deal is "pretty outrageous." DeLay made the remarks during a campaign event with Houston real estate executives.

Who's next? Is Laura Bush herself going to come out against this port deal?

This latest ploy to give the GOP members of Congress who are running for reelection a chance to distance themselves from our unpopular president is starting to get pretty obvious, Karl. Stick to attacking war veterans instead -- you are much better at that.

NeoConflagration: Confessions of a Disgruntled PNAC Signatory

This New York Times essay isn't necessarily interesting for what it says, but for who is saying it. It was written by Francis Fukuyama, a leading neocon with connections to the Project For The New American Century (PNAC), and is titled "After Neoconservatism."

After stating that "[t]he so-called Bush Doctrine that set the framework for the administration's first term is now in shambles," Fukuyama remarkably declares -- several pages into his essay -- that the neoconservative position articulated by people like William Kristol and Robert Kagan is a "Leninist" position in that "they believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will." Fukuyama continues:

Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States. Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support.

Fukuyama then goes after the PNAC people currently running or otherwise influencing the actions of our Executive Branch, noting that after the end of the Cold War, neoconservatives such as Kristol and Kagan suggested that the United States would "use its margin of power to exert a kind of 'benevolent hegemony' over the rest of the world, fixing problems like rogue states with W.M.D., human rights abuses and terrorist threats as they came up." But things went terribly wrong when BushCo began implementing the PNAC strategy:

[American benevolent hegemony] was premised on American exceptionalism, the idea that America could use its power in instances where others could not because it was more virtuous than other countries. The doctrine of pre-emption against terrorist threats contained in the 2002 National Security Strategy was one that could not safely be generalized through the international system; America would be the first country to object if Russia, China, India or France declared a similar right of unilateral action. The United States was seeking to pass judgment on others while being unwilling to have its own conduct questioned in places like the International Criminal Court.

Another problem with benevolent hegemony was domestic. There are sharp limits to the American people's attention to foreign affairs and willingness to finance projects overseas that do not have clear benefits to American interests. Sept. 11 changed that calculus in many ways, providing popular support for two wars in the Middle East and large increases in defense spending. But the durability of the support is uncertain: although most Americans want to do what is necessary to make the project of rebuilding Iraq succeed, the aftermath of the invasion did not increase the public appetite for further costly interventions. Americans are not, at heart, an imperial people. Even benevolent hegemons sometimes have to act ruthlessly, and they need a staying power that does not come easily to people who are reasonably content with their own lives and society.

Fukuyama closes out the analysis portion of his essay by stating that in order for a benevolent hegemony to work, there also must be some competency in its execution. Unfortunately for America and the rest of the world, this much-needed competency was sorely lacking:

The most basic misjudgment was an overestimation of the threat facing the United States from radical Islamism. Although the new and ominous possibility of undeterrable terrorists armed with weapons of mass destruction did indeed present itself, advocates of the war wrongly conflated this with the threat presented by Iraq and with the rogue state/proliferation problem more generally. The misjudgment was based in part on the massive failure of the American intelligence community to correctly assess the state of Iraq's W.M.D. programs before the war. But the intelligence community never took nearly as alarmist a view of the terrorist/W.M.D. threat as the war's supporters did. Overestimation of this threat was then used to justify the elevation of preventive war to the centerpiece of a new security strategy, as well as a whole series of measures that infringed on civil liberties, from detention policy to domestic eavesdropping.

Finally, Fukuyama makes some suggestions with regard to what the U.S. should do "[n]ow that the neoconservative moment appears to have passed." He suggests, for example, that the U.S. needs to "demilitarize" the War on Terror and try another approach:

We are fighting hot counterinsurgency wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and against the international jihadist movement, wars in which we need to prevail. But "war" is the wrong metaphor for the broader struggle, since wars are fought at full intensity and have clear beginnings and endings. Meeting the jihadist challenge is more of a "long, twilight struggle" whose core is not a military campaign but a political contest for the hearts and minds of ordinary Muslims around the world.

I think Fukuyama is right. Indeed, it was refreshing to see this much candor from someone who was so extensively hooked into the neoconservative movement. Unfortunately, the necessary changes will have to wait for Bush to leave office, given that he is undoubtedly the wrong person to usher in the post-neocon era.

The real bummer, of course, is that America's great experiment in nonconservativism has caused tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths, opened up the Mother of All Terrorist Training Grounds in Iraq, pissed off just about every other country in the world, and has needlessly cost the American taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars, money that could have been spent improving the U.S. infrastructure as well as improving the lives and health of Americans generally. It is a mistake from which it will take us decades to recover.

This Might Explain Why The Press Is Really Getting Down On Cheney These Days

From Newsweek (via Hoffmania):

Cheney has long had a chilly relationship with the press. Some of his advisers say he is merely indifferent to reporters, while his wife and daughters are more aggressively hostile. But in any case, journalists are usually left guessing at his whereabouts and activities, and the vice president seems to take a certain pleasure in keeping it that way. NEWSWEEK once accompanied Cheney on a trip to upstate New York, where he met with several Marines just returning from Iraq. After about 30 seconds, Cheney asked his handlers to "kick the press out." Eying the departing reporters, he offered his slightly lopsided grin and announced, "It always makes my day."

Payback can really be a bitch sometimes.

Governing By The Seat Of The Pants

From the Washington Post:

The Energy Department said it has come up with $5 million to immediately restore jobs cut at a renewable energy laboratory President George W. Bush will visit on Tuesday, avoiding a potentially embarrassing moment as the president promotes his energy plan.

In his State of the Union speech last month, Bush called for the United States to use less Middle East oil and develop alternative energy sources, including renewable energy such as wind, solar power and biomass.

Bush proposed spending millions more dollars in renewable energy research. However, Democratic lawmakers and environmentalists questioned the administration's commitment when jobs were being eliminated at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colorado.

Bush will visit the lab on Tuesday to tout his proposal for more renewable energy research funding.

I read somewhere that the whole "America is addicted to oil" part of Bush's SOTU speech was added at the last minute in order to give Bush something "positive" to say. This latest act of job restoration at the Department of Energy seems to confirm that this was indeed the case, as does the fact that, one day after the SOTU, BushCo had to issue a retraction wherein the energy secretary and national economic adviser stated that Bush really "didn't mean it" when he vowed to reduce America's dependence on Middle East oil by cutting imports from there 75 percent by 2025.

I mean, if the "addicted to oil" statement really wasn't a last-minute addition, one would think that BushCo would have gotten its ducks in line and restored these jobs before Bush's speech, or would have at least run the whole idea by its energy secretary.

I just think it is pathetic that one of Bush's big political pushes this year will center on an idea that someone in his administration came up with at the last second just to give him something positive to say in his State of the Union speech. That's one hell of a way to run a country.

BushCo And Its Problem With Enemy Identification

It's funny, but I would have been furious if you had told me that the Bush Regime was merely considering turning over six major American ports to an Arab country with ties to the 9-11 attacks:

The Bush administration gave control of six crucial ports to a Sept. 11-linked Arab nation after a flimsy investigation and with weak guarantees the company in charge can stop Osama bin Laden from infiltrating, the House homeland security chairman said.

"There are conditions, which shows they had concerns, but it's all procedural and relies entirely on good faith," Rep. Pete King, R-N.Y., told the New York Daily News. "There's nothing those conditions ... nothing that assures us they're not hiring someone with bin Laden."

The firm, Dubai Ports World, owned by the United Arab Emirate of Dubai, cut a $6.8 billion deal last week to buy control of the ports - including Manhattan's cruise ship terminal and Newark, N.J.'s, giant container port - from a British firm.

