The head of a California company hired by the U.S. government to help build a fence along the Southwest border to curb the flow of illegal aliens into the United States has been sentenced on charges of hiring illegals for the job.
Good to know Washington takes cleanup of radioactive waste seriously. Look how quickly they plan to finish the job:
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Nor am I particularly upset with the artist for sculpting the Redeemer's immaculate thingy, although the thought that the communion host transubstantiates into something with a penis is very discomforting, particularly because I get kind of excited when I think about it. Don't get me wrong. I'm sure the Pope has had similar thoughts many, many times, so I guess it's OK. I mean, it doesn't make me any more homosexual than the Pope. Right?
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Hope everyone with pets will sign up for itchmo's recall alerts and tell their friends to do so as well, as it appears to be the only way to keep up with recalls of all kinds. Is there a site for human food recalls similar to itchmo? Anyone know?
WASHINGTON "The Marine Corps is recalling 1,800 reservists to active duty, citing a shortage of volunteers to fill some jobs in Iraq.
Members of the branch's Individual Ready Reserve (IRR) will get letters this week notifying them of plans to mobilize them involuntarily for a year, said Lt. Col. Jeff Riehl of Marine manpower and reserve affairs.
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March 31 - Wabash, Ind., became first city to be lighted by electricity, 1880.
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Similarly, in its geopolitical incarnation, adherents to the Costanza doctrine cast aside many of the fundamental tenets they learnt at staff college or graduate school. Let me name a few.
First, military and diplomatic resources are finite and should be directed towards your greatest priority. An example of the opposite approach would be for a country that has been attacked by a non-state terrorist group to retaliate by removing a state regime that had nothing to do with the attack.
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Guess who the latest Bush administration officials stricken with amnesia are trying to protect in the U.S. attorneys scandal.
Looking at this buttoned-down operative of the famously buttoned-down, tight-sphinctered Bush political machine, why would anybody believe that? These guys don't freelance, and they don't take Karl's name in vain.
Far more probable is that somewhere high above his pay grade, the same imperative that doomed Scooter Libby is now about to claim Fredo Gonzales. That precious flower, the turd blossom, must be protected above all.
The Tuskegee airmen were the U.S. military's first group of African American fighter pilots, an elite unit that served with distinction during World War II only to return home to face to discrimination and harassment. Today, they received the Congressional Gold Medal, "the most prestigious Congress has to offer."
But the event was marred slightly by the presentation of House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH):
During his short speech to those in attendance, Boehner six times mispronounced the group's name as the "Tusk-E-gee," eliciting audible groans from the front to the back of the Capitol Rotunda. One woman standing in front of me leaned to her companion and whispered, "This is so embarrassing, and he's from my state."
Perhaps making matters worse, almost all of Boehner's speech focused on the general accomplishments of American forces in World War II, paying little direct respect to those in the room.
As if to remove any doubt about the verbal kerfuffle, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell took the stage and began his speech by pronouncing the group's name correctly, while making a clear, if passing, glance in Boehner's direction. Immediately afterward, the entire crowd broke into applause at the correction.
Multiple sources reported today that a top aide to President George W. Bush's key adviser Karl Rove will soon step down from her job in the White House. The aide, Sara M. Taylor, was identified in yesterday's hearing with a former top Justice Department official as seeking the resignation of a US Attorney in Arkansas. She could still face a subpoena, RAW STORY learned.
[...] Firing a prosecutor for failing to find wide voter fraud is like firing a park ranger for failing to find Sasquatch. [...]
Maybe Dick Cheney was right: we are in the "last throes of the insurgency" - but not the "insurgency" he was talking about.
Cheney's "insurgency" is a nebulous ill-defined neoconcoction that will never die as long as Halliburton can wring billions upon billions of dollars out of it (over 20 billion at last count). Cheney depicts the insurgency as some monolithic enemy, composed of "terrorists" who "hate freedom," Coca-Cola, and MTV. The imperial Cheney expects us not to notice that the dread "insurgency" is Sunnis one day and Shiites the next, Saddam lovers one day, Saddam haters the next, Iranians one day, Syrians the next, Al-Qaeda and its infinite imitators and permutations one day, the Taliban and its swelling ranks the next, Saudis, Moroccans, Pakistanis, Indonesians, Ethiopians, and more. (It also includes Cindy Sheehan, Teddy Kennedy, Valerie and Joe Wilson, Keith Olbermann, and you.)
