The Staton Jones Report

Bush's campaign religious advisor, Deal W. Hudson, has resigned after his illicit sexual encounter in 1994 was exposed.

The alleged victim, Carastona Poppas, was an 18-year-old Fordham freshman who had been in and out of foster homes since age 7. Hudson was her philosophy teacher, a tenured associate professor who had been a Baptist minister before converting to Catholicism.

"He knew I was a ward of the court, without parents, severely depressed, and even suicidal," Poppas told the Catholic newspaper. "He was extremely attentive and genuinely concerned."

That attention allegedly went too far one night in February 1994 when Hudson invited her and several older students to a bar in New York's West Village. They all got drunk, and he had sex with her in his car and office, the paper reported.

When confronted with this, all he had to say was that it was "now being dug up, I believe, for political reasons".

No shit, Sherlock. Now why on Earth would that be? Maybe because your back-stabbing political party chose to go this path with Clinton about the time you were dorking students in your car? You can't have it both ways (and in this case, I don't mean Missionary and Rear Entry) -- either you fuck over every two-faced politician or none. The GOP chose to harrass and expose every Democrat involved in illicit affairs, but that doesn't shield you from your own witch hunts.

BTW, this is the man who put Rove onto the idea of politicizing every conservative Catholic in America. I hope there really is a hell for him to burn in.

When collecting footage for Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore's team filmed Florida Rep. and Bush's choice to head the CIA admitting he was unqualified for the job.

"I couldn't get a job with CIA today. I am not qualified," the Florida Republican told documentary-maker Michael Moore's production company during the filming of the anti-Bush movie "Fahrenheit 9/11."

"I don't have the language skills. I, you know, my language skills were romance languages and stuff. We're looking for Arabists today. I don't have the cultural background probably," Goss is quoted in an interview transcript.

"And I certainly don't have the technical skills, uh, as my children remind me every day: 'Dad you got to get better on your computer.' Uh, so, the things that you need to have, I don't have."

When Moore released the footage, the White House went into over drive denouncing the interview. But the irony is that Goss himself didn't realize he was giving an interview to Moore's producers.

"You'd think the person who was the head of the intelligence committee would ask a few more questions," said Moore.

"The reality is that Porter Goss was in charge of the oversight of the CIA during a time when the CIA didn't do its job, which in part resulted in the loss of lives of 3,000 people," he said via telephone from New York.

Excerpts from President Signs Defense Bill
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT AT THE SIGNING OF H.R. 4613, THE DEFENSE APPROPRIATIONS ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 2005

"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."

'Nuff said.

Talking Points Memo has an interesting backgrounder on the Plame investigation. It looks like Valerie Plame was potentially exposed as a secret agent twice in the past, mostly thanks to Aldrich Ames (the counter-spy). It is starting to look like the White House is going to use this information to muddy the prosecutorial waters around the Novak article, probably in an attempt to keep "Scooter" Libby out of prison.

There does seem to be a rush of articles aimed not simply at discrediting Wilson but specifically at arguing that there is no legal basis for a prosecution of the folks who leaked Plame's name. Who's so concerned? It makes me wonder.

If this succeeds, then it will set a precedent for weaseling out of breaking the law by discrediting a political enemy.

How do you beat the rap that Tom DeLay is facing (illegally shuffling money around to orchestrate and finance the biggest GOP takeover in a Texas' history) ? Make sure the House Ethics Panel investigating you is bought and paid for. Four of the five members of the Panel received funds from DeLay when they ran for office. They're his beotches, and I fully expect them to do exactly as they're told.

Here's an editorial from The Dallas Morning News making the case for a special prosecutor to investigate DeLay. (For those not in the know, the DMN is Dallas' only newspaper, and hence, the conservative one.)

Let's say you get called for jury duty. It happens that the person on trial once gave you money. Would you expect to get picked for that jury?

Heck, no.

You'd expect to be sent home, pronto, and for good reason.

Even if you, as an upright and fair-minded citizen, could put the financial tie completely out of your mind, how could those of us looking on, who can't get inside your head, be confident in your impartiality?

That's essentially the situation in Washington, where Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas stands accused of unethical fund-raising practices. Four of the five Republicans on the committee investigating him have received money from his political action committee.

The sums aren't huge -- no more than $15,000 to any one person. But the payments illustrate how difficult it is for members of Congress -- a body that exists on back-scratching and favor-swapping, sometimes in the form of hard, cold cash -- to police themselves.

That difficulty is compounded manyfold when the subject of the probe is the House member with the greatest ability to reward friends and punish enemies. That's why former House ethics panels appointed outside counsels to handle investigations of former speakers Jim Wright and Newt Gingrich.

