VA Secretary Jim Nicholson resigns

Think Progress. Links at site.

Veterans Affairs Secretary Jim Nicholson has resigned.

Nicholson's primary qualification for the VA job was serving as chairman of the Republican National Committee from 1997 to 2000, "raising close to $380 million for the 2000 cycle." In March, Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) called for his resignation, noting that his appointment was purely political and looked "like a Brownie situation."

UPDATE: In February, Nicholson tried to downplay the number of injured veterans, claiming that "a lot of them come in for dental problems."

Dental problems. Yeah, IEDs, grinding your teeth for one fifteen month tour after another after another, or meth and alcohol abuse from PTSD will play Hell with your smile.

Reminds me of the time Suzuki had a rash of broken motorcycle frames. Afraid of lawsuits, they downplayed it and claimed it was an 'electrical problem'. When pressed, their rep said, in perfect Japanenglish, "Frame break, pull off spark prug wire, bike stop - erectrical probrem!"

Good riddance to another incompetent Repug crony.

It'll all be over in '09? Maybe not...

From Corrente:

So! The DFH types like us aren't the only ones to think this way. Former US Ambassador Dan Simpson writes for the Toledo Blade:

[...]

There is also the late-at-night, eerie concern that Mr. Bush has in his head some sort of scenario where, for reasons of national security - real or drummed up - the 2008 elections will have to be postponed and he will get to stay on.

My suspicions have at their base the feeling I have that, given their operating style now, this bunch will not leave the White House easily in 2009.

Nice to see this mainstreamed at last.

Because when the going gets tough, the tough get foily.

Because, really, when do monarchs ever surrender power?

I just checked the Dow. I'm rich! Prescience has paid off at last! Tinfoil hat stocks are up now that this has hit the MSM!

Don't worry - they'll leave the White House even if not right on time. Feet first, maybe, but they'll leave.

Media Putz of the Week

Media Putz:

William Kristol is living proof of how the American media has turned the concept of meritocracy upside its head and now puts chronic failures at the top of the pundit pyramid.

Kristol is the scion of leftists turned Neo-Cons. He has the East Coast pedigree that used to be a prerequisite for entrance into the neo-liberal ruling class. But somewhere, something went horribly wrong.

As the paid shill of Rupert Murdoch, who underwrites the Weekly Standard that Kristol "edits," Kristol has emerged as the favorite Neo-Con "expert spokesman" on the mainstream media. This is despite the reality that Kristol has a record of being a smiling booster of just about every failed "Masters of the Universe" foreign policy pursued by Bush and Cheney.

Lately, Kristol has been advocating the nuking of Iran when not doing the Sunday morning "news show" circuit, boasting about what a great job Bush is doing in Iraq. He's the kind of insider that the D.C. media establishment thinks of as a "nice guy" and "one of them."

That's just the intro. Specifics follow.

Which brings us to the specific recent reason for Kristol occupying the Media Putz hat this week: a July 15 column in the Washington Post that the Washington Post prominently promoted online with the teaser, "Weekly Standard Editor William Kristol will chart the remarkable -- and often ignored -- successes of the Bush administration."

Many BuzzFlash readers took note of this "Neo-Con in Wonderland" view of a presidency that has made us more vulnerable as a nation to external threats, at a grave cost in lives and hundreds of billions of dollars.

Then the winning nomination. Definitely worth the read.

I like these lines in the close:

Bill Kristol loves to be perceived as a player in the Bush White House, which is kind of like feeling macho because you hang out at the Gotti crime family's poker club.

With Kristol, you need a crowbar to separate the facts from the fiction, if you can find any facts in his endless, chipper blather. With columns like this one, you remind us how easy it is to separate journalism from the truth.

Hell yeah it's easy - all you have to be is deluded and lie a little. Well, OK, be really deluded and lie a lot.

Update:

Go read David Corn's rebuttal to Kristol's idiot op-ed:

Who knew Bill Kristol had such a flair for satire?

