Post 'em here --- if you dare.
Me? I have no New Year's Resolution because the last one I made several years ago - I resolved never to make another silly New Year's resolution - I've kept successfully.
But I definitely have hopes and dreams (and a few evil thoughts about the whole White House staff and a good part of the top echelon of the Pentagon being frog marched to prison) for 2006. I did not enjoy 2005.
Well, as Yogi Berra (sp?) used to say, "Never make predictions, especially about the future."
But during the Bush years, with so much revisionist history afoot, it's been hard to make predictions about how even the past will be viewed. Ay carumba, oy vey and ugh.
Some of you may remember me as "PCKate", my online managerial persona on major online technical communities on AOL, MSN, and ZDNet.
Well, PCKate will be resurrected, although not - at least yet - tied to an external community. PCKate.com is already up but it's right now got old content from another site in place because I can't yet edit the current contents.
I'll let you know when it's up. It will include a blog where people can ask Windows based and PC hardware questions, we'll have a weekly chat, there will be articles, and links to other material.
Don't get all excited and wet yourself or anything. I know I won't (hey, it's like 2 degrees here, it's hard to get excited about anything except a hot draft up my panties; sadly, the last time that happened was when the dog got curious about me wearing a skirt and it wasn't even my dog but his girlfriend, Gimli, from next door - how's that for a long-winded description noone, including myself needed?).
Biodiesel however doesn't necessarily (usually?) mean environmentally friendly.
But... well... I'd rather buy from Nelson, I suppose, than Exxon. But has anyone heard of what they're doing with hemp for fuel in Canada? Wowser.
(and who says only men can make sexist remarks?)
Anyhoo, this blog turned three on Wednesday. It's teething and grumpy, completely unlike it's delightful, sunny dispositioned, and ever optimistic host (HA!).
Sickening. Disgusting. Ever so typically Bush.
It's the Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping, who spent most of the last two months trying to get people to stop consuming for the sake of consuming.
I chose not to talk of him much during Christmas because everyone has to make their own decisions. Mine, however, was NOT to shop this holiday season. We actually survived a Christmas without presents beneath the tree.
Did it feel funny? Yeah. But I'm glad I didn't engage. I got more than a few unhappy comments from people I usually grace with gifts, but I discovered I often gave because I felt I must rather than giving something people needed, wanted, etc. Nor did I need anything this holiday season that could be wrapped up in paper and put beneath a tree. Probably like most of you, I have a house full of stuff. Stuff I rarely use. Stuff I have to dust and rearrange and store.
Enough with stuff just to have stuff - at least for me.
We're consuming way too much in this country, at least in part because it helps keep us from thinking about important questions or doing something more important.
I've actually got a slew of items to post, but Blogger keeps... well, not quite eating them but they never seem to appear.
Heck, I'm not even sure THIS will appear.
But one can hope.
Kevin posting at Preemptive Karma points us to Pew Research Center's public opinion survey for big issues in 2005. As you might expect, the president's (lack of) popularity, Katrina and Rita (hurricane, not Texas cheerleaders) damage, and the Terri Schiavo backlash make their way onto the list.
Check it out here, or here. Maybe worth the time.
This is all really nice, but after four years, are we supposed to believe this Justice Department is going to do anything to Ken Lay?
Enron's former chief accounting officer, Richard Causey, has struck a plea bargain with federal prosecutors and will avoid going to trial with the fallen energy company's two top executives, according to a person familiar with the negotiations.Lay knows EXACTLY how this presidency was bought and sold. He knows EXACTLY how helpful Dick Cheney wanted to be to Halliburton and energy companies with "the president's visionary energy policy" that just gives whole new levels of corporate welfare (the only type of welfare Republicans like besides BIG tax breaks for billionaires) to energy companies.
Causey was expected to plead guilty Wednesday to one or more of the 34 criminal charges pending against him, this person told The Associated Press Tuesday on condition of anonymity because of the private nature of the discussions.
Causey, 45, agreed to testify against his former bosses, Enron Corp. founder Kenneth Lay and former CEO Jeffrey Skilling, in exchange for a much lesser prison sentence than he would receive if convicted on all counts.
Let me count the ways....
Anyway, I notice Keith Olbermann (finally, not a collection of cute shorts!) had John Dean on and they had fully 13 or 14 different events that are actionable for impeachment.
If the air marshals are "all stretched so painfully thin", aren't we going to have more situations like we did in Florida where a mentally ill man makes them nervous and they end up emptying guns into him?
Before someone tells me the air marshals were correct, not a SINGLE person on the plane within earshot of the incident says they heard ANY mention of the word "bomb" that the air marshals insisted the man said repeatedly. The media dropped the story about the time no witnesses confirmed the air marshal account.
My second question is, "Why the fuck would anybody fly?"
If I want a deep cavity search, pat down, lie detectors, handcuffs, intimidation, and to be treated like an idiot by someone who R one, I'd marry a Texas Republican. ;)
Arrive derci, baby:
NEW YORK (AP) — John Diebold, a business visionary who preached computerization during the era of Elvis and Eisenhower as the future of worldwide industry, has died at the age of 79.
Diebold died of esophageal cancer Monday at his home in suburban Bedford Hills, said a nephew, John B. Diebold.
Although Diebold is now hailed as a prophet of the computerized future, his zeal for computers was not widely shared in the 1950s.
After graduating from the Harvard Business School in 1951, he was hired by a New York management consulting firm and fired three times for insisting that clients consider computerizing.
"I was too early," he once said. "It was before the first computer was installed for business use."
Diebold laid out his vision of a computerized future with his 1952 book, Automation, which presented the then-radical notion of using programmable devices in daily business.
Arnold Schwarzenegger did it: investigated himself on charges of no less than boorish behavior toward women (the women charged much worse), but decided there was insufficient evidence to try himself.
The Bush Administration forever does the same.
And now the Russian government has declared that it has found it did nothing wrong in the school siege in September 2004 which ended with so many of the children and other hostages dead when Putin ordered stormtroopers in.
On that score, Bush was right: he and Putin really do operate very much like they share the same heart and mind. Both limited, both brutal.
“Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.” — Gertrude Stein
From the Washington Post, which I believe is LONG overdue in reporting this, in an editorial entitled, "Saga of Incompetence" (indeed):
IN THE WAKE of the catastrophic performance of the Federal Emergency Management Agency during Hurricane Katrina, it was hard not to heap opprobrium on the head of Michael D. Brown, the FEMA boss who sent joking e-mails to an aide in the middle of the storm ("Can I quit now? Can I go home?") as well as his boss, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who seemed to know less about the plight of New Orleans than the television reporters asking him questions about it. But as Post reporters Susan B. Glasser and Michael Grunwald showed in their two-part series last week ["Prelude to Disaster," Dec. 22-23], the failures of FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security predate Hurricane Katrina by several years. Although both Mr. Chertoff and Mr. Brown made mistakes during the storm, far more fingers should have been pointed at the haphazard, irrational and unabashedly political process that led to the creation of DHS, as well as the inept leadership of the department's first boss, Tom Ridge.
Four years ago, there was a case to be made for a government department that would group together different elements of border security -- the Coast Guard, the immigration services and customs -- in a more streamlined way. But, as the Post series documents, that wasn't what happened. Instead, White House officials anxious to prove their boss was more gung-ho about preparedness than congressional Democrats threw a lot of agencies together without much consideration of whether they belonged together, even at one point including Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which carries out nuclear weapons research. Other agencies and tasks that should belong to homeland security, such as managing the nation's emergency vaccine stockpile, were left out. The result was bureaucratic redundancy and a mystifying command structure. One example: Even today, it still is unclear who in the government -- the White House, DHS or the Department of Health and Human Services -- is really in charge of defense against bioterrorism...
By far the most disturbing aspect of the DHS saga is how familiar it sounds: After all, the administration's attempts to reform the intelligence services have been no less political, and apparently no less clumsy. It stumbled in Iraq for two years. Will incompetence be remembered as the salient characteristic of the Bush presidency?