(It was Gingrich, you may recall, who held up the Democrats as the example of the effects of a single party wielding too much power. Something about "a cancer threatening the very essence of representative freedom.")

Turning the probe over to an outsider was sensible then, and it's sensible now. In fact, some scholars of congressional ethics would make such an appointment mandatory in all ethics investigations.

Without going that far, it's clear that, if ever there was a good time to bring in an impartial investigator, this is it.

To paraphrase a popular Texas bumper sticker, "Belo said it, I believe it, and that settles it".

(Belo is the parent company of the Dallas Morning News and the Big Dog in Dallas media.)

Barbara Ehrenreich's editorial in the New York Times today is especially good.

This is a surprise? Groupthink has become as American as apple pie and prisoner abuse; in fact, it's hard to find any thinking these days that doesn't qualify for the prefix "group." Our standardized-test-driven schools reward the right answer, not the unsettling question. Our corporate culture prides itself on individualism, but it's the "team player" with the fixed smile who gets to be employee of the month. In our political culture, the most crushing rebuke is to call someone "out of step with the American people." Zip your lips, is the universal message, and get with the program.

...

The list goes on. Sibel Edmonds lost her job at the F.B.I. for complaining about mistranslations of terror-related documents from the Arabic. Jesselyn Radack was driven out of her post at the Justice Department for objecting to the treatment of John Walker Lindh, then harassed by John Ashcroft's enforcers at her next job. As Fred Alford, a political scientist who studies the fate of whistle-blowers, puts it: "We need to understand in this `land of the free and home of the brave' that most people are scared to death. About 50 percent of all whistle-blowers lose their jobs, about half of those lose their homes, and half of those people lose their families."

Remember, only children should play "follow the leader".

So, I'm walking down fucking Main Street in fucking Houston when some fucking guy driving by in a fucking SUV yells, "Get a fucking job," to someone or other on the street. After fucking glancing around, I fucking notice a shabbiliy drassed man on the fucking street corner holding a fucking cardboard sign. It's a fucking image that's so fucking common these fucking days, that I fucking hardly notice it any more.

Now, how did I fucking know that the fucking guy in the fucking SUV was a fucking Republican? Is it that the fucking yeller displayed the kind of fucking compassion that makes the fucking term "Compassionate Fucking Conservative" such a fucking knee-slapper? No. Was it the fucking irony of yelling "get a fucking job" to someone on the fucking street of a fucking city where tens of fucking thousands of fucking people have lost their fucking jobs thanks to the fucking malfeasance of George W. Fucking Bush's fucking close personal friends? No.

Maybe there was something about the fucking specific thing the driver yelled. He obviously had some fucking economic elitism that enabled him to affect a fucking attitude of fucking moral superiority while yelling, "Get a fucking job," at a perfect stranger who was doing nothing fucking more than standing on a fucking street corner with a fucking sign. That sure reeks of fucking Republicanism, but it's not actually what fucking tipped me off.

The man was standing on a busy street corner, but not really in a good place to panhandle people stopped at lights. In fact, he wasn't panhandling at all. His sign said nothing about working for food, or needing help — in fact, his disheveled appearance was the only indication of joblessness.

The sign said, "End the reign of Bush II! Get Bush out of the Whitehouse!"

That's how I knew the driver was a fucking Republican.

Fucker.

Today, Salon.com has an article titled The United States of Texas reviewing two books that detail the political power that the “Texas Power Elite” weild in Washington.

I'm sure they are fine books, but I think I summed up this issue quite nicely in a sidebar I published last year in part of my eternally-unfinished History of Iraq. This is what I wrote:

The Texan agenda has been follow so closely by the puppet government in Washington, that there has been only one visible sign of any conflict.

As part of his bold new "Moon Landing" initiative, President Kennedy foolishly chose Cambridge, Massachussetts — home of M.I.T. and Harvard — as the site for the new Space Agency headquarters. After Kennedy was shot in Texas, by a Texan and a Texan became President, the location was moved to Houston, home of Rice University — which is a pretty good school, even though it can't beat M.I.T. in science or Harvard in football.

That's all that really needs to be said on the subject.

Everyone remember Al Haig's famous line when Reagan was shot?

Now, this last week we've see Bush wrap Reagan's dead carcass around him like a primitive caveman holding the body of a lion on his shoulders hoping to impart some of it's "magical" powers. And lo and behold, it worked! Pew reports Bush's ratings rose as he turned Reagan into an entry in the Mounted President Nature Trail.