Fortunately, there is (of course) bipartisan opposition to this in Congress -- and GOP governors in two of the affected states are also reportedly up in arms -- but Jesus Mary and Joseph, what were these people thinking?

Permanent U.S. Military Bases In Iraq

Last November, I predicted that the Bush Regime would begin to significantly draw down troops in Iraq by Spring of 2006 in order to prevent the Iraq Debacle from being the big political issue in the run-up to the 2006 mid-term elections. But this excellent piece by Tom Engelhardt (via Kevin Drum and Daily Kos) suggests that any withdrawal from Iraq will be illusory at best:

Since guerrilla attacks have actually been on the rise and the delivery of the basic amenities of modern civilization (electrical power, potable water, gas for cars, functional sewage systems, working traffic lights, and so on) on the decline, since the very establishment of a government inside the heavily fortified Green Zone has proved immensely difficult, and since U.S. reconstruction funds (those that haven't already disappeared down one clogged drain or another) are drying up, such partial withdrawals may prove more complicated to pull off than imagined.

It's clear, nonetheless, that "withdrawal" is on the propaganda agenda of an administration heading into mid-term elections with an increasingly skittish Republican Party in tow and congressional candidates worried about defending the President's mission-unaccomplished war of choice. Under the circumstances, we can expect more hints of, followed by promises of, followed by announcements of "major" withdrawals, possibly including news in the fall election season of even more "massive" withdrawals slated for the end of 2006 or early 2007, all hedged with conditional clauses and "only ifs" -- withdrawal promises that, once the election is over, this administration would undoubtedly feel under no particular obligation to fulfill.

The problem, of course, is that the U.S. military has no intention of ever withdrawing from Iraq. Engelhardt's article goes on to describe American "super-bases" that are being constructed there right now.

After describing some of the amenities these bases have to offer -- one of them has "a Subway, a Pizza Hut, a Popeye's, 'an ersatz Starbucks,' a 24-hour Burger King, two post exchanges where TVs, iPods, and the like can be purchased, four mess halls, a hospital, a strictly enforced on-base speed limit of 10 MPH, a huge airstrip, 250 aircraft (helicopters and predator drones included), air-traffic pile-ups of a sort you would see over Chicago's O'Hare airport, and "a miniature golf course, which mimics a battlefield with its baby sandbags" -- Engelhardt goes on to note that withdrawal is clearly not BushCo's plan when it comes to Iraq:

There are at least four such "super-bases" in Iraq, none of which have anything to do with "withdrawal" from that country. Quite the contrary, these bases are being constructed as little American islands of eternal order in an anarchic sea. Whatever top administration officials and military commanders say -- and they always deny that we seek "permanent" bases in Iraq -– facts-on-the-ground speak with another voice entirely. These bases practically scream "permanency."

Unfortunately, there's a problem here. American reporters adhere to a simple rule: The words "permanent," "bases," and "Iraq" should never be placed in the same sentence, not even in the same paragraph; in fact, not even in the same news report. . . .

So expect in the coming months a lot of talk from the Bush Administration about how we are withdrawing from Iraq, and maybe even enough actual troop withdrawals to present the appearance that we are beginning a pull-out. But don't expect to hear anything from the American mainstream press about these Iraqi super-bases. And whatever you do, read Engelhardt's piece in its entirety. It's a real eye-opener.

Hackett Should Tell Democrats To Piss Up A Rope

Democrat and Iraq War veteran Paul Hackett became famous last year for narrowly losing a Congressional race in a heavily Republican district in Ohio to Jean Schmidt. He has since made a name for himself by correctly referring to our Deserter-In-Chief as a "chickenhawk" and a "sonuvabitch." Until recently, the Democratic Party establishment loved Hackett, who entered the Ohio Senate race last October. But seven-term Akron Democrat Rep. Sherrod Brown entered the same race shortly thereafter -- despite representations that he would not do so -- and that caused the party to ultimately betray Hackett.

This Mother Jones article gives some good background on how the Democrats got Hackett to drop his Senate bid, and some of it ain't pretty:

With Brown, a party insider, on board, the Democratic establishment quickly began pulling away from the fiery Hackett. Schumer, after having wooed him in August, called again in October. “Schumer didn’t tell me anything definitive,” Hackett told me at the time. “But I’m not a dumb ass, and I know what he wanted me to do.” Hackett, a maverick who relishes the fight, decided to buck the Beltway insiders, and stay in the race.

Hackett’s scorching rhetoric earned him notoriety and cash on the campaign trail. He declared that people who opposed gay marriage were "un-American." He said the Republican party had been hijacked by religious extremists who he said "aren’t a whole lot different than Osama bin Laden." Bloggers loved him, donors ponied up, while Democratic Party insiders grumbled that he wasn’t "senatorial."

Swift boats soon appeared on the horizon. A whisper campaign started: Hackett committed war crimes in Iraq—and there were photos. "The first rumor that I heard was probably a month and a half ago," Dave Lane, chair of the Clermont County Democratic Party, told me the day after Hackett pulled out of the race. "I heard it more than once that someone was distributing photos of Paul in Iraq with Iraqi war casualties with captions or suggestions that Paul had committed some sort of atrocities. Who did it? I have no idea. It sounds like a Republican M.O. to me, but I have no proof of that. But if it was someone on my side of the fence, I have a real problem with that. I have a hard time believing that a Democrat would do that to another Democrat."

In late November, Hackett got a call from Sen. Harry Reid. "I hear there’s a photo of you mistreating bodies in Iraq. Is it true?" demanded the Senate minority leader. "No sir," replied Hackett. To drive home his point, Hackett traveled to Washington to show Reid’s staff the photo in question. Hackett declined to send me the photo, but he insists that it shows another Marine—not Hackett—unloading a sealed body bag from a truck. "There was nothing disrespectful or unprofessional," he insists. "That was a photo of a Marine doing his job. If you don’t like what they’re doing, don’t send Marines into war."

A staffer in Reid’s office confirmed that Hackett had showed them several photos. "The ones I saw were part of a diary he kept while serving in Iraq and were in no way compromising. The one picture in question depicted Marines doing their work on what looked like a scorching day in Iraq," said the aide.

But the whispering continued, and Hackett was troubled. “It creates doubt and suspicion,” Hackett told me, saying his close supporters were asking him privately about the rumors. "It tarnishes my very strength as a candidate, my military service. It’s like you take a handful of seeds, throw them up in the wind, and they blow all around and start growing. It really bothered me."

Although Hackett says that he's done with politics for the time being, I'm hoping he changes his mind and decides to run for the Senate seat as an independent. He certainly doesn't owe anything to the bastards who are currently running the Democratic Party.

Would I be upset if Hackett spoiled the Democrats' chance of gaining this particular Senate seat? No, I wouldn't. In fact, I'd laugh my ass off if that happened.

Greenland's Glaciers And NOAA's "Minders"

All you Bush-loving, radical right-wing extremist conservatives out there can ignore this post, because it refers to articles about global warming, and we all know you don't believe that global warming is real.

So I guess this article was written mostly for the reality-based community:

Greenland's glaciers are melting into the sea twice as fast as previously believed, the result of a warming trend that renders obsolete predictions of how quickly Earth's oceans will rise over the next century, scientists said yesterday.

The new data come from satellite imagery and give fresh urgency to worries about the role of human activity in global warming. The Greenland data are mirrored by findings from Bolivia to the Himalayas, scientists said, noting that rising sea levels threaten widespread flooding and severe storm damage in low-lying areas worldwide.

