Serve Those Who Served Us (Despite Bush's Lies)

This sent along by Steve of Cernigs Newshog (aka The Newshoggers) is worthy of our attention in this bipartison blog fundraising effort:

I'd like, if I may, to impose and request you spend a few minutes reading about a bipartisan blog fundraiser in honor of the tragically-killed NYT op-ed writers Sgt. Omar Mora & Sgt. Yance T. Gray.

This is truly a bipartisan effort, which has the approval of Sgt. Gray's father, and it goes to a good cause. All funds raised will go to the Fisher House charity, an organization which builds houses near military medical facilities where loved ones of those who have been injured in the line of duty can stay free of charge while their service member undergoes necessary treatment.

More here.

A Must Read

This is from Wes Clark (Retired NATO Supreme Commander and 2004 Dem presidential runner), but I've heard great reviews of this book from many sources. I won't like reading about it, but I feel it's my duty as a citizen of a country that sees war as a tool of empire.

I have just finished reading a book that was so compelling and moving that I wanted to urge you to buy a copy, while helping a worthy cause. "The War I Always Wanted: The Illusion of Glory and Reality of War," by Iraq and Afghanistan Veteran Brandon Friedman, captures the feelings of war with uncanny perception. Among the many excellent war memoirs by Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, Brandon's stands out as the best. I couldn't put it down.

Bush and Iran: Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid But STOP Him

Insane and megalomaniacal simply do not begin to describe Bush anymore.

Our military is broken, our coffers are empty, and yet the Bushies say Iran is not just in their sights, but a definite strike zone.

Support our troops in the best way possible: demand treason charges be leveled against the Bush Administration not next week, not next month. NOW.

In Honor Of My Repressed, Angry, And Homicidal New England Female Forebearers

It's August 4th, a date notable for the following:

"Lizzie Borden took an axe,

gave her mother forty whacks.

When she saw what she had done,

she gave her father forty-one."

Ol' Lizzie B. (the longtime Sunday School teacher, of which I was one once) was indeed ultimately acquitted of the bloody murders of her father and stepmother at their home at 92 Second Street in Fall River, Massachusetts on August 4th, 1892 (on a sultry, 92-degree morning). [Fall River is where my family hailed from once they got off Plymouth Rock. A part of my family were her neighbors.]

However, from 1892 until her death in 1926, the whole community turned on her (Bush likes the "guilty until proven innocent" manner of jurisprudence, at least as long as the indicted do NOT belong to his administration) and Lizzie died a recluse, her own friends those she largely paid to socialize with her.

[Waving to Mr. Judd.]

Tragedies Waiting To Happen: Yesterday Minneapolis, Tomorrow Your Town?

Right now, according to ABC News, the federal government acknowledges that about 35% of this nation's major highways are in desperate shape; this in addition to the tens of thousands of bridges, countless thousands of stretches of railway, and other parts of the infrastructure that have been left to decay and are now at best "structurally unsound" and more likely flat out very dangerous.

It's only a matter of time before we see the disaster on the I35W bridge in Minneapolis repeated, perhaps with far more deadly results.

Department of Homeland Security? I dunno; al Qaeda supposedly attacked us ONCE. But can these terrorists do anywhere near the damage our federal government has, just in its total irresponsibility regarding the failing infrastructure?

I think not. President Bush's plan? Why, to tell us to pray, of course.

"I Cannot Answer Your Question Because To Do So Might Require The Truth; We Can't Have That"

And, as we all know too well, the truth (and accountability, and responsibility, and words with more than one syllable) is the worst and scariest form of terror to the Bush Administration.

If you missed the Senate Judiciary Committee's hearing this morning where Karl Rove was supposed to appear, yet did not (big surprise, eh?), but where his deputy (J. Scott Jennings) did show up just to say, "Screw you!", here's a Recap for Dummies:

Chairman Patrick Leahy: What is your name?

Rove's ASSistant: I respectfully (chortle) decline to tell you this because it might endanger national security, cause terrorists to stop fighting us over there and come fight us over here, AND possibly make the president mess his pants (again) at a time when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is not available to change his ultra-small Pampers.