So if Bush is Reagan, that makes Cheney ... Al Haig? Apparently Dick "Crashcart" thinks he is. Afterall, he ordered the Air Force to shoot down commercial airliners on 9-11. Isn't that the job of the Commander in Chief, just maybe?

Vice President Dick Cheney repeatedly authorized U.S. fighters to shoot down hijacked airliners as the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks unfolded but his orders did not reach military pilots until the last of the four planes had already crashed, the commission investigating the terrorist attacks said Thursday.

Cheney was in an underground bunker when Bush was still doing his level best to not appear dyslexic, scared or clueless (too bad he utterly failed) before an audience of future disenfranchised voters. So while "Crashcart" was ordering the deaths of hundreds of civilians, the al-Qaeda plan unfurled pretty much on target (with the notable example of the plane intended for the Capitol Building).

Bush was "rushed" to Air Force One fifty minutes after the attacks began, again showing staggering "cat like reflexes" on the part of the Secret Service. If I was a public school principal, I'd politely turn down any future offers of Bush visiting to read his favorite Victorian gothic literary masterpiece: My Hungry Caterpillar..

When it became clear that the nation was under attack, Bush decided to continue his remarks to a classroom of second graders. "The president told us his instinct was to project calm, not to have the country see an excited reaction at a moment of crisis." Fifty minutes later, he was on Air Force One as it climbed into the sky with no certain destination. The objective was to get into the air as fast as possible and decide where to go, the commission said.

Poor "Crashcart". At one point, he thought that two commercial jets had been taken out by the Air Force on his orders. Alas, despite his (probably illegal) orders, the greatest military power in the world could not intercept commercial planes still on the Eastern seaboard with supersonic fighter jets and more radar than a Florida speed trap. No wonder Saddam thought we were bluffing about attacking him.

Remember the Contract For America? I sure do. According to (of all the useless newspapers in the world, why did a great article like this wander in?) USA Today, the GOP is doing all the same things to the Democrats in Congress that they accused the Dems. of doing to them (only worse). Read about it here.

As chairman of the House Rules Committee, Dreier is emblematic of the role reversal in the partisan, polarized Congress of the 21st century. He routinely uses his gavel to crush Democrats' efforts to air their proposals, much less enact them. His party writes legislation without Democrats' input, limits Democrats' ability to amend that legislation and prolongs votes in the House for as long as it takes to win. Republicans redraw congressional lines to elect more Republican members and pressure interest groups to hire more Republican lobbyists.

"We have had to do some of the things we criticized once," Dreier admits. "But now that I'm in the majority, I have this responsibility to govern. It's something I didn't completely understand when I was in the minority."

If they had simply won control of the Congress by running on their core platform, I'd say "fair enough" or even "turn about is fair play", but these bastards ran on the platform: we're not going to do what the Dems. did to us.

Goddamned hypocrites.

And by the way, the Dems. never cut the GOP entirely out of the legislative process. In doing so, the GOP has eliminated representation of the constituents who voted for their Democratic Congress-critters. That's not DEMOCRACY. Is that what we're exporting to Iraq? Is Democracy now a finite substance, like oil? When we send it abroad, are we depleting ourselves of it? It sure as hell seems like it with the GOP.

Holy Neocons, Batman!

Luckily for me, I'm stuck in Canada, a nation that currently isn't sucking up to the United States, so I've had to endure little of the Reagan worship that must be washing across the U.S. right now. Here are a few articles that put Reagan in perspective:

Where's the Rest of Him? by Eric Alterman of The Nation

Reagan Stories at The Nation

The Great Taxer by Paul Krugman of The New York Times

Tom Tomorrow's comments from This Modern World

Mother Jones offers some parting shots at Reagan by those who knew him best (Noriega, Contras, etc.)

Gorbachev ended the Cold War, not the "Gipper"

Looks like some bad boy in the administration has been passing off highly classified information to Ahmed Chalabi, who has been feeding it to Iran. From Josh Marshall:

Newsday, which continues to be one of the two best papers on the entire Iraq-intel story (along with related matters), has a new article out this morning following up on the Chalabi revelations and his multiple appearances yesterday on the Sunday talk shows.

But the big story is contained in this sentence: "An intelligence source confirmed to Newsday reports in Time and Newsweek that the FBI had launched an investigation into who in the administration had passed the classified material to his Iraqi National Congress."

Perhaps we'll find out that Chalabi got his classified info from some obscure analyst at DIA or a Colonel in the field. But both of those possibilities seem highly unlikely.