So what's BushCo doing about all this? Well, the Bush Administration is sending out "minders" to make sure that NOAA scientists don't say anything that goes against BushCo's bullshit line regarding climate change. From the Wall Street Journal:

Pieter Tans, a researcher who studies carbon dioxide at NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo., says public-affairs "minders" now sit in on more interviews, something that didn't happen before. He said he sees it as an attempt to control comments about the dangers of climate change.

A ruckus erupted after the November issue of the agency's magazine said there was a "consensus" among NOAA hurricane experts that increases in hurricane activity were primarily the result of natural factors -- even though within NOAA some believed man-made warming was a key cause.

Kerry Emanuel, a climate researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said he found the statement problematic because it appeared to represent an official NOAA position, and might discourage agency scientists from contradicting it. Dr. Emanuel, who believes global warming is making hurricanes worse, was among the first to publicly criticize NOAA's policy at a major meeting in December, where he termed it "censorship."

Why The "Cheney Shoots Man In Face" Story Just Won't Die

I was never much of a bird hunter -- and it's been over 20 years since the last time I went pheasant hunting -- but Cheney's claim that he was nearly 30 yards away from Whittington when he shot him in the face didn't make much sense to me, and it apparently doesn't make much sense to the experts either:

Veteran hunters and shooting experts said Thursday that they still did not understand how the vice president injured his fellow hunting partner so badly if he was actually 30 yards away as Cheney says.

"It just doesn't add up," said John Kelly, a quail hunter from New York with more than 36 years of experience. "With a shotgun, the pellets spread out the further you get, and for that many pellets to hit such a small part of this man's body means Mr. Cheney was far closer" than the 27-meter distance cited.

Cheney is finding out the hard way why it is important to (1) immediately come clean on something like this, and (2) tell the truth when you do so. Of course, I guess it is possible that Cheney got it wrong because he was drunk (as AmericaBlog asks, "What did Cheney drink and when did he drink it?"), and it certainly doesn't help that his so-called eyewitness was actually so far away from the incident that she thought Cheney was having a heart attack.

Roses of the Prophet Muhammad

I almost choked on my Freedom Fries when I read this article:

Iranians love Danish pastries, but when they look for the flaky dessert at the bakery they now have to ask for "Roses of the Prophet Muhammad."

Bakeries across the capital were covering up their ads for Danish pastries Thursday after the confectioners' union ordered the name change in retaliation for caricatures of the Muslim prophet published in a Danish newspaper.

"Given the insults by Danish newspapers against the prophet, as of now the name of Danish pastries will give way to 'Rose of Muhammad' pastries," the union said in its order.

"This is a punishment for those who started misusing freedom of expression to insult the sanctities of Islam," said Ahmad Mahmoudi, a cake shop owner in northern Tehran.

I'm glad they got that all straightened out.

More On BushCo's Anti-Science Push At NASA

Public affairs officers at NASA have reported that "[t]op political appointees in the NASA press office exerted strong pressure during the 2004 presidential campaign to cut the flow of news releases on glaciers, climate, pollution and other earth sciences." From the New York Times:

Press officers, who were granted anonymity because they said they were still concerned for their jobs despite Dr. Griffin's call for openness, said much of the pressure in late 2004 was placed on Gretchen Cook-Anderson. At the time, Ms. Cook-Anderson was in charge of managing the flow of earth science news at NASA headquarters.

In a conference call with colleagues in October 2004, the colleagues said, she said that Glenn Mahone, then the assistant administrator for public affairs, had told her that a planned news conference on fresh readings by a new NASA satellite, Aura, that measures ozone and air pollution, should not take place until after the election.

In an e-mail message yesterday, Ms. Cook-Anderson, who now works as a writer and editor for NASA through a contractor, said, "While I can't discuss these matters, I won't disagree with that description of what took place."

We can't expect to compete with China if our government continues to attack science for politcal reasons. Didn't the Nazis do something similar?

Oh Canada

I received this comment from a Canadian reader with regard to my last post on PoliceStateGate:

Duck!!!...I just blew your useless leftie ass off.Oppppssss. Too bad they couldn't do anything to protect you,because you didn't want that protection,yet don't have the balls to protect yourself.To easy.../sarc...just to save the Useless Criminal and Losers Union from suing me.Come on.Try it,butt heads!!!

Not sure I completely understand it -- some of it might be lost in translation -- but it was good for a laugh. In fact, as I was sitting on my Chesterfield reading the comment, I horked so much that I nearly loaded my ginch.

PoliceStateGate, Part II

This is just great:

A former NSA employee said Tuesday there is another ongoing top-secret surveillance program that might have violated millions of Americans' Constitutional rights.

Russell D. Tice told the House Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations he has concerns about a "special access" electronic surveillance program that he characterized as far more wide-ranging than the warrentless wiretapping recently exposed by the New York Times but he is forbidden from discussing the program with Congress.

Tice said he believes it violates the Constitution's protection against unlawful search and seizures but has no way of sharing the information without breaking classification laws. He is not even allowed to tell the congressional intelligence committees - members or their staff - because they lack high enough clearance.

Neither could he brief the inspector general of the NSA because that office is not cleared to hear the information, he said.

Unfortunately, it is starting to sound like BushCo is going to get its way on its "Terrorist Surveillance Program" and that there will not be a Congressional investigation:

Congress appeared ready to launch an investigation into the Bush administration's warrantless domestic surveillance program last week, but an all-out White House lobbying campaign has dramatically slowed the effort and may kill it, key Republican and Democratic sources said yesterday.

The Senate intelligence committee is scheduled to vote tomorrow on a Democratic-sponsored motion to start an inquiry into the recently revealed program in which the National Security Agency eavesdrops on an undisclosed number of phone calls and e-mails involving U.S. residents without obtaining warrants from a secret court. Two committee Democrats said the panel -- made up of eight Republicans and seven Democrats -- was clearly leaning in favor of the motion last week but now is closely divided and possibly inclined against it.

They attributed the shift to last week's closed briefings given by top administration officials to the full House and Senate intelligence committees, and to private appeals to wavering GOP senators by officials, including Vice President Cheney. "It's been a full-court press," said a top Senate Republican aide who asked to speak only on background -- as did several others for this story -- because of the classified nature of the intelligence committees' work.

Of course, what Republican would have to guts to stand up to Cheney these days.

Cheney Speaks!

Or, I should say, he will speak:

Vice President Dick Cheney planned to break his silence Wednesday in his first televised interview about the Texas hunting accident in which he shot a 78-year-old lawyer.

Cheney was to appear on Fox News Channel at 6 p.m. ET, the network and the White House announced. He hasn’t spoken publicly about the accident Saturday that hospitalized Harry Whittington of Austin.

And I'm sure the Cheney haters at Fox will just tear him up, just like Cavuto did here:

CAVUTO: This is a Fox News alert. The lawyer accidentally hit by Vice President Dick Cheney suffering a mild heart attack this morning. Doctors say he’s doing just fine and could be released in a week. Meanwhile, the White House press corps again beating a dead horse as it tries to find out why they were not told right away about the Vice President’s hunting accident. Not one person bothering to ask, in the meantime, how Dick Cheney’s feeling about all this. After all, he’s a human being and injuring someone else in an accident can take a huge toll. With us now someone who knows the Vice President pretty well. Ron Christie is a former Cheney advisor and author of Black in the White House. Good to have you back my friend. . . .

