Rove is a TRAITOR!

The Sister says so:

Sick

Oliver Willis:

[. . .]

On a personal note, I'm sick of these guys. Sick of all of them. Sick of the apologists in government, the media, and among the chattering classes. Sick of these people not giving a damn about dead civilians. Sick of the Republicans crapping on the American people. Sick of George Bush appeasing terrorists and doing nothing - nothing - to prevent terror attacks. Sick of having to wonder if the subway train I'm on is going to blow up, or if some yahoo will smash a plane into the White House a block and a half away from where I work, yet the President, his party and his apologists don't give a damn because they've got a "mandate". A mandate for immorality.

Go read the whole thing.

Exactly right

Froggy:

You want to fight terrorism? You want to hit the Arab world where it really lives and deliver a crippling blow to terrorism from which it will never, ever recover again?

Start a National Energy Race. Challenge the American people to come up with an alternative to fossil fuels the way Kennedy challenged the American people to fly to the moon. It took less than ten years from the start to the completion of that challenge. If the American people were challenged to come up with a clean energy solution, they could finish that challenge in less than ten years too.

[. . .]

Opening ANWR won't do shit, nor will clogging up the Gulf of Mexico with offshore platforms. A viable, alternative energy source is the only way to go. As long as we have to kiss OPEC ass (and support the corrupt regimes of the 'Oil Kings') we will never be free of the scourge of terrorism.

A little whoring: I dealt with this subject in Lightning Crashes, purely fiction but something to think about.

Short excerpt below the fold . . .

Fucking Supporting the troops

[. . .]

The VA is one the place in the DOD that, for all his overheated rhetoric, Bush has failed to adequately fund, in part thanks to his appointee, VA head James Nicholson, who failed to ask for money he knew the agency needed. In fact, the treatment of returning injured soldiers has been one of the great shameful chapters of the horror novel that has been the Bush administration. Most interesting, Democrats in Congress saw the shortfalls coming this past spring and tried to get additional funding included, which Bush and the Republicans both refused to pass.

[. . .]

Read the rest here and get angry.

pShrinking Wingnuts

Digby catches it perfectly:

[. . .]

That is not what we are dealing with here, however. We are dealing with a group of right wing glory seekers who chose long ago to eschew putting themselves on the line in favor of tough talk and empty posturing --- the Vietnam chickenhawks and their recently hatched offspring of the new Global War On Terrorism. These are men (mostly) driven by the desire to prove their manhood but who refuse to actually test their physical courage. Neither are they able to prove their virility as they are held hostage by prudish theocrats and their own shortcomings. So they adopt the pose of warrior but never actually place themselves under fire. This is a psychologically difficult position to uphold. Bullshitting yourself is never without a cost.

[. . .]

Now, I've learned that in combat (or in any similar high-stress, life and death situation) there are two types of people. Those who can and those who can't. You can't guess it about someone or yourself. You have to live the situation to find out. Those of us who've been there know talk is cheap. That's why the chickenhawks (and the 51% of the electorate who listen to them) piss me off so much. They have no idea what they're talking about. My grandfather (WW1 and WW2 on the German side) called them 'Movie Warriors'.

Old fashioned ethics

As opposed to the self-serving shit that's being shoveled nowadays. From the guy in the tuxedo:

Let's say that you're a reporter. You witness a murder. You happen to know the murderer. In fact, the murderer happens to be a source of yours that you talk to regularly. Now a prosecutor calls you to testify before a grand jury about the murder that you witnessed. Do you have a responsibility to testify?

If you were a priest, there's no conflict here. If you personally witnessed the crime, you have a moral responsibility to talk to the proper authorities.

[. . .]

Say it with me: 'Source privilege' cannot be used to cover up a crime. Period.

Journalism

I hope nobody is under the impression what we do here at the Brain is journalism.

Resilience and wisdom

Ol' Yella:

[. . .]

Perhaps having suffered so many insults to their collective safety from old enemies is the reason that the British were so hesitant for their government to go rushing out to make new ones.

Commentary

My weekly commentary is up at Pourquoi Pas.

Good question

JRH asks:

[. . .]