From The Times today - it's not good but I'm glad we're hearing about it, anyway:
Federal appeals court judges around the nation have repeatedly excoriated immigration judges this year for what they call a pattern of biased and incoherent decisions in asylum cases.
Rise in Immigration Cases In one decision last month, Richard A. Posner, a prominent and relatively conservative federal appeals court judge in Chicago, concluded that "the adjudication of these cases at the administrative level has fallen below the minimum standards of legal justice."
Similarly, the federal appeals court in Philadelphia said in September that it had "time and time again" been forced to rebuke immigration judges for their "intemperate and humiliating remarks." Citing cases from around the country, the court wrote of "a disturbing pattern" of misconduct in immigration rulings that sent people back to countries where they had said they would face persecution.
The harsh criticism may stem in part from a surge in immigration cases before the federal appeals courts. Immigration cases, most involving asylum seekers, accounted for about 17 percent of all federal appeals cases last year, up from just 3 percent in 2001. In the courts in New York and California, nearly 40 percent of federal appeals involved immigration cases.
If the Bushie types have their way, children born in this country to immigrant parents will no longer have the safety net of US citizenship.
Story here from US Toady.
Typo? Maybe. Maybe not.
From Howie (the GOP Media Whorelet) Kurtz in the WaPo:
President Bush has been summoning newspaper editors lately in an effort to prevent publication of stories he considers damaging to national security.National security or Bush's security?
The efforts have failed, but the rare White House sessions with the executive editors of The Washington Post and New York Times are an indication of how seriously the president takes the recent reporting that has raised questions about the administration's anti-terror tactics.
Leonard Downie Jr., The Post's executive editor, would not confirm the meeting with Bush before publishing reporter Dana Priest's Nov. 2 article disclosing the existence of secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe used to interrogate terror suspects. Bill Keller, executive editor of the Times, would not confirm that he, publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Washington bureau chief Philip Taubman had an Oval Office sit-down with the president on Dec. 5, 11 days before reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau revealed that Bush had authorized eavesdropping on Americans and others within the United States without court orders.
But the meetings were confirmed by sources who have been briefed on them but are not authorized to comment because both sides had agreed to keep the sessions off the record. The White House had no comment.
"When senior administration officials raised national security questions about details in Dana's story during her reporting, at their request we met with them on more than one occasion," Downie says. "The meetings were off the record for the purpose of discussing national security issues in her story." At least one of the meetings involved John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, and CIA Director Porter Goss, the sources said.
Ooops.
From Information Week:
The federal government is responsible for issuing Social Security numbers, but it may not be doing enough to protect these critically personal pieces of information on its own Web sites. Acting on a tip, InformationWeek was able to access Web pages that include the names and Social Security numbers of people involved in Justice Department-related legal actions. It's a discomforting discovery at a time when identity theft and fraud are on the rise.How absolutely divine (NOT).
One document on the Justice Department Executive Office for Immigration Review's site listed the name and Social Security number of a woman involved in a 2003 immigration-review case. Another document from 2002 listed the name and Social Security number of a man who was being prosecuted for committing insurance fraud. Other searches of the Justice Department's site yielded more Social Security numbers and identifying information.
When contacted on Dec. 20 about the presence of a 2003 document revealing personally identifying information, a spokesman for the Justice Department's Executive Office for Immigration Review noted that his division is governed by the department's overall privacy rules, the Privacy Act, and the Freedom of Information Act. He acknowledged that the woman's Social Security number displayed in the immigration-review case shouldn't be available to the general public, would be removed from the site, and that the woman in question would be notified that her number had been published.
A search Friday on the Justice Department's Web site for the woman's name indicated that the document had been blocked from public view. However, Google and Yahoo searches returned a hyperlink to her PDF court document. The PDF is now blocked when clicking on this link, but the information can still be obtained by clicking on the "text version" of the link.
The death toll among US soldiers is now up to 2166 as of the two killed on Christmas day.
This from the wire:
At least five Iraqis and a U.S. soldier were killed in violence in Iraq on Sunday as fresh street protests over election results kept up tension that has soured the mood after a peaceful ballot 10 days ago.Oh yeah, these elections are ALWAYS going to turn things around.
In the turbulent northern city of Mosul, the killing of a Sunni Arab student leader abducted after heading a demonstration against the election results prompted accusations by mourners at his funeral against militias loyal to the victorious Shi'ite Islamists and their Kurdish allies in the interim government.
President Jalal Talabani, meeting the U.S. ambassador who is mediating in efforts to transform the newly inclusive parliament into a viable government, urged Sunni leaders to join a new, broader coalition. Otherwise there would be no peace, he warned.
Disappointed Sunni and secular parties have demanded a rerun of the December 15 election and threatened to boycott parliament, a move that could damage U.S. hopes of forging a consensus that can keep Iraq from breaking up in ethnic and sectarian warfare.
But despite militant rhetoric, seemingly aimed at increasing their leverage, Sunnis are negotiating with others to build a governing coalition on the basis of the existing poll results.
A classified radiation monitoring program, conducted without warrants, has targeted private U.S. property in an effort to prevent an al-Qaida attack, federal law enforcement officials confirmed Friday.Muslim sites.
While declining to provide details, including the number of cities and sites monitored, the officials said the air monitoring began after the Sept. 11 attacks and was conducted from publicly accessible areas, which they said made warrants and court orders unnecessary.
U.S. News and World Report first reported the program on Friday. The magazine said the monitoring was conducted at more than 100 Muslim sites in the Washington, D.C. area — including Maryland and Virginia suburbs — and at least five other cities when threat levels had risen: Chicago, Detroit, Las Vegas, New York and Seattle.
A telephone company - the National Security Agency's bestest friend when the Bushies want to illegally spy on American citizens - knows how to help (gag).
From CNN:
Telecommunications companies are helping the National Security Agency collect information as part of a program President Bush secretly approved in 2002, a source familiar with the program said.
The program, which involves domestic surveillance of Americans and other people who communicate with terror suspects abroad, requires the agency to collect, trace and analyze data from these companies.
Two sources, both former officials with knowledge of the program, said a great deal of information is analyzed to glean information on terror plots.
The New York Times on Saturday reported that the NSA has been monitoring "large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States" -- a larger volume than previously indicated by the administration.
"NSA has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain back-door access to streams of domestic and international communications," the newspaper added.
A former official familiar with the program said that eavesdropping is not sufficient to understand the information being collected, but by employing communications companies to help find patterns that point to terror suspects officials are better able to discern what is threatening.
Merry Christmas...
Happy Hannukkah...
Joyous Kwanzaa...
Righteous Ramadan...
Amazing Agnostic Attitude....
.....toooooooo you.......
Err...
From AP:
A lovers’ dispute over a cell phone ended suddenly when the woman swallowed the phone whole, police said.Wanna bet she asks Santa for a new phone?
USA Today, ironically, has the story.
Apparently Mr. Bush feels particularly sympathy for moonshiners.
No, don't ask me why. I have NO idea.
OooooooK.
Here:
Osama bin Laden's niece, in an interview with GQ magazine in which she appears scantily clad, says she has nothing in common with the al-Qaeda leader and simply wants acceptance by Americans.I'm sorry to hear that, Ms. Dufour.
" I want to be embraced, because my values are like yours," Waah Dufour says in the interview.
I abandoned a new template but it seems to have become the Man Who Came to Dinner (and wouldn't leave). Let me see if I can rinky-dink it.
I might be inclined to argue this one, but... from WaPo (and I'd love to hear your response to it):
After four years in which Congress repeatedly lay down while President Bush dictated his priorities, 2005 will go down as the year legislators stood up.
This week's uprising against a four-year extension of the USA Patriot Act was the latest example of a new willingness by lawmakers in both parties to challenge Bush and his notions of expansive executive power.
Since this spring, Congress has forced Bush to scrap plans for a broad restructuring of Social Security, accept tighter restrictions on the treatment of detainees and rewrite his immigration plan. Lawmakers have rebuffed Bush's call to make permanent his first-term tax cuts and helped force the president to speak more candidly about setbacks in Iraq.
