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just yesterday skippy received a call from the "democratic finance committee." once the caller identified whom he was representing, skippy told him in no uncertain terms, "you guys really screwed up on the iraq funding withdrawl vote. i'm not giving you guys another cent until you get that right."
and he hung up.
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This isn't good news.
THIS IS EXTREMELY OMINOUS
I've been writing for over a year now that the Joint Chiefs have been blocking the White House's efforts to expand the war to Iran. No matter what you might think of Gen. Pete Pace, this really is TERRIFYING news, unless you crave a wider war in the Persian Gulf and South Asia.
Pace has been the most visible symbol of the push-back within the military against the Long War.
MORE below . . .
Poor George W. Except for his cohort, "Buckshot" Cheney, no one really likes his Iraq policy – not the generals, not the troops dying for it, not the people of Iraq, not his fellow Republicans, and certainly not the American public.
But wait – there is one group that is ecstatic about what he's doing there: al Qaeda! Yes, Osama bin Laden's network of terrorists. Remember him? He's responsible for the 9/11 attack on the U.S., and Bush himself promised in 2001 to "smoke him out." But then George, Buckshot, and Rummy decided to forget him and divert our military to Iraq, so bin Laden is still on the loose.
To get congress and the public to accept their nonsensical detour, the Bushites claimed that al Qaeda had a presence in Iraq. That turns out to have been another of their little fibs, but guess what? Thanks to Bush's invasion and occupation of this Muslim nation, al Qaeda now has a great big pressence there. They've been able to recruit thousands of mostly-young men to go to Iraq and fight the Bushites' imperialist ambitions. In fact, Iraq has now become al Qaeda's top recruiting ground! Indeed, al Qaeda now exports war-tested veterans from Iraq to train anti-American forces in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
Thanks, George!
Battling Bush has turned Iraq into a cash cow for al Qaeda's whole terrorist network, energizing donors from all across the Middle East. Add in ransoms from their kidnappings of wealthy Iraqis, and al Qaeda is generating so much money in Iraq that it can not only keep fighting our troops there, but also export funds to other al Qaeda pockets. The CIA has learned that even Osama bin Laden's core command is being financed by payments coming from its Iraq franchise. As one American counter-terrorism official concedes, "Iraq has been a moneymaker for them."
Ironic, huh?
BWAHAHAHAHA... Shorter Judge Walton: get a fucking life and then go fuck yourself, you sniveling little jizz rags.
"He would probably get a warmer welcome in Cuba," said Roberto Calderoli, senator from the opposition Northern League.
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced that he would be replacing Joint Chiefs Chairman Peter Pace in an unexpected news conference Friday afternoon.
Flexing their new-found political muscle, Native Americans - the only "true" Americans - have now weighed in on the McCain-Kennedy immigration bill, lobbying Congress to provide for the immediate deportation of all Mayflower descendants.
Speaking for the National Council of American Indians, Chief "Running Tab at Foxwoods" asserted that the Mayflower settlers "not only entered this country illegally, without visas or work permits, but behaved very badly – spreading disease, raping our women, despoiling the land, and worst of all, stealing our very identity for their sports teams."
Other tribes have proposed a "touchback provision," requiring the illegal squatters to return to the 17th Century, for four centuries, before applying to live here legally in the present.
In Tuesday's Republican presidential debate, Mitt Romney completely misrepresented how we ended up in Iraq. Later, Mike Huckabee mistakenly claimed that it was Ronald Reagan's birthday.
Guess which remark The Washington Post identified as the "gaffe of the night"?
Folks, this is serious. If early campaign reporting is any guide, the bad media habits that helped install the worst president ever in the White House haven't changed a bit.
Thus most analysts declared Mrs. Clinton the winner in her debate, because she did the best job of delivering sound bites - including her Bush-talking-point declaration that we're safer now than we were on 9/11, a claim her advisers later tried to explain away as not meaning what it seemed to mean.
