"Kick the darkness till it bleeds daylight." - Bruce Cockburn
Friday, August 31, 2007
Poor Fredo
He probably thought that quitting would let him get away with it.
Running away doesn't make the perjury disappear.
Justice Dept. Probing Whether Gonzales Lied
The Justice Department's inspector general indicated yesterday that he is investigating whether departing Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales gave false or misleading testimony to Congress, including whether he lied under oath about warrantless surveillance and the firings of nine U.S. attorneys.
Running away doesn't make the perjury disappear.
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Surprise, Surprise: The surge isn't working.
Ok - so we were supposed to wait till September. Keep in mind that the purported reason for the escalation was to give the Iraqi Government a chance to meet benchmarks.
Here's a prediction:
1) Every agency and group with a hand in auditing this thing will release a report or statement saying that the "surge" is NOT working.
2) Then Petraeus, on September 15th, will issue a report that comes straight out of fantasyland, saying that it's going EXACTLY as planned.
3) And the press will fail to question the General's integrity or the honesty of his report.
I'll give you odds.
WASHINGTON - Congressional auditors have determined that the Iraqi government has failed to meet the vast majority of political and military goals laid out by lawmakers to assess President Bush's Iraq war strategy, The Associated Press has learned.
Here's a prediction:
1) Every agency and group with a hand in auditing this thing will release a report or statement saying that the "surge" is NOT working.
2) Then Petraeus, on September 15th, will issue a report that comes straight out of fantasyland, saying that it's going EXACTLY as planned.
3) And the press will fail to question the General's integrity or the honesty of his report.
I'll give you odds.
Friday, August 24, 2007
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Put on a happy face
WASHINGTON - The Iraqi government will become more precarious over the next six to 12 months and its security forces have not improved enough to operate without outside help, intelligence analysts conclude in a new National Intelligence Estimate.
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Deuling Quotes
There's the video of him saying it below, but I'll repeat the text:
Well, the people are demanding that we get the hell out of Iraq, of course.
This is part of the reason why:
True enough, dude. But you ALSO don't have the right to have the American military propping up your worthless ass.
Ok - no timetables. Let's get the hell out.
"There's a process taking place, and the fundamental question is, will the government respond to the demands of the people? And if the government doesn't respond to the demands of the people, they will replace the government."
Well, the people are demanding that we get the hell out of Iraq, of course.
This is part of the reason why:
"No one has the right to place timetables on the Iraq government. It was elected by its people." - Al-Maliki
True enough, dude. But you ALSO don't have the right to have the American military propping up your worthless ass.
Ok - no timetables. Let's get the hell out.
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
The war through the eyes of some soldiers.
"As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day."
Here.
Obama wants to ease Cuba embargo
I'm surprised. This is actually kind of gutty, and shows some leadership:
He's right, of course, but it's probably VERY risky to say so, and it can lose Florida easily.
But good for him. About time we see some guts.
MIAMI (AP) - Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is leaping into the long-running Cuba debate by calling for the U.S. to ease restrictions for Cuban-Americans who want to visit the island or send money home.
Obama's campaign said Monday that, if elected, the Illinois senator would lift restrictions imposed by the Bush administration and allow Cuban-Americans to visit their relatives more frequently, as well as ease limits on the amount of money they can send to their families.
``Senator Obama feels that the Bush administration has made a humanitarian and a strategic blunder,'' spokeswoman Jen Psaki said in an e-mail. ``His concern is that this has had a profoundly negative impact on the Cuban people, making them more dependent on the Castro regime, thus isolating them from the transformative message carried by Cuban-Americans.''
He's right, of course, but it's probably VERY risky to say so, and it can lose Florida easily.
But good for him. About time we see some guts.
Monday, August 20, 2007
Uhhh....yeah
GOD, I would like to see the Democrats DO something besides bluster.
And how many times do these people have to jerk your chain before you realize that YOU'RE BEING MADE A DAMNED FOOL OF?
"You'd PREFER cooperation"? Well, you're NOT GOING TO GET IT. What, Leahy - do they have to call you on the phone and actually tell you to go fuck yourself?
Oh, my bad - they actually DID tell you to go fuck yourself. IN THOSE WORDS.
And you're STILL waiting for cooperation?
It STILL wasn't enough for you to figure it out?