Meanwhile, get your "Dick Cheney Shot Me" tee shirts here.

UPDATE: This is pretty good.

More Corporate Welfare

From The New York Times:

The federal government is on the verge of one of the biggest giveaways of oil and gas in American history, worth an estimated $7 billion over five years.

New projections, buried in the Interior Department's just-published budget plan, anticipate that the government will let companies pump about $65 billion worth of oil and natural gas from federal territory over the next five years without paying any royalties to the government.

Based on the administration figures, the government will give up more than $7 billion in payments between now and 2011. The companies are expected to get the largess, known as royalty relief, even though the administration assumes that oil prices will remain above $50 a barrel throughout that period.

I wouldn't be so mad about this if, in exchange for the waiver of the $7 billion, the Federal government required the oil companies to sell jet fuel to the airlines at a reduced price. After all, the airlines are actually suffering from high oil prices and could use some federal assistance. Last I heard, though, the oil industry is in pretty good shape.

A Little Too Much Catnip

Great Atrios Post

This pretty much sums up the whole "Shooter" Cheney incident and its fallout:

Things I've Learned Recently

Every conservative on the internet is an avid hunter and they've all been shot multiple times.

Shotguns aren't really guns, just toys. You can't really hurt people with them, only animals.

It's standard hunter etiquette to yell and scream at your fellow hunters as they're stalking their prey.

The most dangerous place to be is behind the people with the guns.

And Dick Cheney was not drunk, so stop saying that.

Perfect.

And here is a humorous Washington Post article on the subject. And McClelland's statement this morning was pretty funny as well:

After a not-entirely-successful effort on Monday to explain the vice president's hunting accident, press secretary Scott McClellan reloaded this morning and took aim at Dick Cheney himself.

President Bush, he announced, would be on the South Lawn with the national champion University of Texas football team. "The orange they're wearing is not because they are concerned that the vice president will be there," he deadpanned.

More Bad News For BushCo

Bush is at 39%.

Meanwhile, Raw Story is reporting that the 2003 outing of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame by Dick "Shooter" Cheney and Lewis "Scooter" Libby caused significant damage to the United States' ability to monitor the Iranian nuclear program:

According to current and former intelligence officials, Plame Wilson, who worked on the clandestine side of the CIA in the Directorate of Operations as a non-official cover (NOC) officer, was part of an operation tracking distribution and acquisition of weapons of mass destruction technology to and from Iran.

Speaking under strict confidentiality, intelligence officials revealed heretofore unreported elements of Plame's work. Their accounts suggest that Plame's outing was more serious than has previously been reported and carries grave implications for U.S. national security and its ability to monitor Iran's burgeoning nuclear program.

Obviously, if Cheney ordered the leak that resulted in Plame's outing, then Cheney should resign.

The Daily Show Is Going To Have A Field Day With This One

Dick Cheney shot someone:

Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot and wounded a companion during a weekend quail hunting trip in Texas, spraying the fellow hunter in the face and chest with shotgun pellets.

Harry Whittington, a millionaire attorney from Austin, was in stable condition in the intensive care unit of a Corpus Christi hospital Sunday, said Yvonne Wheeler, spokeswoman for the Christus Spohn Health System.

The accident occurred Saturday at a ranch in south Texas where the vice president and several companions were hunting quail. It was not reported publicly by the vice president's office for nearly 24 hours, and then only after it was reported locally by the Corpus Christi Caller-Times on its Web site Sunday.

Just go to any liberal/progressive blog for more details, but Josh Marshall's site has the best analysis so far:

TPM Reader MN points out that Dick Cheney now joins Aaron Burr as one of the two vice presidents to shoot someone while in office. Are we leaving anyone out? VP Mifflin? Did John Nance Garner take anyone out during his two terms?

King George of Swamp Castle and Other Assorted Rants

Danimal whipped up a real shit storm over at his blog last week when he had the nerve to suggest that (1) Big Brother really is watching us, and (2) the United States is moving toward a theocratic dictatorship. Here is an example of one of the comments he received, which was offered in an attempt to minimize BushCo's illegal wiretap program (I'll address the "theocratic dictatorship" issue in a later post):

[T]his is what the NSA program involved: NSA computers are given a list of phone numbers corresponding to known Al Qaeda agents. When a call is placed from one of those numbers to a U.S. number, the software analyzes the speech, looking for pre-flagged keywords. The keywords are derived from known AQ code words, and other words that might indicate that the parties were discussing terrorism. When one of those keywords pops up, the transcript is flagged and is sent for review by a human. Before this, no human eyes have looked at it, or listened to it. With the transcript, NSA agents can zero in on the suspects and investigate the crime.

Of course, this assessment of the NSA program is absurd on its face. Is this Danimal detractor actually suggesting that when a "known Al Qaeda agent" places a phone call to someone in the U.S., that the Bush Regime has no choice but to go outside the FISA Court in order to investigate this call? Does this person actually think that the FISA court would not retroactively approve a wiretap on a call into the U.S. that originates from a phone number of a known Al Qaeda agent?

The FISA judges haven't exactly been tough sells over the years. In fact, in the first 22 years of the court's operation, the FISA judges modified only two search warrant orders out of the 13,102 applications that were approved. Even the corrupt Bush Regime has a fairly good approval record with the FISA court -- the FISA judges modified only 179 of the 5,645 BushCo requests for court-ordered surveillance, with virtually all of these modifications taking place in 2003 and 2004. But ominously, the judges "also rejected or deferred at least six requests for warrants during those two years -- the first outright rejection in the court's history."

It is obvious to anyone with an open mind that BushCo's illegal surveillance program is going way beyond situations where known Al Qaeda agents place phone calls to people in the United States. Even House Republican Heather A. Wilson, the chairwoman of the Intelligence Subcommittee on Technical and Tactical Intelligence, is calling for a "full Congressional inquiry" into BushCo's domestic eavesdropping program. She's apprehensive about whom the Bush Administration is monitoring and why.

Do you think that Congresswoman Wilson, as chairwoman of the subcommittee that oversees the N.S.A., might have information on the spying program that we don't have? It would be a safe bet that she is aware of certain things that are giving her enough pause with regard to BushCo's "Terrorist Surveillance Program" to justify a call for a full Congressional inquiry. She certainly has access to more information on this issue than, say, Danimal's detractors.

Here is another comment posted to Danimal's blog:

A 2004 NBC report graphically illustrated what not having this program cost us 4 1/2 years ago. In 1999, the NSA began monitoring a known al Qaeda "switchboard" in Yemen that relayed calls from Osama bin Laden to operatives all over world. The surveillance picked up the phone number of a "Khalid" in the United States — but the NSA didn't intercept those calls, fearing it would be accused of "domestic spying."

After 9/11, investigators learned that "Khalid" was Khalid al-Mihdhar, then living in San Diego under his own name — one of the hijackers who flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon. He made more than a dozen calls to the Yemen house, where his brother-in-law lived.

I loved that last comment, given that Bush apologists hardly ever want to take a hard look at what happened in the pre-9-11 days (unless, of course, they want to blame Clinton for what happened).

Indeed, it seems that whenever opponents of the Bush Regime bring up anything that happened (or failed to happen) in the past, they get attacked for either living in the past or "distractin' our country from more important concerns." Who could forget Bush's opposition to any type of investigation of the 9-11 attacks because such an inquiry could distract from the War on Terrorism, or Bush's resistance to any inquiries concerning whether BushCo lied to the country in the run-up to his Iraq Debacle. It's a common theme with this administration.