How else to read his piece for Outlook on Sunday, in which he declared, "George W. Bush's presidency will probably be a successful one"? Surely Kristol, the No. 1 cheerleader for the Iraq war, was mocking himself (and his neoconservative pals) for having been so mistaken about so much. But just in case his article was meant to be a serious stab at commentary, let's review Kristol's record as a prognosticator.

And review Kristol's prognostications he does! The word 'wrong' pops into mind a lot...

The Bush-Cheney years have been marked by ineptitude, miscalculation, and scandal. A successful presidency? Bush will be lucky if he gets a public elementary school in his adopted hometown of Crawford, Tex., named after him. He has placed this country in a hole. Yet Kristol, with shovel in hand, points to that hole and says, Trust me -- we're about to strike oil!

If it's true that history repeats first as tragedy and then as farce, Kristol has short-circuited the process and gone straight to parody. His Bush boosterism -- an act of self-justification -- would be amusing were it not for all the damage he has helped Bush to cause.

Perhaps there's a spot for Kristol right next to his idol Bush in a nice quiet Eastern European secret CIA prison. Or at The Hague.

Cheney Suppressed Evidence in California Energy Crisis

Quite a long piece at Truthout. If you're interested in this, you'll be interested in this. All the usual suspects, plus a few.

In-depth investigation shows how Vice President Dick Cheney pressured federal energy regulators to conceal evidence of widespread market manipulation by energy companies during the California electricity crisis in 2001.

Cheney had just been informed by his longtime friend Thomas Cruikshank, the man who handpicked the vice president to succeed him at Halliburton in the mid-1990s, that federal energy regulators were close to completing an investigation into allegations that Tulsa, Oklahoma-based Williams Companies and AES Corporation of Arlington, Virginia had created an artificial power shortage in California in April and May of 2000 by shutting down a power plant for more than two weeks.

This story is based on a two-month investigation into Cheney's energy task force; how the vice president pressured cabinet officials to conceal clear-cut evidence of market manipulation during California's energy crisis, and how that subsequently led Cheney to exert executive privilege when lawmakers called on him to turn over documents related to his meetings with energy industry officials who helped draft the National Energy Policy and also gamed California's power market. Truthout spoke with more than a dozen former officials from the Energy Department and FERC as well as current and former energy industry executives all of whom were involved in personal discussions with Cheney relating to the National Energy Policy.

"[We] started out Monday losing $3 million ... So, then we decided as a group that we were going to make it back up, so we turned like about almost every power plant off. It worked. Prices went back up. Made back about $4 million, actually more than that, $5 million," the Reliant trader says in a tape-recorded conversation on June 23, 2000.

Just one more reason The Dick should be in jail, along with a whole bunch of other people.

Bush is the one our founding fathers warned us about

Robert Scheer

George W. Bush is the imperial president that James Madison and other founders of this great republic warned us about. He lied the nation into precisely the "foreign entanglements" that George Washington feared would destroy the experiment in representative government, and he has championed a spurious notion of security over individual liberty, thus eschewing the alarms of Thomas Jefferson as to the deprivation of the inalienable rights of free citizens. But most important, he has used the sledgehammer of war to obliterate the separation of powers that James Madison enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

[...] "The separation of the power of raising armies from the power of commanding them is intended to prevent the raising of armies for the sake of commanding them."

That last sentence perfectly describes the threat of what President Dwight Eisenhower, 165 years later, would describe as the "military-industrial complex," a permanent war economy feeding off a permanent state of insecurity. The collapse of the Soviet Union deprived the military profiteers and their handsomely rewarded cheerleaders in the government of a raison d’être for the massive war economy supposedly created in response to it. Fortunately for them, Bush found in the 9/11 attack an excuse to make war even more profitable and longer lasting. The Iraq war, which the president’s 9/11 Commission concluded never had anything to do with the terrorist assault, nonetheless has transferred many hundreds of billions in taxpayer dollars into the military economy. And when Congress seeks to exercise its power to control the budget, this president asserts that this will not govern his conduct of the war.