What the hell ARE you - an abused wife or something?
GROW SOME DAMNED BALLS.
How did I get stuck in a party of such spineless cowards?
During a press conference this afternoon, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) announced that the White House had still not responded to the committee's subpoena for documents relating to the legal basis for the warrantless surveillance program. "Time is up," Leahy said, "we've waited long enough." He went on to say, however, that he remained open to cooperating with the White House for the production of the documents: "I prefer cooperation to contempt." But if the administration has still not responded to the subpoena by September when Congress returns from recess, he said that he would pursue contempt proceedings in the committee "if that's what it takes."
And how many times do these people have to jerk your chain before you realize that YOU'RE BEING MADE A DAMNED FOOL OF?
"You'd PREFER cooperation"? Well, you're NOT GOING TO GET IT. What, Leahy - do they have to call you on the phone and actually tell you to go fuck yourself?
Oh, my bad - they actually DID tell you to go fuck yourself. IN THOSE WORDS.
And you're STILL waiting for cooperation?
It STILL wasn't enough for you to figure it out?
What the hell ARE you - an abused wife or something?
GROW SOME DAMNED BALLS.
How did I get stuck in a party of such spineless cowards?
Bush should join the Taliban
If he hurts them as much as he's hurt America, he'll be doing us a huge favor.
WASHINGTON - Sapped by nearly six years of war, the Army has nearly exhausted its fighting force and its options if the Bush administration decides to extend the Iraq buildup beyond next spring.
Sunday, August 19, 2007
Nuts To You
Since Merv Griffin just died and I said nothing about it, I thought I'd make up for that by posting him singing "I've Got A Lovely Bunch Of Coconuts." How's THAT for service?
Frank Rich
Brought to you from behind the New York Times' wall.
He Got Out While the Getting Was Good
Karl Rove’s departure was both abrupt and fast. The ritualistic “for the sake of my family” rationale convinced no one.
Frank Rich
OP-ED COLUMNIST
The New York Times
August 19, 2007
BACK in those heady days of late summer 2002, Andrew Card, then the president's chief of staff, told The New York Times why the much-anticipated push for war in Iraq hadn't yet arrived. "You don't introduce new products in August," he said, sounding like the mouthpiece for the Big Three automakers he once was. Sure enough, with an efficiency Detroit can only envy, the manufactured aluminum tubes and mushroom clouds rolled off the White House assembly line after Labor Day like clockwork.
Five summers later, we have the flip side of the Card corollary: You do recall defective products in August, whether you're Mattel or the Bush administration. Karl Rove's departure was both abrupt and fast. The ritualistic "for the sake of my family" rationale convinced no one, and the decision to leak the news in a friendly print interview (on The Wall Street Journal's op-ed page) rather than announce it in a White House spotlight came off as furtive. Inquiring Rove haters wanted to know: Was he one step ahead of yet another major new scandal? Was a Congressional investigation at last about to draw blood?
Perhaps, but the Republican reaction to Mr. Rove's departure is more revealing than the cries from his longtime critics. No G.O.P. presidential candidates paid tribute to Mr. Rove, and, except in the die-hard Bush bastions of Murdochland present (The Weekly Standard, Fox News) and future (The Journal), the conservative commentariat was often surprisingly harsh. It is this condemnation of Rove from his own ideological camp — not the Democrats' familiar litany about his corruption, polarizing partisanship, dirty tricks, etc. — that the White House and Mr. Rove wanted to bury in the August dog days.
What the Rove critics on the right recognize is that it may be even more difficult for their political party to dig out of his wreckage than it will be for America. Their angry bill of grievances only sporadically overlaps that of the Democrats. One popular conservative blogger, Michelle Malkin, mocked Mr. Rove and his interviewer, Paul Gigot, for ignoring "the Harriet Miers debacle, the botching of the Dubai ports battle, or the undeniable stumbles in post-Iraq invasion policies," not to mention "the spectacular disaster of the illegal alien shamnesty." Ms. Malkin, an Asian-American in her 30s, comes from a far different place than the Gigot-Fred Barnes-William Kristol axis of Bush-era ideological lock step.
