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At least he didn't puke in someone's lap
 From the NY Times... write your own "exit strategy" joke. After meeting with reporters in Beijing, Mr. Bush tried to exit through a locked door. Realizing the mistake, he made a mock grimace, and an aide pointed the way. He joked: "I was trying to escape. It didn't work."
Quote of the day...
Great quote in today's NY Post from Harper's editor, Lewis Lapham on his departure from that post. "I've arrived at the point where I would prefer to read Machiavelli than listen to Karl Rove."
It reminds me a of a line from a Tom Stoppard play, which I will now misquote "it's half as funny as Mien Kampf and twice as long."
It's lonely at the top
Speaking of the mood of conservatives, here's what they are saying about our president... he's losing it. Well, at least that's the liberal hyperbole surrounding what the conservative are saying. The Washington Times, you may know, is an "independent" newspaper that is basically the mouthpiece of the Republican party. For that reason, it sometimes gets inside scoops as to what the GOP is thinking, and even what's going on inside the White House. For that reason, their latest story on Bush is extremely disturbing:
President Bush feels betrayed by several of his most senior aides and advisors and has severely restricted access to the Oval Office, administration sources say. The president's reclusiveness in the face of relentless public scrutiny of the U.S.-led war in Iraq and White House leaks regarding CIA operative Valerie Plame has become so extreme that Mr. Bush has also reduced contact with his father, former President George H.W. Bush, administration sources said on the condition of anonymity.
What this president needs is a good, old-fashioned sex scandal with an intern!
Bush... the awkward years
Re-writing history... again
An uplifting story in the Post this morning. Nebraska Republican Senator Chuck Hagel fires back at the administration for their attack against critics of its Iraq policy. It goes a little something like this... "To question your government is not unpatriotic -- to not question your government is unpatriotic," Hagel said, arguing that 58,000 troops died in Vietnam because of silence by political leaders. "America owes its men and women in uniform a policy worthy of their sacrifices."
Wouldn't you know it... the only Democrat the balls to stand up to the White House is a Republican.
If only they had issued a spring break
The Post today reports that the Sept. 11 commission issued a failing report card to our president, stating that he has made "insufficient progress" in trying to prevent terrorist from acquiring nuclear weapons. Poor George. He never liked report cards. The report, released by a private lobbying group created by the commissioners when their panel disbanded last year, focused on nuclear proliferation and foreign policy issues. It was the latest effort by the group to grade the government's response to the recommendations made in the commission's final, official report 16 months ago. While the report praised some of the government's efforts, finding that there had been "good progress" over the last year in cracking down on terrorist financing and in promoting economic policies to advance Arab and Muslim nations, it found "minimal" or "insufficient progress" in 7 of the 13 areas it surveyed. Asked about the report, Dana Perino, a White House spokeswoman, said the Bush administration "appreciated all the hard work of the commissioners, and our focus is on building upon the steps already taken." Ms. Perino said that by the White House count, President Bush had acted on 37 of the panel's 39 major recommendations. "The administration holds prevention of a potential nuclear terrorism attack as an extremely high priority," she said, "and we are implementing an aggressive and comprehensive strategy against such a possibility." She added that the administration had called for $316 million over the next year for a new Domestic Nuclear Detection Office.
And, who will head this office? I'm thinking Michael Brown needs a new job...
It must depend on what your definition of "torture" is
In the Washington Post... Abuse Included Use of Lions, Iraqis Allege
Two Iraqi men who were arrested in Iraq in 2003 but never charged with crimes say that U.S. troops put them in a cage with lions, pretended to execute them in a firing line and humiliated them during interrogations at multiple detention facilities. Sherzad Khalid, 35, and Thahe Sabber, 37, say they were brutally beaten over several months at U.S. facilities such as Camp Bucca, Abu Ghraib prison and another detention facility at the Baghdad airport. They said the abuse occurred when they were unable to tell U.S. troops where Saddam Hussein was hiding and did not know about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
You've got to hand it to Rumsfeld though... he really stuck to that whole "we're here to find weapons of mass destruction" story.
Questioning Bush's intelligence
Breaking news from this morning's Washington Post. Apparently Senators will now "really stop and think a moment" before deciding to go to war. Here you go... "I think a lot of us would really stop and think a moment before we would ever vote for war or to go and take military action," Sen. Pat Roberts (Kan.) said on "Fox News Sunday." "We don't accept this intelligence at face value anymore," he added. "We get into preemptive oversight and do digging in regards to our hard targets." He said that agreement has been reached on the Phase 2 review that the intelligence panel is doing to look into whether the Bush administration exaggerated or misused prewar intelligence. The review may not be finished this year, he said. ... Appearing on CNN's "Late Edition," national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley said the White House is "supporting" the study, adding: "I think that what you're going to find is that the statements by the administration had backing at the time from accepted intelligence sources." He said that when administration statements turned out to be wrong, that was "because the underlying intelligence was not true, but that's not the same as manipulating intelligence, and that is not misleading the American people."