Leahy: You're trying to tell us you can't even state your name for the record?

ASSistant: No, I'm stating I won't. I mean, who the fuck elected you and gave you any constitional right to question the authority of the Absolute Monarch, God's boss and mine, George Bush?

Leahy: Moving on, please state your job title and your specific responsibilities.

ASSistant: I can't tell you that.

Leahy: Why?

ASSistant: Because I don't like you. Nobody likes you. Remember when Vice President Cheney, the only man who can tell God to take a freaking hike, told you to go fuck yourself? Just as promised, sir, the Bush Administration restored much needed maturity, accountability, and leadership - not to mention a colorful disregard for just about everything without a billion dollar check attached - to Washington.

Leahy: I see. So your job is to stonewall?

ASSistant: Did I mention that in the latest revision of the Patriot Act, we plan to place all Democrats and just about anyone who earns less than a cool three million a year on a list of terrorists to be denied jobs, services, constitutional protections, AND breathing privileges? Now, if you'll excuse me (and it's not like you've got a fucking choice, you old shit), I need to go so I can get Karl's Starbucks and his daily 50 lb bag of Skittles. It's a tough job subverting democracy and making a mockery of all America claims to hold dear, but Karl and Cheney are damned good at it!

Oh, one more thing: Impeach this! [holding crotch, jiggling it]

As The Worm(s) Turn: Rove Flips The Bird While His ASSistant Refuses to So Much As Identify His Job Function

Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post offers a good take on Karl Rove's middle finger flip to the Senate Judiciary Committee today in the continuing, ever more baffling U.S. Attorney purge scandal that Rove and Bush clearly orchestrated for partisan gain; God forbid someone - anyone - in the Bush White House be held accountable for his or her actions.

For my take on how Rove's hench-weasel responded to the simplest questions posed by Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Arlen Specter (R-PA and Scotland (cough)), see this post. The fellow seemed unwilling to so much as give his name. The contempt these folks hold for anyone not part of them is just astonishing. I have to say I can find no real precedent for the extensiveness of the clear and utter disregard for any accountability for their felonious actions.

At the same time, the Bush Administration is apparently pumping its set of huge brass balls ever larger because, as it becomes clearer with each passing day that U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales cannot tell a truth and certainly has NO capacity for performing his job ("I serve at the pleasure of the president; I nap when he does!"), the Bushies want to give this dolt even MORE capability for spying on us all under FISA, without due cause and definitely without any accountability.

Elsewhere, Time Magazine states what is all too obvious to those of us paying attention: Bush won't boot Gonzo because to do so might bring some very nasty, impeachable, perhaps fully treasonous facts into the light of day. How terrible that would be - for them, that is.

Of Disasters And Playing The Fear Card: Did You Notice?

Wednesday night, as the tragedy of the bridge collapse in Minneapolis played out in prime time, gave what (at least for me) seemed a potent example of how badly the media, especially hopelessly partisan and misleading venues such as virtually anything and everything Rupert Murdoch owns like Fox News, the Department of Homeland Security, AND the Bush Administration serve us in times of tragedy.

I've addressed my complete disgust with the Bushies on this subject in earlier posts today, so let me turn to the rest, starting with the Department of Homeland (Incompetence and In)Security, which took rather long Wednesday night to say they doubted terrorism was at fault for the devastation.