Those Bush dead-enders are in a serious state of denial. Just how much so could be found in the Journal interview when Mr. Rove extolled his party's health by arguing, without contradiction from Mr. Gigot, that young people are more "pro-life" and "free-market" than their elders. Maybe he was talking about 12-year-olds. Back in the real world of potential voters, the latest New York Times-CBS News poll of Americans aged 17 to 29 found that their views on abortion were almost identical to the rest of the country's. (Only 24 percent want abortion outlawed.)
That poll also found that the percentage of young people who identify as Republicans, whether free-marketers or not, is down to 25, from a high of 37 at the end of the Reagan era. Tony Fabrizio, a Republican pollster, found that self-identified G.O.P. voters are trending older rapidly, with the percentage over age 55 jumping from 28 to 41 percent in a decade.
Every poll and demographic accounting finds the Republican Party on the losing side of history, both politically and culturally. Not even a miraculous armistice in Iraq or vintage Democratic incompetence may be able to ride to the rescue. A survey conducted by The Journal itself (with NBC News) in June reported G.O.P. approval numbers lower than any in that poll's two decades of existence. Such is the political legacy for a party to which Mr. Rove sold Mr. Bush as "a new kind of Republican," an exemplar of "compassionate conservatism" and the avatar of a permanent Republican majority.
That sales pitch, as we long ago learned, was all about packaging, not substance. The hope was that No Child Left Behind and a 2000 G.O.P. convention stacked with break dancers and gospel singers would peel away some independent and black voters from the Democrats. The promise of immigration reform would spread Bush's popularity among Hispanics. Another potential add-on to the Republican base was Muslims, a growing constituency that Mr. Rove's pal Grover Norquist plotted to herd into the coalition.
The rest is history. Any prospect of a rapprochement between the G.O.P. and African-Americans died in the New Orleans Superdome. The tardy, botched immigration initiative unleashed a wave of xenophobia against Hispanics, the fastest-growing voting bloc in the country. The Muslim outreach project disappeared into the memory hole after 9/11.
Forced to pick a single symbolic episode to encapsulate the collapse of Rovian Republicanism, however, I would not choose any of those national watersheds, or even the implosion of the Iraq war, but the George Allen "macaca" moment. Its first anniversary fell, fittingly enough, on the same day last weekend that Mitt Romney bought his victory at the desultory, poorly attended G.O.P. straw poll in Iowa.
A century seems to have passed since Mr. Allen, the Virginia Republican running for re-election to the Senate, was anointed by Washington insiders as the inevitable heir to the Bush-Rove mantle: a former governor whose jus'-folks personality, the Bushian camouflage for hard-edged conservatism, would propel him to the White House. Mr. Allen's senatorial campaign and presidential future melted down overnight after he insulted a Jim Webb campaign worker, the 20-year-old son of Indian immigrants, not just by calling him a monkey but by sarcastically welcoming him "to America" and "the real world of Virginia."
This incident had resonance well beyond Virginia and Mr. Allen for several reasons. First, it crystallized the monochromatic whiteness at the dark heart of Rovian Republicanism. For all the minstrel antics at the 2000 convention, the record speaks for itself: there is not a single black Republican serving in either the House or Senate, and little representation of other minorities, either. Far from looking like America, the G.O.P. caucus, like the party's presidential field, could pass for a Rotary Club, circa 1954. Meanwhile, a new census analysis released this month finds that nonwhites now make up a majority in nearly a third of the nation's most populous counties, with Houston overtaking Los Angeles in black population and metropolitan Chicago surpassing Honolulu in Asian residents. Even small towns and rural America are exploding in Hispanic growth.
Second, the Allen slur was a compact distillation of the brute nastiness of the Bush-Rove years, all that ostentatious "compassion" notwithstanding. Mr. Bush and Mr. Rove are not xenophobes, but the record will show that their White House spoke up too late and said too little when some of its political allies descended into Mexican-bashing during the immigration brawl. Mr. Bush and Mr. Rove winked at anti-immigrant bigotry, much as they did at the homophobia they inflamed with their incessant election-year demagoguery about same-sex marriage.
Finally, the "macaca" incident was a media touchstone. It became a national phenomenon when the video landed on YouTube, the rollicking Web site whose reach now threatens mainstream news outlets. A year later, leading Republicans are still clueless and panicked about this new medium, which is why they, unlike their Democratic counterparts, pulled out of even a tightly controlled CNN-YouTube debate. It took smart young conservative bloggers like a former Republican National Committee operative, Patrick Ruffini, to shame them into reinstating the debate for November, lest the entire G.O.P. field look as pathetically out of touch as it is.