"What you have seen is a Congress, which has been AWOL through intimidation or lack of unity, get off the sidelines and jump in with both feet," especially on the national security front, said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.).
What is most striking is that the pushback is coming not just from Democrats and moderate Republicans, who often disagree with Bush, but also from mainstream conservatives.
I was waiting for something like this; it comes to us from Daschle, former Dem minority leader in the Senate before a rigged election in SD took him out (gotta love Diebold and dear Jeff Gannon who was involved in the dirty dealings there).
From today's WaPo:
The Bush administration requested, and Congress rejected, war-making authority "in the United States" in negotiations over the joint resolution passed days after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, according to an opinion article by former Senate majority leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) in today's Washington Post.
Daschle's disclosure challenges a central legal argument offered by the White House in defense of the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens and permanent residents. It suggests that Congress refused explicitly to grant authority that the Bush administration now asserts is implicit in the resolution.
The Justice Department acknowledged yesterday, in a letter to Congress, that the president's October 2001 eavesdropping order did not comply with "the 'procedures' of" the law that has regulated domestic espionage since 1978. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, established a secret intelligence court and made it a criminal offense to conduct electronic surveillance without a warrant from that court, "except as authorized by statute."
There is one other statutory authority for wiretapping, which covers conventional criminal cases. That law describes itself, along with FISA, as "the exclusive means by which electronic surveillance . . . may be conducted."
Also from the Carpetbagger Report, which I found pretty interesting considering how Stevens' behaved yesterday (even more poorly than usual; he's a crazy old crank with serious delusions of grandeur at his state's expense and his wallet's expansion):
All Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) wanted for Christmas was for the Senate to approve his plan to drill the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil. No such luck. The question then becomes what Stevens is prepared to do about it.Hey, Ted, don't let the door hit you in the derriere on your way out the door. The Senate would be a better place with you gone. But who will sell out the last unblemished molecule in Alaska for your profit when you're gone?
First, he apparently plans to do some traveling in order to spite everyone who voted against ANWR drilling."I'm going to go to every one of your states, and I'm going to tell them what you've done," said Stevens, the leading advocate of drilling in Alaska. "This was wrong."
Second, Stevens has to decide whether to even stay in the Senate at all. After losing the ANWR vote last night, Stevens complained, "This has been the saddest day of my life. It's a day I don't want to remember. I say goodbye to the Senate tonight. Thank you very much."
Did that "say goodbye to the Senate" line mean that Stevens will no longer grace the chamber with his presence? According to MSNBC (via Atrios), it seems like a real possibility.
Vote to Impeach (dot org) has 615,265 signatures so far.
Of course, according to Mr. Bush, we're just a small, insignificant focus group.
From The Carpetbagger Report:
The legal background on alleged "dirty bomber" Jose Padilla is a long and bizarre tale. It's important, though, particularly after yesterday.Padilla, you may recall, is the fellow the Bushies want us to believe went from Taco Bell's 3rd shift to Al Qaeda mastermind in no time flat. Right.
Padilla, an American citizen, was first "arrested" in Chicago in May 2002 under suspicion that he was involved with a plan to detonate a radiological "dirty bomb." Padilla was named an enemy combatant in the war on terror, which meant, as far as the administration was concerned, that he had no right to counsel and could be held indefinitely without being charged with a crime. His case ultimately went to the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals — the most conservative court in the nation — which ruled in the Bush administration's favor. Padilla, the 4th Circuit said, could be held however the administration wanted.
As Kevin Drum explained well last night, Padilla could appeal to the Supreme Court, where the Bush administration believed it was likely to lose. To avoid that embarrassing setback, the government asked the 4th Circuit to reverse itself. The appeals court was not amused.
From my favorite bush kangaroo:
keeps on getting better.Hop(aroo) to it, people.
addendum: sign the petition!
Or, as Reuters put it, New Jersey, land without sarcasm (too hard to understand):
PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - New Jersey, trying to overcome its reputation for corruption, traffic and toxic waste dumps, has rejected dozens of sardonic and sarcastic entries in a contest for a new tourist slogan.A quarter million plus for THAT? Geez.
A list of five possible slogans released on Wednesday leaves out "New Jersey: We can always use another relative on the payroll," and "Come to New Jersey: It's not as bad as it smells."
Voters get to pick the winner in the competition launched after Gov. Richard Codey nixed "New Jersey: We'll Win You Over," created by a consultant who was paid $260,000.
Congress just said fuck you to millions in desperate need of fuel assistance during a season just 30 hours old that has already produced bitter temperatures throughout the country (we've been doing the sub-zero thing a LOT here and we basically had to close a bunch of the place down for the winter; it's that or just sign every check over to the gas company).
Here:
WASHINGTON - Millions of low-income families will face a bleak winter because Congress failed to deliver home-heating funds, Northeast lawmakers warned Thursday.
"It was the wrong choice for the American people in this cold holiday season," said Sen. Jack Reed (news, bio, voting record), D-R.I., who led a Senate fight for fuel assistance.
Home-heat advocates had been hopeful as late as Wednesday night that the Senate would approve two spending bills providing $4.1 billion in fuel assistance. But $2 billion in energy aid was stripped from a defense appropriations bill along with a GOP-backed provision to open Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.
That left just $2.1 billion for this winter's Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, slightly below last year's funding.
With the holidays upon us, the name of Santa Claus is being used for evil rather than good by worm developers, who have targeted major instant-messaging systems with a holiday-themed virus.I tell you, the worm that took my network down Thanksgiving week was a real peckerwood. Never saw a worm work that effectively.
The IM.GiftCom.All worm has made an appearance on several messaging networks, including America Online, Microsoft MSN, and Yahoo.
The worm attempts to dupe you into believing that a friend has sent you a link to a harmless file. If you click on the file, you see an image of Santa. While viewing it, the worm attempts to install a rootkit on your system.
Rootkits are frequently used to circumvent security software and give an attacker remote control of a machine. Once the attacker is inside your system, the worm harvests your instant-message contact lists for subsequent infections.
From Salon:
Yes, the president committed a federal crime by wiretapping Americans, say constitutional scholars, former intelligence officers and politicians. What's missing is the political will to impeach him.Indeed.
And this government isn't going to want to go after Tommy Boy because he's played ball with them right nicely.
Uh huh. DHS is just supposed to sit there holding its ass while we contract everything out to Halliburton and Bechtel. Got ya.
OK, so? I paraphrased (colorfully).
Here:
The presiding judge of a secret court that oversees government surveillance in espionage and terrorism cases is arranging a classified briefing for her fellow judges to address their concerns about the legality of President Bush's domestic spying program, according to several intelligence and government sources.
Several members of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court said in interviews that they want to know why the administration believed secretly listening in on telephone calls and reading e-mails of U.S. citizens without court authorization was legal. Some of the judges said they are particularly concerned that information gleaned from the president's eavesdropping program may have been improperly used to gain authorized wiretaps from their court.
"The questions are obvious," said U.S. District Judge Dee Benson of Utah. "What have you been doing, and how might it affect the reliability and credibility of the information we're getting in our court?"
The U.S. government's Food and Drug Administration proposed on Thursday a stricter recommended limit on the amount of lead, a highly toxic metal, allowable in certain Mexican-style children's candies.I have a theory. The FDA, long a useless bitch whore to the drug industry, believes that lead is good for Hispanic children because it kills brain cells and may get them to vote for Bush and men like him.
The list includes spicy lollipops widely sold in many Hispanic neighborhoods in the United States. The FDA now recommends that candies likely to be eaten by small children not contain more lead than one-tenth of a part per million, an 80 percent reduction from the previous, decade-old recommended level of one-half part per million.
The amount of lead represented by the new level does not pose a significant risk to small children, the agency said.
Idiots everywhere feel they are vindicated, that they are NOT the village idiot because the junior Senator from Pennsylvania is this great country's village idiot (and James Sensenbrenner is vying for the same position).