From what I could tell, more than 90 minutes elapsed before the DHS managed to say that probably Osama bin Laden - or a liberal blogger, for that matter - was responsible. Now that might not sound too bad, but this message came SIGNIFICANTLY AFTER one cable TV news source, notably Keith Olbermann doing live coverage on MSNBC, bothered to check the Minnesota DOT's Web site and learned important details like the fact significant pile-driving, which can cause fierce vibration and therefore could be a major contributing factor to such a structural failure, was to take place that very night. I flipped between MSNBC, CNN, and Fox for the better part of three hours, and I have to say Olbermann's crew was almost always not just ahead of the game, but putting out important and verifiable details that put the disaster in much better perspective. For example, they seemed the first to report that this bridge had been considered at only 50% of its structural best several years ago and was on a list with tens of thousands of other bridges throughout the country in dire need of repair or replacement. In Bush's America especially, little things like basic safety take a huge backseat to getting Halliburton ever greater unprecedented profits thanks to no bid contracts awarded by the Bushies. Was this information magically available globally to the World Wide Web somehow not available to the idiot DHS director Michael Chertoff and his band of corrupt incompetents calling themselves by a department name they aren't fit to wear? So yes, I wonder if the slowness by them wasn't convenient to the fear campaign.

Fox, on the other hand, at best behaved almost hysterically and at worst... well, I have to say that I seriously wondered whether they were deliberately playing into the fear card as part of the great leadup to the nonstop terror scare fest we must expect as we edge closer to the 2008 presidential election. It seems to be part of the Republican playbook to scare the bejesus out of everyone with the silliest of potential terror events (exploding cheese and grandmas with bombs in their Reeboks, for example) while completely ignoring the gravest of present dangers like the Bushies and Fox News. At one point, Shep Smith filling in for O'Reilly was as breathless as a scared schoolgirl talking about explosions and all but suggesting that Osama bin Laden had decided that the way to hurt America most was to make it tough to get to Minnesota's Mall of America. They had a terror alert banner running that seemed suspiciously like something to be used to scare the not-so-bright into thinking al Qaeda wants to win its war one structurally unsound American bridge at a time.

Folks, we're being played and for far worse than mere fools. Fox plays us, the Bushies play us, and our own desire to not worry about all this "pesky political stuff" also plays us directly into the hands of those who want to peddle fear while reaping huge profits for doing nothing more than none too talented sleight-of-hand, hoping you're too busy watching American Idol or the latest ball game to notice.

As Rome And Bridges Burn (And Collapse), Bush Fiddles But Without The Talent of Nero

[Ed. note: For more on this issue, read my posts here and here.]

As a person of faith, I happen to believe in the power of prayer. I make no bones or apologies about this. I also have no desire to shove it in your face, whether we think alike or not.

However, when President Bush finally appeared, sandwiching in time for a comment about the tragedy on the I35W bridge across the Mississippi River in Minneapolis Thursday evening - hard to schedule between his naps, bike rides, Condi Rice still helping him read "My Pet Goat" (he's still trying to finish it lo these six years since he began it on the morning of 9-11 but, written for small children, some of the words probably prove quite a challenge to him) along with (of course) his myriad lies and machinations - Bush was once again quick to cite that he was praying and telling us we should do so as well.

Now, I'm certainly not going to say it's inappropriate for the leader of the free world to pray. However, I rather expect that same leader to do MORE than pray. And I sure as hell don't need him telling ME to do so since the decision to pray, or not, is one that is intensely private and personal.

Time and again, whether on the subject of September 11th or the horror he's caused in Iraq (and Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and here, there, and everywhere), the U.S. Constitution he and pal Alberto Gonzales have used for toilet paper, or whether his favorite Texas team wins the playoffs, Bush shoves prayer at us like he's our moral compass (well, he does seem to believe he sits not just at the right hand of God, but on His - or Her - lap, fiddling dangerously with the control panel, wondering what happens if he presses that big red button - indeed, as Gonzales says he serves at the pleasure of the president, our president thinks God serves at the pleasure of Bush's "decider" omnipotence). Why bother to actually lead when you can just spout prayer and then return to his nap, right?

Let me suggest that Bush should be looking at the nation's infrastructure; for example, the thousands of OTHER bridges out there ruled as structurally questionable if not more so than the one that collapsed yesterday. And not just LOOK at the infrastructure and rush to award lucrative no-bid/no-work/no-good-results contracts to his bestest pals in exchange for money in Bush & Cheney's pockets, but start implementing a real plan to address these issues. The ever-accelerating decay of the nation's infrastructure did not begin with the Bushies, but in the name of the ridiculously incompetent "Homeland Security", everything thing else has gone to goo while he sees terrorists everywhere but where we have the greatest concentration of terrorists these days: namely, HIS administration.