The rise of YouTube certifies the passing of Mr. Rove's era, a cultural changing of the guard in the digital age. Mr. Rove made his name in direct-mail fund-raising and with fierce top-down message management. As the Internet erodes snail mail, so it upends direct mail. As YouTube threatens a politician's ability to rigidly control a message, so it threatens the Rove ethos that led Mr. Bush to campaign at "town hall" meetings attended only by hand-picked supporters.
It's no coincidence that this new culture is also threatening the Beltway journalistic establishment that celebrated Mr. Rove's invincibility well past its expiration date (much as it did James Carville's before him), extolling what Joshua Green, in his superb new Rove article in The Atlantic, calls the Cult of the Consultant. The YouTube video of Mr. Rove impersonating a rapper at one of those black-tie correspondents' dinners makes the Washington press corps look even more antediluvian than he is.
Last weekend's Iowa straw poll was a more somber but equally anachronistic spectacle. Again, it's a young conservative commentator, Ryan Sager, writing in The New York Sun, who put it best: "The face of the Republican Party in Iowa is the face of a losing party, full of hatred toward immigrants, lust for government subsidies, and the demand that any Republican seeking the office of the presidency acknowledge that he's little more than Jesus Christ's running mate."
That face, at once contemptuous and greedy and self-righteous, is Karl Rove's face. Unless someone in his party rolls out a revolutionary new product, it is indelible enough to serve as the Republican brand for a generation.
He Got Out While the Getting Was Good
Karl Rove’s departure was both abrupt and fast. The ritualistic “for the sake of my family” rationale convinced no one.
Frank Rich
OP-ED COLUMNIST
The New York Times
August 19, 2007
BACK in those heady days of late summer 2002, Andrew Card, then the president's chief of staff, told The New York Times why the much-anticipated push for war in Iraq hadn't yet arrived. "You don't introduce new products in August," he said, sounding like the mouthpiece for the Big Three automakers he once was. Sure enough, with an efficiency Detroit can only envy, the manufactured aluminum tubes and mushroom clouds rolled off the White House assembly line after Labor Day like clockwork.
Five summers later, we have the flip side of the Card corollary: You do recall defective products in August, whether you're Mattel or the Bush administration. Karl Rove's departure was both abrupt and fast. The ritualistic "for the sake of my family" rationale convinced no one, and the decision to leak the news in a friendly print interview (on The Wall Street Journal's op-ed page) rather than announce it in a White House spotlight came off as furtive. Inquiring Rove haters wanted to know: Was he one step ahead of yet another major new scandal? Was a Congressional investigation at last about to draw blood?
Perhaps, but the Republican reaction to Mr. Rove's departure is more revealing than the cries from his longtime critics. No G.O.P. presidential candidates paid tribute to Mr. Rove, and, except in the die-hard Bush bastions of Murdochland present (The Weekly Standard, Fox News) and future (The Journal), the conservative commentariat was often surprisingly harsh. It is this condemnation of Rove from his own ideological camp — not the Democrats' familiar litany about his corruption, polarizing partisanship, dirty tricks, etc. — that the White House and Mr. Rove wanted to bury in the August dog days.
What the Rove critics on the right recognize is that it may be even more difficult for their political party to dig out of his wreckage than it will be for America. Their angry bill of grievances only sporadically overlaps that of the Democrats. One popular conservative blogger, Michelle Malkin, mocked Mr. Rove and his interviewer, Paul Gigot, for ignoring "the Harriet Miers debacle, the botching of the Dubai ports battle, or the undeniable stumbles in post-Iraq invasion policies," not to mention "the spectacular disaster of the illegal alien shamnesty." Ms. Malkin, an Asian-American in her 30s, comes from a far different place than the Gigot-Fred Barnes-William Kristol axis of Bush-era ideological lock step.
Those Bush dead-enders are in a serious state of denial. Just how much so could be found in the Journal interview when Mr. Rove extolled his party's health by arguing, without contradiction from Mr. Gigot, that young people are more "pro-life" and "free-market" than their elders. Maybe he was talking about 12-year-olds. Back in the real world of potential voters, the latest New York Times-CBS News poll of Americans aged 17 to 29 found that their views on abortion were almost identical to the rest of the country's. (Only 24 percent want abortion outlawed.)