Now Santorum has rethought - without a brain, never a wise idea - his position on "intelligent design". Yeah, I know. From the man who brought us "it will lead to man on dog sex and cousins marrying their rapists and child molesters stalking the Bush twins".
From Santorum Exposed (keep it zipped, Ricky, there are enough little village idiots Santorums already):
Yesterday, one day after the Dover Area School District was told by a federal judge that their new "more balanced approach to teaching evolution" was unconstitutional, Rick's point of view seems to have, um, grown an opposable thumb. Here's how today's Philadelphia Inquirer describes it:An idiot and a whore of the right wing. A bad, untalented and ugly whore, at that.And, he (Santorum) said in an interview, he disagreed with the board for mandating the teaching of intelligent design, rather than just the controversy surrounding evolution.
Santorum - who sits on the advisory board of the Thomas More Law Center, which defended the school board in court - said the case offered "a bad set of facts" to test the concept that theories other than evolution should be taught in science classrooms.
"I thought the Thomas More Law Center made a huge mistake in taking this case and in pushing this case to the extent they did," Santorum said.
...Santorum said his statements are not contradictory, nor has his position changed.
Oops, typo on Dubya. My bad (bite me).
From CBS News, and I'd agree with most of it:
The President of the United States has enormous powers. During wartime, he has even greater powers, as he should. But he doesn't have "unlimited powers." Countries in which the rulers have unlimited powers are known as dictatorships, and those are the kinds of governments that we are supposedly against. So, when I heard the president use as an excuse for eavesdropping on U.S. citizens the fact that he just felt it was necessary, it didn't seem like a good enough reason. We already have a system in which there is a special court set up to issue secret warrants for this purpose. These warrants can be granted quickly, and are rarely turned down. If time is of the essence, the president can even get these warrants after the fact. The only thing is, if you get a warrant, there will be a record of whom you have eavesdropped on.
This warrant system came about after the Vietnam War when it was discovered that the federal government had been spying on people whose positions on the war were different from the administration's, and on people the government just didn't like. One of the presidents involved in these tapings was Richard Nixon, and he had an infamous "enemies list," and he felt he had a right to spy on whomever he wanted. As I recall, Nixon got into a lot of trouble...
A few days after it was revealed that the government was secretly spying on U.S. citizens without warrants, President Bush used words like "unexcusable" and "shameful." I was happily surprised that he took this position, but when I read closer, I saw that he was saying that what was "unexcusable" and "shameful" was the media's telling the American people that this spying was going on.
The problem with all this secret taping is that once it gets started, it can get out of control. Since all of this is so secretive, how are we — or Congress — to know who's listening in on what conversations?
Patrick Leahy, dearie, is not an Independent senator from Vermont. He's the sole Democratic Senator from Vermont.
Now go back to pouffing your lip gloss and touching up your roots.
[Ed. note: Andrea is Ted's daughter, but nowhere NEAR as smart. She's a correspondent for CNN when she's not on regular maternity leave, like Soleduh O'Brien.]
News from CNN that the House has put the kibosh on the 6-month extension of the ever-so-inappropriately named Patriot Act to make it a 5-week extension, too. The reason? James Sensenbrenner said he didn't want to make the president unhappy.
Poor, poor, poor Mr. Bush.
Sensenbrenner is a pig, which is an insult to all porcine players.
Sorry, but evil applies just as well. That man has to be the smarmiest human being I've ever had the delight not to know personally.
Daily Kos has a brief profile of a baaa.....aaaaa......aaaaaa.....aaaaa....aaaaad man.
Snip snip:
Tom DeLay, 11/16/1995:The time has come that the American people know exactly what their Representatives are doing here in Washington. Are they feeding at the public trough, taking lobbyist-paid vacations, getting wined and dined by special interest groups? Or are they working hard to represent their constituents?
Tom DeLay, 12/21/2005:Over the past six years, the former House majority leader or his associates have visited places of luxury most Americans have never seen, often getting there aboard corporate jets arranged by lobbyists and other special interests.
What a difference a decade makes.
This actually is relatively good news. While I'm not a sufferer, I know several who are.
Cheney, Condi, and Rummy must be going nuts trying to find a way to better them.
Be careful of your next GYN or prostate exam. An anal mind probe may be on its way to your... um... anus. Not my anus.... Your anus.
Blacks who do apply face an 87% rejection rate.
Our tax dollars at work keeping well-heeled whites rich and well, yes, white.
Here's The Times' article on the matter. (Anal) Registration required, but of course, at the paper of record for well-heeled white people.
[Ed note: Yeah, right. So why does Faux News and Bush the Reborn offer "happy holidays" gear?]
Jesus' General, JC Christian, is on the case.
The Patriot Act got extended six months. Just to protect us, of course.
Meanwhile, I'm still replaying Ted Stevens' (R-Sellout Alaska) apoplexy yesterday that he isn't going to make another pile of millions drilling in ANWR. Poor, poor dear. He should get something communicable... ho ho ho.
Here, from Howie Fineman:
I am told by a very good source, there was a lot of wishing out loud in the White House Situation Room about expanding the National Security Agency’s ability to instantly monitor phone calls and e-mails between American callers and possible terror suspects abroad. “We talked a lot about how useful that would be,” said this source, who was “in the room” in the critical period after the attacks.uh huh
Well, as the world now knows, the NSA — at the prompting of Vice President Cheney and on official (secret) orders from President Bush — was doing just that. And yet, as I understand it, many of the people in the White House’s own Situation Room — including leaders of the national security adviser’s top staff and officials of the FBI — had no idea that it was happening.
As best I can tell — and this really isn’t my beat — the only people who knew about the NSA’s new (and now so controversial) warrant-less eavesdropping program early on were Bush, Cheney, NSA chief Michael Hayden, his top deputies, top leaders of the CIA, and lawyers at the Justice Department and the White House counsel’s office hurriedly called in to sprinkle holy water on it.
Howie's right on at least one point; the Senate dealt out the Patriot Act today. More's the pity.Some thoughts on where all of this is headed:
* The president says that his highest duty is to protect the American people and our homeland. And it is true that, as commander-in-chief, he has sweeping powers to, as his oath says, “faithfully execute the office” of president. But the entity he swore to “preserve, protect and defend” isn’t the homeland per se — but the Constitution itself.
*The Patriot Act will be extended, but it’s just the beginning, not the end, of the never-ending argument between the Bill of Rights and national security. The act primarily covers the activities of the FBI; the sheer volume of intelligence-gathering across the government has yet to become apparent, and voters will blanch when they see it all laid before them.
* The department most likely to get in trouble on this: the Pentagon, which doesn’t have a tradition of limiting inquiries, and which, in the name of protecting domestic military installations, will want to look at everyone.
* If you thought the Samuel Alito hearings were going to be contentious, wait till you see them now. Sen. Arlen Specter, the prickly but brilliant chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has said that the issue of warrant-less spying by the NSA — and the larger question of the reach of the president’s wartime powers — is now fair game for the Alito hearings. Alito is going to try to beg off but won’t be allowed to. And members who might have been afraid to vote against Alito on the abortion issue might now have another, politically less risky, reason to do so.* Arguably the most interesting — and influential — Republicans in the Senate right now are the libertarians. They’re suspicious of the Patriot Act and, I am guessing, pivotal in any discussion of the NSA and others' spy efforts. Most are Westerners (Craig, Hagel, Murkowski) and the other is Sen. John Sununu. He is from New Hampshire, which, as anyone who has spent time there understands, is the Wild West of the East Coast. All you have to do is look at its license plate slogan: “Live Free or Die.” It’ll be interesting to see how other nominal small-government conservatives — Sen. George Allen of Virginia comes to mind — handle the issue.