The reluctance of Bush and his apologists to look into the past always reminded me of that great scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail where the King of Swamp Castle tries to calm down a wedding crowd after Sir Lancelot mistakenly kills several guests in a misguided effort to rescue the King's daughter (I mean -- son). The scene starts out like this:

King of Swamp Castle: Who are you?

Prince Herbert: I'm your son!

King of Swamp Castle: No, not you!

Sir Lancelot: I am Sir Lancelot, sir.

Prince Herbert: He's come to rescue me, father!

Sir Lancelot: Well, let's not jump to conclusions.

King of Swamp Castle: Did you kill all those guards?

Sir Lancelot: Um... oh, yes! Sorry.

King of Swamp Castle: They cost fifty pounds each!

Sir Lancelot: Well, the thing is, I thought your son was a lady.

King of Swamp Castle: Well, I can understand that.

But once the King finds out that Lancelot was from Camelot ("Good Pig Country") and that a friendship with Lancelot may be politically advantageous, the King tells the angry and bloodied wedding crowd: "Please! This is supposed to be a happy occasion. Let's not bicker and argue over who killed who."

Bush and his apologists act exactly the same way: "We're at War, people. AT WAR!!! So let's not bicker and argue over who screwed up where or who lied to who." But suddenly Bush apologists want to talk about what happened -- or what didn't happen -- four-and-a-half years ago, and that is fine with me.

The one thing that graphically illustrates what having an idiot in the White House cost us 4 1/2 years ago was the memo titled "Bin Laden Determined To Strike In US." The now-infamous Harriet Miers handed this memo to our Deserter-in-Chief on or about August 6, 2001, over a month before the 9-11 attacks. That memo made references to patterns of suspicious activity in the U.S. consistent with preparations for hijackings, and also made reference to surveillances of federal buildings in New York.

How did Bush respond to being informed that bin Laden's desire to determinedly strike the U.S. via hijackings? Well, he stayed on vacation, of course, much the way he stayed on vacation in the run-up to and the unfolding of his Katrina Debacle, one of the most pathetic failures of his administration so far (and that is saying a lot). And what was Bush's ultimate response to 9-11? He incompetently invaded a fourth-rate military power that had no connection to the 9-11 attacks, and we all know how that turned out.

And that leads to why I find it so funny that Bush Lovers are now arguing that if we had their illegal "terrorist surveillance program" back in the pre-9-11 days, that we could have stopped the attacks. Who could have stopped the attacks -- the idiots in the Bush Administration? Is that a joke or something?

Geesus, Al Qaeda wasn't even on BushCo's radar screen in September of 2001, despite the warning a few month earlier from outgoing Clinton officials that dealing with bin Laden and his organization would be the new administration's number-one priority and despite the admonitions from the bipartisan-authorized Hart-Rudman Commission, which predicted a 9-11-type of attack where Americans would die on American soil, "possibly in large numbers."

In fact, BushCo basically scrapped the Hart-Rudman recommendations and turned the whole domestic terrorism deal over to "Dick" Cheney in May of 2002 (who naturally proceeded to do nothing on it). Remarkably, Condi Rice, BushCo's then National Security Adviser, was scheduled to give a speech on national security issues on September 11, 2001, and the text of that speech contained absolutely no references to Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, or Islamic fundamentalist groups. Condi's speech was, of course, cancelled after al Qaeda flew hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center buildings.

So you can understand why I laugh when I hear right wingers spew the BushCo talking point that we could have stopped 9-11 had we had Bush's illegal wiretap program back then. The truth is that we didn't need to have such a program to catch 9-11 hijacker Khalid al-Mihdhar. The following is from an analysis by the Merkle Foundation (referenced in Al Gore's November 10, 2003 "Freedom and Security" Speech):

· "In late August 2001, Nawaq Alhamzi and Khalid Al-Midhar bought tickets to fly on American Airlines Flight 77 (which was flown into the Pentagon). They bought the tickets using their real names. Both names were then on a State Department/INS watch list called TIPOFF. Both men were sought by the FBI and CIA as suspected terrorists, in part because they had been observed at a terrorist meeting in Malaysia.

· These two passenger names would have been exact matches when checked against the TIPOFF list. But that would only have been the first step. Further data checks could then have begun.

· Checking for common addresses (address information is widely available, including on the internet), analysts would have discovered that Salem Al-Hazmi (who also bought a seat on American 77) used the same address as Nawaq Alhazmi. More importantly, they could have discovered that Mohamed Atta (American 11, North Tower of the World Trade Center) and Marwan Al-Shehhi (United 175, South Tower of the World Trade Center) used the same address as Khalid Al-Midhar.

· Checking for identical frequent flier numbers, analysts would have discovered that Majed Moqed (American 77) used the same number as Al-Midhar.

· With Mohamed Atta now also identified as a possible associate of the wanted terrorist, Al-Midhar, analysts could have added Atta's phone numbers (also publicly available information) to their checklist. By doing so they would have identified five other hijackers (Fayez Ahmed, Mohand Alshehri, Wail Alsheri, and Abdulaziz Alomari).

· Closer to September 11, a further check of passenger lists against a more innocuous INS watch list (for expired visas) would have identified Ahmed Alghandi. Through him, the same sort of relatively simple correlations could have led to identifying the remaining hijackers, who boarded United 93 (which crashed in Pennsylvania)."

In addition, Al-Midhar and Nawaf Alhamzi "rented an apartment in San Diego under their own names and were listed, again under their own names, in the San Diego phone book while the FBI was searching for them."

So let's sum up: Danimal's detractor -- echoing Bush's State of the Union speech -- contends that had the "Terrorist Surveillance Program" been in place in the months before 9-11, Khalid Al-Midhar would have been detected and the 9-11 attacks foiled. Forget the fact that Al-Midhar was on the watch list under that name and that he bought his airline ticket using that name. Forget the fact that he was already being sought by the FBI and CIA as a suspected terrorist. Forget the fact that he was in the San Diego phone book under that name while the FBI was searching for him.

Hell, the only thing Khalid Al-Midhar didn't do was post a flashing neon sign above his San Diego apartment saying "Terrorists Live Here," yet our president and his apologists now insist that BushCo would have caught Al-Midhar and stopped the 9-11 attacks had it just been allowed to illegally eavesdrop back then.

Bull-Shit.

Brownie, You Did A Heck Of A Job . . . Kicking Norm Coleman's Ass

For me, it was kind of like watching Barbara Bush fight Tonya Harding (not sure who to cheer for), but you can watch Michael "Brownie" Brown tear apart Senator Norm Coleman here.



Josh Marshall summed it up best:

Coleman tried the standard hearings grandstanding against a disgraced or weakened witness -- a tactic pretty much written into the DNA of every senator and rep. But Brown managed to get in Coleman's face and turn the tables on him.


At the end, Coleman actually used the fact that he had run out of time to run away from the encounter with Brown. I'm not sure I've ever seen that happen before.

Straight From The Department Of Understatement

From the BBC (via Kos):

The head of Israel's domestic security agency, Shin Bet, has said his country may come to regret the overthrow of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Yuval Diskin said a strong dictatorship would be preferable to the present "chaos" in Iraq, in a speech to teenage Jewish settlers in the West Bank.

They are just figuring this out now?

Paul Bremer And The Phantom WMD

Paul Bremer, America's former Presidential Envoy to Iraq, was asked on CNN today what he thought the U.S. invasion of Iraq was all about. Here was his response:

"Well, it was certainly not about oil. I'll tell you, I was there for fourteen months and met with all of our top leaders and attended hundreds of hours of meetings and nobody ever said this is about oil, so that's just a complete myth.

