So to keep the Gitmo trials on their proper and preplanned schedule, the Defense Dept has removed the presiding judge who threatened to suspend the trials for that most frivolous of reasons, fairness for the defendants.
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“I have no intention of reading Scott McClellan’s book,” Mr. Bush told reporters, “because it’s a book.”
Mr. Bush said he was “surprised” that Mr. McClellan had written a book to criticize him because “if you’re trying to communicate some criticism to me, a book is pretty much the last place you’d put it.”
The president said that he thought the chances of his someday reading Mr. McClellan’s book were “zero,” adding, “If I didn’t read the Iraq Study Group’s report, I really don’t think I’m about to read Scott McClellan’s little book.”
“Scott McClellan would have had a much better shot if he had put his memoir in Xbox 360 format and then slipped it into a package labeled ‘Grand Theft Auto 5,’” he said.
For his part, Mr. Bush said that there was in fact a book published this week that had caught his eye: the new James Bond thrilled entitled “Devil May Care.”
“Now, that book looks like it could be good,” he said. “Maybe I’ll have Laura read it to me.”
A little-noticed civil lawsuit in Florida is shining a light on an unusual but hugely profitable Pentagon contract to ship millions of gallons of aviation fuel to U.S. bases in Iraq through the kingdom of Jordan.
The deal involves a cast of influential characters, including the king of Jordan’s brother-in-law, who is suing Harry Sargeant III, a top Florida-based fundraiser for Sen. John McCain’s presidential bid.
No wonder Senator McCain wants to stay in Iraq for 100 years, one of his top fundraisers is making hundreds of millions of dollars in profits from it — and you can rest assured, Sargent isn’t the only war profiteer who keeps McCain neatly tucked in his back pocket.
MARTINEZ, Calif. - For 18 years, Stephen Weir has been in charge of the office that hands out marriage licenses in California's ninth-largest county. And for just as long, Weir has been unable to get a license himself because the love of his life is a man.
The irony did not escape him.
"Always the bridesmaid, never the bride," he quips with a rueful smile.
So Weir hopes the citizens of Contra Costa County understand if their clerk-recorder invokes executive privilege and opens up for business a little early on June 17, when same-sex couples may be able to legally wed in California.
He and his partner, John Hemm, want to be first at the counter that day. They plan to be the first to exchange vows and kisses in the conference room Weir converted into a wedding chapel that hosts 1,200 couples a year, but that he could never use.
Until now, we've resisted the temptation to post on former White House press secretary Scott McClellan's new book, which accuses the Bush White House of launching a propaganda campaign to sell the war in Iraq.
Why? It's not news. At least not to some of us who've covered the story from the start.
But the responses to McClellan from the Bush administration and media bigwigs, history-bending as they are, compel us to jump in. As we like to say around here, it's truth to power time, not just for the politicians but also for some folks in our own business.
Bush loyalists have responded in three ways:
1) Scott, how could you? This conveniently ignores the issue of what Bush did or didn't know and do about intelligence on Iraq, converting the story line into that of wounded leader and treasonous former aide. (That canard was the sole focus of a CBS news radio report Wednesday night).
2) Invading Iraq was the right thing to do. Okay. When do Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, et al *not* say that? Dog bites man.
3) It was an intelligence failure. The CIA gave us bad dope on WMD and, well, they're the experts. More on this in a second.
The news media have been, if anything, even more craven than the administration has been in defending its failure to investigate Bush's case for war in Iraq before the war.
So the Pentagon tells the media what kind of reporting is in- and out-of-bounds?
Hogwash. Hogwash! HOGWASH.
Enough self-aggrandizing trumpet-blowing. OK, Scott, What Happened?
Here's what happened, based entirely on our own reporting and publicly available documents:
We could go on, but the rest, as they say, is history.
That's what happened.
Scott McClellan, and millionaire and Medal of Freedom recipient George Tenet, embody everything that has gone wrong in Washington in the dark age of the Bush years. They stand for the courtier, the sycophant, the seeker of power at all costs. Instead of risking their careers while others gave their lives for policies that were catastrophic, the likes of McClellan and Tenet did the wrong thing first, then the get-rich-scheme later, to make a bundle from their bungles, and a fortune from their bad faith.
Contrast this with the courage and integrity of genuine military heroes such as Adm. Fallon, retired Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni and retired Army Gen. Eric Shinseki.