Chalabi's interlocutors in the US government were a fairly small and well-known group, stacked heavily toward the top of the totem pole and very much on the appointive, civilian side -- start with the acronyms OSD and OVP. For those who know the nature of the relationship it would, quite frankly, be hard to imagine that they weren't sharing highly sensitive information with him.

If one of those guys gets pegged for giving Chalabi info that later ended up in the hands of Iranian intelligence, everything up till now will seem like it was a breeze.

Here is an interesting piece by the London Telegraph (Warning: contents of article not vetted by the Bush Administration) detailing the unravelling of the Bush Administration's Iraq effort.

... Infighting over Iraq within the Bush administration and on Capitol Hill has reached such a pitch and ferocity that, according to one official within the Coalition Provisional Authority, Washington DC is now referred to as "Sunni Triangle, West".

On Thursday, Mr Bush made an unexpected visit to Congress, in an attempt to persuade increasingly restive Republican representatives that events in Iraq are under control.

According to one member, the President's visit was intended to head off a "full-scale revolt".

Could it really be true that the GOP membership outside of its maddog leaders (DeLay, Frist, Hastert) is panicking about the fall election season? Could the White House be falling apart with many members of Cheney's staff "ducking and covering" (e.g. "Scooter" Libby, the man most likely to have tipped off Novak about CIA agent Plame) to avoid fallout, if not criminal prosecution? Could the mad, insane and power crazed administration be imploding?

God I hope so!

Salon has an OpEd piece by Sidney Blumenthal called Smiting the Infidels, which is about Gen. William "Jerry" Boykin, the infamous military leader who compared "his God" to the "Muslim God" and found it lacking.

Boykin was recommended to his position by his storied résumé in the elite Delta Force. He was a commander in the failed effort to rescue U.S. hostages in Iran in 1980, tracked drug lord Pablo Escobar in Colombia, advised the gas attack on barricaded cultists at Waco, Texas, and lost 18 men in Mogadishu, Somalia, while trying to capture a warlord in the notorious "Black Hawk Down" fiasco in 1993. Boykin told an evangelical gathering last year how this fostered his crisis of spirituality. "There is no God," he said. "If there was a God, he would have been here to protect my soldiers." But he was thunderstruck with the insight that his battle with the warlord was between good and evil, between the true God and the false one. "I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol."

Even more disturbing his how this career military man (who's resume looks awful, IMHO) has blended his religion with his job. It certainly seems like everything he touches turns into a disaster (and no doubt, Bill Clinton's fault!).

Just before Boykin was put in charge of the hunt for Osama bin Laden and then inserted into Iraqi prison reform, he was a circuit rider for the religious right. He allied himself with a small group known as the Faith Force Multiplier that advocates applying military principles to evangelism. Its manifesto, "Warrior Message," summons "warriors in this spiritual war for souls of this nation and the world ... God has given us the stewardship and accountability of FAITH as our strategy for this time to mobilize an exceedingly great army."

As the head of the Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg, N.C., Boykin invited Southern Baptist ministers for prayer meetings that would be highlighted by demonstrations of Special Forces hand-to-hand combat and guided tours of the "Shoot House" and "Snake Room."

This is the man who brough the illegal torture methods to Abu Ghraib prison. Is it any wonder?

In this week's Democractic Underground Top Ten Consevative Idiots is a gem of a line that sums up why Bush won't fire Rummy (or anyone else in his neocon secret society):

I guess you don't change horsemen in the middle of an apocalypse.

That really, truly nails it on the head.

Today's USA Today (hey, I couldn't find a single copy of The Globe and Mail today) has a story about college commencement speakers that have political agendas. Without exception, the "liberal" speakers were booed and disrespected by conservative students, even if they were not talking about politics, whereas conservatives were more often protested against in the local papers and more often than not used the opportunity to promote their politics of hate (e.g. Dick "head" Cheney).

Ithica College, Ithica, NY
Ice cream entrepreneurs Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield were booed, and some people walked out, when the subject turned to the war in Iraq.

North Carolina State University, Raleigh NC
Talk-show pioneer Phil Donahue was booed when he asked students to "bring America back to basic Constitutional values" and to stress civility rather than a "trend to the sword."

Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek:

Since 9/11, a handful of officials at the top of the Defense Department and the vice president's office have commandeered American foreign and defense policy. In the name of fighting terror they have systematically weakened the traditional restraints that have made this country respected around the world. Alliances, international institutions, norms and ethical conventions have all been deemed expensive indulgences at a time of crisis...