I don't get how these right wing idiots can say with a straight face that we need to focus on who the real bad guys are instead of arguing with each other by calling out people who disagree with them. Sean Hannity did something similar on his show yesterday that I caught the end of. How do they not choke on the hypocrisy coming out of their mouths?

[. . .]

Because it keeps them their jobs, my friend. They're all part of the Republican spin machine and they'd spout their diatribe in Swahili if the WH and RNC told them to. The thing that pisses me off even more is that so many people in this country believe this shit. You know how many people I've heard in the last 36 hours say we should nuke Mecca? How many people say criticizing the 'War on Terra' is hurting our troops? And this is New York.

Friday Cattle Dog London Blogging

The Princess takes a break this week to let us think about London in happier days.

More below the fold . . .

Novak's a Rat

We knew that. My apologies to rats. David Corn speculates on How Novak Covered His Ideological Ass And Sold Journalism Down The River For Partisan Gain.

No good options for Iraq

Go read the opinions of experts and others at Knight-Ridder.

There are easier options of what to do with the sonsabitches that got us into this mess: Leavenworth, the gallows, or a firing squad.

Turdblossom Three-fer

Here are three articles about Rove on the same page at Truthout.

From Joe Conason:

Even as Matthew Cooper of Time and Judith Miller of The New York Times both face prison time for protecting their White House sources, a question arises that the indignant Washington press corps seems to have forgotten to ask: Why hasn't the President of the United States tracked down the officials who leaked the CIA identity of Valerie Plame Wilson, fired them and turned them over to the special prosecutor?

I assume that's a rhetorical question. We know damn well why: Because he's a moral coward. He isn't about to out his Machiavellian brain because then he'd have no one to do his thinking for him except Cheney, and he needs all the help he can get to keep his little charade going as long as possible. Bush has absolutely no acquaintance with the truth and no guts to go against the demons who put him in power, not that he would want to. He has power, but no will to do the right thing. He never has and never will.

From Paul Kuhn:

O'Donnell is standing by his statement, which set off a flurry of "Is it Rove?" stories and blog posts over the weekend. On Arianna Huffington's Huffington Post, O'Donnell has continued to blog about "breaking" the story that Rove was Cooper's source, and likely Novak's as well. After naming Rove on the PBS program "Friday," O'Donnell proceeded to say, "When [Bush] finds out it's Karl Rove, the question becomes, What does the president do then?"

"It was a deliberate act that I was planning for months," O'Donnell told Salon. "What I've been doing with the Huffington Post is simply staying abreast of the story while it was evolving, and it turns out that a blog is an absolutely perfect way to do that," he said. When asked about his sourcing, O'Donnell replied: "I will not characterize my sourcing in anyway." Then he added, "After my public revelation of it, I obtained yet another highly authoritative source on this matter, on the same thing. That Rove is the person Matt Cooper is protecting - had been protecting up until today."

It has been said that the wheels of justice grind slowly, but exceedingly fine. I wish they'd change the gearing and speed 'em up, even if the end result is a little more coarse.

GOP cranks up fear-mongering

Of course they have. They have no shame. From Sirotablog:

You knew it was coming, didn't you? That's right - within 24 hours, the right-wing spin machine is up and working to transform the tragic London bombing into a way to attack progressives as weak on terrorism. Sadly, it is a tactic that continues to emasculate many Democrats, who still can't seem to find the guts to stand up to this nonsense.

Here's a dose of truth for the Republican Party in Washington, D.C.: your war-mongering policies and devotion to creating a constant state of panic/fear in this country has made America less safe, especially in light of your negligence on homeland security. Your heated rhetoric that indicts the strength and patriotism of progressives is a sad attempt to cover up your own pathetic failures.

Now, here's a dose of truth for the insulated Democratic establishment in Washington - an establishment that continues to lose elections, yet, incredibly, refuses to change: if you continue to pathetically cower in the face of all of this; if you continue to ignore the courageous lawmakers in your ranks who know the party needs to stand up; if you continue to defend the Iraq War in light of public opposition to it, in light of proof that the Bush administration lied about it and in light of proof it made America less safe; and if you continue to have positively no courage of any convictions and positively no ability to give voice to the concerns of the majority of Americans, then you will unfortunately continue losing elections far into the future.

I think that about says it.

Did the Brits know?

