Especially if you're poor or minority or both:

The rate at which infants die in the United States has dropped substantially over the past half-century, but broad disparities remain among racial groups, and the country stacks up poorly next to other industrialized nations.

In 2004, the most recent year for which statistics are available, roughly seven babies died for every 1,000 live births before reaching their first birthday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says. That was down from about 26 in 1960.

Babies born to black mothers died at two and a half times the rate of those born to white mothers, according to the CDC figures.

The United States ranks near the bottom for infant survival rates among modernized nations. A Save the Children report last year placed the United States ahead of only Latvia, and tied with Hungary, Malta, Poland and Slovakia.

The same report noted the United States had more neonatologists and newborn intensive care beds per person than Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom — but still had a higher rate of infant mortality than any of those nations.

Doctors and analysts blame broad disparities in access to health care among racial and income groups in the United States.

And those who oppose universal health care want to make damn sure it stays that way.

Labels: health care

Because there's too much good stuff out there for me to link in separate posts...

Melissa says there has too been terrorism in the United States since September 11, 2001. Mike Huckabee probably doesn't think it's terrorism, but it is.

Glenn Greenwald on how Dianne Feinstein is selling us out again. Would someone please mount a primary challenge against this sellout?

Jurassicpork has a post over at his place listing the accomplishments of the Democrats since taking over Congress. And it isn't a pretty one. When you're done, check out the video of his grandson and their dog. I'm not one for babies and even I think this is cute.

Because that's where the money is! Archcrone reports on the latest rash of aspiring Willie Suttons.

Kate's BMI Project shows how ridiculous this measure of supposed "health" is.

Congratulations to John Cole and the Balloon Juice crew for coming out on top of the "Best 250 TTLB blogs" category in the Weblog Awards. With John's migration over to our side of the fence, this victory has to be especially sweet. See how much more fun we are than conservatives? Barry, take note.

Why They Invented the Internets: What started out as a temporary blog to document the "Lisa/Cancer" storyline in Funky Winkerbean has turned out to be a full-on geek community. Most of us only WISH we generated as many comments.

Kevin Hayden gets philosophical and declares himself the enemy of those who would impose theocracy.

The next resource over which people go to war is not oil but water. Pam looks at two places in the U.S. where the rumblings are already taking place.

Labels: bloggers

Not so much:

US President George W. Bush had a shoot-out with the "bad guys" in Iraq on Thursday, playing a computer game with war veterans that simulates a firefight in Baghdad, the White House said.

Bush tried his hand at the game with two soldiers during a visit to a rehabilitation center in Texas that treats veterans wounded in Iraq.

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Bush helped "shoot the bad guys" in a Baghdad neighborhood, albeit virtually.

The fuckwad visits a rehabilitation center and plays an Iraq video game? I wonder what the recovering soldiers who lost limbs in the real war thought about a commander-in-chief who was too busy snorting coke from a stripper's ass to even finish his cushy National Guard gig doing pretend soldier stuff. Ten bucks says he was too fucking drunk to realize it was just a video game.

You know, this hole in my forehead from sticking an icepick in it is getting kinda nasty.

(h/t: Digby)

Labels: George W. Bush, icepick meet forehead, idocy

Former AT&T tech Mark Klein appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee this week to testify that AT&T has for years been sweeping up ALL communications of ALL types from ALL people both inside the United States. He talked about what he saw on Countdown:



LowerManhattanite at the Group News Blog knows what it's like to know that your every call is being wiretapped. If you think that if you have nothing to hide, you shouldn't object to the government snooping on your every move, go read how the same cast of characters that were pulling this shit in the 1960's and early 1970's are behind the current efforts as well.

Labels: NSA wiretapping, police state

I use that title a lot, don't I?

It's discouraging that BOTH the Republican and Democratic frontrunners are taking pages from the Bush playbook, thus adding fuel to the notion that a Hillary Clinton or Rudy Giuliani president is not going to differ that much from what we see today.

Hillary may not be the fascistic, authoritarian crazy that Rudy is, but already she's showing signs of not wanting to deal with people who dare ask uncomfortable questions:

The Clinton campaign has admitted to planting questions in Iowa. They have confirmed that a campaign staffer approached a student to ask Sen. Clinton a question about global warming during a campaign stop at a biodiesel plant in Newton, Iowa, on Nov. 6.