That poll also found that the percentage of young people who identify as Republicans, whether free-marketers or not, is down to 25, from a high of 37 at the end of the Reagan era. Tony Fabrizio, a Republican pollster, found that self-identified G.O.P. voters are trending older rapidly, with the percentage over age 55 jumping from 28 to 41 percent in a decade.
Every poll and demographic accounting finds the Republican Party on the losing side of history, both politically and culturally. Not even a miraculous armistice in Iraq or vintage Democratic incompetence may be able to ride to the rescue. A survey conducted by The Journal itself (with NBC News) in June reported G.O.P. approval numbers lower than any in that poll's two decades of existence. Such is the political legacy for a party to which Mr. Rove sold Mr. Bush as "a new kind of Republican," an exemplar of "compassionate conservatism" and the avatar of a permanent Republican majority.
That sales pitch, as we long ago learned, was all about packaging, not substance. The hope was that No Child Left Behind and a 2000 G.O.P. convention stacked with break dancers and gospel singers would peel away some independent and black voters from the Democrats. The promise of immigration reform would spread Bush's popularity among Hispanics. Another potential add-on to the Republican base was Muslims, a growing constituency that Mr. Rove's pal Grover Norquist plotted to herd into the coalition.
The rest is history. Any prospect of a rapprochement between the G.O.P. and African-Americans died in the New Orleans Superdome. The tardy, botched immigration initiative unleashed a wave of xenophobia against Hispanics, the fastest-growing voting bloc in the country. The Muslim outreach project disappeared into the memory hole after 9/11.
Forced to pick a single symbolic episode to encapsulate the collapse of Rovian Republicanism, however, I would not choose any of those national watersheds, or even the implosion of the Iraq war, but the George Allen "macaca" moment. Its first anniversary fell, fittingly enough, on the same day last weekend that Mitt Romney bought his victory at the desultory, poorly attended G.O.P. straw poll in Iowa.
A century seems to have passed since Mr. Allen, the Virginia Republican running for re-election to the Senate, was anointed by Washington insiders as the inevitable heir to the Bush-Rove mantle: a former governor whose jus'-folks personality, the Bushian camouflage for hard-edged conservatism, would propel him to the White House. Mr. Allen's senatorial campaign and presidential future melted down overnight after he insulted a Jim Webb campaign worker, the 20-year-old son of Indian immigrants, not just by calling him a monkey but by sarcastically welcoming him "to America" and "the real world of Virginia."
This incident had resonance well beyond Virginia and Mr. Allen for several reasons. First, it crystallized the monochromatic whiteness at the dark heart of Rovian Republicanism. For all the minstrel antics at the 2000 convention, the record speaks for itself: there is not a single black Republican serving in either the House or Senate, and little representation of other minorities, either. Far from looking like America, the G.O.P. caucus, like the party's presidential field, could pass for a Rotary Club, circa 1954. Meanwhile, a new census analysis released this month finds that nonwhites now make up a majority in nearly a third of the nation's most populous counties, with Houston overtaking Los Angeles in black population and metropolitan Chicago surpassing Honolulu in Asian residents. Even small towns and rural America are exploding in Hispanic growth.
Second, the Allen slur was a compact distillation of the brute nastiness of the Bush-Rove years, all that ostentatious "compassion" notwithstanding. Mr. Bush and Mr. Rove are not xenophobes, but the record will show that their White House spoke up too late and said too little when some of its political allies descended into Mexican-bashing during the immigration brawl. Mr. Bush and Mr. Rove winked at anti-immigrant bigotry, much as they did at the homophobia they inflamed with their incessant election-year demagoguery about same-sex marriage.
Finally, the "macaca" incident was a media touchstone. It became a national phenomenon when the video landed on YouTube, the rollicking Web site whose reach now threatens mainstream news outlets. A year later, leading Republicans are still clueless and panicked about this new medium, which is why they, unlike their Democratic counterparts, pulled out of even a tightly controlled CNN-YouTube debate. It took smart young conservative bloggers like a former Republican National Committee operative, Patrick Ruffini, to shame them into reinstating the debate for November, lest the entire G.O.P. field look as pathetically out of touch as it is.