It takes a special person to still support Bush-Cheney in March 2007! To call oneself a Republican today, a person necessarily falls into one of three narrow fairly hopeless categories: (1) filthy rich and pathologically selfish; (2) congenitally mean and pathologically indifferent to the suffering of others; or (3) woefully ignorant, mentally retarded, insane, delusional, or in a psychotic state of denial. The first two categories (rich/selfish and mean/sadistic) are basically incapable of redemption barring some life-altering experience such as being kidnapped (Patty Hearst), incarcerated (Charles Colson), or getting old (my friend Tony's father). The third group (retarded/crazy/in denial) can do remarkably well with medication, residential treatment, radical therapy, injections of LSD, or in some cases, a lobotomy - all of which are vastly preferable to being a proud Republican.
The most important issue here is not whether ITM is a CIA blog, or a money-making scam, or a desperate trick to earn the Fadhils a couple of US Green Cards. It's not whether SoA is a clever bit of US PsyOps, or a neocon money-laundering operations. It is the fact that this foolish nonsense is all Bush has got left in his propaganda armoury. The man is a fool, a fake and a shameless stooge. Impeach now!!!.
Seriously, what could be more emblematic of Bush's pathetic situation today than the fact that he is reduced - nay, he chooses it because he is so out of touch! - to quoting these charlatan bloggers for proof of his desperate last "surge" policy's success?
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War turns human beings into killers, "citizens of death’s gray land". We all became killers and must come to terms with that fact. One way is to insist that our actions were absolutely justified, that we were right to kill. Another way is to recognize that what we did was not justified, that we were either fooled or acquiesced to killing. I have always considered myself in the latter category, which has left me with a legacy of self doubt and anger. On the surface, I would think that believing in what you did would be easier to deal with but the vehemence of the pro-war veterans suggest to me that they can only be sure of their actions as long as no one questions them. When fellow veterans question war, their certainty is at risk. [my em]
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Here's the good news: The Republican party is dying. Slow, painful, twitching, secreting war and intolerance and desperation like a fetid gas, snarling and gagging like Jabba the Hutt being choked by the hard chain of progress and hope and relaxed social mores and an upcoming Generation Next that seems to sense that screaming about gays and women's rights and Muslims and drugs actually doesn't do much to move the human experiment forward in the slightest.
Seems Generation Next tend to be more socially liberal and much less worried about the trembling "sanctity" of the failed nuclear family, and are overall less inclined to align with a particular religion. Indeed, it almost makes you want to weep and sigh and go buy a large grass-fed free-range organic hybrid vibrator.
Ah, but there is a flip side. A counterargument. A dark cloud of righteous bleakness and it looms like a giant synthetic cheesecake-scented Glade PlugIn of potential misery.
It is this: According to another set of data, for the past 30 years or so, conservatives -- particularly those of the right-wing red-state Christian strain -- have been out-breeding liberals by a margin of at least 20 percent, if not far more.
It's true. The reason? Why, God loves babies, of course. White American babies, most especially. Also: issues of space, religion, sexual orientation and, of course, conscience. Or, you know, lack thereof.
It seems impossible. Either we are we headed toward a new dawn full of smart social liberalism, perhaps leading to concomitant ideas of peace and tolerance and a newly evolved American identity, or there is another massive group lurking in the shadows, entirely overlooked by Pew Research, a seething army of religious conservatives who are working like a spiritual STD to force us backward once again, much the way the Bush regime brutally reversed decades of social, environmental, fiscal and international progress and made war and isolationism and megachurch evangelicals the lords of the playground for a shocklingly painful blip of time.