The basic attitude taken by Rumsfeld, Cheney and their top aides has been "We're at war; all these niceties will have to wait." As a result, we have waged pre-emptive war unilaterally, spurned international cooperation, rejected United Nations participation, humiliated allies, discounted the need for local support in Iraq and incurred massive costs in blood and treasure. If the world is not to be trusted in these dangerous times, key agencies of the American government, like the State Department, are to be trusted even less. Congress is barely informed, even on issues on which its "advise and consent" are constitutionally mandated.

Leave process aside: the results are plain. On almost every issue involving postwar Iraq—troop strength, international support, the credibility of exiles, de-Baathification, handling Ayatollah Ali Sistani—Washington's assumptions and policies have been wrong. By now most have been reversed, often too late to have much effect. This strange combination of arrogance and incompetence has not only destroyed the hopes for a new Iraq. It has had the much broader effect of turning the United States into an international outlaw in the eyes of much of the world.

Whether he wins or loses in November, George W. Bush's legacy is now clear: the creation of a poisonous atmosphere of anti-Americanism around the globe. I'm sure he takes full responsibility.

What do you do if you are a private security firm and need a bunch of new interrogators in a hurry? Just hire people at random! What do you do if you are one of these randomly chosen interrogators and you can't find the suspected insurgents you are looking for? Just grab the neighbors and interrogate them! Let's show these Iraqis how capitalism works.

From the Guardian via Josh Marshall:

Mr Nelson said he had come forward to speak now because he believed that military intelligence was seeking to blame the Abu Ghraib scandal on a handful of soldiers to divert attention away from ingrained problems in the military deten-tion and interrogation system.

As a witness in an ongoing investigation, Mr Nelson said he could not talk about the abuses of specific prisoners at Abu Ghraib, but he said the nature of the detention system makes the imprisonment and abuse of innocent people all but inevitable.

"A unit goes out on a raid and they have a target and the target is not available; they just grab anybody because that was their job," Mr Nelson said, referring to counter-insurgency operations in Iraq. "The troops are under a lot of stress and they don't know one guy from the next. They're not cultural experts. All they want is to count down the days and hopefully go home.

"I've read reports from capturing units where the capturing unit wrote, 'the target was not at home. The neighbour came out to see what was going on and we grabbed him'," he said.

Interrogators "weren't interested in going through the less glamorous work of sifting through the chaff to get to the kernels of truth from the willing detainees; they were interested in 'breaking' tough targets", he said.

Much of the problem lay in the quality of the interrogators, Mr Nelson said; only the youngest and least experienced intelligence officers actually question detainees.

As the number of suspects sucked into the system exploded, the Pentagon came to rely increasingly on interrogators from private contractors to question them. Mr Nelson was one of a roughly 30-strong team in Abu Ghraib employed by a Virginia-based firm, CACI International. He believes his decade of experience in military intelligence made him well qualified to do the job, but he had growing doubts about his colleagues.

"I'd say about of the contractors that it's kind of a hit or miss. They're under so much pressure to fill slots quickly ... They penalise contracting companies if they can't fill slots on time and it looks bad on companies' records. If you're in such a hurry to get bodies, you end up with cooks and truck drivers doing intelligence work."

While Shrub & Co. are busy "spreading Democracy" in the Middle East, the good citizens of Hong Kong lost theirs altogether yesterday when the Bejing government decided that they weren't going to honor the agreement they signed in 1997 with Britain when they took control of the region. Of course, they're just following the lead of the Bush Administration; international agreements are not really going to be respected by super powers (or former super powers -- these days Russia and China look pretty formidable to me). If the United States is supposed to be "exporting" Democracy, shouldn't it at least be able to maintain where it exists?

Check out more anti-Bush hilarity at The Bean

Matt Yglesias has some thoughts on our new Ambassador to Iraq:

Negroponte speaks no Arabic and has no background in the Middle East or the Islamic world. What he does have is a good deal of experience with counterinsurgency. Bad experience. Experience dating from the waning days of the Vietnam War through the Reagan administration's policies in Central America and consisting largely of propping up right-wing dictators, violating human rights, and working to deceive the Congress and the American people.

The post of ambassador to Honduras, which Negroponte held from 1981 to 1985, is not normally a crucial one in the grand scheme of U.S. foreign policy. Negroponte's main task, however, was a rather vital one: implementing the Reagan administration's illegal efforts to arm and train Contra rebels, who would then cross the border into neighboring Nicaragua to overthrow the Sandinista government there. As the CIA, which oversaw the Contra operation, eventually admitted, the rebel force "engaged in kidnapping, extortion, and robbery to fund its operations." Wishing to avoid combat with the Nicaraguan army, it became, in essence, a terrorist group, attacking civilian targets in an effort to disrupt Nicaragua's economy and society.