Hadley went on to say, "Manipulating intelligence is when you tell people what your objective is and ask them to make a case for it... oh, wait..."
Pat Robertson says the darndest things
I missed this in the WaPost Friday... Robertson Says Town Rejects God. When I first heard about the good folks of Dover, PA voting their school board out for supporting intelligent design, I thought that perhaps sanity was finally making a return to politics. Enter Pat Robertson, who saw the vote a bit differently... "I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover: if there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God -- you just rejected Him from your city," Robertson said on his daily television show, "The 700 Club." "And don't wonder why He hasn't helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I'm not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that's the case, don't ask for His help because he might not be there," he said.
You getting all this down, Lord?
Getting Carried Away in the Excitement
I am happy to announce that Mr. Schwarzenegger's, "high stakes plan to reshape the state," fell flat on its face yesterday. Why California newspapers are referring to it as a, "high stakes plan to reshape the state," I'm not quite certain, since it was clearly a bland and brutish attempt to undermine groups which tended to support Democrats (namely teachers, unions and teahcers unions,) and convert as much of that power directly into the hands of Arnold and the GOP as was possible. Look at some of these measures. Given the issues California is dealing with, Arnold decided that our big issues were redistricting, a proposed a measure in which the authority for redistricting gets bottlenecked, for whatever reason, into the hands of three retired judges. Oh, right, the reason is that the GOP wants to try and limit the number of people they need to influence in order to gain control of districting. Then he went after unions, because lord knows that even if every other 'think tank' or 'corporation' is able to donate whatever it wants to the GOP, we can't allow some group which leans to the left the same freedom. Local news sources are reporting this as a failure of Arnold's celebrity charm, which is about what you'd expect from your modern journalist. Apparently the fact that every single person around me was violently reminding one another to vote down every single proposition with a number less than eighty meant nothing. Certainly the populace wasn't informed about the nature of the propositions, nor were they voting for the good of their state. No one was questioning why Arnold gave a shit about redistricting or attacking unions. Arnold just doesn't have the dazzle to keep us in line, is all. Alas, people must have gotten so carried away checking no boxes that the very intelligent prop 80, which reregulated our power industry (you may recall a few power crisis not too long ago that Californians were all whining about,) got passed over as well, so who knows, maybe the news media is right, common sense isn't the motivating factor.
See Karl leak sensative information. Leak, Karl, leak!
In today's Washington Times [though it looks more like it came from the Onion]... White House gets ethics lesson
White House staffers yesterday began taking refresher courses on ethics and the handling of classified material as ordered by President Bush because of the CIA leak probe. ... Although White House officials have to take classes on ethics and the handling of classified material before obtaining security clearances, Mr. Bush thought this would be a good time for refresher courses for 3,000 employees. Among those who will be attending the one-hour sessions is the president's top political strategist, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove. Mr. Rove testified four times before the grand jury investigating the CIA leak. He has not been charged.
The bad news is that Cheney is teaching the class.
PETA folks have a sense of humor
From NY Daily News... Dick Cheney's annual poultry-plugging pilgrimage to South Dakota is again drawing fire from animal-rights activists. "When we first heard that Dick Cheney was hunting pheasants, we thought that it might be a misspelling of 'peasants,'" PETA rep Jen McClure told us.
In an act of sickening, overt political bias invoking the most repulsive of anti-American, perhaps even illegal acts, the IRS has targeted a church in Pasadena for an investigation into its tax-exempt status due to an anti-war sermon given in 2004. Now, don’t get me wrong. I consider the notion of religious tax exemption to be a horrific misuse of the first amendment. You use the system, you pays the taxes. But as we do allow religions tax exempt status, for the IRS to attempt to threaten such a status in order to punish social view points is not merely deplorable, it’s traitorous. We are a free nation, and most important among those freedoms are the rights to have varying political ideas, and the right to oppose the current trend of power. To be honest, given the trend of corruption in politics, the ability to voice both political and social opinions freely is essential to the working of any society. Without it, the people become purely the pawns of those in power. And so, for the IRS to use its powers to try and silence a social voice, to threaten citizens openly in order to prevent them from legitimate political speech, is as terrible an act as can be committed in a free society, short of merely having them gunned down. After all, we live in a nation where churches have largely been behind moves to attack and legislate against gay citizens, freedom of speech, adult industry and other religions. We live in a nation where just a couple of years back a Catholic diocese threatened members with excommunication for voting for Kerry. And yet the IRS has always clammed up. This miserable hypocrisy merely further condemns them.