And hence we are, as ever, simply a mad intoxicated mishmash of reactions and beliefs and ideologies, a God-obsessed sex-crazed drug-lovin' sociopolitical train wreck of a country that doesn't really know its ass from a hole in the ground or its God from a burp in the sky.
Personally, I'm going with the new liberal dawn thing. Hell, it doesn't hurt to dream, right?
The last known surviving American female World War I veteran, a refined Civil War buff who met face-to-face with the Secretary of the Navy to fight for women in the military, has died. She was 109.
Charlotte Winters died Tuesday at a nursing home near Boonsboro in northwest Maryland, the U.S. Naval District in Washington said in a statement. Her death leaves just five known surviving American World War I veterans.
In 1916, Winters met with Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels to persuade him to allow women in the service, said Kelly Auber, who grew up on South Mountain, where Winters and her husband, John Winters, settled.
When the Navy opened support roles to women, Winters and her sister, Sophie, joined immediately in 1917, Auber said. By December 1918, the Naval District said more than 11,000 women had enlisted and were serving in support positions.
Friends said she was proud of her role but didn't like to be fussed over as she grew older and there were fewer and fewer WWI veterans alive.
"Why are they doing this for me? I don't deserve all this," Doug Bast of Boonsboro recalled her saying.
"She was very proud of her accomplishments, and when asked, she'd say it was the thing to do, to be patriotic. And, she was very patriotic," Auber told The Hagerstown Herald-Mail.
I swear, it's seeming like by the end of this, they'll be indicting every Nixon and Reagan survivor who hasn't either been busted yet or died.
After a small club gig in Stockholm, it's reported that Bob Dylan "actually smiled several times and ... against all odds ... played the guitar."
As almost all 500 members of "The Gang" from ABC's now defunct "The Note" swim in the turbid waters of the U.S. Attorneys purge scandal, we are seeing waves of subpoenas and daily changing stories from Attorney General Gonzalez. Alas, it's a typical case of Bush Administration Attention Deficit Disorder - the competing scandals are coming in faster than the main stream media seems to want to address them.
Yet the prevailing MSM attitude is "Let them get away with it." Or at best it's "One scandal at a time, please. We're reporters." But as the invaluable E.J. Dionne inquires, "Is the U.S. attorney scandal actually a small part of a larger story about how politicized the Justice Department has become over the past six years?"
To investigate Clinton -- even his Christmas card list -- was God's work. To investigate Bush is "to head down the partisan road of issuing subpoenas and demanding show trials," as the president put it this week.
House Minority Leader John Boehner was booed on Wednesday at a construction workers' union legislative forum for saying the United States needs to fight the war in Iraq or face terror attacks at home.
New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson also won a standing ovation by pledging that if he is president, he will appoint a union leader to the top of his administration.
He also rallied the audience by saying that in 1992 unions turned out 19 percent of the vote and Bill Clinton won the presidency. "In 2000, unions turned out 25 percent of the vote and Al Gore won," Richardson said.
He also pushed his foreign policy credentials as a representative to the United Nations who negotiated the release of American soldiers being held by Cuba's Fidel Castro and Iraq's Saddam Hussein.
"Clinton used to say, 'send Richardson. Bad guys like him.' I have the experience," Richardson said. "I'm not a rock star but I'm the best candidate for president."
Mr Rove, I urge you to voluntarily testify, under oath, to Congress regarding your role in the decision to fire eight U.S. Attorneys. After all, if you have nothing to hide and are willing to tell the truth, there should be no reason for you to fear sworn testimony before Congress.
WASHINGTON, DC - White House Secret Service Agent Anthony Panucci is being called a hero after intercepting what could have been a critically damaging question aimed directly at President Bush during a press conference in the Rose Garden Tuesday.
According to eyewitnesses, the press conference began with Bush fielding routine questions about March Madness and the dedication of a World War II memorial near his home in Crawford, TX. However, approximately seven minutes into the event, a lone reporter somehow managed to maneuver to the front of the press corps group and fire off a loaded, highly charged question concerning Bush's role in the controversial dismissal of eight federal attorneys last year.