The story was first reported by Patrick Caldwell, a junior at Grinnell College and the features editor of The Scarlet and Black college newspaper. He reported that student Muriel Gallo-Chasanoff was approached by the campaign to ask a question. She told the reporter that "they wanted a question from a college student." She also said that she "noted that staffers prompted Clinton to call on her and another who had been approached before the event, although Clinton used her discretion to select questions and called on people who had not been prepped beforehand. Some of the questions asked were confusing and clearly off-message."

Clinton Campaign spokesperson Mo Elleithee tells ABC News that "on this occasion a member of our staff did discuss a possible question about Sen. Clinton's energy plan at a forum. However, Sen. Clinton did not know which questioners she was calling on during the event. This is not standard policy and will not be repeated again."

The staffer still remains with the Clinton campaign and they would not reveal his or her name. The campaign did not comment on whether this is the only time they have planted questions among audience members.

Given that this president has approval ratings that vary between 24% and a sizzling 31%, why are the parties' frontrunners striving to be as much like him as possible?

Labels: Hillary Clinton

"You people are really nuts...There’s kids dying in the war, the price of oil right now — there’s better things in this world to be thinking about than who served Hillary Clinton at Maid-Rite and who got a tip and who didn’t get a tip." -- Maid's Rite Diner waitress Anita Esterday, to a reporter, commenting on Tipgate.

Esterday is one of those "uniquely American" people who has to work two or three jobs just to pay the bills.

Labels: smackdown, voters

I guess the Administration figures they'll run the fear card up the ol' flagpole one mo' time and see if anyone salutes:

In what one FBI spokesman described as "almost an annual ritual," the bureau has obtained uncorroborated intelligence indicating al Qaeda would like to strike shopping malls during the holiday shopping season, two law enforcement sources said Thursday.

Those sources confirmed there is intelligence dating back to August that al Qaeda would like to attack malls in Los Angeles, California, and Chicago, Illinois.

The FBI's information is contained in an intelligence report and is intended for law enforcement and intelligence partners.

"There is no information to state this is a credible threat," FBI spokesman Richard Kolko said in a statement.

The information is being shared "for situational awareness," he said, and the FBI is reminding people to "remain vigilant and report suspicious activity to authorities."

A spokesman for the FBI's Chicago field office, Ross Rice, stressed the intelligence came "from an uncorroborated source and it's non-specific."

Rice said there was no mention of particular malls in Chicago and Los Angeles that might be the focus of a threat. And he added that "it's almost an annual ritual" for information to come to light about mall threats at holiday shopping time.

There's something kind of sad and pathetic about how they keep reviving this same old chestnut every time the Administration needs a bounce: threat, mall, not credible, but be afraid anyway. Besides, aren't we supposed to keep shopping or the terrorists win?

(h/t: Space Cowboy)

Labels: fearmongering

The indictment of Bernie Kerik ought to be more than just a temporary distraction for the Giuliani campaign:

The grand jury voted to indict Mr. Kerik on conspiracy to commit wire and mail fraud, and substantive counts of wire and mail fraud, under a statute often used in corruption cases, according to people briefed on the vote. The panel also voted to charge him with lying on a mortgage application and his homeland security application and with several counts of tax fraud.

This isn't just a long-term friend; someone whose plane he uses. This is someone who was practically attached to Giuliani at the hip. This is a known thug that Giuliani recommended to head up the Department of Homeland Security:

Mr. Kerik's rise from a harsh upbringing to likely Cabinet nominee has much to do with his powerful patron, Mr. Giuliani, whom he first served as a bodyguard. Along the way, Mr. Kerik has developed a reputation as a tough-talking, sometimes coarse law enforcer who rarely stands on ceremony. He is known as a relentless boss who likes to shake up the status quo and toss out subordinates he considers slackers.

When Mr. Kerik was appointed to a top job in the New York City Department of Correction in the mid-1990's, one official told the department's commissioner: "Congratulations. You've just hired Rambo."

[snip]

Mr. Kerik, who declared bankruptcy as a young police officer, also could face questions about how he made millions of dollars since leaving city government, mainly through his partnership in a consulting firm led by Mr. Giuliani. Most recently, he sold $5.8 million of stock in a company that makes stun guns used by many police forces.