If you go back and read what the president said before the war -- and his top advisors -- they said it's about two things: it's about Saddam's refusal to cooperate on coming clean about his weapons of mass destruction -- he was in violation of seventeen U.N. Security Council resolutions. And its about one of the most brutal and awful regimes anywhere in all the world -- one of the most totalitarian -- and therefore giving the Iraqi a prospective for a democratic, better future, and we've done that."

Certainly not about oil? Is he joking? Of course the Iraq Invasion was about oil. It was all about oil -- everybody knows this -- and I'm sick of all the BushCo lying on that particular issue.

But the Bremer statement I couldn't believe was his comment that the Iraq War was "about Saddam's refusal to cooperate on coming clean about his weapons of mass destruction." Excuse me? Maybe this is a stupid question, but how the hell does someone come clean on something he doesn't have?

The Touch of Death (I Hope)

The moral of this story is: Whatever you do, do not let George W. Bush touch you.

There's a big political fight occurring in Texas right now. This Newsweek article will fill you in on the details. In a nutshell, a March 7th Texas congressional primary between Democrats Henry Cuellar and Ciro Rodriguez will decide who gets the seat, because there will be no Republican running against the winner.

Cuellar, the incumbent, beat out Rodriguez, the ex-incumbent, in the primary two years ago. There's some bad blood between the two candidates right now, and for good reason:

The story begins in 2002, when Cuellar ran against Republican congressman Henry Bonilla. During that race, he received significant help from Rodriguez, then the congressman from San Antonio, who wanted to see the Democrats pick up Bonilla’s seat. But after Cuellar narrowly lost, and after Texas Republicans -- in their controversial redistricting plan a year later -- reconfigured Rodriguez’s district to include Cuellar’s hometown of Laredo, Texas, Cuellar did what some thought was an act of betrayal: He challenged Rodriguez for his seat in the 2004 primary, and won. (Cuellar went on to defeat his Republican opponent in the general election, 59-39 percent.)

Things started getting really interesting at last week's State of the Union address. Instead of sitting on the Democratic side during the speech, Cuellar decided to sit on the Republican side. But that ain't all that happened at the State of the Union (from he above-linked Newsweek article):

More recently, Cuellar made some Democrats furious when a photo was published showing President Bush grabbing Cuellar’s cheeks at the State of the Union. After liberal blogs posted the photo, Rodriguez’s campaign has raked in the cash, more than $70,000 from online donors, according to ActBlue, a Democratic online clearinghouse.

"He has pissed off every single Democrat [in Washington]," Rodriguez said in an interview. In fact, campaign-finance records show that at least 10 current members of Congress have donated to Rodriguez’s campaign, while not a single one has given to the incumbent Cuellar. "That never happens," Rodriguez added.

Anyway, it should be a good fight. And if Rodriguez manages to pull out an upset in this one, we'll have George W. Bush to thank for it.

What Is It With These People Anyway?

Comrade George Deutsch, Bush's 24-year old NASA commissar with no science background, has resigned his post at the Space Agency:

George C. Deutsch, the young presidential appointee at NASA who told public affairs workers to limit reporters' access to a top climate scientist and told a Web designer to add the word "theory" at every mention of the Big Bang, resigned yesterday, agency officials said.

Mr. Deutsch's resignation came on the same day that officials at Texas A&M University confirmed that he did not graduate from there, as his résumé on file at the agency asserted.

I wish I could claim that I'm shocked by this, but I'm not.

Chinks In The BushCo Armor

One of the reasons the GOP is so worried about the upcoming mid-term elections is that if the Democrats take control of either the House or Senate, then real investigations into Republican wrongdoing will ensue. The Bush Administration has -- thanks to its allies in Congress -- been able to avoid any serious congressional inquiries into matters such as the manipulation of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq Debacle and the related Plame TraitorGate Scandal.

But the days of weak Congressional oversight on the Bush Administration may be coming to an end:

A House Republican whose subcommittee oversees the National Security Agency broke ranks with the White House on Tuesday and called for a full Congressional inquiry into the Bush administration's domestic eavesdropping program.

The lawmaker, Representative Heather A. Wilson of New Mexico, chairwoman of the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Technical and Tactical Intelligence, said in an interview that she had "serious concerns" about the surveillance program. By withholding information about its operations from many lawmakers, she said, the administration has deepened her apprehension about whom the agency is monitoring and why.

Ms. Wilson, who was a National Security Council aide in the administration of President Bush's father, is the first Republican on either the House's Intelligence Committee or the Senate's to call for a full Congressional investigation into the program, in which the N.S.A. has been eavesdropping without warrants on the international communications of people inside the United States believed to have links with terrorists.

I'm certain we'll see BushCo-spawned attacks on the patriotism of Rep. Wilson ensue very soon, particularly given that she is "a former Air Force officer who is the only female veteran currently in Congress." Our Deserter-In-Chief and his deputy Chickenhawks seem to relish the chance to go after veterans who speak out against their corrupt regime.

And speaking of BushCo-spawned attacks on our veterans, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review -- a paper that has been critical of John Murtha in the past -- now endorses Murtha's plan with regard to Iraq:

The nuclear saber-rattling of neighboring Iran is heading for a showdown. To meet that threat should diplomacy fail, the United States must begin the six- to nine-month logistical process of drawing down its Iraqi force and repositioning it to respond, if need be, to the Iranian threat.

This is not retreat. This is not cut-and-run. This is a recognition of the reality in Iraq -- one that has evolved into an Iraqi problem that only the Iraqis now can solve -- and that the paramount world security threat now is Iran.

On CBS's "60 Minutes" Sunday night, Jack Murtha predicted the "vast majority" of U.S. troops will be out of Iraq by year's end if not sooner. We hope he's right. The time has come.

As Arianna points out, this flip-flop is an interesting one because of who owns this particular paper:

What makes this so significant is not the Tribune-Review's reach (circulation 102,000) but its provenance. It's part of a seven-paper chain that is published -- and controlled -- by Richard Mellon Scaife, the arch-conservative icon who has donated so much money to conservative causes and institutions that the Washington Post dubbed him the "Funding Father of the Right."

Besides infamously backing the American Spectator's smear-Clinton Arkansas Project, Scaife has given hundreds of millions of dollars to a who's who of right-leaning groups including the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, Judicial Watch, the Federalist Society, Paul Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation, David Horowitz's Center for the Study of Popular Culture, Brent Bozell's Media Research Center, and many others. He's also part owner of NewsMax.

Scaife is clearly starting to read the writing on the wall. He must have realized that if Bush doesn't start pulling out of Iraq soon, the G.O.P. will pay a heavy political price in November.

Oregon Coast Sunset

I took these photos on Monday evening at Lincoln City, Oregon, where the temperature reached into the 60s on Tuesday.

Iraq -- Looking More and More Like Our GOP-Controlled Congress Every Day

Right wingers are always complaining about how the libral media fail to report all the good things that are happening in Iraq right now. But I think the U.S. media are underreporting just how bad it is over there.

I doubt this article from the New York Times will get much coverage anywhere else in the U.S. Press:

[A] sitting member of the Iraqi National Assembly has been indicted in the theft of millions of dollars meant for protecting a critical oil pipeline against attacks and is suspected of funneling some of that money to the insurgency, said Radhi Hamza al-Radhi, the chairman of Iraq's Commission on Public Integrity. The indictment has not been made public.