The rise of YouTube certifies the passing of Mr. Rove's era, a cultural changing of the guard in the digital age. Mr. Rove made his name in direct-mail fund-raising and with fierce top-down message management. As the Internet erodes snail mail, so it upends direct mail. As YouTube threatens a politician's ability to rigidly control a message, so it threatens the Rove ethos that led Mr. Bush to campaign at "town hall" meetings attended only by hand-picked supporters.
It's no coincidence that this new culture is also threatening the Beltway journalistic establishment that celebrated Mr. Rove's invincibility well past its expiration date (much as it did James Carville's before him), extolling what Joshua Green, in his superb new Rove article in The Atlantic, calls the Cult of the Consultant. The YouTube video of Mr. Rove impersonating a rapper at one of those black-tie correspondents' dinners makes the Washington press corps look even more antediluvian than he is.
Last weekend's Iowa straw poll was a more somber but equally anachronistic spectacle. Again, it's a young conservative commentator, Ryan Sager, writing in The New York Sun, who put it best: "The face of the Republican Party in Iowa is the face of a losing party, full of hatred toward immigrants, lust for government subsidies, and the demand that any Republican seeking the office of the presidency acknowledge that he's little more than Jesus Christ's running mate."
That face, at once contemptuous and greedy and self-righteous, is Karl Rove's face. Unless someone in his party rolls out a revolutionary new product, it is indelible enough to serve as the Republican brand for a generation.
Saturday, August 18, 2007
Not enough ammunition
Thanks to the Iraq war, the National Guard isn't here for domestic crises, and the cops don't have enough bullets.
RALEIGH, N.C. -- Troops training for and fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are firing more than 1 billion bullets a year, contributing to ammunition shortages hitting police departments nationwide and preventing some officers from training with the weapons they carry on patrol.
Serious comedy
'Daily Show' to air reports from Iraq
NEW YORK -- "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart," whose phony news coverage has long included phony "remotes" from war-torn Iraq, will be reporting from Iraq for real next week.
How messed up are things when a COMEDIAN is the only one actually reporting the news?
It's like we're trapped in a Shakespeare play - only the Fool can tell the truth.
Friday, August 17, 2007
Pooooor George
They made fun of his CLOTHES.
Saith Think Progress:
And you KNOW that strutting around in costumes is about the only damned thing he cares about. Obviously, they wounded the little boy's vanity.
(By the way, George, that get-up really DOES look pretty damned dorky. Most of us stopped being impressed by crap like that when we were sixteen.)
Saith Think Progress:
After Marques Harper of the Austin American- Statesman wrote a short style piece critiquing Bush’s choice of clothing while he down’s on the Crawford ranch, noting that lately “he’s opted to look more like ‘Walker, Texas Ranger’ than a sweaty, tough ranch hand.” Harper said after the article appeared, the White House called to express its disdain:
Harper received a phone call that morning from White House deputy press secretary Dana Perino, who, Harper told friends, said the president read the article and was unhappy about the way he was portrayed.
And you KNOW that strutting around in costumes is about the only damned thing he cares about. Obviously, they wounded the little boy's vanity.
(By the way, George, that get-up really DOES look pretty damned dorky. Most of us stopped being impressed by crap like that when we were sixteen.)
Cheney: "Who gives a rat's ass?"
From Raw Story. Originally seen on Kathie Costos who is now Screaming in an Empty Room.
Got that? His remarks don't matter because he was only Secretary of Defense.
And I guess that's not a whole fourth branch of Government like the Vice-President is, so what the hell?
Cheney shrugs off 1994 remarks about Iraq
A local CBS affiliate who called Vice President Cheney's office asking why Cheney said in 1994 that the US should not invade Iraq actually got a reply.
"He was not Vice President at the time, it was after he was Secretary of Defense," a spokesperson told CBS 5 San Francisco. "I don't have any comment."
Got that? His remarks don't matter because he was only Secretary of Defense.
And I guess that's not a whole fourth branch of Government like the Vice-President is, so what the hell?
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
“If Rove is so smart, how come you lost Congress?” - Bill Plante to George Bush during the resignation announcement
Hillary kicks ass.