"I just followed my training and did what I was supposed to do - put myself between the president and irreparable harm," said Panucci, who is credited with safely deflecting the attack away from Bush, as well as acting before the reporter had a chance to get off a follow-up question at close range. "And let's not forget my colleagues who rushed the president from the scene."
"These potential character assassins are getting smarter, swifter, and bolder, and it's cause for alarm," Sullivan said. "So far, we've been able to prevent most of the blunt, obvious queries from getting anywhere near President Bush, but you never know when a seemingly harmless inquiry will contain hidden barbs or corrosive implications, or even poisonous little crystals of embedded truth."
The reporter who aimed the pointed question has been positively identified as Walter Pincus of The Washington Post. He was pronounced dead at the scene after being shot more than 140 times by Secret Service agents, FBI sharpshooters, and D.C. police.
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At some point you have to look past the leadership and ask why people were so willing to follow them over the cliff. It wasn't the system that failed --- it was every single Republican (like Iglesias) who looked the other way because their boy was on top and they wanted to be in the winners circle. Many of them knew that something was very wrong and yet they said nothing. They need to think about that.
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If you want a tattoo larger than the illustration above in a place visible in your "workout shirt", you may be out of luck! These guys may be going off to die, leave them alone ferchrissake! The article claims that HQMC says large tattoo's are disruptive to the image of the Corps! What?
We are Bad-asses! We are trained to be Bad-asses! This is body-art to these guys! It's their War Paint! Stop treating the most efficient killers in the world like a bunch of Alter Boys, willya? [his em, he was yellin']
The Iraq war has left the U.S. military "in a position of strategic peril," retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey has warned in the wake of a recent trip to Iraq.
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"Stateside U.S. Army and Marine Corps readiness ratings are starting to unravel," he writes. "Ground combat equipment is shot in both the active and reserve components. Army active and reserve component recruiting has now encountered serious quality and number problems .... Our promotion rates for officers and NCOs have skyrocketed to replace departing leaders. There is no longer a national or a theater U.S. Army strategic reserve."
Noting that the Army "will be forced to call up as many as nine National Guard combat brigades for an involuntary second combat tour this coming year," he adds that [m]any believe that this second round of involuntary call-ups will topple the weakened National Guard structure – which is so central to U.S. domestic security."
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Yesterday, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) told CNN that that President Bush's escalation in Iraq is going so well, "General Petraeus goes out there almost every day in an unarmed humvee." On Monday, he told radio host Bill Bennett that there "are neighborhoods in Baghdad where you and I could walk through those neighborhoods, today."
This morning, during an interview with McCain, CNN's John Roberts rebutted McCain's assertions, stating, "I checked with General Petraeus's people overnight and they said he never goes out in anything less than an up-armored humvee." He added that a new report by retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey "said no Iraqi government official, coalition soldier, diplomat reporter could walk the streets of Baghdad without heavily armed protection."
Faced with overwhelming evidence that he was wrong, McCain denied he'd ever said it: "Well, I'm not saying they could go without protection. The President goes around America with protection. So, certainly I didn't say that." Watch it:
CNN's Baghdad correspondent Michael Ware, who has lived in Iraq for four years, said military sources greeted McCain's comments yesterday with "laughter down the line."
Goodbye, John.
...you'll find a large tree set back about 200 feet from the road on the right side. At this point you're standing in downtown Bagdad.
Right about now, George W. Bush probably fancies himself Leonidas, the leader of the vastly outnumbered Spartan army, defiantly bucking the odds as those sturdy old Persian warlords Leahy and Conyers bellow, "Our subpoenas will blot out the sun!" Because this generation's mentally- and morally-crippled answer to Leonidas petulantly responds with, "Then we'll do our finaglin' in the shade... like we always do." However, Bush is no King Leonidas, the tax-hating man credited with winning the Persian War. He's more like that wily and treacherous con man Themistocles.
That the Gang That Can't Think Straight suffers from memory lesions when it comes to who attended what meeting, when, what was discussed and who pushed the button to out this agent or fire that attorney.