* For months now, I have been getting e-mails demanding that my various employers (Newsweek, NBC News and MSNBC.com) include in their poll questionnaires the issue of whether Bush should be impeached. They used to demand this on the strength of the WMD issue, on the theory that the president had “lied us into war.” Now the Bush foes will base their case on his having signed off on the NSA’s warrant-less wiretaps. He and Cheney will argue his inherent powers and will cite Supreme Court cases and the resolution that authorized him to make war on the Taliban and al-Qaida. They will respond by calling him Nixon 2.0 and have already hauled forth no less an authority than John Dean to testify to the president’s dictatorial perfidy. The “I-word” is out there, and, I predict, you are going to hear more of it next year — much more
Does anyone else see my right sidebar way down at the end of the blog?
So far, I'm the only one of five, but I doubt I'm actually the only one.
Thank you.
This is the one purported by the nutwing - no less than G. Gordon lost-his-Liddy, the hand-over-a-burning flame to prove he's macho and not short, pudgy, and losing his hair - to say that if you're upset about Bush spying, well, Clinton spied far more.
But as Think Progress tells us - and so does short-term history, Echelon is a myth. This is another big lie.
Prominent right-wing bloggers – including Michelle Malkin, the Corner, Wizbang and Free Republic — are pushing the argument that President Bush’s warrantless domestic spying program isn’t news because the Clinton administration did the same thing.
The right-wing outlet NewsMax sums up the basic argument:During the 1990’s under President Clinton, the National Security Agency monitored millions of private phone calls placed by U.S. citizens and citizens of other countries under a super secret program code-named Echelon…all of it done without a court order, let alone a catalyst like the 9/11 attacks.
That’s flatly false. The Clinton administration program, code-named Echelon, complied with FISA. Before any conversations of U.S. persons were targeted, a FISA warrant was obtained. CIA director George
Tenet testified to this before Congress on 4/12/00:I’m here today to discuss specific issues about and allegations regarding Signals Intelligence activities and the so-called Echelon Program of the National Security Agency…
Meanwhile, the position of the Bush administration is that they can bypass the FISA court and every other court, even when they are monitoring the communications of U.S. persons. It is the difference between following the law and breaking it.
There is a rigorous regime of checks and balances which we, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and the FBI scrupulously adhere to whenever conversations of U.S. persons are involved, whether directly or indirectly. We do not collect against U.S. persons unless they are agents of a foreign power as that term is defined in the law. We do not target their conversations for collection in the United States unless a FISA warrant has been obtained from the FISA court by the Justice Department.
Nice that Cheney came to break the 50-50 split in the Senate that led to the spending cuts bill being passed.
Thanks to Grinch Cheney, tens of millions of Americans who have underwritten health care will pay much more for basic services ($20-$160 for each visit compared to $3), funding for student loans is cut back severely (Rumsfeld is hoping for more military recruits), and native-born US citizens need to show proof of citizenship to get treatment (many older blacks alive today do not have such proof, for example), and support to get child support for abandoned children is cut (about $8 billion is expected NOT to be collected there). Welfare changes, too, are much, much harsher.
MissM provides us links to some good material on our fascination with torture, so long as we're the one administering it to Muslims rather than getting it.
Here's a Slate article on the "Get Out of Torture Free Card" subject and this links to the Thomas library concerning Senators Graham, Kyl, and others.
Mayor Mike Bloomberg, a billionaire unlike the workers themselves, laid it on thick today. For the second day straight, he tied up traffic being chaffeured across the Brooklyn Bridge so he could make a showboat walk back across the bridge with others. Nice.
But as much as everyone wants to resolve the strike and as much of an inconvenience as it represents this week before Christmas, I do wish people would also take the longer view.
What transit workers are fighting for - all the union hyperbole aside - or against is the effective destruction of their union and a good benefit package. What gets missed in this is that it is the city, rather than the union, who has refused to budge. The city of New York demands a two-tier union system that makes newer workers accept a much-diminished retirement and health care package over what is already provided for longer term workers.
History shows that once rights are taken away, they do not come back.
So while everyone is shouting about the selfish transit workers, stop to think when the last time was you saw a really good employee benefits package that some court wasn't willing to denude to make the corporation's stockholders richer still. That's what this strike is about.
I don't like unions myself, but I think we need them at this time in the country. To kill them means to kill the chance of having anything guaranteed by an employer stand up in court.
I think I'm turning into a pagan.
But the winter solstice arrived just now at 1:35 PM ET.
May you all keep warm and survive the winter, and may the political weather change as well. I'd be just as happy to see the Bushies frozen out in the cold, considering their disastrous energy and so many other policies.
Also from WaPo:
The clash over the secret domestic spying program is one slice of a broader struggle over the power of the presidency that has animated the Bush administration. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney came to office convinced that the authority of the presidency had eroded and have spent the past five years trying to reclaim it.This damned well SHOULD be a broad fight. This is at the fundamental (cough) core of the ideals on which this country was founded. Mr. Bush and Dictator Cheney have made it clear that they treat the Bill of Rights as a mud rug and the U.S. Constitution has a rough draft.
From shielding energy policy deliberations to setting up military tribunals without court involvement, Bush, with Cheney's encouragement, has taken what scholars call a more expansive view of his role than any commander in chief in decades. With few exceptions, Congress and the courts have largely stayed out of the way, deferential to the argument that a president needs free rein, especially in wartime.
• More politics newsBut the disclosure of Bush's eavesdropping program has revived the issue, and Congress appears to be growing restive about surrendering so much of its authority. Democrats and even key Republicans maintain Bush went too far -- and may have even violated the law -- by authorizing the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens' overseas telephone calls in search of terrorist plots without obtaining warrants from a secret intelligence court.
That's what the Washington Post indicates here:
U.S. District Judge James Robertson, one of 11 members of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, sent a letter to Chief Justice John D. Roberts Jr. late Monday notifying him of his resignation without providing an explanation.
Two associates familiar with his decision said yesterday that Robertson privately expressed deep concern that the warrantless surveillance program authorized by the president in 2001 was legally questionable and may have tainted the FISA court's work.
Eh?
A bill on Gov. Bob Taft's desk right now is drawing a lot of criticism, NewsChannel5 reported.
One state representative said it resembles Gestapo-style tactics of government, and there could be changes coming on the streets of Ohio's small towns and big cities.
The Ohio Patriot Act has made it to the Taft's desk, and with the stroke of a pen, it would most likely become the toughest terrorism bill in the country. The lengthy piece of legislation would let police arrest people in public places who will not give their names, address and birth dates, even if they are not doing anything wrong.
WEWS reported it would also pave the way for everyone entering critical transportation sites such as, train stations, airports and bus stations to show ID.
"It brings us frighteningly close to a show me your papers society," said Carrie Davis of the ACLU, which opposes the Ohio Patriot Act.
There are many others who oppose the bill as well.
"The variety of people who opposed to this is not just a group of the usual suspects. We have people far right to the left opposing the bill who think it is a bad idea," said Al McGinty, NewsChannel5's terrorism expert.
I think the judge was right on the mark. I notice, too, that CNN's poll on the question had 70% feeling that intelligent design did not belong in a biology class.
I don't think just the mention of intelligent design is necessarily a bad thing; unlike the rightest nutwing, I don't think ideas and critical thought KILLS. But when it's specifically a science class, well... let's keep it to science.
I do, however, suspect this poor judge has gone right to the top of the seriously deranged winger hit list.
Lovely old tool, he is.
A group founded by evangelist Pat Robertson is suing to stop Illinois from requiring pharmacies to fill prescriptions for emergency contraception, saying the rule violates a druggist's right to refuse on religious and moral grounds.
Editor & Publisher (again) has the story:
In recent days, E&P has monitored the overwhelmingly critical response, at major metro editorial pages, to current revelations about the Bush administration's domestic spying program. Even conservatives such as George Will have raised issues about it, but he's another inside-the-Beltway guy. How is the story "playing in Peoria"?
We mean, literally.