As police commissioner, he had less than friendly relations with the F.B.I., and occasionally was criticized for his use of power. In writing his memoirs, which touched on 9/11 and detailed his abandonment by his mother, who was a prostitute, he used police officers to conduct research, a move that earned him a $2,500 fine from the city's Conflicts of Interest Board. He was also once accused of dispatching homicide investigators to question and fingerprint several Fox News employees whom his publisher, Judith Regan, apparently suspected of stealing her cellphone and necklace.
[snip]

In 2002, after Mr. Giuliani's term as mayor ended, Mr. Kerik joined him in forming Giuliani Partners, a business consulting firm.

Part of Mr. Kerik's job was as one of the firm's very public faces, speaking at events around the United States on topics ranging from how real estate executives can better protect their office buildings to disaster readiness tips for local government officials in suburban New York.

In the presentations, Mr. Kerik typically focused on New York City's response to the terrorist attack, or on its efforts to reduce crime. But his appearances were often sponsored by companies that were selling just the kinds of products that the former police commissioner was indirectly promoting, like Nextel, the cellular phone company that many police and fire departments use.

This is a guy who used an apartment meant for Ground Zero workers to fuck Judith Regan, the sleazemonger who later went on to acquire O.J. Simpson's confessional book.

And this isn't just someone in Giuliani's social circle, or a fundraiser. This is a close personal friend and business partner. There is no way that Giuliani didn't know what he was getting when he recommended this thug for an important national security position. And there is no way we can have confidence that his judgment is any better today, especially if you look at the fact that neocon lunatics like Norman Podhoretz are integral parts of his campaign and policy apparatus.

Lost in the unbelievable botch job the Administration has made of America's position in the world is the unbelievable botch job they have made of our economic condition.

1. Oil prices. So far gasoline hasn't topped $3/gallon in most places, despite the recent spike in oil prices. It makes one wonder what the trigger was when they DID top $3 last summer when the per-barrel price of crude was far lower. But there's only so long this will hold before prices at the pump hold up. Meanwhile, homeowners with oil heat (like Mr. Brilliant and I) are going to wear a lot of sweaters this weekend (except that our price is capped because we are on a payment plan):

Oil prices rose Thursday after dipping briefly below $96 a barrel, indicating traders were back in a buying mood after pocketing gains from crude's recent rally.

Oil prices had surged to a record above $98 a barrel in the previous session amid supply concerns, the weak U.S. dollar and OPEC's apparent reluctance to pump more crude into the market.

And oil prices affect EVERYTHING:

Converted into chemicals, the oil and gas become petrochemicals that are used to develop plastic, polyester, rubbers, detergent, and chemical fertilizers and other pesticides. But it's also used in fragrances and lipstick, in candles and telephones, in pharmaceuticals and insecticides.
Petroleum is used to make artificial limbs and soaps, but it's not used to produce dairy products. Cows are. But cows need to fatten up before they're milked and slaughtered, and they're mostly fed a diet heavy on corn. As more corn is directed to energy production, the price for corn has risen and dairy farmers have passed those costs up the food chain.
Those higher feed costs alone have infused an extra $47 a year per person into grocery bills, according to an Iowa State University study in May.
And don't forget: Farmers sow crops with tractors and use trucks to haul goods, all of which are fueled by diesel. Those higher transportation costs also get pushed up the food chain.
Consumers at the supermarket check-out counter see that they're paying sometimes record-high prices for milk, cheese and yogurt at the same time that the costs of Tide, Pampers, Ivory soap, M&Ms and Cheerios are creeping up.

2. Debt. The so-called "Fiscal Responsibility" party has been maxing out national credit cards as quickly as it can amass them:

The U.S. Treasury Department said on Wednesday publicly held U.S. debt breached $9 trillion this week for the first time ever, just five weeks after Congress had raised the statutory borrowing limit.

At the end of September, U.S. President George W. Bush signed a measure to increase the debt limit ceiling to $9.815 trillion from $8.965 trillion, allowing the government to keep issuing debt.

3. Housing. Are you part of the 67% that now "owns" a home? Do you live in any of these markets? Then I sure hope you haven't been using your house as a piggybank, because the value of your house is going to drop like a stone over the next few years. Now this isn't all the Administration's fault, except to the extent that Republican laissez-faire contributed to the development of mortgage products that allowed people who couldn't possibly afford it get into homes they couldn't afford -- products that were like those "no interest for 15 months" payment plans that appliance stores offer. But the Bushistas didn't care as long as it was just middle-class individuals in danger of losing their homes. When the financial markets started to feel the pain, suddenly the idea of letting millions of people lose their homes wasn't something that "the market should sort out" any longer.