But the same gang remembers (and never in the proper context) which attorneys Clinton fired and when and what brand of panties Monica was wearing the night of the Cumshot Heard 'Round the World.
Iran-Contra? Isn't that some new hippity hop group? Help me out here, Mommy.
The major difference between the actual Themistocles and his latter day counterpart is that the real thing only pretended to commit treason.
The cop-out for progressives is to declare a pox on Capitol Hill and give up. That's what the anti-democratic zealots in Washington want us to do, and why their attacks on the majority of Americans become ever more shrill. But the louder they squeal, the more we know we are closer to our goal. If the progressive movement perseveres and picks its targets carefully, Congress will be forced to end this war.
"Firing those eight prosecutors was as justified as our invasion of Iraq."
Just watching this from the outside, it looks as though that is the bad act she's afraid to testify about or -- and somehow I find this more believeable -- she's afraid of indictment for perjury because she has to go up to Congress and testify under oath before the White House has decided what its story is. And yeah, I'd feel like I was in jeopardy then too.
For Democrats, it will be like Christmas and Hanukkah
If Republicans are done in by someone named Monica.
Last night I noted that Monica Goodling, Alberto Gonzales' senior counsel and white house liason graduated from Pat Robertson's Regent Unicersity law school. Apparently, she did her undergraduate work at someplace known as Messiah University, so it's pretty clear that this 33 year old is a dyed in the wool social conservative who was likely hired for that reason. Apparently, the Bush Emerald City hiring practices were more systemic than we thought: there are more than 150 graduates of Regent University serving in the Bush Administration.
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"Honestly, Wolf, you'll barely last twenty minutes out there. I don't know what part of Neverland Senator McCain is talking about when he says we can go strolling in Baghdad."
The Squeeze Inn, right in the middle of Truckee's main drag, serves a wild and unruly assortment of omelets. They also serve lunch and other breakfast items, but that doesn't matter. What does matters are the omelets: Big, man-sized omelets--omelets larger than the hearts of eight dead elk, omelets loaded with fresh ingredients like bell peppers and avocado, omelets with catchy names like "Jeremiah" and "Racy Tracy."
It's not good, apparently her lawyer is trying to suggest they're building a perjury trap for people in the Justice Department. But the truth is, Wolf, Congress - its Judiciary Committees - they have oversight over the Justice Department. It is inexcusable for people in the Justice Department to take the 5th amendment to avoid testifying in Congress. People there must go testify. There's no question about it.
[Bush] has made a few key bad decisions about policy and personnel, compounded them by not reacting quickly enough when things go wrong, and failed to create a sense of accountability in his government ...
The senior counselor to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales will refuse to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee in the unfolding U.S. attorneys scandal, invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, her attorneys said today.
Monica M. Goodling -- who is on an indefinite leave of absence from Gonzales's office -- also alleges in a sworn declaration that a "senior Department of Justice official" has admitted he was "not entirely candid" in his Senate testimony and has blamed Goodling and others for not fully briefing him.
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WASHINGTON -- If Long Island were hit with a major hurricane, debilitating shortages of equipment could potentially slow response by the New York Army National Guard and put lives in jeopardy.
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Five years after grueling deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, the Guard in New York, as elsewhere in the country, is under huge strains balancing warfighting, guarding the homeland and responding to natural disasters.
A report by the Government Accountability Office in January found that states had about 50 percent of their authorized trucks, generators, radios, and medical gear available for domestic use. The GAO said it could not determine whether the Guard was equipped to respond to a terrorist attack or a Katrina-style natural disaster.
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"GO BACK TO AFRICA AND DO YOUR GAY VOODOO LIMBO TANGO AND WANGO DANCE AND JUMP AROUND AND PRANCE AND RUN ALL OVER THE PLACE HALF NAKED THERE."
-- U.S. Army recruiter Sgt. Marcia Ramode, using her military email address to respond to Jersey City resident Corey Andrew, after Ramode learned Andrew was gay.
Is this the General Peter Pace policy at work?