Fallon, Zinni and Shinseki spoke with clarity and conscience, with integrity and courage. They spoke real truth to power, when the power hated their words and retaliated against them. They put their military judgment, the integrity of their military advice, their honor in what they felt was best for their troops and the nation ahead of personal advantage and career opportunism.
While Fallon, Zinni and Shinseki acted with principle and honor, standing against the unwise polices of a disastrous presidency, McClellan and Tenet courted favor with power first, then peddled their wares for profit later while the number of Gold Star mothers continues to rise.
Make no mistake: Fallon, Zinni and Shinseki are heroes. McClellan and Tenet are bums.
Yesterday, CNN’s Michael Ware dismissed Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) recent assertion that Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) travel to Iraq in order to get a better sense of the war. Ware said that U.S. officials’ trips to Iraq are usually “divorced from reality” adding that its “impossible” to “get much of a real picture.” Ware then noted that McCain’s own trips to Iraq have not helped him get a sense of the realities in Iraq:
WARE: I’ll issue a word of caution, too. I mean Senator McCain has been here, what, more than half a dozen times. And we’ve seen him get assessments of Iraq terribly wrong. So I wouldn’t be hanging my hat on the fact that your opponent has only been here once.
McCain falsely claims Mosul is ‘quiet.’
Today at a townhall meeting in Wisconsin, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) tried to claim that President Bush’s policies in Iraq are “succeeding,” by pointing to the “quiet” in Mosul and other cities:
So I can tell you that it is succeeding. I can look you in the eye and tell you it’s succeeding. We have drawn down to pre-surge levels. Basra, Mosul and now Sadr city are quiet and it’s long and it’s hard and it’s tough and there will be setbacks.
Mosul, however, is not quiet. In fact, today AP reported, “Another suicide bomber driving a police vehicle struck Iraqi commandos earlier Thursday in Mosul, killing three of them and wounding nine other people, according to battalion commander Capt. Aziz Latif.”
Forget Rachael Ray, Michelle Malkin Claims Indy 500 Sold Out to Terrorists
"It's just one more example of the Indy-fada."
NY Governor Patterson [sic] has directed that NY will recognize out of state same-sex marriages. It's not totally clear from the NY Times article whether this includes civil unions that are not called "marriage" from other states. I would expect so.
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Bahrain's king has appointed a Jewish woman as the country's envoy to the United States.
Houda Nonoo said she was proud to serve her country "first of all as a Bahraini" and that she was not chosen for the post because of her religion.
She is believed to be the Arab world's first Jewish ambassador.
Ms Nonoo, 43, has served as a legislator in Bahrain's 40-member Shura Council for three years and is head of the Bahrain Human Rights Watch.
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It's been a habit of the Democrats to let Republicans get away with their crimes. New administration, new Congress, move on, let bygones be bygones. It is imperative that the next Democratic president and the next Democratic Congress establish the principle that no one is above the law. Here's part of the reason why:Earlier, Bolton had defended the US's right to launch pre-emptive nuclear attacks and to promote regime change or, if necessary, a military attack on Iran to prevent it acquiring nuclear weapons.
If people like Bolton aren't held accountable, not only will the U.S. continue to cede any moral authority on any human rights issues anywhere, but these same people will continue to turn up in other Republican administrations, ready and enabled to cause more crimes, more destruction, and more death.
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If you've ever been curious about the subtleties of vomiting demons, watch this interview.
After “Rahmbo” Emanuel, the Illinois congressman dubbed “the hostage negotiator” by the Obama forces, fails to talk Hillary down, Barack Obama knows that he is left with one final roll of the dice. He sets up a secret meeting with Bill Clinton in neutral territory at Rahm’s hideaway office in the Capitol.
“Mr. President, I’m going to run a very transparent administration, everything on C-Span. So I’ll need a full accounting of your foundation donors.”
“Oh, sure thing, buddy, from this day forward.”
“No, Bill, we’ll need full disclosure of your business dealings for the last eight years. And you can no longer accept Arab millions — not if I’m going to talk tough to them about oil. I can’t send Hillary on diplomatic missions to the Middle East if you’re taking money from Dubai and Kuwait. And no more trips to Kazakhstan. I wouldn’t want to have to put a Geiger-counter bracelet on you to check that you’re not involved in another shady uranium deal.”
“Ha, ha.”