The increase in the debt limit is the fifth since Bush took office in January 2001. The U.S. debt stood at about $5.6 trillion at the start of his presidency.

In approving the debt limit increase, Congressional lawmakers said the $850 billion increase should be large enough to allow the government to continue borrowing into 2009, well beyond next year's presidential and congressional elections.

If this bunch had set about to wreck everything as a matter of policy, they couldn't have done a better job. The only question is whether they've reduced so much of our prestige and our credibility and our economy to rubble that it can't possibly be rebuilt.

Labels: debt, housing bubble, oil

(Because if the Coen Brothers can rip off the bard of County Sligo, then so can I.)

It can be accurately said that Iraq is no country for old men. In the estimate of Just Foreign Policy.org, we have either directly or indirectly caused the deaths of over 1.1 million Iraqis, many of them young men and children who will never be privileged to grow into old men. They will never have the chance to bounce their grandchildren on their knees and tell them how much better off they were under a tinpot dictator like Saddam Hussein than they ever were under the Crusadin’ Decider.

The poem which opening line I quote is “Sailing to Byzantium” but perhaps a more apt (according to Rep. Jim McDermott) visual would be another Yeats masterpiece, “The Second Coming” (unintentionally apt when one considers George W. Bush’s messianic complex), with perhaps a helpful visual backdrop lifted from T.S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi.”

And George W. Bush’s own journey of the mad Magi would be darkly comic if actual human lives weren’t being ended violently, painfully so their unwilling sacrifices could be melted down into a comma on the glorious road to Democracy. The Three Wise Men, George, Dick and Donald, bore not gifts of liberty, prosperity and democracy but detention and torture, poverty and famine and tribal rule that trumps what risibly tries to pass itself off as a democratic government. This epic journey in the sand not to meet Jesus but to import him one rifle butt and bullet to the head at a time could be fairly summed up as Bush and his GOP lemmings fastening themselves to a dying animal.

Consider the latest brain dropping from The Decider yesterday at a joint press conference with Nicholas Sarkozy. George, who has had a religious epiphany that, with France’s election of a right wing nutjob, the snail-eaters are respectable again, said, “If you lived in Iraq and had lived under a tyranny, you’d be saying: God, I love freedom, because that’s what’s happened.”

Now, let’s just charitably elide over the irony that if you could find an Iraqi who hasn’t lost a relative to US and coalition forces, Blackwater mercenaries and those of other “security consultants”, cholera and other poverty-related diseases, famine, terrorist and insurgent activity and a whole host of other life-threatening phenomena and s/he thanks their newfound freedom, they would praise not God but Allah. Such arrogance that even Muslims would thank a white Christian God with an equally white beard and flowing Brooks Brothers robes instead of Allah is a fish that we can afford not to shoot in the barrel for now.

Let’s, instead, focus on the bigger picture, which is George W. Bush’s final slide into permanent, irretrievable, irrevocable insanity and him grabbing us and the Iraqi people by the lapels as he slithers over the slippery edge of the cliff of lucidity, with nobody to warn us but poor little Dennis Kucinich.

Consider, also, who’s supporting him. No, no, I’m not talking about PNAC and their realized spooge dream for another Pearl Harbor nor the Republican party that publicly gags at the thought of impeaching him for war crimes that have damaged their own political fortunes (which, to them, is their primary consideration).

Consider that the Democrats are also filling up the seats for this banjo orchestra that keeps strumming its happy little tunes (because, as Steve Martin once said, you can never get depressed listening to the perky little banjo) entitled, “Well, It’s Not Such a Bad War, After All But We Can Manage it Better” and “Please, Sir, May I Have Another War?”

Consider that they still support this messianic madman and feel privileged and even arrogant over their stewardship of the erosion of the United States constitution and all of our civil liberties and the open looting of the Treasury. Consider that when they defend a madman who makes statements such as Iraqis thanking God or Allah for their freedom “because that’s what’s happened”, they do so by condemning Americans for exercising four of the first amendment rights over whose destruction they’ve cheerfully presided by condemning Moveon.org (freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom to assemble online and freedom to petition).