Much Better: Arrest Impeach Supporters Rather Than Indict A Lying, Thieving President

It's amazing, really.

A president who stole two elections, lied us into countless wars (the one in Iraq and the ridiculous one he labeled "War on Terror" are but two), violates the U.S. Constitution and the Geneva Convention on a daily and egregious basis, has made our country far less safe (and our risk from terrorists seems almost microscopic compared with our grave and present risks from the Bush-Cheney minions who are themselves terrorists), has killed the American dollar (still in freefall throughout the world) along with countless soldiers, civilians, and so-called enemy detainees, goes scot-free.

But cops arrest a 74-year-old man for selling Impeach Bush buttons at a Maryland farmer's market. Cindy Sheehan and nearly four dozen other Americans have also been arrested this week for impeachment efforts.

Feel any safer? I don't.

Bush Retains Deep Burrowing Bug Up His Butt

[On Saturday morning, as CNN ran the breaking news headline for hours saying they were awaiting news of Bush coming out of his colonoscopy, I was still woozy from a lack of caffeine. Thus, when they showed video - while that banner headline ran - of a bust of more than 30 pounds of marijuana found in the trunk of a car driven by a teenager, I slapped my head and thought, "Geez. Is THAT what he's had buried up there all this time? You'd think if it was pot, he wouldn't have been such a paranoid, perverse, and antagonistic little prick!" Turns out, these were two separate stories.]

On Friday night or so, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann joked that President Bush had to rush to sign the "new" anti-torture legislation bill (one meant to "clarify", as if it was anyone but the Bushies who needed such clarification, the rules against torture during interrogation laid out by the Geneva Convention) into effect before he "handed over" temporary control of the presidency to Vice President Dick Cheney while he underwent general anesthesia for a routine colonoscopy Saturday morning, just in case The Dick got any "funny" ideas.

There were also more than a few jokes running around (not exactly the ha-ha variety given what these chickenhawks are willing to do when someone else is in the line of fire) that we should pray like hell that Cheney didn't decide to use his few hours as commander-in-cheat to declare full scale war on Iran.

The sad news? Well, it's pretty damned clear that Bush's colonoscopy failed to dislodge the very deep, dangerous, and dum-bulbafying bug he's had buried up his sigmoid (one of the lovely stretches of intestine we call the colon) for at least the last seven years. Also, according to the president's doctors, they found no brain wedged up there, finally putting an end to the theory that this is where Bush has had his mind buried all this time.

Paul Krugman: "All The President's Enablers"

Like Krugman, I couldn't care less if Bush is "certain" and "confident" we'll defeat Iraqi insurgents and al Qaeda because Bush was just as confident about the ease of the Iraq war, how fast he would find Osama bin Laden, and how the world would love our War on Terror, areas in which he failed light years beyond miserably. Read the rest here:

In a coordinated public relations offensive, the White House is using reliably friendly pundits — amazingly, they still exist — to put out the word that President Bush is as upbeat and confident as ever. It might even be true.

What I don’t understand is why we’re supposed to consider Mr. Bush’s continuing confidence a good thing.

Remember, Mr. Bush was confident six years ago when he promised to bring in Osama, dead or alive. He was confident four years ago, when he told the insurgents to bring it on. He was confident two years ago, when he told Brownie that he was doing a heckuva job.

Now Iraq is a bloody quagmire, Afghanistan is deteriorating and the Bush administration’s own National Intelligence Estimate admits, in effect, that thanks to Mr. Bush’s poor leadership America is losing the struggle with Al Qaeda. Yet Mr. Bush remains confident.

Sorry, but that’s not reassuring; it’s terrifying. It doesn’t demonstrate Mr. Bush’s strength of character; it shows that he has lost touch with reality.