GOOD.
And not only did she kick ass, but when the Idiot In The White House tried to cow her with phony indignation, she smacked him BACK. Hard.
Not only do I hope she keeps saying it, I hope every other spineless Democrats picks up on it, and starts saying it, too.
And not only did she kick ass, but when the Idiot In The White House tried to cow her with phony indignation, she smacked him BACK. Hard.
The ad, which started running in Iowa Tuesday, shows Clinton at a recent campaign rally saying, "If you're a family that is struggling and you don't have health care, you are invisible to this president. If you're a single mom trying to find affordable child care so you can go to work, you're invisible too."
The ad, which started running in Iowa Tuesday, shows Clinton at a recent campaign rally saying, "If you're a family that is struggling and you don't have health care, you are invisible to this president. If you're a single mom trying to find affordable child care so you can go to work, you're invisible too."
She is also seen saying the president treats the troops in "Iraq and Afghanistan as though they were invisible as well."
White House spokeswoman Dana Perino sharply fired back to the Clinton's allegations Tuesday in a press conference, saying "This is a president who, first and foremost, has helped millions of seniors across the country have access to prescription drugs at a much lower cost."
"As to whether or not our troops are invisible to this president, I think that is absurd and that it is unconscionable that a member of Congress would say such a thing," Perino added.
The Clinton campaign seemed delighted the White House highlighted the ad, immediately flagging Perino's comments on its Web site with the headline, "White House Attacks Hillary's New Ad."
Clinton herself shot back at the Perino's comments while campaigning in Dubuque, Iowa Tuesday, according to the Associated Press.
"Apparently I've struck a nerve, the White House just attacked me a few minutes ago," she said. "Not only have I said it and am saying it, I will keep saying it because I happen to believe it."
Not only do I hope she keeps saying it, I hope every other spineless Democrats picks up on it, and starts saying it, too.
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Heh.
Chapel Hill, North Carolina – John Edwards today released the following statement in reaction to President Bush’s announcement that his senior advisor, Karl Rove, will resign at the end of the month:
"Goodbye, good riddance."
Godspeed, Scooter
Philip Francis Rizzuto 1917 – 2007, RIP
Yeah, it's not politics.
This one actually hurts.
Rest In Peace. You earned it.
Thanks for the memories.
Yeah, it's not politics.
This one actually hurts.
Rest In Peace. You earned it.
Thanks for the memories.
Monday, August 13, 2007
Rove is quitting
Well, THIS is an interesting thing to wake up to:
Wants to spend more time with his family and all that.
I was happy when I read this, but I think the Universal Huzzahs from all of Left Blogistan make it out to be more than it is. He ISN'T going to jail, which would make me huzzah. This removes him from the heat, which will only increase. And Bush's political career is over. Which is probably why he's leaving. I suspect he will re-emerge as the political advisor for one of the Republican candidates.
Still - good riddance, you porcine sack of guts.
Karl Rove to resign at end of August
Wants to spend more time with his family and all that.
I was happy when I read this, but I think the Universal Huzzahs from all of Left Blogistan make it out to be more than it is. He ISN'T going to jail, which would make me huzzah. This removes him from the heat, which will only increase. And Bush's political career is over. Which is probably why he's leaving. I suspect he will re-emerge as the political advisor for one of the Republican candidates.
Still - good riddance, you porcine sack of guts.
Sunday, August 12, 2007
Alternate Universe
Here is Dick Cheney in 1994, explaining exactly what would happen if we invaded Iraq. He got it dead right. He even uses the word "quagmire."
Dick Cheney knew exactly what would happen if we invaded Iraq. And he didn't care.
Dick Cheney knew exactly what would happen if we invaded Iraq. And he didn't care.
Saturday, August 11, 2007
Friday, August 10, 2007
What a total frigging jerk.
Total.
I didn't like him as mayor, but was he THIS BIG of a jackass?
"I was at Ground Zero as often, if not more, than most of the workers. I was there working with them. I was exposed to exactly the same things they were exposed to. So in that sense, I'm one of them." - Giuliani
I didn't like him as mayor, but was he THIS BIG of a jackass?
Bush to vets: Thanks and F You.
"We support the troops as long as it doesn't cost us anything."