They tell us to shut up and not criticize political stooges like General Petraeus and Ryan Crocker because, well, George Bush’s track record of putting the right men in the right positions at the right time is, like George Bush himself, unimpeachable. And that we have to pay for it all.

Shut the fuck up, we’re hearing, and be grateful that you don’t have to sacrifice anything in return.

And we as a nation are in turn feeding the delusion that the Old Boy network still had and always will have the answers as we throw our support behind scheming witches like Hillary Rodham Clinton, essentially Joe Lieberman in drag, and balding psychopaths like Rudy Giuliani. Hillary is trying to rope as many horses into her corral as possible by appealing to Independents, moderates, uncommitted voters, Reagan Democrats, disaffected Republicans and anybody and everybody except the liberal, progressive vote that she and Mark Penn know all too well alone will not get her elected. This is why she’s terrified of getting hidebound in a Democratic ideology and that fragmenting that Big Tent base by telling us what she really thinks about things is unthinkable.

So look forward to four more years of stories of suicide bombings and more dead Iraqis, which shouldn’t be a bad thing since we’ve become inured to such background noise, even when the stories we’re hearing now will come out of Baghdad, Bagram and Tehran.

Because people like Hillary think that the war’s just being mismanaged, even while admitting that if she knew then what she knows now… And Rudy… well, Rudy’s content to take Bush’s legacy to the Nexus level.

Thank you in advance, America, for the future retrospective of the 2002 midterm election that swept Republican scumbags into power on a “Let’s Bomb the Shit Out of Iraq” platform. Thank you in advance, you fucking idiots, for continuing the murderous clown show while George W. Bush slouches toward the American Enterprise Institute and PNAC for his lucrative speaking gigs.

This is about as close an admission as we're going to get that the so-called "strong economy" of the Bush years despite anemic at best job growth and stagnant wages was a function of homeowners using their bubble-inflated homes as a piggybank:

“Everybody was basically using their house as an A.T.M. machine,” said Dave Simonsen, a senior vice president for NAI Alliance, an industrial real estate firm in Reno. “Now they are upside down on their house without that piggy bank to go back to.”

From 2004 through 2006, Americans pulled about $840 billion a year out of residential real estate, via sales, home equity lines of credit and refinanced mortgages, according to data presented in an updated working paper by James Kennedy, an economist, and Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman. These so-called home equity withdrawals financed as much as $310 billion a year in personal consumption from 2004 to 2006, according to the data.

But in the first half of this year, equity withdrawals were down 15 percent nationally compared with the average for the last three years, and consumption supported by such funds plunged nearly one-fourth, according to the Kennedy and Greenspan data.

This summer, the size of withdrawals fell even more sharply to about one-third below the level of late last year, according to Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com.

“This slide in equity withdrawal is very recent,” Mr. Zandi said, “so you wouldn’t expect the drop in spending to occur until now, or Christmas.”

Only a year ago, money taken out of houses was still more than 9 percent of the nation’s disposable income, Mr. Zandi calculated, using a sampling of Equifax credit reports to supplement Fed data. By this fall, it had dropped to about 5 percent, a difference of about $350 billion a year.

Much of the attention in the recent collapse of the housing boom has focused on those in danger of losing their home or facing higher monthly payments in their adjustable mortgages. But the broader effect on the economy is likely to come from the much larger group of homeowners who can no longer count on rising home values to bolster their wealth.

You know what? I have no sympathy for people who find themselves tapped out because they decided to blow their home equity on home theatres and in-ground pools and Ford Excursions and vacations in Tahiti. You don't have to be a genius to know that tapping equity for ephemera is really goddamn stupid. It's one thing to take an equity loan to remodel the kitchen, though I would say that the way things look now, those who spent $70,000 to put a gourmet kitchen with custom cabinets, tumbled marble floors, commercial appliances, and quartz countertops in a 1950's cape cod aren't going to see a return on that investment. But at least that's putting the money back into the asset. Tapping home equity for things that wear out within a few years or are gone within a few weeks is just plain stupid.

But it's hard to believe that retailers are going to enjoy the kind of holiday seasons they've had in recent years.

Mr. Brilliant and I have no equity loans and no credit card debt. And when we go out to buy our HDTV this season, we'll probably get a really good price. And if we buy it on a "no interest for eighteen months" plan, we won't be paying interest either, because it'll be paid in less time than that.