Honduras was, at the time, a military dictatorship operating beneath a civilian facade. Negroponte's policy was to use U.S. aid not to push the country toward democracy but to further increase the strength of its military. His predecessor had warned him that he ought to be concerned about an increase in recent years in repression and human-rights violations, but, to put it bluntly, he didn't care. Instead, he looked the other way as the CIA trained the infamous Battalion 316, a project of Honduran military intelligence responsible for widespread torture, kidnapping, and extrajudicial killing.

The blogosphere has established itself as the communal voice of the intellectual elite — well, actually, the intellectual elite and about a zillion morons with AOL accounts. Well, make that a zillion and one morons as of this weekend, the Bush/Cheney Reappointment Campaign Web Site went live, blog and all. In a departure from the usual Bush endeavor, this one actually provides information without the need for court orders, or investigative panels. Of course, it's not a complete break from tradition, the information actually undermines the point it's presented to support.

Case in point: Iraq and Al Qaeda. Before the Iraq invastion, smart people repeatedly pointed out that there was no credible link between Saddam Hussein and Usama bin Laden. Iraq was defanged, and despite Hussein's bluster, was of little consequence, even in the shadowy world of middle-eastern terrorism. By the end of 2003, even Bush administration officials were conceding that Al Qaeda and Iraq were not connected in any meaningful way.

The contrived connection was not the real folly, however. Iraq war opponents predicted that Iraq would go from being a non-issue in terrorism, to being the biggest issue driving islamic radicals. Invading Iraq would not only fail to address actual terrorist threats, it would create new ones.

Sure enough, UBL's latest audio tape mentions Iraq prominently. Now, thanks to GWB's web site, Bush supporters will be informed of this. Of course, the Bush team highlighted it to show that Iraq and Al Qaeda are involved and people who said otherwise, like John Kerry were wrong. No, they weren't. They'd be wrong now, just like the Bush campaign — which was wrong before, too.

Hey! George Tenet! Yeah, you! When did you learn about Zacarias Moussaoui?

Tenet: "...I was briefed on Moussaoui in late August. . . . I believe it's the 23rd or the 24th."

Whoa. Did you get a chance to talk to Chimpy — I mean, the President — about it?

Tenet: "In this time period, I'm not talking to him, no."

So, Mr. Tenet, that's what you said to the 9/11 Panel. Good job, but I, uh, found a puffy little piece on the White House web site. George W. Bush give a tour of his Crawford ranch on August 25th, 2001, in which he says this:

The CIA briefings, I have on our porch, the end of our porch looking out over the lake. When Tenet came up, that's where we visited, out there.

You know, everybody wants to see the ranch, which I'm proud to show it off. So George Tenet and I -- yesterday, we piled in the new nominees for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the Vice Chairman and their wives and went right up the canyon.

So... when George Tenet learned about Moussaoui on August 23rd or 24th he was with the President in Crawford.

You can read Bush's puff piece for yourself.

Tenet's office has since amended his testimony to include this meeting — I guess so little of importance was discussed, Tenet just blanked on it.

In The Globe and Mail today is an article detailing George Tenet's testimony before the 9/11 Commission. While being questioned, Tenet made plain the fact that President Bush was, for all practical purposes, out of the loop during August of 2001 while vacationing in Crawford, TX [NOTE: Not a vacation paradise]. After further questioning it became apparent to Commission member Tim Roemer that Mr. Tenet was nearly as incompetent as the USA's #1 miserable failure, so he asked Mr. Tenet a softball question, "Who is most responsible for dropping the ball on 9/11?". Mr. Tenet, unable to answer the classified question during an open hearing, could only point to the likely culprit.

Charles Dharapak/AP

Most people demonstrating this level of incompetence are fired from their jobs, with cause, on the day the misdeed is discovered. But not this guy! He's too useful for GWB. Being the President's beotch is a fulltime job for Tenet.

Miserable Failure, Act II.

Last month, I noted the shutdown — by American troops — of a pro-Sadr Iraqi newspaper. The rationale was that this paper was promoting violence against Americans. Well, if you've been following the body count, you can see what a fabulous success this turned out to be.

I also suggested that we start cracking down on the press here, just to show that we're not hypocrites. I was kidding!

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said just the other day:

"The Constitution of the United States is extraordinary and amazing. People just don't revere it like they used to."

Of course, you'll have to take my word for it because tapes of him saying that were forcibly erased by law enforcement. Yes, in a violation of statutes protecting the assets of news-gathering organizations, reporters were forced at gunpoint to destroy tapes of Scalia's ode the the Constitution.