The problem is that the "state of war" in question here was an al-Qaida attack on the U.S. that had nothing whatsoever to do with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Perhaps to spare Congress the embarrassment of formally declaring war against a nation that had not attacked America, Bush settled for a loosely worded resolution supporting his use of military power if Iraq failed to comply with U.N. mandates. This was justified by the White House as a means of strengthening the United Nations in holding Iraq accountable for its WMD arsenal, but as most of the world looked on in dismay, Bush invaded Iraq after U.N. inspectors on the ground discovered that Iraq had no WMD.

Bush betrayed Congress, which in turn betrayed the American people - just as Madison feared when he wrote: "Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it compromises and develops the germ of every other."

I wish that germ in the White House had never been developed.

Molly Ivins: Another reminder of what we lost with her

From her 16. January 2003 column in The Free Press
“I assume we can defeat Hussein without great cost to our side (God forgive me if that is hubris). The problem is what happens after we win. The country is 20 percent Kurd, 20 percent Sunni and 60 percent Shiite. Can you say, "Horrible three-way civil war?" And as George W. Bush himself once said, "Unrest in the Middle East causes unrest throughout the region."”

—Molly Ivins

Go read the whole thing, it is just one small example of how brilliant (and what a brillian writer) she was.

R.

Harry's new balls ...

You gotta hand it to Harry Reid for growing a set of nuts in the past week. Seems he likes them and wants to show 'em off.

Playing hard ball. Reid just pulled the Defense Authorization bill off the floor. If the GOP Senators want to continue filibustering meaningful Iraq legislation, Reid won't proceed.

...

Give 'em Hell, Harry, and don't back down.

Sorry ...

No circle jerk for the Rethugs:



Woulda made their day if this was a terrorist bomb.

Judy, Judy, Judy ...

She's a hero, you know? At least Lardass thinks so.

Matthews: Judy, you’re a hero to the press. You are a woman to be trusted with secrets and thank you for coming on.

Call me on the night a couple big guys in white suits come on and take Matthews away kicking and screaming in a straitjacket. Then I'll actually watch his show. What a fucking idiot.

Tell me ...

Why does the Senate hate the troops?

Senate Republicans scuttled a Democratic proposal ordering troop withdrawals from Iraq in a showdown Wednesday that capped an all-night debate on the war.

The 52-47 vote fell short of the 60 votes needed to cut off debate under Senate rules. It was a sound defeat for Democrats who say the U.S. military campaign, in its fifth year and requiring 158,000 troops, cannot tame the sectarian violence in Iraq.[..]

I've about had it with our elected officials, all of them. Though, as Nicole says:

It’s disappointing to say the least…however, now we have these Republicans (and honorary Republicans, like Joe Lieberman) on record ...

I suggest keeping a list of things about your reps that piss you off during their term so you remember just why you shouldn't reelect them in November.

BES

I've got this for sure. From The Smirking Chimp:

An intensive study of 1,000 randomly-selected Americans has yielded conclusive evidence of a heretofore unnoted contagion, an offshoot of Tourette's Syndrome doctors have labeled BES, or Bush Exasperation Syndrome. As first reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), symptoms of Bush Exasperation Syndrome include involuntary outbursts of projectile cursing whenever the name or image of President George W. Bush is flashed before sufferers of this malady. This catalytic image (or trigger) has produced bouts of explosive and uncontrollable profanity in well over half of those tested for the disease.

Preliminary studies reveal, however, that people with measurably low intelligence have an inexplicable immunity to this ailment thought to be linked to their DNA. Scientists have found an almost exact correlation between IQ and the degree of susceptibility to BES. The lower your IQ, the less likely it is that you will be infected.

That explains why I have such a virulent, aggressive case. Ahem.

Stuck in Senate all-nighter, Vitter orders in 'Chinese'’

"Officially, this will be noted in the Congressional Record as a 'closed-door session', on a 'joint resolution' to insert more 'pork', and to add 'spanking' privileges."