Actually, it’s not clear that he ever was in touch with reality. I wrote about the Bush administration’s “infallibility complex,” its inability to admit mistakes or face up to real problems it didn’t want to deal with, in June 2002. Around the same time Ron Suskind, the investigative journalist, had a conversation with a senior Bush adviser who mocked the “reality-based community,” asserting that “when we act, we create our own reality.”

People who worried that the administration was living in a fantasy world used to be dismissed as victims of “Bush derangement syndrome,” liberals driven mad by Mr. Bush’s success. Now, however, it’s a syndrome that has spread even to former loyal Bushies.

Yet while Mr. Bush no longer has many true believers, he still has plenty of enablers — people who understand the folly of his actions, but refuse to do anything to stop him.

Pottersville delivers the rest (say "hi" to JurassicPork for me).

Nicholas D. Kristof: "Cheney's Long-Lost Twin"

That there can be even one Cheney has cost many meals and countless times worshipping the porcelain goddess" after reading about the Bushies' latest atrocities; the idea, as Kristoff proposes in this Times OpEd column, he may have a twin is beyond frightening (read it all here):

Could Dick Cheney and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad be twins separated at birth?

The U.S. vice president and Iranian president, each the No. 2 in his country, certainly seem to be working together to create conflict between the two nations. Theirs may be the oddest and perhaps most dangerous partnership in the world today.

Both men are hawks who defy the international community, scorn the U.N. and are unpopular at home because of incompetence and recklessness — and each finds justification in the extremism of the other.

“Iranians refer to their new political radicals as ‘neoconservatives,’ with multiple layers of deliberate irony,” notes Gary Sick, an Iran specialist at Columbia University, adding: “The hotheads around President Ahmadinejad’s office and the U.S. foreign policy radicals who cluster around Vice President Cheney’s office, listen to each other, cite each others’ statements and goad each other to new excesses on either side.”

So one of the perils in the final 18 months of the Bush administration is that Mr. Cheney and Mr. Ahmadinejad will escalate provocations, ending up with airstrikes by the U.S. against Iranian nuclear sites.

Already we’re seeing a series of leaks about Iran that echo leaks in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. The reports say that Iran is turning a blind eye to Al Qaeda, is using Hezbollah to wage a proxy war against U.S. forces in Iraq, is transferring bomb-making skills to Iraq insurgents and is handing out armor-piercing bullets to fighters in Iran and Afghanistan so as to kill more Americans.

Yet the jingoists aren’t all in our government: These leaks may well all be accurate, for Mr. Ahmadinejad is a perfect match for Mr. Cheney in his hawkishness and contempt for the international community.

It’s worrying that Iran has just recalled its most able diplomat — Javad Zarif, ambassador to the U.N. — and sent him out to pasture as an academic. Hard-liners always hated Mr. Zarif; goons from a mysterious Iranian security agency detained me on my last trip to Tehran and accused me of being a C.I.A. or Mossad spy, apparently because they were trying to get dirt to use against Mr. Zarif (who had given me my visa).

[...]A recent opinion poll in Iran found that 70 percent of Iranians want to normalize relations with the U.S., and 61 percent oppose the current Iranian system of government. Any visitor to Iran knows that it is — at a people-to-people level — the most pro-American Muslim country in the region, and the regime is as out of touch and moribund as the shah’s was in the late 1970s.

The ayatollahs’ only hope is that we will rescue them with a military strike, which would cement them in place for many years to come. But look out, because that’s what may happen if bilateral relations are driven by those jingoistic twins, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Ahmadinejad.

JP at Pottersville offers more.

Maureen Dowd: "Hey, W! Bin Laden (Still) Determined To Strike In U.S."

Maureen lays it on the line, most ably (find the rest here at Pottersville):

Oh, as it turns out, they’re not on the run.

And, oh yeah, they can fight us here even if we fight them there.

And oh, one more thing, after spending hundreds of billions and losing all those lives in Iraq and Afghanistan, we’re more vulnerable to terrorists than ever.

And, um, you know that Dead-or-Alive stuff? We may be the ones who end up dead.

Squirming White House officials had to confront the fact yesterday that everything President Bush has been spouting the last six years about Al Qaeda being on the run, disrupted and weakened was just guff.