School Aid for Vets Opposed by Bush Administration
Alexandra Bahou and Anna Schecter report for ABC News: "The Bush administration opposes a Democratic effort to restore full educational benefits for returning veterans, according to an official's comments last week."
Will somebody tell Bush...
...to stop making speeches about how healthy the economy is? He sounds EXACTLY like when he told us how good things were going in Iraq, and it's scaring the crap out of people.
Friday, August 03, 2007
Boor-in-Chief
Saw this on archy.
Why doesn't the American press call this rude moron on his rude behavior?
Why doesn't the American press call this rude moron on his rude behavior?
At a recent press conference at Camp David, President George Bush insulted BBC political editor Nick Robinson, the Daily Mirror reports.
Robinson, who has asked Bush pointed questions in the past such as whetherthe president was “in denial” over the Iraq war, posed a question to Bush about whether he could trust visiting British Prime Minister Gordon Brown not to “cut and run” from Iraq.
Bush replied with a dismissal: “Are you still hanging around?”
Later on, Bush poked fun at the bare-pate of Robinson, joking, “You’d better cover up your bald head, it’s getting hot out.”
The respected British reporter shot back, “I didn’t know you cared.”
Bush responded with a cool, “I don’t.” The Mirror reports that Bush then “snorted disdainfully” and “walked away to laughter.”
Wednesday, August 01, 2007
Barack Attack.
WASHINGTON (Aug. 1) - Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said Wednesday that he would send troops into Pakistan to hunt down terrorists even without local permission if warranted - an attempt to show strength when his chief rival has described his foreign policy skills as naive.
The Illinois senator warned Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf that he must do more to shut down terrorist operations in his country and evict foreign fighters under an Obama presidency, or Pakistan will risk a U.S. troop invasion and losing hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. military aid.
"Let me make this clear," Obama said in a speech at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. "There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al-Qaida leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will."
In the first place, Obama is absolutely right. If Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda have found a haven in Pakistan, we MUST go get them, and if our supposed "ally" refuses to help, he obviously isn't our ally.
And Musharraf is in his sixties and holding on to power rather tenuously. What happens when he dies or is deposed? You don't think Al Qaeda will actually make a play to get some REAL power? That's a nuclear country Al Qaeda has a foothold in. They actually HAVE WMDs.
BUT - I also want to draw attention to something that the press does constantly:
"Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said Wednesday that he would send troops into Pakistan to hunt down terrorists even without local permission if warranted - an attempt to show strength when his chief rival has described his foreign policy skills as naive."
The writer of the article can't possibly know that.
They make their guesses about candidates' motives part of the actual story, and repeat those guesses as fact - as though it isn't POSSIBLE that any candidate ever says something simply because he believes it. EVERYTHING must be viewed purely through the prism of political calculation.
The REPORTERS are that cynical and without principle, so their reporting includes the presumption that everybody else is, too.
Corrupt, corrupt, corrupt
"Ignore the law for Republican contributors, or we'll fire you."
The night before the government secured a guilty plea from the manufacturer of the addictive painkiller OxyContin, a senior Justice Department official called the U.S. attorney handling the case and, at the behest of an executive for the drugmaker, urged him to slow down, the prosecutor told the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday.
John L. Brownlee, the U.S. attorney in Roanoke, testified that he was at home the evening of Oct. 24 when he received the call on his cellphone from Michael J. Elston, then chief of staff to the deputy attorney general and one of the Justice aides involved in the removal of nine U.S. attorneys last year.
Brownlee settled the case anyway. Eight days later, his name appeared on a list compiled by Elston of prosecutors that officials had suggested be fired.
Big Fratboy is Watching You
Mike McConnell, director of National Intelligence, wrote a letter to Arlen Specter (R - Sane But Spineless), attempting a rather pathetic defense of Gonzales. The pathetic defense ("Terrorist Surveillance Program might not mean Terrorist Surveillance Program") seems to be the story.
The story is that McConnell admitted that Bush has been doing tons of surveillance that nobody knew about, and which has no oversight.
The story is that McConnell admitted that Bush has been doing tons of surveillance that nobody knew about, and which has no oversight.
Lest we forget
Fuel tanker blast kills at least 50 in Baghdad
60 more wounded hours after separate car bomb kills 17 civilians
60 more wounded hours after separate car bomb kills 17 civilians
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