Torture And The Laws Bush Won't Even Pretend to Follow

At the same time he stands by his unmitigated nerve to cry foul against Russia in 2001 for its human rights abuses (talk about the skanky pot calling the Putey-Put kettle black), Bush wants everyone to notice he's "making illegal" what was already illegal to do but which he practices with all the fervor of a Republican Christian moralist paying a dominatrix for kinky sex (can you say William "Morals Czar" Bennett, anyone?).

Thus, may we assume (oh, yeaaaaahhhhh!) that President Bush signed a new law designed to "stop" torture in interrogations used against detainees and so-called terror suspects using invisible ink, with his fingers crossed behind his hand, AND with a signing statement that says, "this law applies only to Democrats and others not named Bush & Cheney"?

Meanwhile, the CIA is now allowed to return to interrogating whoever the hell they want, after many appropriate (and too many unasked) questions arose about how they conducted them.

Star Wars II: Bush's Dangerous Missile Shield Plan

More than 20 years ago, Ronald Reagan, already clearly well into the slide into the mental abyss of Alzheimer's Disease (and sadly, I suspect he was incompetent possibly well BEFORE the start of his 2nd term), pushed the Star Wars defense shield program while all the experts said it would not work.

Now, Bush is pushing it - in a measure he started the summer of 9/11 in his first major divide with the rest of the world - in a way that not only costs many, many times more than Reagan's while even less apt to "work", but he's winning whole new enemies. These enemies include, perhaps, nearly every world leader at the G-8 summit.

Only George W. Bush Could Work So Hard To ReStart The Cold War

With all the press the last few days about how Bush - who once infamously informed us that he had looked into former KGB superspy and now Russian president Vladimir Putin's heart and discerned it was "good" - is feuding with Putey-put (Bush's nickname for him), my biggest question is why it took the American press so damned long to notice.

For several years now, Putin has been warning the U.S. that he would not be the same lapdog for Bush as was Not-So-Great Britain's Tony Blair had been, which may explain why Blair is out but Putin's enjoying better-than-ever popularity in his own part of the world. Putin was against U.S. involvement in Iraq and has stated fervently that Russia would not just sit back and watch Bush go after Iran. On top of that, Russia was forced to write off HUGE amounts of money owed Russia from Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

But let's be clear about one thing. Despite all the talk since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the cold war did not magically end that day. It couldn't, not with the massive amounts of profit the military industrial complex has made and will still make. If anything, the cold war has morphed into a much larger entity, one whose face isn't always Eastern European. We also perhaps have never seen a president like Bush so horrifically eager to wage war for ego alone (but his friends, of course, profit wildly from his ego).

Let me also point you to Words of Power, a blog I just happened upon, and their specific piece about the Cold War's thaw.

Good Night, Boris

Boris Yeltsin, a controversial figure in the former USSR as well as the Russia post-breakup, has died.

I actually have some positive things to say about him, but it's hard for me to post them in light of how he handed the country over to Vladimir Putin who I think is very destructive for his country and the world (and not just because he was former bestest friends with Bush who calls him Putey-Put).