Sometimes deferred gratification has its advantages.

As long as Maggie's obsession with the walls in the basement doesn't mean there's mice behind them. That would mean basement remodeling. And then I won't be able to be so damn smug.

Labels: economics, housing bubble, I love the smell of schadenfreude in the morning, unabashed consumerism

The mere thought of another four to eight years of Clinton scandalmongering by the media makes me want to take to my bed with every DVD box set I own and never let any news touch my ears again.

Taylor Marsh gives us a taste of what's to come...hell, it's already started:

Former President Clinton brought it up yesterday, as he senses the slime about to start. But what actually qualifies as swiftboating isn't a debate, which is nothing close to what decorated veterans Max Cleland and John Kerry faced. It's this piece of trash (h/t John Cole):

In a new book alleging a campaign of slander and intimidation orchestrated chiefly by Hillary Clinton, Kathleen Willey points a finger of suspicion at the former first couple for the death of her husband, who was believed to have killed himself. Willey, who claims she was groped by President Clinton in the White House, acknowledged in an interview with WND today that she stands by the speculation she poses about her husband's demise in "Target: Caught in the Crosshairs of Bill and Hillary Clinton," set for release this week by World Ahead Publishing, WND Books' partner. Asked if she suspects her husband Ed, a lawyer and son of a prominent Virginia lawmaker, was murdered, Willey replied, "Most definitely." "I'm having someone with a forensics background look at this, and I intend to pursue this further, now that these questions have been raised," she told WND, pointing to alleged discrepancies in the autopsy report. Does she believe the Clintons were involved? "I do have suspicions," Willey said, "yes." ... .. Kathleen Willey suspects Clintons murdered husband New book details evidence of 'smear' campaign orchestrated by Hillary

Sean Hannity will be the first to gobble this one up, with the rest of the wingnut crew not far behind.

Double-teaming, with great effort, is Mrs. Tim Russert in "Vanity Fair," simultaneously gushing and whining about the bygone days of great D.C. hostesses. Sally Quinn picks a target and you'll never guess who it is.

Read more here.

And Digby has a post that will make you want to join me in the self-infliction of icepick wound to forehead. It's about Mrs. Tim Russert's article in this month's Vanity Fair dealing with how the aging doyennes of Washington's social circle are aghast at the thought of the Clintons being allowed to sully their party scene again, because they didn't understand the rules -- that people like Sally Quinn are entitled by their exalted position to have their surgery-lifted derriéres baised on a regular and ongoing basis by whomever is the leader of the free world and his consort.

Let's just assume for a minute that the Democrats decide to hold the gun to their own heads and nominate Hillary Clinton -- which looks increasingly likely, regardless of what actual voters may want. And let's assume by some miracle that she defeats the Saint of 9/11™ even though the latter has just received the endorsement of Crazy Pat Robertson, thus giving the sheeple of the Christofascist Zombie Brigade™ the signal that it's OK to vote for Rudy, despite the fact that he fucks other women while married and is estranged from his children. Because after all, that's exactly what THEY do. So Hillary takes office on January 20, 2009, and has to deal with a housing crash that's about to cause massive foreclosures because of mortgage resets, a plummeting dollar that's making ballplayers WANT to play for the Toronto Blue Jays, bankruptcies among some of the biggest Wall Street firms, $300/barrel oil and $10/gallon gasoline, and ongoing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, AND Iran. That's a lot for a new president to have on her plate, right? But none of it will matter, because Sally Quinn and Maureens Dowd and Orth are already sharpening their knives because there won't be any fun parties at the White House. Jerome Corsi will settle his lawsuit against Regnery so he can publish more books about the thousands of conservatives that Bill 'n' Hill have secretly murdered and the satanic den of human sacrifice they've set up in the White House basement in Cheney's old bunker. Then Madam President will be appear in an interview on the Today show, where Matt Lauer will ask, "Some say that you cynically used your position as First Lady to lay the groundwork to take over the White House so you could turn the White House Basement into a castration den. What do you say to that?"

This is what we have to look forward to, folks.

But today, as quickly as you can say "White House For Sale", and fresh on the heels of the news of Neil Bush stuffing his pockets with Education Department cash, comes word that if you're a big fat REPUBLICAN donor, you don't just get to spend the night in That Bedroom in the White House, you get to attend state dinners:

A Las Vegas casino magnate, a North Carolina construction materials manufacturer and a Colorado oil executive were among the 17 major Republican donors invited to dine with French President Nicholas Sarkozy, along with U.S. and French officials, at last night's social dinner.