A tip o' the Brain to Don Davis.

Skooter Skates

Will Durst on Libby's pardon:

If Bush had explained that he wiped away the VP's right hand man's sentence of 30 months for perjury in federal court, because you can't send a man named Scooter to prison, I would have understood. But the excuse used was the sentence was "excessive." And we Americans who are just 19 months shy of serving our full 96 month sentence living under the fear mongering, torture outsourcing, and middle class eradication efforts of this Administration, can totally relate.

"Excessive." That's what he called it. This is the same guy who when running for governor of Texas actually said out loud in front of people with microphones sticking out of their hands that he wanted to "stiffen the death penalty." Stiffen the death penalty? What the hell does that mean? Was he going to apply it twice? Were doctors mandated not to rub alcohol on the point of insertion before lethal injections? Did he empanel a blue ribbon committee to figure out a way of how to dump the electric chair and wire up some bleachers?

But when it came to punishing his string puller's best friend, the President's compassion predictably welled up like a zit the morning of picture day in 8th grade. He did keep intact the other part of Mr. Libby's sentence; the $250,000 fine, but that didn't seem to pose much of a hardship, as the skedaddling scofflaw simply wrote a personal check for it. Don't feel too bad for him. I'm sure he'll be reimbursed by the Scooter Libby Defense Fund or as we are used to calling it: Halliburton.

Only too true.

What I learned from Bush

On Flickr

This girl got a lot of attention for this one. The sign reads:

What I learned from BUSH

1. Lying is O.K.
2. Cheating is O.K.
3. Torture is O.K.
4. Taking people's rights is O.K.
5. Neglecting the poor is O.K.
6. Being a religious hypocrite is O.K.
7. Killing is O.K.
8. Incompetence is O.K.
9. Cronyism is O.K.

Thank you, young lady. I am glad the youngsters have such a sterling role model. As you, not Bush.

Forcing The Issue

William Rivers Pitt

The Republican leadership has established hurdles and blockades, everything they can find to stop us from a vote that reflects the feelings of the American people. You know why? They're afraid of what the American people want. They're afraid the American people might prevail.

- Senator Dick Durbin (D-Illinois)

The Bush administration has displayed absolutely no interest in heeding the wisdom of The First Law of Holes - when you're in a hole, stop digging - even as the circle of carnage widens and public support plummets to new and awe-inspiring lows. The original plan called for the establishment of a permanent American military presence in Iraq, and the bitter-enders in the White House mean to stay this course no matter what comes.

For now, they can do so. Bush and Cheney hold the Executive high ground, their lackeys control the military, and if they don't wish to withdraw from Iraq, any Congressional strategies for withdrawal are meaningless. The administration dictates policy, and they control the military. Further, any withdrawal legislation supported only by the Democratic majority will be undone by Bush's veto pen. No legislative solution can be successfully passed and protected from that veto until 67 senators all vote "Aye."

Before anyone can even begin to craft a plan for extracting us from this disaster, Bush and Cheney will have to be politically cornered, politically overwhelmed, and politically defeated. That defeat must begin in Congress. That is the punch behind the Reid-Levin amendment. That is the punch behind the next amendment to come, and the one after that, and the one after that.

If those 22 Republicans fail to heed the public's demands for much longer, the '08 midterms may well see many, most, or all of them defeated at the polls. The current one-vote Democratic majority in the Senate would be vastly increased, and would wield the kind of legislative power not seen in the Senate in many years. Such a muscular majority could dictate terms on Iraq, restoration of habeas corpus, the nomination of new justices to the United States Supreme Court, and those issues are just for starters.

If, on the other hand, enough of those 22 Republicans abandon Bush after facing repeated legislative salvos from the majority, bills mandating withdrawal from Iraq could then be crafted and passed; if the majority's seeming strategy bears fruit, a coalition of 67 senators will be the final result, holding enough votes to override any veto, enough votes to begin legislating an end to this war. The Bush administration would, at long last, be cornered and check-mated.