It turns out, not all that differently. Here is a lengthy excerpt from the Tuesday editorial in the Peoria (Ill.) Journal Star.*An unrepentant, even defiant President Bush has admitted to authorizing the National Security Agency to conduct secret electronic eavesdropping on more than 30 occasions involving thousands of citizens, bypassing the court established by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to deal with such circumstances. He defended those actions, proclaiming that the procedure has only been used against those with "a clear link" to al-Qaida. Bush said the Constitution and Congress, when it green-lighted his request to wage war, give him such latitude, which he will continue to exercise.Americans who appreciate what this nation stands for should respectfully disagree with the president's generous and arguably self-serving interpretation of the Constitution, which does not give any occupant of the Oval Office absolute, unilateral power, even in wartime.
Second, to suggest that this is "a vital tool in our war against the terrorists" is stretching reality. Indeed, there is nothing the president has done that he couldn't have within the already established rules. Yes, this is a different kind of war and Uncle Sam needs the bureaucratic flexibility to react quickly and discreetly. But the Justice Department already could move immediately to initiate electronic surveillance, with 72 hours to seek a judge's retroactive OK. Even without that, it can take just a few hours to get the permission of the FISA court, which operates behind closed doors. In practice, presidential petitions for wiretaps are rarely denied.
Graham and others are right to be worried about the integrity of the Fourth Amendment, which protects Americans against unreasonable search and seizure. The president maintains there was oversight because congressional leaders were briefed. But it's not like he was seeking their permission. Moreover, if any congressman had revealed the existence of the program by objecting to it in any public way, wouldn't that have amounted to an illegal disclosure of classified information?
From Editor and Publisher:
First, Copley News Service suspended Doug Bandow's syndicated column. Now two newspapers say they will no longer publish opinion pieces by another conservative commentator who has admitted taking payments from indicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff to write opinion pieces favorable to Abramoff's clients.Reuters reports that The Manchester Union Leader and the Washington Times both said they did not know that Peter Ferrara took payments for his pieces.
"Anybody who misrepresents or doesn't voluntarily reveal that they are being paid to write the article by an interested obviously has fallen below the standard that we would hold any published author to," Washington Times editorial page editor Tony Blankley told Reuters.
Ferrara told BusinessWeek Online last week that he takes payments from lobbyists "all the time" to write articles favorable to their clients and did not see anything wrong with that. He did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
This man - and I use the term lightly with Reprehensible Tom DeLay - is so low that a snake can look down on him with no problem at all.
As Tom DeLay became a king of campaign fundraising, he lived like one too. He visited cliff-top Caribbean resorts, golf courses designed by PGA champions and four-star restaurants — all courtesy of donors who bankrolled his political money empire.You ain't fucking kidding.
Over the past six years, the former House majority leader and his associates have visited places of luxury most Americans have never seen, often getting there aboard corporate jets arranged by lobbyists and other special interests.
Public documents reviewed by The Associated Press tell the story: at least 48 visits to golf clubs and resorts; 100 flights aboard company planes; 200 stays at hotels, many world-class; and 500 meals at restaurants, some averaging nearly $200 for a dinner for two.
Instead of his personal expense, the meals and trips for DeLay and his associates were paid with donations collected by the campaign committees, political action committees and children's charity the Texas Republican created during his rise to the top of Congress. His lawyer says the expenses are part of DeLay's effort to raise money from Republicans and to spread the GOP message.
Put them together and a lifestyle emerges.
Story here.
Are you sick of this yet? I certainly am.
Impeach.
Story here.
I don't agree with Jim Douglas often - I find him too much of a Bushie, although I won't quite call him a toady - but on this point, I concur.
Vermont has lost more soldiers per capita in Iraq than any other state. Like many, most of our soldiers have been those with few other employment options.
... and the press moved on far too quickly, no longer showing you how very awful it is there and how many people live in terrible squalor, far worse than before, because they have no other option.
An important USA Today editorial:
After initially refusing to discuss whether he had authorized domestic spying without court approval, President Bush decided to come clean. He acknowledged over the weekend that such spying had taken place, much as it was described in Friday's New York Times. He argued that it was vital to thwart an enemy that knows no boundaries. (Related: Opposing view)
The question this disclosure raises is not why an administration would resort to extraordinary tactics during extraordinary times by engaging in domestic intelligence gathering. The deadly nature and sophistication of al-Qaeda provide compelling answers to that.
It is, rather, why an administration would skirt existing procedures for engaging in domestic intelligence gathering while showing such blatant disregard for the restraints on presidential power that the Founding Fathers imposed...
Not since the days when Richard Nixon was fighting the Cold War, the Vietnam War and a rising tide of domestic unrest has an administration felt so emboldened by circumstances to put itself above the law and expand its powers unilaterally. Then, as now, a decision to go around the law in the name of national security or preserving presidential prerogatives can quickly descend into widespread abuses...
The administration has also turned its wrath on a familiar target: the news media. In his Saturday radio address, Bush said the disclosure by The Times had provided information that terrorists could use to put Americans at further risk.
Because so much about this domestic spying episode is cloaked in secrecy, it is hard to fully evaluate this claim. (The Times said it had held off publishing its story for a year — an eternity in the competitive news business — to evaluate the national security implications.) Nevertheless, it seems unlikely that the issue of whether U.S. agents conduct their intelligence gathering with court warrants or without them would be of much interest to terrorists. They must surely assume that the U.S. government is aggressively trying to find them.
These terrorists are evil people. They do not care much for our democratic way of life. It would be a tragedy if we, and not they, undermined it.
From CNN/wire:
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Three Democratic and two Republican senators have sent a letter to the leaders of the Senate's Judiciary and Intelligence committees, asking for an "immediate inquiry" into President Bush's authorization of a secret wiretapping program.IMHO, ALL senators should have been behind this, and certainly the chinless wonders responsible for impeaching Bill Clinton (et tu Lindsey Graham?).
"We write to express our profound concern about recent revelations that the United States government may have engaged in domestic electronic surveillance without appropriate legal authority," says the letter, which was signed by Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein, Carl Levin and Ron Wyden, as well as GOP Sens. Chuck Hagel and Olympia Snowe.
"These allegations, which the president, at least in part, confirmed this weekend, require immediate inquiry and action by the Senate," said the letter, which was sent Monday.
I swear Babs (Barbara WaWa) is getting loonier and loonier. Yes, I know 90% of Americans believe in some kind of an afterlife, and most of those, in Heaven.
Likewise, I was raised to believe (although with my family's pentecostal roots, there was also plenty of "This life is hell and heaven is our reward from it") in it; I think I still believe in something, that at least a kind of energy can continue on.
That's what CNN is reporting. Vote shows people there want a theocracy, much like the extremists here want.
"I think it is interesting that we haven't heard from him in a year, close to a year," he said. "I don't know what it means. I suspect that in any event if he's alive and functioning that he's probably spending a major fraction of his time trying to avoid being caught.
"I have trouble believing that he's able to operate sufficiently to be in a position of major command over a worldwide al Qaeda operation, but I could be wrong. We just don't know."
Right. And becoming 6 feet tall is still a priority of mine.
I'll let you know if mine comes true. As for Donny's? Well...
Here's the Dork Contest (John Bolton isn't a nominee) and the Scared of Santa photo contest.
Nice work, Bloomberg, Pataki and Bushies.
You've consistently made any action by any unions punishable. This one involves the breaking of a union by trying to create a two-tier system that would have long-time workers covered by one set of rules and rights and the more junior workers covered by very little at all. And when they say no to union breaking, you call them "terrorists" and people "ready to harm Americans, starting with New Yorkers".
Very nice.
I'm not a big union lover, but I'm sick and tired of contracts being broken by corporations right and left and all rights and responsibilities employers should follow instead being taken from the American worker. If you happen to think this can't hurt you or someone you care about, I'm afraid to say you may be quite mistaken.
[Update from Editor: Er.. make that DoD Secretary Donald "True Grit" Rumsfeld. If you want a real experience, watch a copy of "Catch 22" - or better yet, reread the novel - while you think about how the Bushies and Rumsfeld run the military. I did the other night, and it was grimly hilarious.]
That's what Rumself announced today.
Unfortunately, everything we hear of Afghanistan indicates things there are far worse than they were before we attacked on October 8, 2001. Oh yeah, and Osama's bin Forgotten is still loose - imagine that!
admittedly to pummel, threaten, and demean those asking for an investigation and ready to "cast" tie-breaking votes to push through Bush Rule.