Campaign finance watchdogs say the Bush administration has taken a page from the Clinton White House and other previous administrations, reserving the coveted invitations for their most loyal supporters.

"These are longtime patrons of the Republican party," said Shiela Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics. "If it weren't for their money, they would not be there."

The donors on the guest list have raised and contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars for Bush and the Republican party, according to an ABCNews.com analysis of campaign finance data on the Center for Responsive Politics Web site

Among the guests to attend was Las Vegas casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who has contributed hundreds of the thousands of dollars to the Republican party and its candidates and more than $1 million to conservative advocacy groups.

Harold Simmons, another major donor in attendance, contributed $3 million to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the group responsible for the controversial ads discrediting Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry's military record during the 2004 campaign.

Not surprisingly, the U.S. ambassador to France and his predecessor both attended the dinner. They too, though, are major Republican donors.

The current ambassador to France, Craig Stapleton, who is married to Bush's cousin, has contributed more than $85,000 to the Republican party and campaigns since 2000, and raised at least $200,000 for Bush's 2004 presidential campaign, making him a Bush "Ranger."

Stapleton's predecessor as U.S. ambassador to France, Howard Leach, a former finance chair for the Republican National Committee, has contributed more than $900,000 to the Republican party and campaigns since 1993. Leach raised at least $100,000 for Bush's 2000 campaign, making him a Bush "Pioneer."

But of course, it's perfectly OK for George W. Bush to reward HIS moneyed friends. Because after all, his family is part of the Washington establishment. And they probably also invited Sally Quinn and Maureens Dowd and Orth.

Labels: George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, icepick meet forehead

Just sit through the procedural stuff until about three minutes in:

Labels: Barney Frank, GLBT

Remember when old Babs Bush, that vile spew of a woman, donated money for Hurricane Katrina relief but only with the stipulation that it be used to buy educational software from son Neil's company? Well, it turns out that old Neil, he of the Thai hookers who came to his hotel room to have sex with him out of the goodness of their hearts, has been getting a nice sum of taxpayer cash shoveled into his pockets through his company, and the Education Department's Inspector General smells a rat:

The inspector general of the Department of Education has said he will examine whether federal money was inappropriately used by three states to buy educational products from a company owned by Neil Bush, the president’s brother.

John P. Higgins Jr., the inspector general, said he would review the matter after a group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, detailed at least $1 million in spending from the No Child Left Behind program by school districts in Texas, Florida and Nevada to buy products made by Mr. Bush’s company, Ignite Learning of Austin, Tex. Mr. Higgins stated his plans in a letter to the group sent last week.

Members of the group and other critics in Texas contend that school districts are buying Ignite’s signature product, the Curriculum on Wheels, because of political considerations. The product, they said, does not meet standards for financing under the No Child Left Behind Act, which allocates federal money to help students raise their achievement levels, particularly in elementary school reading.

Ignite, founded by Neil Bush in 1999, includes as investors his parents, former President George H. W. Bush and his wife, Barbara. Company officials say that about 100 school districts use the Curriculum on Wheels, known as the Cow, which is a portable classroom with software to teach middle-school social studies, science and math. The units cost about $3,800 each and require about $1,000 a year in maintenance.

I was right in 1988 and I am now: This bunch of chazzers thinks this country's treasury is theirs to plunder at will. I hope that the next time they try to shove one of their disgusting spawn on us, that Americans remember what kind of greedy trash this family is.

Labels: Bush family, Cronyism, greed, Neil Bush

George W. Bush's affinity for torture is nothing new, and has little to do with the so-called "war on terror." It's just another manifestation of his sociopathic psychosis, as is evident form this article from 1967.

Money quote: "A former president of Delta [said] that the branding is done with a hot coathanger. But the former president, George Bush, a Yale senior, said that the resulting wound is 'only a cigarette burn.'"

Have you ever had a cigarette stubbed out on your skin? I have. It was in the Museum of Natural History cafeteria while on an 8th grade field trip. I was robbed of my lunch money (literally) and the perpetrator put out a cigarette on the inside of my arm. If you look really carefully, you can still see the mark. It hurt like a sonofabitch.