The showdown on Tuesday placed this choice before the GOP. More legislation is coming that will force the same choice upon them. The elections are coming, the public is not with them, and they are no longer sheltered by the media-inflated approval ratings of Mr. Bush and his war. They will be forced to vote time and again on Iraq, forced to defend their votes, and ultimately forced to campaign on those votes.

I think it's awful that those clowns put their careers ahead of doing what's right. Eventually, the ghastly thought that they may not get re-elected will force them to make the right decision for the wrong reasons, but they'll make it. Meanwhile, the needless dying and expense will continue.

Note to Dems: I hesitate to compare your political turkey slap to an actual fist fight, but you don't always win one of those with the first punch. The last election at least got you off your knees. Keep punching, kicking, biting until you prevail. If you quit, the bad guys win and we all lose. If you can't land a knockout punch, just wear 'em down.

It's not the way I want it, but it's the way it is. Dammit. As slow and ineffectual as things move on Capitol Hill, my money's on molasses in January.

For anyone who may have committed 'genre'

I thought our esteemed resident novelist might get a kick out of this, and also I already have a copy of "The Yiddish Policemen's Union" and it's next on my reading list. From Jon Carroll:

OK, this is really too wonderful to pass up. My friend Mary pointed it out to me, and to her goes all the glory. Background: Ursula K. Le Guin is of course a venerable, much-honored and utterly fabulous writer of science fiction. She's won a bunch of awards. She wrote the "Earthsea" series and a novel called "The Left Hand of Darkness," and a few dozen other books.

Quote from a Franklin review in Slate of "The Yiddish Policeman's Union:" "Michael Chabon has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it."

Le Guin, from her Web site: "Something woke her in the night. Was it steps she heard, coming up the stairs -- somebody in wet training shoes, climbing the stairs very slowly ... but who? And why wet shoes? It hadn't rained.

"There, again, the heavy, soggy sound. But it hadn't rained for weeks, it was only sultry, the air close, with a cloying hint of mildew or rot, sweet rot, like very old finiocchiona, or perhaps liverwurst gone green.

"There, again -- the slow, squelching, sucking steps, and the foul smell was stronger. Something was climbing her stairs, coming closer to her door. As she heard the click of heel bones that had broken through rotting flesh, she knew what it was. But it was dead, dead! God damn that Chabon, dragging it out of the grave where she and the other serious writers had buried it to save serious literature from its polluting touch, the horror of its blank, pustular face, the lifeless, meaningless glare of its decaying eyes!

"What did the fool think he was doing? Had he paid no attention at all to the endless rituals of the serious writers and their serious critics -- the formal expulsion ceremonies, the repeated anathemata, the stakes driven over and over through the heart, the vitriolic sneers, the endless, solemn dances on the grave? Did he not want to preserve the virginity of Yaddo? Had he not even understood the importance of the distinction between sci fi and counterfactual fiction?

There's lots more. Mr. Carroll closes with:

Them's writing, friends.

I agree.

Quote of the Day

via Think Progress:

“I challenge the President or whoever has us here for 15 months to ride alongside me. I’ll do another 15 months if he comes out here and rides along with me every day for 15 months. I’ll do 15 more months. They don’t even have to pay me extra.”

—A soldier on the ground in Baghdad

Never argue with a woman ...

No shit. Mrs. F suggested I post this*. Who am I to argue?


Never Argue with a Woman...

One morning the husband returns after several hours of fishing and decides to take a nap. Although not familiar with the lake, the wife decides to take the boat out. She motors out a short distance, anchors, and reads her book.

Along comes a Game Warden in his boat. He pulls up alongside the woman and says, "Good morning, Ma'am. What are you doing?"

"Reading a book," she replies, (thinking, Isn't that obvious?)

"You're in a Restricted Fishing Area," he informs her.

"I'm sorry, officer, but I'm not fishing. I'm reading."