Now, I have to ask, he was talking about the United States' Constitution, right?

I urge you to read this article in the New Republic covering the Newdow case before the Supreme Court. Michael Newdow is defending his 9th Circuit Court win in his "crusade" to remove the phrase "Under God" from the Pledge of Allegance. The article shows how defenders of God in the Pledge are undermining their own religious beliefs.

But the conservatives were not the only ones at the Supreme Court who denied religion by the manner in which they defended it. Justice Breyer wondered, in a challenge to Newdow, whether the words "under God" referred only to a "supreme being." Citing United States v. Seeger from 1965, though he might have illustrated his speculation more vividly with the historical precedent of the Cult of the Supreme Being in revolutionary Paris, Breyer proposed that such a faith "in any ordinary person's life fills the same place as belief in God fills in the life of an orthodox religionist," and so "it's reaching out to be inclusive"--so inclusive, in fact, that it may satisfy a non-believer such as Newdow. Breyer suggested that the God in "under God" is "this kind of very comprehensive supreme being, Seeger-type thing." And he posed an extraordinary question to Newdow: "So do you think that God is so generic in this context that it could be that inclusive, and if it is, then does your objection disappear?"

Needless to say, Newdow's objection did not disappear, because it is one of the admirable features of atheism to take God seriously. Newdow's reply was unforgettable: "I don't think that I can include 'under God' to mean 'no God,' which is exactly what I think. I deny the existence of God." The sound of those words in that room gave me what I can only call a constitutional thrill. This is freedom. And he continued: "For someone to tell me that 'under God' should mean some broad thing that even encompasses my religious beliefs sounds a little, you know, it seems like the government is imposing what it wants me to think in terms of religion, which it may not do. Government needs to stay out of this business altogether."

Amen to that.

Besides, the argument that Olson makes implies that we only added the phrase "Under God" to counter the Soviet threat during the Cold War. Well, look around. We won that conflict. The fifty year clock has run out ... let's drop the line now. If your religious belief is so fragile that it will only be sustained by forcing millions of American children to repeat the token phrase, which is exactly what I think the religious leaders who politicize religion are doing, it's not very strong now is it?

Having just seen to sparring that goes on between Democrats challenging each other for a nomination — economic policy, what do do about Iraq and the like — we now look at a Republican contest. In Dallas, Sam Walls and Rob Orr are vying to win the Republican nomination for a Texas House of Representative seat. Sam Walls, bouyed by solid endorsements by prominent Texas Republicans, was expected to win the April 13^th contest.

Well, that was beforel photos of him in drag were circulated. Read the Reuters story, printed in the Houston Chronicle:

Walls, 64, who describes himself as a fervent Baptist, told the paper his family had "dealt with" the issue of his cross-dressing and that he asked for forgiveness.

Hate the sin, vote for the sinner? Who knows, and — let's face it &mdash who cares?!

This link to The Memory Hole shows how long GWB's input queue is on any given day (approximately five minutes). My guess is that his brain's parser is written in VB emulated in Java. Nonetheless, not only did GWB not leap into action, neither did the Secret Service, a group of people allegedly non-partisan and theoretically competent.

What did the Commander in Chief do? Nothing. He sat there. He sat for well over 5 minutes, doing nothing while 3,000 people were dying and the attacks were still in progress.

Way to go, Commander in Chief.

Startling new evidence that President Clinton did have sexual relations with that woman!

Just kidding.

It's another former intelligence agent talking about the Bush Administration. I can't get to the streaming media from work, but the Democracy Now radio/television show has the interview on their site.

We speak with former FBI translator, Sibel Edmonds, who was hired shortly after Sept. 11 to translate intelligence gathered over the previous year related to the 9/11 attacks. She says the FBI had information that an attack using airplanes was being planned before Sept. 11 and calls Condoleezza Rice's claim the White House had no specific information on a domestic threat or one involving planes "an outrageous lie."

Golly.

Apparently, the FBI has been stalling Ms. Edmonds' FOIA request for 1500 documents that support her allegations.

Update:

I missed a Salon article about this last week. If you want to view the MRWZ take on this, David "I used to be liberal" Horowitz's FrontPage Magazine web site has a withering attack on Edmonds that — oops — forgets to mention Republican Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa affirming her credibility and citing corroborating witnesses.

Apparently there are some drawbacks to being evil. From the Washington Post:

Several hundred people stormed the small yard of President Bush's chief political strategist, Karl Rove, yesterday afternoon, pounding on his windows, shoving signs at others and challenging Rove to talk to them about a bill that deals with educational opportunities for immigrants.