What better a time to have the extension of the Patriot Act sitting on the table than a time when it's becoming apparent even to the most slow-to-catch-on citizens that Bush and Cheney have been waging war AGAINST American ideals and our spirit of freedom? I'm sorry but I've read the original Patriot Act and I've read extensively about how the Patriot Act has been used and abused (we paid for Michael Jackson's child porn investigation which ended in dismissal, we "liberated" bootleg copies of Revenge of the Sith, and we've put more docile pot smokers in jail than we have any real terrorists with this act). Don't pee on my leg and say it's raining, and don't force the Patriot Act down by throat and tell me this administration loves freedom and glory.
Shakespeare's Sister has the most welcome news here.
To send the word to your Congress critter that you want - no, DEMAND - a full investigation, here's the place to start.
There is also the Censure Bush group. Links to more information about these developments can be found there.
It's actually broken out in Washington, DC this week, and got even louder after Mr. Bush came out swinging at the press for revealing - after holding it back for a year - the fact that he's permitted domestic surveillance of American citizens, something that as much as Mr. Bush spins it, is still NOT allowed.
And regardless of what the talking (but just reciting) heads say, Republicans signed onto a call for investigations into Bush's actions. It's hardly JUST Democrats.
Last week, he said he would refuse to call the "bad guys" in Iraq "insurgents" anymore because they didn't deserve the label and besides, they were almost all defeated now.
This week, he's calling them insurgents again.
Remember, kiddies: we go to war with the Defense Secretary we have rather than the Defense Secretary we want.
do you think Bush would hold up under torture?
I mean, a tough question makes him sweat a few gallons.
I also suspect anything harder than "Do you want a chili dog or beans or dinner?" is a tortuously difficult question for Little Lord Bushleroy.
Brent Scocroft, Bush I's Dick Cheney, is being pillaried because he's speaking up - and has been - about this administration's egregious behavior. Telling in his most recent missives are remarks indicating that he has known and respected Cheney for a very long time, but he does not know this Cheney.
I don't think anyone does, except perhaps Cheney's equally perverted, mean spirited, tyrannical wife... the only possible top to a Dick bottom.
So Cheney's put out the word now - widely used as a talking point - that ol Brent is senile.
What class!
Mind you, we've heard for sometime that Brent largely only speaks up when Bush I - who feels totally ignored by Sonny Boy to the point where he does love-nuts with Bill Clinton - thinks Bush II is fucking up beyond all comprehension.
I'm starting to like Brent a hell of a lot more now than I did during Bush I's term. But I can never forgive Bush I and Babs for turning Georgie Porgie loose upon the world. They knew better than anyone that Bush II was the world's grandest fuck-up short of Joey Buttafuocco (there's a stinky blast from a sordid past).
And why?
Why would Scooter Libby, under indictment, still have the highest level of the nation's security clearance?
I mean, one of the big red flags AGAINST someone getting any level of security clearance has always been ANYTHING that might make you easily compromised - meaning that you have something hanging around in your current or past that someone else could threaten to disclose. One would think Scooter Baby - and ol Turd Blossom Karl Rove - would certainly fit that bill (a few thousand times over).
I'll spare you the long story about the projects from hell, disks sent to publishers that went missing, followed by an Internet worm that took my entire network out from early afternoon Wednesday until just a few hours ago, despite the fact that I've spent my entire holiday weekend on it (I seem to have skipped giving thanks on Thursday). I'm still trying to get Outlook Express to accept my message store and then triple disinfect every file that should have gotten to a publisher last week. It's another all nighter at Chateau Someone Else's Schadenfreude Ecstasy.
Ugh.
But it's nice to "see" you all again, and man, do I hope you had a better holiday and more reasons to give thanks. I also hope your turkey is history (the last of mine went into soup and sandwiches today).
Here:
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A judge threw out a lawsuit Wednesday that sought to block the No Child Left Behind law, President Bush's signature education policy. The National Education Association said it would appeal.Bush's home state of Texas, where illiteracy, poverty, juvenile executions, and teen pregnancies lead the country (what a great standard), and which is arguably considered the worst state for education - bad before but a sharp falloff during the Bush years (governor and president).
The NEA and school districts in three states had argued that schools should not have to comply with requirements that were not paid for by the federal government.
Chief U.S. District Judge Bernard A. Friedman, based in eastern Michigan, said, "Congress has appropriated significant funding" and has the power to require states to set educational standards in exchange for federal money.
The NEA, a union of 2.7 million members and often a political adversary of the administration, had filed the suit along with districts in Michigan, Vermont and Bush's home state of Texas, plus 10 NEA chapters in those states and Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Utah.
Ah, but the government did. Kept paying disgraced FEMA director Michael Brown even after the debacle of Katrina. And I have ZERO doubt he'll get lucrative government contracts from our Chief of Homeland Manipulated Insecurity.
Brown has set up his own emergency planning agency.
Imbecile.
Things are bizarre and getting more so.
But until I can, please feel free to discuss any of the following in Comments (and there's far more than I list, so have a shot):
There's a million topics to discuss before we all come down with Avian flu. ;)
A few folks have kindly inquired privately where else I write. In fact, my work pops up all over the place - for example, I used to write for a Los Angeles paper (although I've never been deeper into LA than LAX). A search at Amazon.com on "Kate J. Chase" shows you most recent book titles.
But some very recent stuff is found here:
How to Talk to and Support a Friend or Loved One Diagnosed with Cancer
How to Protect Your Home Office or Business Against Disasters
Parents: Don't Assume Software Keeps Your Kids Safe Online
Looking for a Job? Katrina-Ravaged Areas Need You
Come to Vermont to Leaf Peep or Ski But Stay for Good Food
I happened to catch McCain on Letterman last night - although I generally ignore CBS these days since they bent over and spread it to the right wing on the whole Bush National Guard debacle where the lies still well outnumber any semblance of truth.
McCain insists the answer is nucular (his phrasing), that we just harbor unreasonable fears about it.
Well, here's my take on nuclear. Yes, it has much potential. The problem is that since the very beginning of our harnassing of it, we've done so blind. We have no good way to dispose of spent crap from nuclear energy (or weaponry), we have little protection for these plants that don't need to be attacked to cause problems (hello Three Mile Island!), and we still don't begin to understand its ramifications.
My partner, John, had a father who was, as a metallurgist, involved in a nuclear accident back in the '50s. A completely unnecessary accident that could have been prevented except that the company he worked for wanted results that could not be achieved safely. His boss ordered him to conduct an experiment that was guaranteed to blow up. It did.
That he survived at all was a miracle. But it cut his life much shorter. And, sadly, we're not much farther along in dealing with the ill effects of radiation as we were then. Quite honestly, I doubt we'll ever have a way to fully use nuclear power safely or a way to save people exposed to massive doses of it (a particularly gruesome death where those last 2-3-4 days put hell to shame).
Anyone recall Chernobyl? That site is still - about two decades later - so toxic and yet the sarcophagus literally built around it to contain it is disintegrating, land for miles and miles around it still a devastated wasteland, people still living with the horrible effects. That's how we deal with nuclear accidents; we hide them under a blanket and smile. Unfortunately, radiation permeates and penetrates through a LOT, including blankets.
So let John McCain move into a nuclear reactor and tell us how his cancer's doing a few months later. Then tell us nuclear power is the answer.
If only they had directed some of that hot rhetoric up here to the great frigid north where it is highly unlikely we'll see the bare ground again until sometime in April (hint: crocuses are a May-June bloom up here as some indication of long the winters are).
Build a huge fence between Mexico and the US.
Can you say, "No bid Halliburton contract with overages well into the billions"?
I just knew you could.
But all kidding - and there wasn't much, trust me - aside, when Israel did this it was a very BAD idea. In a VERY RARE expression of criticism by Bush of Ariel Sharon, our Commode in Chief said the wall was a very bad idea.