The charges against the Sunni lawmaker, Meshaan al-Juburi, are far from the only indication that the insurgency is profiting from Iraq's oil riches.

On Saturday, the director of a major oil storage plant near Kirkuk was arrested with other employees and several local police officials, and charged with helping to orchestrate a mortar attack on the plant on Thursday, a Northern Oil Company employee said. The attack resulted in devastating pipeline fires and a shutdown of all oil operations in the area, said the employee, who was granted anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.

Ali Allawi, Iraq's finance minister, estimated that insurgents reap 40 percent to 50 percent of all oil-smuggling profits in the country. Offering an example of how illicit oil products are kept flowing on the black market, he said that the insurgency had infiltrated senior management positions at the major northern refinery in Baiji and routinely terrorized truck drivers there. This allows the insurgents and their confederates to tap the pipeline, empty the trucks and sell the oil or gas themselves.

None of this should be too surprising given that "nearly half (47%) of Iraqis approve of attacks on U.S.-led forces."

Clearly, this is bad news for the Republicans. Majority Leader John Boehner was on Meet the Press this morning. Russert asked, "If the situation in Iraq in November of this year is like it is today, will the Republicans pay a price?" Boehner's response: "I think we will."

I think he's right, assuming the Democrats are willing to push the Iraq Debacle as a campaign issue. The problem, however, is that there were plenty of Democrats who voted to give Bush the authority to invade, and the GOP will obviously try to exploit this fact. It will be interesting to see whether the American people nonetheless blame the Republicans for the Iraq Catastrophe.

I'm Getting Really Tired Of These Stalinist Bastards

NASA Chief Michael D. Griffin is calling for "scientific openness" in the space agency (from the New York Times):

It is not the job of public-affairs officers," Dr. Griffin wrote in an e-mail message to the agency's 19,000 employees, "to alter, filter or adjust engineering or scientific material produced by NASA's technical staff."

The statement came six days after The New York Times quoted the scientist, James E. Hansen, as saying he was threatened with "dire consequences" if he continued to call for prompt action to limit emissions of heat-trapping gases linked to global warming. He and intermediaries in the agency's 350-member public-affairs staff said the warnings came from White House appointees in NASA headquarters.

As I was reading the above-quoted paragraphs, I was reminded of a book I read a few years ago by Albert Seaton called The Russo-German War: 1941-45. In that book, Seaton gave the following description of the Red Army's commissar system:

The system of military commissars originated at the time of the revolution when trustworthy communists were recruited to keep under surveillance the suspect Tsarist officers re-employed in the Red Army as military specialists. To each officer at all levels of command from battalion upwards was appointed a political commissar of equivalent rank and authority, who was made responsible for the political reliability and military effectiveness of officers and men. This political officer had very wide powers, including that of veto of the military commander's orders.

Although the Soviet commissar organization lost some of its power in the days before World War II, Seaton noted that these commissars could, among other things, be "relied upon to report any deviationists or free thinkers."

It is fairly obvious that the Bush Regime has adopted the Soviet Union's commissar system when it comes to monitoring Federal agencies. And BushCo's commissar over at NASA appears to be a 24-year-old Bible-Beater with no background in science.

The NYTimes article makes several references to this particular presidential appointee, who back in October told a Web designer working for NASA to add the word "theory" after every mention of the Big Bang:

The Big Bang memo came from [George] Deutsch, a 24-year-old presidential appointee in the press office at NASA headquarters whose resume says he was an intern in the "war room" of the 2004 Bush-Cheney re-election campaign. A 2003 journalism graduate of Texas A&M, he was also the public-affairs officer who sought more control over Dr. Hansen's public statements.

In October 2005, Mr. Deutsch sent an e-mail message to Flint Wild, a NASA contractor working on a set of Web presentations about Einstein for middle-school students. The message said the word "theory" needed to be added after every mention of the Big Bang.

The Big Bang is "not proven fact; it is opinion," Mr. Deutsch wrote, adding, "It is not NASA's place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator."

It continued: "This is more than a science issue, it is a religious issue. And I would hate to think that young people would only be getting one-half of this debate from NASA. That would mean we had failed to properly educate the very people who rely on us for factual information the most."

Jesus, is it any wonder that the American educational system is in the toilet? Hell, NASA is being censored by a 24-year old kid who probably thinks (1) that the Earth is only 5000 years old and (2) that Jesus survived all those weeks in the desert by eating dinosaur meat.

Of course, young Comrade Deutsch did not respond to any e-mails or phone messages from the New York Times, but the White House did:

On Friday evening, repeated queries were made to the White House about how a young presidential appointee with no science background came to be supervising Web presentations on cosmology and interview requests to senior NASA scientists.

The only response came from Donald Tighe of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. "Science is respected and protected and highly valued by the administration," he said.

Bolsheviks.

Scooter Has A Defense Fund

From Tim Grieve at Salon:

It's good to have rich friends.

As Murray Waas raises new questions about what Dick Cheney knew about Niger, the Associated Press is reporting that Scooter Libby's legal defense fund has already received more than $2 million in donations to help him fight off charges that he lied about his role in outing Valerie Plame.

Barbara Comstock, the Republican strategist organizing the fund, hopes to raise a total of $5 million or $6 million for Libby's defense by the time his case goes to trial next year.

You might be thinking that that's a lot money. You'd be right. By the Los Angeles Times' math, $2 million would pay for the next 20 minutes of the war in Iraq.

Some Bad Numbers For Bush

Americans are finally starting to see the light:

A new Gallup Poll, conducted in late January, reveals that just 39% of Americans approve of the way President Bush is handling Iraq, with 58% disapproving.

Over half (53%) now say the administration "deliberately misled the American public about whether Iraq has weapons of mass destruction," with 46% disagreeing. Gallup notes that this finding is "essentially reversed" from one year ago.

Further, some 51% say the U.S. "made a mistake in sending troops to Iraq." Yet, despite this, only 17% expect a significant reduction of U.S. troops in Iraq in the next year.

Needless to say, this is a very bad development for Bush because the lack of WMD in Iraq is pretty much a settled story, meaning that 53% "deliberately misled" number has nowhere to go but up. And it certainly doesn't help that Americans are getting daily reminders that Bush lied his way into Iraq (e.g., a network co-anchor being seriously wounded there, American servicemen dying there on a routine basis, etc.).

God Help The United States Of America

The Guardian has some background information on what Bush and Blair were discussing prior to launching their illegal war against Iraq:

A memo of a two-hour meeting between the two leaders at the White House on January 31 2003 - nearly two months before the invasion - reveals that Mr Bush made it clear the US intended to invade whether or not there was a second resolution and even if UN inspectors found no evidence of a banned Iraqi weapons programme.

"The diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning", the president told Mr Blair. The prime minister is said to have raised no objection. He is quoted as saying he was "solidly with the president and ready to do whatever it took to disarm Saddam".

None of this should be too surprising to anyone, but there it is. Bush even wanted to fly U2 reconnaissance planes with fighter cover over Iraq, but have them painted in UN colors so if Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach of UN resolutions.

We have a lunatic running our country.

And speaking of lunacy, BushCo is seeking $120 billion more for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This announcement coincided with the death of five more American servicemen in Iraq, and occurred just after the Republican-controlled House voted to approve billions of dollars in cuts to student loan programs and Medicaid.

Very Cool Footage of Stardust Capsule Reentry

This video of the Stardust Capsule reentry was taken from onboard NASA's DC-8 Airborne Laboratory on January 15.