Last year, W. called his “personal friend” Gen. Pervez Musharraf “a strong defender of freedom.” Unfortunately, it turned out to be Al Qaeda’s freedom. The White House is pinning the blame on Pervez.

While the administration lavishes billions on Pakistan, including $750 million in a risible attempt to win “hearts and minds” in tribal areas where Al Qaeda leaders are hiding and training, President Musharraf has helped create a quiet mountain retreat, a veritable terrorism spa, for Osama and Ayman al-Zawahiri to refresh themselves and get back in shape.

The administration’s most thorough intelligence assessment since 9/11 is stark and dark. Two pages add up to one message: The Bushies blew it. Al Qaeda has exploded into a worldwide state of mind. Because of what’s going on with Iraq and Iran, Hezbollah may now “be more likely to consider” attacking us. Al Qaeda will try to “put operatives here” — (some news reports say a cell from Pakistan already is en route or has arrived) — and “acquire and employ chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear material in attacks.”

(Democrats on cots are ineffectual, but Al Qaeda in caves gets the job done?)

After 9/11, W. stopped mentioning Osama’s name, calling him “just a person who’s now been marginalized,” and adding “I just don’t spend that much time on him.”

This week, as counterterrorism officials gathered at the White House to frantically brainstorm on covert and overt plans to capture Osama, the president may have regretted his perverse attempt to demote America’s most determined enemy.

W. began to mention Osama and Al Qaeda more recently, but only to assert: “The same folks that are bombing innocent people in Iraq were the ones who attacked us in America on September the 11th.” His conflation is contradicted by the fact that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, as the Sunni terrorist group in Iraq is known, did not exist before 9/11.

Fran Townsend, the president’s homeland security adviser, did her best to put a gloss on the dross but failed. She had to admit that the hands-off approach used by Mr. Musharraf with the tribal leaders in North Waziristan, which always looked like a nutty way to give Al Qaeda room to regroup, was a nutty way to give Al Qaeda room to regroup.

[...]W. swaggers about with his cowboy boots and gunslinger stance. But when talking about Waziristan last February, he explained that it was hard to round up the Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders there because: “This is wild country; this is wilder than the Wild West.”

Yes, they shoot with real bullets up there, and they fly into buildings with real planes.

If W. were a real cowboy, instead of somebody who just plays one on TV, he would have cleaned up Dodge by now.

The rest is here.

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.

With Bush, The Damned Lies Keep Coming After HE Refused to Give Troops a Pay Raise

The words Bush and lies go together as surely as hot fudge sauce and vanilla ice cream, Halliburton and stealing/overbilling, Cheney and nasty secrets, government and crime, not to mention Republican "Christian moralists and kinky prostitutes. So why should this surprise us? Well, except that Bush and his GOP loyalists have refused for 4+ years to properly equip our troops and that just a few weeks ago, they insisted soldiers did NOT need a pay raise and would block any measure to give them one:

President Bush, ratcheting up a fight with Congress over Iraq, accused Democrats on Friday of conducting a political debate on the war while delaying action on money to upgrade equipment and give troops a pay raise.

"It is time to rise above partisanship, stand behind our troops in the field, and give them everything they need to succeed," Bush said in the Rose Garden after meeting with veterans and military families.

Bush spoke two days after Senate Republicans thwarted a Democratic proposal to pull out troops from Iraq. Bush said that instead of approving money for the war, "the Democratic leaders chose to have a political debate on a precipitous withdrawal of our troops from Iraq."

Despite Bush's suggestion that the bill is a must-pass measure that would pay for critical war programs, the legislation is not an appropriations bill that feeds military spending accounts. Called the defense authorization bill, the legislation is a policy measure used by Congress to influence the management of major defense programs, set goals and guide the 2008 military spending bill.

Votes That Don't Count

If you think that just hoping the 2008 presidential election will bring about fair and accurate voting results - and the novelty that the person the actual majority of voters cast ballots for actually will become president, something we did not do in 2000 and 2004 which handed us the fascist regime of Bush & Cheney - you've been supplementing your diet with Konservative Koolaid. Stand up and reverse this foolish and felonious delay for verified voting reform!