Ah, but we're good at telling other countries they can't do what we do ourselves. And as much as Bush said the Israeli wall was a bad idea, our tax dollars went to Israel to help pay for it.
This is like Bush's speech today in which he blew up at North Korea saying there was no discussion until N Korea gets rid of ALL its nuclear stuff. But America has more nukes than the entire rest of the world put together. Why aren't we getting rid of ours? Though exactly where we'd get rid of it is in question considering the half life of this crap is astronomical. But I'm sure Halliburton would be very willing to accept another multi-billion dollar no-bid contract to pretend to get rid of it safely while actually placing it in the Jersey Pine Barrens or as part of the "new and improved" levee system in New Orleans.
Having no scruples, no ethics, no humanity really clears the way for you to proceed exactly as you'd like - the rest of the country, world, and universe be damned.
Oops, sorry. I was using President Bush's "How I Learnt Real Good Uzing Phonetics While at Harveyard Doing My MBA (or Megalomaniac Bastard-eye-za-shun of A-thor-a-tee)" as my style guide.
His followup book was an even bigger bestseller, "Hooked on Cocaine and Comix".
This is a known, but investigators now agree that Ken Tomlinson spent his time as head of PBS by trying to make it a right-wing flag waving network.
Bush practically called anyone who questioned his decision a traitor today.
Talk about taking responsibility.
Even a PhD complains he can't begin to make hide nor hair of the "great" plan that will, no doubt, end up screwing seniors.
Heh.
From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
Marty McNett of Burlington (Letters, Wednesday) believes there is no proof that President Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, so we should lay off claims that he did.
I refer McNett and anyone else who is laboring under that misconception to read "Iraq On The Record: The Bush Administration's Public Statements On Iraq," prepared by the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform -- Minority Staff Special Investigations Division, March 16, 2004.
This 36-page report goes into great detail about outright false and deceptive public statements by Bush (55 misleading statements), Vice President Dick Cheney (51), former Secretary of State Colin Powell (50), former National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice (29) and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (52) on the subject. These 237 misleading statements were made in a variety of forums (53 interviews, 40 speeches, 26 news conferences and briefings, four written statements and articles and two appearances before Congress) beginning at least a year before the war began, and their frequency peaked at key decision-making points.
Here are a few excerpts: In October 2002, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research concluded in the National Intelligence Estimate that "the activities we have detected do not, however, add up to a compelling case that Iraq is currently pursuing what INR would consider to be an integrated and comprehensive approach to acquire nuclear weapons."
This USA Today/Gallup poll is the worst yet:
Fewer than one in 10 adults say they would prefer a congressional candidate who is a Republican and who agrees with Bush on most major issues, according to a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll taken Friday through Sunday. Even among Republicans, seven of 10 are most likely to back a candidate who has at least some disagreements with the president.
Bush's job approval rating sank to a record low 37%. The poll finds growing criticism of the president, unease about the nation's direction and opposition to the Iraq war.
"All of this is a culmination: How we ended up going into Iraq, gasoline prices, the underlying economic jitters, the sense that the president is out of touch with what the average person wants," Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio says. "What good news have people heard?"
I'm not sure even the Devil would accept "Here Kitty, Kitty - let me dissect you!" Dr. Frist.
On the way to work at his job on Capitol Hill, Sen. Bill Frist’s limo stopped at a traffic light, and the Devil opened the door and joined him on the back seat.
Frist reportedly thought for a moment or two about asking the Devil to leave, but decided against it. He was intrigued. When you are trying to pilot a sinking ship through a mine-laden harbor, you will look just about anywhere for a life jacket.
By the time they reached the Hill, the Devil had Frist’s signature on a personal services contract. “Do a little easy work for me, Billy Boy, and you’ll see a return that will make that HCA stock you dumped at just the right time look like chicken feed in a cyclone.” Without batting an eyelid, Frist got into the Senate chamber and announced that the leaking to the Washington Post of the fact that the CIA had set up secret world-wide torture camps was a far more serious “crime” than the establishment of those very same camps. “There you go, Devil. You owe me ten grand.”
Let’s try to weigh these two alleged “crimes” side by side and try to determine which on a scale of important things is the more serious. Leaks to Post? World revolts? No. Torture camps? World revolts? Yes. Hmmmm.
From the Taipei Times:
US Vice President Dick Cheney chose someone in his own likeness to be his new chief of staff. Like Cheney, David Addington avoids public acclaim. And like Cheney, Addington already has made a large imprint on President George W. Bush's White House.
At Cheney's side since the 1980s, Addington has been a behind-the-scenes player in one after another of the sensitive and contentious situations the Bush administration has faced.
Some include: the investigation into the leak of an undercover CIA officer's name, the fight not to disclose which corporations advised the White House on energy policy, the dispute over the treatment of suspected terrorists, and the White House disagreements with the commission that investigated intelligence failures surrounding the Sept. 11 attacks and with the Senate Intelligence Committee over the release of documents. Cheney tapped Addington after Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the vice president's former chief of staff, was indicted in the CIA leak investigation.
Addington, who previously was the vice president's lawyer, was special assistant to the secretary of defense when Cheney led the Pentagon during the presidency of Bush's father, George H.W. Bush.
In some respects, Addington is a Cheney twin. Neither is prone to knee-jerk reactions. Each has a direct style that some interpret as blunt and unyielding. Neither is prone to expressing excessive emotion. Both prefer short meetings. Each is a voracious reader. Both are known for their work ethics and mental organizational skills.
Here:
Some anti-abortion groups are starting to wonder whether Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito is as strong an ally of their cause as opponents have depicted him.
Although most major conservative groups have embraced him, those whose sole mission is to restrict and prohibit abortion have reservations about Alito as they learn more about his record on that issue.
"I don't know what his personal views are, but I know that he has ruled on pro-life cases four times and he has ruled against pro-life positions three times. And the fourth was a split decision," said Richard Collier, president of the Legal Center for the Defense of Life based in Morristown, N.J. "If you look at the paper trail, it is all negative."
Also concerned is another group from New Jersey, Alito's home state and the jurisdiction where many of his rulings as a federal appeals-court judge have had a direct effect.
"There's a big question mark about what he would do" on the Supreme Court, said Marie Tasy, executive director of New Jersey Right to Life. "We certainly hope that Judge Alito is all the things that our opponents claim he is, but we don't know that yet."
The country's biggest anti-abortion group, the National Right to Life Committee, has not taken a formal position on Alito's nomination, but its Web site suggests his record on abortion is mixed at best.
A faithful Daily Kos apostle has some ideas for taking Bill O'Reilly off the mandated airwaves.
From the Guardian (UK):
Human rights campaigners are calling it the 'November surprise' - a last-minute amendment smuggled into a Pentagon finance bill in the US Senate last Thursday.
Its effects are likely to be devastating: the permanent removal of almost all legal rights from 'war on terror' detainees at Guantanamo Bay and every other similar US facility on foreign or American soil.
'What the British law lord Lord Steyn once called a legal black hole had begun to be filled in,' said the British lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, speaking from Guantanamo, where he represents more than 40 detainees. 'It looks as if it is back, and deeper than before.'
If the amendment passes the House of Representatives unmodified, one of its immediate effects is that Stafford Smith and all the other lawyers who act for Guantanamo prisoners will again be denied access, as they were for more than two years after Camp X-Ray opened in 2002.
The amendment was tabled by Lindsay Graham, a South Carolina Republican, and passed by 49 votes to 42. It reverses the Supreme Court's decision in June last year which affirmed the right of detainees to bring habeas corpus petitions in American federal courts.
As a result, about 200 of Guantanamo's 500 prisoners have filed such cases, many of them arguing that they are not terrorists, as the US authorities claim, and that the evidence against them is unreliable.
None of them were given any kind of hearing when they were consigned to Guantanamo. Instead, the Americans unilaterally declared they were unlawful 'enemy combatants', mostly on the basis of assessments by junior military intelligence personnel, who were often reliant on interpreters whose skills internal Pentagon reports have criticised.
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