“We need to know where that $11 million came from that you guys loaned your campaign. And the $15 million from Ron Burkle at Yucaipa and the $3 million from Vinod Gupta. And you must spill about any offshore accounts in the Caymans. And no more big-money speeches, Bill. You guys have already cashed in for more than $100 million.”
“I’m not debating the meaning of the word ‘speech,’ Bill. We’re going to have an administration so squeaky clean that it makes Jimmy Carter look like Marc Rich. All your trips abroad will have to be authorized by a higher authority.”
“The State Department? Fine, I’ll check with them.”
“Higher.”
“Oh, no. Not that.”
“Yes, Michelle. She’ll have you on a much shorter leash, Bill, and it’s not so fun. There’ll be no more Ron Air, no Burkling and Binging. Eight long years of Michelle watching your every move. No eruptions of any kind. And that big telescope in the Naval Observatory is off limits. We’re going to be a family-values administration. And in the campaign, we’ll use you the way Al Gore did: Not at all. No more Bill YouTube meltdowns.”
If a man told you for years that he didn't love you, essentially had no regard for you at all, and then suddenly, when he needed you, told you he adored you, would you fall for it?
She just won’t be deterred. Despite being roundly ridiculed by, like, everyone for her latest jihad against Rachel Ray’s scarf, Michelle Malkin has dedicated her entire weekly column to the affair. Read. Weep:
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so by acquiescing to malkin's bigoted demands, dunkin' donuts itself has acted in a bigoted manner, eg, implying that all people who wear a kaffiyeh are to be suspected of terrorism.
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Please crawl back under the rock you came out from.
Good day
Raymond Kitchell, veteran 89th Inf Div
“Phillips died at home, in bed, in his sleep, next to his wife,” according to his family, which was in seclusion Sunday at his home about a mile from downtown Nevada City.
The folk musician’s remarkable career included international acclaim for the stories and songs he wrote about social and labor issues, as well as his career as a hobo who ran the rails as a young man. He also once ran for the U.S. Senate.
Phillips’ musical career stretched over 38 years and his songs were performed by Emmylou Harris, Waylon Jennings and Joan Baez. He earned a Grammy nomination for an album he recorded with Ani DiFranco.
He once told The Union that “folk music is the glue that holds the community together,” as people gather to share food, music and to dance.
Mr. Phillips rose to prominence on the folk scene with the single "Moose Turd Pie," a song from his 1973 debut album "Good Though!" That song was about serving moose feces to fellow laborers during the time Mr. Phillips worked as a cook in a railroad gang.
While an irrepressible comedian onstage, Mr. Phillips took his social commitments seriously. A brief stint in the Army that included a tour of Korea in 1956 inspired his work with the peace movement. For a while, Mr. Phillips was a railroad tramp, drinking heavily and ending up in a homeless shelter in Salt Lake City operated by an anarchist.
The son of labor organizers, he ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate from Utah on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket in 1968. He also made a run for the presidency in 1976. Later, he founded the Peace and Justice Center in Nevada City and helped start the Hospitality House, a local homeless shelter.
Just because someone's been fucked a lot doesn't mean they know how to do the fucking.
Scott McClellan tells us Dirty Effing Hippies we were right about most everything.
Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan writes in a surprisingly scathing memoir to be published next week that President Bush “veered terribly off course,” was not “open and forthright on Iraq,” and took a “permanent campaign approach” to governing at the expense of candor and competence.
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McClellan repeatedly embraces the rhetoric of Bush's liberal critics and even charges: “If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq.
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If you look like a hippy and you have the morals of a snake, then the FBI wants to hire you!
Turns out it is straight piecework, you have to give them somebody to arrest. Presumably, if you agitate for bad things to happen and then turn people in for following your lead, the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force will give you oodles of cash.
You'd think that after the cops and the FBI got caught doing this stupid shit in the 1960s that they would have learned their lessons. Apparently not. The police have a long track record of using agent provocateurs to start trouble as an excuse for arresting lots of people.
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Every time Sohaila Rezazadeh rings up a sale at her Exxon station on Chain Bridge Road in Oakton, her cash register sends the information to Exxon Mobil's central computers. If she raises the price of gasoline a couple of pennies, chances are that Exxon will raise the wholesale price she pays by the same amount.