Did the Brits know it was going to happen? It seems the Israelis and American FBI did. The King of Zembla is on this like shrink wrap.

. . . Contrary to original claims that Israel was warned "minutes before" the first attack, unconfirmed rumors in intelligence circles indicate that the Israeli government actually warned London of the attacks "a couple of days" previous.

Pissed

The Sister's angry. A must-read:

[. . .]

I'm angry because on September 11, 2001, terrorists struck on US soil. These terrorists were part of a group called al-Qaida, which is led by a man named Osama bin Laden. Nearly four years later, and after a war in Afghanistan to remove the regime which supported him, bin Laden remains on the loose.

I'm angry because that corrupt Afghani regime, the Taliban, is regaining power, opium production in Afghanistan is skyrocketing, women are still being killed for trying to assert a modicum of independence, and we have all but abandoned the country to further ruin.

I'm angry because we shifted our focus away from Afghanistan and al-Qaida to a vague "war on terror," which diluted our emphasis on the perpetrators of a great American tragedy and made it eminently easy to position ourselves as the consummate victims, thereby indefinitely delaying any examination of our own role in the global community, other than the self-proclaimed purveyors of freedom and liberty at the end of a gun.

[. . .]

Who's winning what?

BBC:

Former enemies Iran and Iraq say they will launch broad military co-operation including training Iraqi armed forces.

"It's a new chapter in our relations with Iraq," said Iranian Defence Minister Admiral Ali Shamkhani.

[. . .]

This is the first visit to Iran by an Iraqi military delegation since the war, in which a million people died, started.

The promise of co-operation comes despite repeated accusations by the US - which has about 140,000 troops in Iraq - that Iran has been undermining security there.

"No one can prevent us from reaching an agreement," Mr Shamkhani said when asked about possible US opposition.

[. . .]

Is this what our children are dying in Iraq for? So Iraq can make nice with a member of the 'Axis of Evil'? So the oil city of Basra can become a Shi'ite theocratic city-state? Not that I personally give a shit about whom the Iraqis ally with, were it not for the cost to the American people in lives and capital.

As we learned from the events of yesterday, the 'War on Terra' is a sham. We are not safer, the 'flypaper' theory [we're fighting them in Iraq so they won't come here] was proved wrong, and now the people who we're giving freedom and democracy seem more inclined to accept the friendship of an Islamic theocracy than a Western democracy.

So, what are we doing except wasting time and treasure in the money-pit known as Iraq? We sure as Hell ain't getting cheap oil.

Links via Corrente.

A ride you won't soon forget...

Dear Fearless Leader,

I've noticed for a couple years now that you have trouble staying upright on two wheels. I done figured it out, and your troubles are over. Here's the deal: you ain't goin' fast enough. The gyroscopic effect hasn't fully kicked in at those slow speeds.

So here's what I propose: I'll tune you up a motersickle that'll go so fast it'll never tip over. I been wrenchin' on them things fer nigh on forty year, and I know how to make 'em go, by golly. We'll get ya a big American V-Twin with a stroker kit and a hot cam, carb, an' pipe setup. Won't be a faster sled on the road. Your eyes'll light up like a kid at Christmas.

I also know all about brakes, tires, and steering, as well as all the non-essential shit, like a kill button. I'll make sure the wheel and swingarm bearings, brake fluid, throttle return spring and stuff like that are all up to snuff, so to speak.

We got some groovy mountain roads out here in California. I'd love to show 'em to ya. During our ride I just know you'll get a lot closer to God. Hope to hear from ya real soon.

Your pal
Gord

A glimmer of hope

Good news (maybe) via Maru via MyDD:

Occasionally I get e-mails from Washington folks who work on the Hill claiming to possess juicy insider digs on our public servants and their corporate paymasters. I usually delete said e-mails, as I don't want to be responsible for propagating dirty rumors or false information that can't be corroborated. I'd rather let Judith Miller and the New York Times do that. Nonetheless, in the past 24 hours I have been contacted by three separate congressional Democrats in Washington, and a Justice Department official, first by e-mail and later phone, who all say the same thing: Karl Rove is about to be indicted.

[. . .]

These are all anonymous sources so take it for what it's worth, but it's nice to think about on a sad day.