"Yes, but you have all the equipment. For all I know you could start at any moment. I'll have to take you in and write you up."

"If you do that, I'll have to charge you with sexual assault," says the woman.

"But I haven't even touched you," says the game warden.

"That's true, but you have all the equipment. For all I know you could start at any moment."

"Have a nice day ma'am," and he left.

MORAL: Never argue with a woman who reads. It's likely she can also think.

*And just to show how badly we've become hooked on technology, she emailed me this from across the room.

Take a break, troopers...

Another BuzzFlash guest contribution, by Charlie Jackson:

President Bush and the U.S. Congress plan to be on vacation throughout the month of August. The Iraqi parliament will leave town as well, according to White House spokesman Tony Snow.

When the heat is on (up to 130 degrees in Baghdad), why should anyone work? Therefore, all U.S. personnel currently serving in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are hereby encouraged to take August off too.

After all, there is general consensus that no matter what tactics are employed, the military, political, and economic situation in Iraq will remain unstable at best throughout the summer. Little progress can be made while the denizens of freedom and liberty are vacationing in Kennebunkport and Aqaba.

Even General Petreaus, sleeping in the air-conditioned comfort of the Republican Palace in the Green Zone deserves a break. Perhaps he and George Casey can share a game of cribbage while in Martha's Vineyard. After all, dissembling for an Administration divorced from reality must be hard work.

So, let's hear it for the troops. Instead of sending care packages with Baby Wipes® and Purel®, we should instead encourage a permanent vacation back home in the good ol' U.S.A. Take August off, then September, October, November, and December as well. How about a complete shutdown of the entire military for awhile?

Or perhaps our men and women in uniform should invite the beltway plutocrats and pundits to join them for a restful time in Baqouba or Sadr City. I am sure that after only a few hours, even advocates of realpolitik would decide it's time to "go home."

Everyone could use a holiday from war this August. Agreed?

Agreed. A permanent holiday. At the very least, our troops should hide 'n skate while the pols are goofing off in the vacation fleshpots of the world. The fighting and dying can continue very nicely without them.

Anti-taco movement in NOLA

LATimes

NEW ORLEANS — In the parking lot of a drive-thru daiquiri bar that sells frozen White Russians in plastic to-go cups, Fidel Sanchez is running an illegal enterprise that's too unwholesome to be tolerated, according to politicians here in suburban Jefferson Parish.

Sanchez is selling tacos out of a truck — and judging from the lunch-hour line outside Taqueria Sanchez el Sabrosito, many Louisianans have become fast fans of his flavorful carne al pastor and spicy pork chicharrones.

But not everyone is enamored of the newest cheap eats to captivate the Crescent City. Jefferson Parish politicians, who have long turned a blind eye to whites and blacks peddling shrimp out of pickup trucks and snow cones on the street, recently outlawed rolling Mexican-food kitchens, calling them an unwelcome reminder of what Hurricane Katrina brought. Soon, Sanchez will be run out of business.

Please read the rest.

For some of us from L.A., and no doubt elsewhere, the ubiquitous taco trucks are the gold standard of street eats. Those things are everywhere. The food is prepared fresh right on the truck, and the fare is orders of magnitude better than the little 'roach coaches' that sell packaged food.

My favorite is a fried egg and cheese torta (aka 'sandwich') with chorizo or al pastor. If you go with tacos, about three of 'em'll make a meal, all of different flavors if you choose, at about a buck and a quarter a pop. I leave the lengua and buche alone, but there are plenty of choices.

The taco rigs are cheap, fast, delicious, and they either come to you or are easy to find. They're real time-savers at lunch or break time.

There's an 'American Dream' element in play here as well. There used to be a taco truck here in my little mountain town. Its operators have parlayed it into two quite popular small sit-down restaurants. They've expanded their menu, of course, but the favoritos de troka are still on it. I think the truck's up on blocks somewhere just in case...

It's too bad that Louisiana pols are using this issue to strike back at an increasing Latino population. Times change.