John Boehner Is The New Majority Leader

The House Republicans voted in John Boehner of Ohio as the new Majority Leader earlier today, replacing Tom DeLay, who resigned the leadership post in disgrace last month:

Boehner is an eight-term congressman from the Cincinnati area. He served in the GOP leadership after the Republicans won control of both houses of Congress in 1994, but he was bounced out after they lost seats in the 1998 elections.

He had offered himself as a reform candidate to succeed Tom DeLay, who faces money-laundering charges in his home state of Texas.

Boehner's ascension comes as other Republicans have raised concerns about an extensive influence-peddling probe involving lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who pleaded guilty to corruption charges in January and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors.

To be fair, DeLay technically did not resign, but merely decided not to reclaim the post. I just enjoy writing that he "resigned in disgrace." It sounds much better than "he decided not to reclaim the leadership post -- in disgrace."

By the way, I heard on CNN over the lunch hour that the Republicans had to re-do one of the votes because the number of votes counted the first time failed to match the actual number of Congressmen who were in the room voting.

No irony there, of course.

A Great Letter To The Editor

From today's Bend Bulletin (thanks for the heads-up, Roxy):

Since, by now, anyone with Internet access knows that Hillary Clinton's use of the term "plantation" merely echoes the use of that term by Newt Gingrich in October 1994 in describing the U.S. House of Representatives, it would be instructive if The Bulletin's editorial staff could unearth an editorial from that month and year indicating its unqualified distaste with this term as it did so recently in addressing Clinton's description of the Republicans' running of the House.

The running of this old editorial would establish The Bulletin's editorial staff as partisan observers instead of conservative lackeys, which an enlightened reader may assume, should this editorial not be forthcoming.

BushCo's State Of The Union Retraction

This article is interesting (via Kos):

One day after President Bush vowed to reduce America's dependence on Middle East oil by cutting imports from there 75 percent by 2025, his energy secretary and national economic adviser said Wednesday that the president didn't mean it literally.

What the president meant, they said in a conference call with reporters, was that alternative fuels could displace an amount of oil imports equivalent to most of what America is expected to import from the Middle East in 2025.

But America still would import oil from the Middle East, because that's where the greatest oil supplies are.

OK, it would be one thing if Bush blurted out something like this as he was walking to his helicopter, but this is the State of the Union address. I assume such an address is, you know, written out beforehand, reviewed by a lot of Administration officials, and perhaps practiced a time or two before delivery.

Obviously, someone -- an oil company executive or a member of the House of Saud -- called to complain about Bush's comment. Wouldn't it be great to have that kind of control over the White House?

UPDATE: It was the House of Saud.

I love it how foreigners are dictating policy over at the Executive Branch. Where's the right-wing outrage over this? Geebus, when a U.S. Supreme Court justice merely made a reference to the laws of other countries, pretty much every wingnut in the U.S. had a stroke.

UPDATE II: Denny Hastert has a great idea on how the oil companies can spend their record profits. He says they should use the money to make commercials explaining why their prices are so high. Meanwhile, Bush doesn't think it would be prudent for oil companies to reduce gas prices:

President Bush defended the huge profits of Exxon Mobil Corp. on Wednesday, saying they are simply the result of the marketplace and that consumers socked with soaring energy costs should not expect price breaks.

Tom Toles

By the way, AmericaBlog is attempting to confirm whether the Pentagon Joint Chiefs of Staff did actually send a menacing letter to the Washington Post over a Tom Toles cartoon. Could the Joint Chiefs be all out of joint (so to speak) over this Toles cartoon?

Interesting Article On TreasonGate Investigation

From the New York Daily News (via Josh Marshall):

CIA leak prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald collected 10,000 pages of documents - including the most sensitive terrorism memos in the U.S. government - from Vice President Cheney's office, he said in court papers released yesterday.

Without serving any warrants in his probe of who outed CIA officer Valerie Plame, Fitzgerald even obtained censored copies of the President's Daily Brief, the supersecret CIA threat memo for President Bush.

Now Lewis (Scooter) Libby, Cheney's disgraced former chief aide, is asking a court to force Fitzgerald to fork over all the documents to fight charges of perjury and lying to the FBI.

Libby will show that "any errors he made in his FBI interviews or grand jury testimony, months after the conversations, were the result of confusion, mistake or faulty memory rather than a willful intent to deceive," his lawyers argued.

The special counsel got the presidential briefing in his hunt for any files concerning Plame or her husband, Joe Wilson, a diplomat sent to Niger in 2002 to see whether the African regime sold uranium to Iraq.

Fitzgerald, who is fighting Libby's request, said in a letter to Libby's lawyers that many e-mails from Cheney's office at the time of the Plame leak in 2003 have been deleted contrary to White House policy.

As Josh Marshall points out, that last paragraph of the Post article is "a bit odd." Marshall continues:

Fitzgerald's letter says that "we have learned that not all email of the Office of Vice President and the Executive Office of President for certain time periods in 2003 was preserved through the normal archiving process on the White House computer system."

State Of The Union

Think Progress is reporting that last night's State of the Union Address "received the lowest level of positive reaction from viewers of President Bush’s tenure." I watched most of it. I loved the part when, after Bush mentioned that Congress failed to act on the BushCo plan to privatize social security, all the Democrats stood up and gave that comment a standing ovation. It was great.

But I'm finding it more difficult each day to watch Bush give a speech. And I'm not just saying that because I dislike him. I'm embarrassed to have Bush as our president. Other American generations had strong leadership during difficult times, but we get this guy. God must really hate us.

Anyway, I can certainly understand why last night's speech received the lowest level of positive reaction of any of Bush's SOTU addresses. As I've mentioned before, Bush likes to talk about how we are AT WAR, but his actions (tax cuts during "war-time," cuts in the Army Reserve, etc.) do not correspond with his talk. As I was listening to Bush speak, all I could think about was Grover Norquist's statement that he wants to of cut government "down to the size where we can drown it in the bath tub."

Well, that is not entirely true. I was also thinking about this article from Monday's Boston Globe, wherein the author asks a very important question:

Here is the embarrassing question: Is America actually at war? We have a war president, war hawks, war planes, war correspondents, war cries, even war crimes -- but do we have war? We have war dead, but the question remains. With young US soldiers being blown up almost daily, it can seem an absurd question, an offensive one. With thousands of Iraqis killed by American firepower, it can seem a heartless question, as if the dead care whether strict definitions of ''war" are fulfilled. There can be no question that Iraq is in a state of war, and that, whatever its elements of post-Saddam sectarian conflict, the warfare is being driven from the Pentagon.

In his speech last night, Bush cited the War on Terror, saying, among other things, that "we will never surrender to evil." It is this War On Terror that BushCo uses to justify its illegal "Terrorist Surveillance Program." But as the Boston Globe piece points out:

[T]he war on terrorism is not real war either, since the Pentagon has proven itself incapable of actually engaging Al Qaeda. That, of course, is because Al Qaeda is a free floating nihilism, not a nation, or even a network. Al Qaeda is a rejectionist idea to which deracinated miscreants are drawn, like filings to a magnet, but that drawing power is generated in Washington. Bin Laden was a self-mythologized figure of no historic standing until George W. Bush designated him America's equal by defining 9/11 as an act of war to be met with war, instead of a crime to be met with criminal justice. But this over-reaction, so satisfying at the time to the wounded American psyche, turned into the war for which the other party simply did not show up. Which is, of course, why we are blasting a substitute Iraq to smithereens.

I would love it if the Democrats started talking this way, but I doubt that a single one of them has the guts.