And while you're at it, take a gander at this sickening development:

A federal court ruling in June that forces voters to register by party could return Mississippi to the days of racially polarized politics, as many white Democrats warn that thousands of white voters will now opt definitively for the Republican Party.

Republican-leaning voters in Mississippi have long been able to cross party lines in primaries, voting for centrist Democrats in state and local races while staying loyal to Republican candidates in national races. But political experts here say that by limiting these voters — almost all of whom are white — to Republican primaries, the ruling will push centrist Democratic candidates to the other party, simply in order to survive.

Fred Thompson And Women's Rights: Demand Abortions End While Pocketing Money To Ease Restrictions

Well, former Senator (I doubt he was ever a human being, so I won't refer to him as a former one) Fred Thompson keeps proving that he has the baldfaced lying ability quite apparently required to be a "popular" Republican presidential candidate AND president. After all, only conservative compassionate Christians - as practiced by the likes of the Bushies, James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson - can break all the commandments while insisting they're anointed by God himself.

While Fred has joined the extreme nutcase fringe of fat old white men who demand the right to tell women what to do with their own bodies, The Times reports Fascist Fred pocketed money as a lobbyist on behalf of those who want to lessen draconian restrictions on abortion counseling for those centers that accept federal funding for family planning. Only, of course, Felonious Fred "can't remember" doing so.

Apparently this Republican is going to start the classic Ronald Reagan defense strategy a little early. Perhaps Fred can hire some of those philandering GOP cocaine drug dealers to help out, just like Rudy Giuliani.

Proof Is In The Papers: How Cheney Sold American Energy to Enron, Ken Lay, And Others

If you want to feel even more sick than you do seeing your latest electric bill or the rising total as you fill up your tank with gas, check out the piece I wrote at All Things Democrat about some of the "truth" finally beginning to leak out about Dick Cheney's energy task force and the way it was bought and paid for by energy conglomerates, Ken Lay and Enron, and the lobbyists they make so rich.

The Newest Season of The Fear Factor: Bush Pulls Osama Bin Laden From Mothballs to Terrorize Us Again

He's baaaaccck; not just Bush (who must be due for his annual 6 week summer vacation which should never be confused with the approximately 22 weeks of other vacations he takes each year) but his favorite convenient bogeyman, Osama bin Forgotten; the same one Bush can never decide whether he is the worst threat EVER or "completely unimportant so we don't need to bother to even pretend to catch him anymore". Writes Dan Froomkin in the Washington Post today:

Nearly six years after President Bush pledged to capture him "dead or alive," Osama bin Laden is not only still at large, but he and his al-Qaeda organization have apparently benefited greatly from Bush's decision to invade Iraq.

That's not just me saying so. It's the inevitable conclusion from the declassified summary of a White House intelligence report released to great fanfare yesterday.

It turns out that bin Laden and his al-Qaeda leadership are safely ensconced in Pakistan. They're still trying to attack us. And the U.S. occupation of Iraq has provided them with a potent rallying cry, recruiting tool and training ground they would not have had otherwise.

The White House has time and again used the specter of al-Qaeda to cow Capitol Hill into doing its bidding. Similarly, Bush and his aides have lately gone to great lengths to conflate the multifaceted insurgency in Iraq with al-Qaeda. After all, when it's Bush vs. al-Qaeda, how many Americans will side with al-Qaeda?

The report's release shot al-Qaeda back into the headlines. But this time, the al-Qaeda stories have a potentially devastating twist for the administration: As it turns out, Bush's policies may have helped bin Laden more than they've hurt him.

Gee, really?

Actually, I suspect that bin Laden and Bush are tied together not just at the hip, and not just at the wallet. Bush needs him as much as Osama needs Bush. What scares me most, however, is that I think their interests may be far more chummy - as profitable for each other as they are devastating to the rest of us - than we can yet even begin to conceive.