Similarly, many analysts gave the G.O.P. debate to Rudy Giuliani not because he made sense - he didn't - but because he sounded tough saying things like, "It's unthinkable that you would leave Saddam Hussein in charge of Iraq and be able to fight the war on terror." (Why?)
Look, debates involving 10 people are, inevitably, short on extended discussion. But news organizations should fight the shallowness of the format by providing the facts - not embrace it by reporting on a presidential race as if it were a high-school popularity contest.
For if there's one thing I hope we've learned from the calamity of the last six and a half years, it's that it matters who becomes president - and that listening to what candidates say about substantive issues offers a much better way to judge potential presidents than superficial character judgments. Mr. Bush's tax lies, not his surface amiability, were the true guide to how he would govern.
And I don't know if this country can survive another four years of Bush-quality leadership.
Star at Creationist Museum Runs Sex Site
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- The man who plays Adam in a video aired at a Bible-based creationist museum has led a different life outside the Garden of Eden, flaunting his sexual exploits online and modeling for a clothing line that promotes free love.
For months, senators have listened to a parade of well-coached Justice Department witnesses claiming to know nothing about how nine prosecutors were chosen for firing. This week, it was the turn of Bradley Schlozman, a former federal attorney in Missouri, to be uninformative and not credible. It is time for Senator Patrick Leahy, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, to deliver subpoenas that have been approved for Karl Rove, former White House counsel Harriet Miers and their top aides, and to make them testify in public and under oath.
This noncooperation has gone on long enough. Mr. Leahy should deliver the subpoenas for the five White House officials and make clear that if the administration resists, Congress will use all available means to get the information it needs.
There it was on the front page of Wednesday's edition of the Washington Post, big as life and twice as ugly: "In the West Wing, Pardon Is A Topic Too Sensitive to Mention."
The gist: I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby got clocked with a 30-month prison sentence after being convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in the Valerie Plame matter, and now squadrons of GOP die-hards are insisting that Bush pardon him before he goes to jail. On the surface, debate over whether or not to pardon Libby centers around how much more scandal and public disgrace this administration can endure. The Post story reports that several White House aides are deeply concerned that a Libby pardon risks "renewing questions about the truthfulness of the Bush administration."
Perish the thought.
Beneath this simplistic surface, however, boils a cauldron of deeper and far more complicated troubles. Bush, Cheney, the administration as a whole, and the entire Republican Party face the simultaneous eruption of several potential catastrophes, which, if they were to coalesce into one gargantuan avalanche, could very well render all prior problems quaint by comparison.
Peel the onion:
The newest Pew Research Center poll shows Bush's overall popularity coming in just under that of scabies and bubonic plague. [...]
The movement faction hasn't quite realized the degree to which they are considered useful-idiot cannon fodder by GOP officeholders and the check-writing faction. Whenever the GOP needs to divide public sentiment or distract public attention, the movement people get deployed to scream about gay rights, the Ten Commandments, snowflake babies, or whatever happens to be available at the moment. By mouthing platitudes about these issues, the party fools the movement faction into thinking the party actually cares about them.
But now, there is this immigration debate, which threatens to rip the scales from the eyes of the movement faction. Battalions of GOP politicians have made careers out of spitting venom at illegal immigrants to gain support from the movement base. Simultaneously, however, those same politicians have been accepting gigantic campaign checks from the big-money faction, who absolutely depend on easy access to the dirt-cheap pool of slave labor availed to them by the existence of millions of undocumented immigrants within the US.
The problem for the GOP politicians, of course, is that their movement-faction constituents have bought into their demagoguery about illegal immigration to such a degree that, today, this issue is second only to abortion on their list of Hated Things. The issue has birthed a seething anger within the movement faction aimed at illegal immigrants in general, but now aimed also at any GOP politician who stands for anything besides mass deportations.
But there are all those checks to consider, right?
If Judge Walton decides June 14 is go-to-jail day for Libby, and no Bush pardon is forthcoming, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald will find himself gripping the handle of an awesomely formidable battle axe. Fitzgerald has made clear his belief that Libby broke the law, but did so to protect his boss, Dick Cheney. Fitzgerald will be able, under these circumstances, to offer Libby a choice: do hard time, or roll on your boss and spill the beans.