Through a password-protected Web portal, Exxon notifies Rezazadeh of wholesale price changes daily. That way the oil giant, which is earning about $3.3 billion a month, fine-tunes the pump prices at the franchise Rezazadeh has owned for 12 years.
Now, however, Rezazadeh says she cannot stay in business. Credit-card fees are eating her profit margins. Exxon, which owns the station land, last week handed Rezazadeh a new lease raising her rent about 30 percent over the next three years. She stuck a copy on the window of her station to show customers who are angry about soaring pump prices. Rezazadeh has told Exxon that she cannot make money with the rent that high. Her territory manager's reply, she said, was simple: When you go, leave us the keys.
Although Exxon owns and operates few stations anymore -- less than 10 percent of the 12,000 Exxon outlets in the United States -- it uses franchise agreements to maintain tight control over stations that bear its brand. The company dictates everything from the number of pumps to hygiene practices to the placement of food on convenience store shelves. "They monitor everything," Rezazadeh said.
Even some of Exxon's successful and loyal dealers complain. Jerry Daggle owns five Exxon stations in Northern Virginia, and even though they have different competitive conditions and prices, "Exxon magically lets me make about 8 cents a gallon" at each one, he said.
Daggle, who has been an Exxon dealer for two decades after working his way up from pumping gas, said he has done well. But he still cannot fathom how the oil company can charge him different wholesale gasoline prices for each of the five Northern Virginia stations he owns. The stations all sell the same Exxon-branded gasoline, delivered from the same terminal in Newington, where it arrives via the same pipeline. Sometimes, Daggle said, it's even dropped off by the same truck and driver hours apart on the same day.
The only thing that's different is the price, which can vary by 35 cents per gallon, Daggle said. [...]
Historically, gasoline marketing has been a low-margin business. For decades, when oil was plentiful, margins were kept low to move as much crude oil through the system as possible. Now, major companies don't have to fight to move product, but they are still battling for nickels and dimes at the pumps.
Like other parts of the retailing business, gasoline marketing has become more concentrated and high volume than it was in the days when mom-and-pop gas stations lured customers with free drinking glasses.
Oddly enough, when prices are rising rapidly and consumers are most upset is usually when profit margins are slimmest for station owners. When prices are falling, as they were in September 2006, is usually when jobbers and station owners make the most money.
How much depends largely on Exxon. "If I had raised my gas, within a couple of days, almost inevitably, they would have raised my wholesale price. It's an unspoken rule," Daggle said. He said his Gainesville station makes most of its money from repairs, not gas sales.
Selling gas remains a cutthroat business in an industry awash in profits. Three years ago, when Daggle bought the Gainesville station, a share of Exxon stock was about $50. Buying and fixing up the station has cost him $800,000, and he hasn't yet drawn a profit from it. "If I had bought the stock," he said, he would have nearly doubled his money and would have "never lifted a finger."
We have a trade and a globalization policy that is designed to create a race to the bottom among ordinary people. When you force American workers into direct unfettered competition with workers who are enslaved, with workers who are allowed to be paid a dollar a day, with workers who are allowed to be employed in sweatshops, you are creating a wage-cutting environment that's destroying competition towards the bottom.
-- David Sirota
BuzzFlash: David, first we want to encourage all the BuzzFlash readers to buy and read The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Scaring Wall Street and Washington. The mainstream corporate media is probably not your biggest fan, so we want to do our best to promote the book.
David Sirota: That's exactly right.
BuzzFlash: Why don't they like you?
David Sirota: I think the frame of the book tells it all. The book is about a backlash to the status quo. It's about a backlash to the media and political establishment. It's a sequel in many ways, to my first book, Hostile Takeover, which is about big money taking over the government. This book is about the uprising against that "Hostile Takeover." Obviously, the people and forces and institutions that have perpetrated that hostile takeover are going to be hostile to a book that describes the uprising against that establishment. When you tell the truth, sometimes people don't like it.
David Sirota: That's right, and that's a huge thing that people sometimes people forget -- that corporate control of the media is more than just a certain network won't cover the parent company. It's actually a whole ideology. And the ideology is deeply ingrained. The media does not question corporate issues -- the concentration of corporate power, the general deregulatory agenda that corporations push. Most issues relating to money and the accumulation of profits are either off limits, or soft-pedaled in the corporate media, because the corporate media is not objective when it comes to those things. It has an ideology.