A little under one-third of U.S. households have no Internet access and do not plan to get it, with most of the holdouts seeing little use for it in their lives, according to a survey released Friday.
Park Associates, a Dallas-based technology market research firm, said 29 percent of U.S. households, or 31 million homes, do not have Internet access and do not intend to subscribe to an Internet service over the next 12 months.
U.S. Military Non-Combat Efforts Now Include Building Schools, Hospitals
Got idea from Hezbollah.
Pet Owners' Ability to Sue Pet Food Companies for Damages Depends on Breed, Cost of Pet
Just like for humans.
Supreme Court Hears "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" Case
Expected to rule similarly to last year's "Crack Pipes 4 Christ" case.
(in "Third Man") Harry Lime (Orson Welles) says, "You know what the fellow said...in Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."
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So, imagine my surprise on Thursday when "All Things Considered" kicked off with a refreshingly unbiased, downright laudatory story about the role Josh Marshall and Talking Points Memo have played in the unravelling of the Abu Gonzales justice department. Most of us know the story of how Marshall and his readers have been on this case for months now and the tale of the now-fabled 3000 page document dump and subsequent all-night data mining expedition. TPM staff and people all across the blogosphere joined forces to drill through the stacks of PDF's in record time, neatly sabotaging the administration's stall-tactic.
Oh, how I wish I could have been a fly on the wall in Karl Rove's little crisis command center when they came in the next morning and announced that a bunch of liberal bloggers had read every single document in less that 24 hours and wanted to know what the hell happened to the crucial missing 18 days of emails around the actual firings. They thought they had bought themselves some time, heh, and it woulda worked to, if it hadn't been for us meddling kids.
Yay.
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President Bush wants to keep everything that happens in his White House secret, but when it comes to his own emotions, he's as transparent as a teenager on MySpace.
On Monday morning he observed the Iraq war's fourth anniversary with a sullen stay-the-course peroration so perfunctory he seemed to sleepwalk through its smorgasbord of recycled half-truths (Iraqi leaders are "beginning to meet the benchmarks") and boilerplate ("There will be good days, and there will be bad days"). But at a press conference the next day to defend his attorney general, the president was back in the saddle, guns blazing, Mr. Bring 'Em On reborn. He vowed to vanquish his Democratic antagonists much as he once, so very long ago, pledged to make short work of insurgents in Iraq.
Mr. Gonzales's career has been laced with such narrow escapes for both him and Mr. Bush. As a partner at the Houston law firm of Vinson & Elkins, Mr. Gonzales had worked for Enron until 1994. After Enron imploded in 2001, reporters wanted to know whether Ken Lay's pals in the Bush hierarchy had received a heads up about the company's pending demise before its unfortunate shareholders were left holding the bag. The White House said that Mr. Gonzales had been out of the Enron loop "to the best of his recollection." This month Murray Waas of The National Journal uncovered a more recent close shave: Just as Justice Department investigators were about to examine "documents that might have shed light on Gonzales’s role" in the administration's extralegal domestic wiretapping program last year, Mr. Bush shut down the investigation.
[...] But in other instances, incriminating evidence coalesces around a familiar administration motive: its desperate desire to cover up the corruption that soiled what was supposed to be this White House's greatest asset, its protection of the nation's security. [...]
The "war on terror" has created a culture of fear in America. The Bush administration's elevation of these three words into a national mantra since the horrific events of 9/11 has had a pernicious impact on American democracy, on America's psyche and on U.S. standing in the world. Using this phrase has actually undermined our ability to effectively confront the real challenges we face from fanatics who may use terrorism against us.
The damage these three words have done -- a classic self-inflicted wound -- is infinitely greater than any wild dreams entertained by the fanatical perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks when they were plotting against us in distant Afghan caves. The phrase itself is meaningless. It defines neither a geographic context nor our presumed enemies. Terrorism is not an enemy but a technique of warfare -- political intimidation through the killing of unarmed non-combatants. [my em]
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... This country is either going to stand for learning, education, and inquiry or it's going to stand for blind acceptance of what someone tells you ...