If that happens, and Libby decides to escape prison time by telling Fitzgerald what he knows, the cat will finally leap all the way out of the bag. The outing of Plame, the manipulation of WMD intelligence, the Office of Special Plans, the manipulation of terror alerts, the true intentions behind the decision to invade, and the whole smelly pile of fish heads will come spilling out onto the dock for all to see. Such an outcome might even pierce the veil surrounding Cheney's secret energy meetings from way back when; many people suspect that an invasion of Iraq, and a capture of their oil infrastructure, played a large part in the formulation of those plans.
June 14, simply put, is going to be a really, really big day.
And yet tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps ever on in this petty pace. Any one of these troubles is trouble enough for the GOP, but to have all of them come together simultaneously portends the kind of total political calamity this country has not seen in generations.
Strap in.
Yes, Dennis Milligan, the head of the Arkansas GOP, said this just a few days ago, posted in a June 3 article in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Now, this is a monstrously barbaric and treasonous statement. It is hard to even begin to wrap one's mind around how it wishes Americans more terrorist attacks to prove Bush is "right" in sending Americans to die and paying hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to war profiteers. To repeat, Milligan is wishing more Americans to die from terrorism on our home soil in order to prove that Bush is doing the "right thing" to prevent such attacks from occurring.
Okay, lift up your jaw.
Now, here's our point. Beyond how Milligan represents the traitorous extremes that Republicans will go to in making excuses for failed policies, have you heard one word of denunciation or alarm from the right wing media echo chamber about the traitor in their midst?
We haven't. Not a peep.
These people are enemies within our midst, whose minds and loyalties to an authoritarian hierarchy of incompetents is more important to them than loyalty to our safety and to our Constitution.
Think of what would have transpired if a Democratic State Party Chairman had said this. It would have been a national media and Republican talking point uproar for days.
But, most importantly, remember this point. This is for real. This is how Republicans think.
They wish us harm in order to prove that they are "right" in pursuing errant policies.
They have lost all sense of real concern for our safety – and are a threat to our well-being.
If the DNC had enough good sense, they'd bankroll the Republican Presidential Debates as a weekly, roving, televised Chautauqua. I mean, what more could a Democratic campaign ever ask for than what was seen Tuesday night on CNN? Every major (and almost every minor) Republican contender elbowing each other aside to chide President Bush while simultaneously and unreservedly endorsing his most unpopular policies. An authentic twofer – for the other party, that is.
I'm not a Republican so I'm no position to judge which candidate came closest to appealing to the party base but none of them made any effort to speak to the some 70% of the American population that by now has had enough of the war.
This was great TV. My TiVo wants to know the next time this circus is scheduled to perform.
"WASHINGTON -- In the past year, lawyers for President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney directed the Secret Service to maintain the confidentiality of visitor logs, declaring them to be presidential records.
"The drive to keep secret the lists of visitors to the White House complex and Cheney's home, the administration says, is essential to ensuring the president and vice president receive candid advice to carry out their duties. The decision made the logs exempt from a law requiring their disclosure to whoever asks to see them."
Washington -- Lawyers for President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have moved to make the text of all laws initiated or supported by them unavailable to whoever asks for them. The laws will still be available to all people who do not ask for them. Members of Congress will be able to see the laws on a "need to know" basis once they have voted in favor of them.
Washington -- Lawyers for President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have moved to have their names stricken from all public documents. "If the terrorists knew who the president was, they could very easily find out where he lives," said Press Secretary Tony Snow. "They could learn to whom he is married and where his daughters go on vacation. Imagine what they could do with that information!"
Washington -- Lawyers for President X and Vice President Y have asked the lawyers to classify everything that might be described as "information." Said Press Secretary Beta 5: "More than anything, the terrorists want information. They spend their time and resources attempting to acquire it. It is our job to prevent that from happening. I did not make these remarks and I do not exist."
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