I do think that the uprising is a backlash to that. I think we are at a precipice. If you look at public opinion data, if you look at the stories in my book, The Uprising, you will see that all of this is boiling now, and that this election and what comes out of the election could end up changing the direction of the country in a really serious way, in an exponential way.
The Lincoln Center revival of this old chestnut is surely the most unexpected cultural sensation the city has experienced in a while. In 2008, when 80-plus percent of Americans believe their country is in a ditch, there wouldn’t seem to be a big market for a show whose heroine, the Navy nurse Nellie Forbush, is a self-described “cockeyed optimist” who sings of being “as corny as Kansas in August.”
Watching “South Pacific” now, we’re forced to contemplate Iraq, which we’re otherwise pretty skilled at avoiding. Most of us don’t have family over there. Most of us long ago decided the war was a mistake and tuned out. Most of us have stopped listening to the president who ginned it up. This month, in case you missed it, he told an interviewer that he had made the ultimate sacrifice of giving up golf for the war’s duration because “I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf.”
“South Pacific” reminds us that those whose memory we honor tomorrow — including those who served in Vietnam — are always at the mercy of the leaders who send them into battle. It increases our admiration for the selflessness of Americans fighting in Iraq. They, unlike their counterparts in World War II, do their duty despite answering to a commander in chief who has been both reckless and narcissistic. You can’t watch “South Pacific” without meditating on their sacrifices for this blunderer, whose wife last year claimed that “no one suffers more” over Iraq than she and her husband do.
The show’s racial conflicts are also startlingly alive. Nellie Forbush, far from her hometown of Little Rock, recoils from de Becque when she learns that he fathered two children by a Polynesian woman. In the original script, Nellie denigrates de Becque’s late wife as “colored.” (Michener gave Nellie a more incendiary word in his book.) “Colored” was cut in rehearsals then but has been restored now, and it lands like a brick in the theater. It’s not only upsetting in itself. It’s upsetting because Nellie isn’t some cracker stereotype — she’s lovable (especially as embodied by the actress Kelli O’Hara). But how can we love a racist? And how can she not love Emile’s young mixed-race children?
Then and now, the show concludes with the most classic of American tableaus: Emile, Nellie and the two kids sitting down to a family meal. It’s hard for us to imagine how this coda must have struck audiences in 1949, when interracial marriage was still illegal in many states (as it would be in 16 until 1967). But nearly 60 years later, this multiracial family portrait has another context. The audiences watching “South Pacific” in this intense election year are being asked daily to take stock of just how far along we are on Nellie’s path and how much further we still have to go.
And so as we watch that family gather at the end of “South Pacific,” both their future and their country’s destiny yet to be written, we weep for the same reason we often do when we experience a catharsis at the theater. We grieve deeply for our losses and our failings, even as we feel an undertow of cockeyed optimism about the possibilities of healing and redemption that may yet lie ahead.
So what do you do when you're a part time employee who makes about $10/hour and it takes you a gallon or so of gas to get to work and another gallon or so to get home and they ask you to come in on Saturday morning for a couple of hours and the gas price is up to $4.15 for regular at the cheap gas station?
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President Bush opposes a new G.I. Bill of Rights. He worries that if the traditional path to college for service members since World War II is improved and expanded for the post-9/11 generation, too many people will take it.
He is wrong, but at least he is consistent. Having saddled the military with a botched, unwinnable war, having squandered soldiers’ lives and failed them in so many ways, the commander in chief now resists giving the troops a chance at better futures out of uniform. He does this on the ground that the bill is too generous and may discourage re-enlistment, further weakening the military he has done so much to break.
So lavish with other people’s sacrifices, so reckless in pouring the national treasure into the sandy pit of Iraq, Mr. Bush remains as cheap as ever when it comes to helping people at home.
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Dead Troops Remembered By President Who Had Them Killed
Yes, that's a harsh headline for this piece.
But I'll ask you to forgive me because, as a Veteran, there isn't a day on the calendar that causes my hatred -- and I do indeed mean hatred -- of George W. Bush to bubble over the top more than Memorial Day.
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The Chickenhawk-in Chief says a lot of things that make this Vet's blood boil but stuff like saying that he prays "...that our country may always prove worthy of the sacrifices they have made" is almost vomit inducing.
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Trotta: …and now we have what some are reading—as a suggestion that somebody knock off Osama , umm, ah… Obama, well both if we could ... haha ...