Protesters poured out of one school bus after another, piercing an otherwise quiet, peaceful Sunday in Rove's Palisades neighborhood in Northwest, chanting, "Karl, Karl, come on out! See what the DREAM Act is all about!"

Rove obliged their first request and opened his door long enough to say, "Get off my property."

"Seems like he doesn't want to invite us in for tea," Emira Palacios quipped to the crowd.

Others chanted, "Karl Rove ain't got no soul."

The crowd then grew more aggressive, fanning around the three accessible sides of Rove's house, tracking him through the many windows, waving signs that read "Say Yes to DREAM" and pounding on the glass. At one point, Rove rushed to a window, pointed a finger and yelled something inaudible.

Calpundit has an article claiming that rumors are spreading that Tom DeLay is planning on stepping down if indicted by the Austin grand jury investigating him.

The "Hammer" is getting the boot! Joe Bob sez check it out!

I recall reading, about a year ago, some right-wing pro-war droolbot opining that he kinda sorta hoped that no WMD's would be found in Iraq. After all, he wrote in some vain attempt at insight, the Liberals would just claim that the WMDs were planted by the US to frame Saddam Hussein.

Well, that guy may get see both things happen. We already know that no WMDs have been found, and that the survey teams have all but packed up and left. Still, the Bush Administration keeps claiming that they still hope to find Nicole Simpson's real killer... er, I mean Saddam's WMDs. Is this a lame attempt to save face, or do they actually expect to find WMDs?

Well, the answer is the latter, if we are to believe a disturbing report from the Tehran Times, an English-language newpaper published in Iran.

TEHRAN (Mehr News Agency) – Over the past few days, in the wake of the bombings in Karbala and the ideological disputes that delayed the signing of Iraq’s interim constitution, there have been reports that U.S. forces have unloaded a large cargo of parts for constructing long-range missiles and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the southern ports of Iraq.

Don't the Iranians hate the U.S.? Yes, but they hate the Iraqis even more, so it's hard to say what bias may be present in their report. The sad thing is that the Bush Administration is so deeply mired in chicanery and deceit that it's I can believe they'd pursue this pathetic ruse.

Speaking of conservatives fighting among themselves, this from Andrew Sullivan:

Imagine for a moment that there is a Democratic administration in the White House. Now imagine that at a time of soaring deficits and a looming social security crisis, the president endorses a huge new entitlement program for seniors, designed purely for electoral purposes. Now imagine that he deliberately low-balls the costs of this program, to the tune of something like 30 percent. Would Republicans be outraged? You bet they would. Now imagine that the official designated to provide accurate costing figures was told that if he released the real numbers, he would be fired. Now stop imagining. It appears that all this occurred in the Bush administration over the Medicare prescription drug program. The administration pressured its own officials to mislead the Congress and the public about the scope of the expenses involved.[...]

What on earth was going on here? I thought conservatives were supposed to be responsible for conserving the country's fiscal health and honest about the costs of entitlements. I smell Rove here. He wanted a political victory. He has no principles. He doesn't give a damn about the country's fiscal health. So he lied and put pressure on others to lie. [emphasis mine]

Is the Republican Party becoming even more fractured than in the days when issues like abortion produced those tell-tail hairline cracks? Along one axis, we now have fiscal conservatives red in the face about budget deficits. The administration's hypocrisy (vis-a-vis when it criticizes tax-and-spend liberals) can't help. But (along a different axis) perhaps we can infer something from a piece by (interestingly enough) Pat Buchanan in The American Conservative that predicts that the days of U.S. imperialism we now kindly refer to as neo-con-dominated foreign policy may be drawing to a close.

BTW, for those interested in analyzing the emergence of neocon influence, I found Neoconservative Ideas and Foreign Policy in the Administration of George W. Bush: A German View, a paper by Patricia Greve, to be pretty interesting.

I caught an article in Washington Monthly that seems to hit a nerve. Titled Creative Class War: How the GOP's anti-elitism could ruin America's economy, it's an interesting read. I'm appalled by the bubba-platform ("don't vote for smart people!") that the GOP runs (and wins) on.

Josh Marshall describes a political machine that isn't firing on all cylinders. Marshall lists the examples of the alienation of swing voters on the gay-bashing amendment, the undermining of the 9/11 commission, and the crass attempt by Bush to use the flag-draped coffins of the 9/11 victims to justify his failed presidency:

Taken together, these and other examples paint a picture of a White House that is going from stumble to stumble or just can’t catch a break. But when we look at each of these goofs, we can see a deeper pattern at work.

And they’ll keep stumbling along until they do.