Dick likes the rough stuff
From the Washington Post... an article about our vice president's support of torture. Well... his opposition to anti-torture language. Cheney Fights for Detainee Policy
Cheney's camp says the United States does not torture captives, but believes the president needs nearly unfettered power to deal with terrorists to protect Americans. To preserve the president's flexibility, any measure that might impose constraints should be resisted. That is why the administration has recoiled from embracing the language of treaties such as the U.N. Convention Against Torture, which Cheney's aides find vague and open-ended. So, Mr. Cheney is working to give our president unfettered power. Sleep tight, America.
Here in the Fun Party, we don’t see the fifty states as ‘red’ or ‘blue’. We don’t see them as ‘north’ or ‘south’ or ‘west’. We don’t see them as democratic, conservative, breadbasket, coastal or carbon based. We have three designations for any state of the Union which encompass entirely every nuance of political relevance they might enjoy. These are, “Saved”, “Redeemable”, and “Lost.” It’s not hard to fathom each category. Along the coasts, most of California, New England and so forth, we see states which consistently strive to promote their citizenry, to uphold the spirit of our nation’s founding, which are ultimately devoted to protecting life, freedom and happiness for all citizens, not just a violent handful. Oh, they slip, they slide, but in the end they are remarkably bereft of, say, towns that brag about their low population of blacks, or constant initiatives to kill science, or attempts to make hatred of gays part of legislation. They vote largely for, well, political parties without an almost perfect track record of dishonesty, warmongering, corruption and bigotry. These are ‘saved’ states. Then there are those states which are now hopeless cases, where the entrenchment of the genuinely sociopathic (or otherwise mentally disabled) is so severe that, by the best estimates of Fun Party political analysts, there’s no effective way to rescue them. States like Florida, Alabama, Utah and so on, states which essentially turn a blind eye towards relevant social issues like health, poverty, education or social development in favor of frenzied assaults on young people, sex, non-Christians, charity or science. Reasoning doesn’t work with these people, even their own short term interests appear to be meaningless to them. We lovingly refer to such states as ‘slag’ states, since that’s all we intend to be left of them once we’ve nuked them and their entire fucking bass-ackwards populations into vast fields of radioactive glass. Somewhere in between are the states that have simply ‘lost their way’. These aren’t bad states, and by and large the people in them aren’t bad people. They’ve just become too susceptible to media manipulation. They’re emotional, reactionary propaganda whores and that causes them to sometimes make bad decisions. However, with patience, strategy and a little selective culling of the native populations, we feel convinced that such states can be uplifted back into being healthy, freedom loving members of the United States. I’ve long contended that Colorado is ripe for retaking. The infection it suffers is tiny and not malign. It longs for freedom, it longs for fun and it teeters on the very edge of social thought, threatening daily to toppling right over into the left. Events like this one here, with Denver deciding that the war on drugs, at least marijuana, is just stupid, merely serve to further convince me. "Wafts to victory," haha funny! (I was born there, by the by.)
Scooter better hope the inmates haven't read his work
Ok, you've no doubt seen this. It's been circulating for several days now. It seems I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby wrote a book back in 1996. This [What the hell is wrong with conservatives?] references the New Yorker's Talk of the Town piece on said novel, "The Apprentice." Here's a taste... The passage “He asked if they should fuck the deer.” is quoted, to which, The New Yorker notes, “The answer, reader, is yes.” And then there are the old stand-bys of conservative fiction writers: Homoeroticism and incest also figure as themes. The main female character, Yukiko, draws hair on the “mound” of a little girl. The brothers of a dead samurai have sex with his daughter. Many things glisten (mouths, hair, evergreens), quiver (a “pink underlip,” arm muscles, legs), and are sniffed (floorboards, sheets, fingers). Perhaps the most disturbing, however, is this passage: At age ten the madam put the child in a cage with a bear trained to couple with young girls so the girls would be frigid and not fall in love with their patrons. They fed her through the bars and aroused the bear with a stick when it seemed to lose interest.
Finally, a conservative writes a non-depressing book detailing how folks get screwed! My pink underlip is all a'quiver.
When the going gets tough, the tough get a torturer
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