Labels: George W. Bush, sociopathy

So much for the crazy aunt in the attic, eh? But before we go dancing in the streets at the impending removal from office of Dick Cheney, let's not underestimate the iron will of Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer -- but only when it comes to political expediency. When it comes to some kind of lame political calculation cooked up by consultants and guaranteed to be wrong, they dig in their heels. If it's about what's right for the country, they crumple like a Yugo.

I've been fighting off getting the viral bronchitis that has levelled half my department at work, so I've had little energy to do much other than go to work, come home, make dinner, clean up, watch Olbermann, and crash. So I haven't really had a chance to dig into this and give it the attention it deserves. So I'm going to kick you over to our friend and colleague jurassicpork, and Group Newsblogger Jesse Wendel, who have.

Labels: Dennis Kucinich, impeachment

I love when wingnuts eat their own. After all, why should Democrats have the only circular firing squad?

It's hard to feel sorry for the authors who have their screeds published by Regnery Press. Without this wingnut purveyor of the printed word, these swill-peddlers would probably be either selling their mimeographed screeds on street corners or toiling away at dawn every day like the rest of us. Instead, they get published and their books are bought in bulk by wingnut organizations, and those bulk purchases push them onto the New York Times bestseller list.

Except that when Regnery plays fast and loose with the royalty structure and it affects THEIR OWN POCKETS, suddenly these so-called "conservatives" are no longer singing the praise of maximization of corporate profits:

In a suit filed in United States District Court in Washington yesterday, the authors Jerome R. Corsi, Bill Gertz, Lt. Col. Robert (Buzz) Patterson, Joel Mowbray and Richard Miniter state that Eagle Publishing, which owns Regnery, “orchestrates and participates in a fraudulent, deceptively concealed and self-dealing scheme to divert book sales away from retail outlets and to wholly owned subsidiary organizations within the Eagle conglomerate.”

Some of the authors’ books have appeared on the New York Times best-seller list, including “Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry,” by Mr. Corsi and John E. O’Neill (who is not a plaintiff in the suit), Mr. Patterson’s “Dereliction of Duty: The Eyewitness Account of How Bill Clinton Compromised America’s National Security” and Mr. Miniter’s “Shadow War: The Untold Story of How Bush Is Winning the War on Terror.” In the lawsuit the authors say that Eagle sells or gives away copies of their books to book clubs, newsletters and other organizations owned by Eagle “to avoid or substantially reduce royalty payments to authors.”

The authors argue that in reducing royalty payments, the publisher is maximizing its profits and the profits of its parent company at their expense.

“They’ve structured their business essentially as a scam and are defrauding their writers,” Mr. Miniter said in an interview, “causing a tremendous rift inside the conservative community.”

Traditionally, authors receive a 15 percent royalty based on the cover price of a hardcover title after they have sold enough copies to cover the cost of the advance they receive upon signing a contract with a publisher. (Authors whose books are sold at steep discounts or to companies that handle remaindered copies receive lower royalties.)

In Regnery’s case, according to the lawsuit, the publisher sells books to sister companies, including the Conservative Book Club, which then sells the books to members at discounted prices, “at, below or only marginally above its own cost of publication.” In the lawsuit the authors say they receive “little or no royalty” on these sales because their contracts specify that the publisher pays only 10 percent of the amount received by the publisher, minus costs — as opposed to 15 percent of the cover price — for the book.

Of course that's what bumps up sales of these books, which appeal primarily to the twenty-eight percenter crowd. The reason these people end up on the Today show and on evening news shows is BECAUSE of the tactics Regnery uses to pump up sales numbers.

The John Birch Society used to publish books. They were more like pamphlets, but they were publications. There was a John Birch Society bookstore at a particular location on Route 22 in New Jersey that I won't mention because I can't find a link to corroborate this recollection. So wingnut screeds have always been published in one form or another. It wasn't until Regnery came on the scene, turned what is essentially vanity publishing into something that at least looke like "real" trade publishing, and by selling huge quantities of its books at discount to wingnut groups managed to inflate the sales numbers to the point of credibility.

So excuse me if I don't sit up tonight crying for the put-upon authors in the Regnery stable; people who sing the praises of unfettered capitalism -- until that unfettered capitalism affects their own wallets.

Labels: wingnuttia

I am 52 years old and both my parents are still living. My mother is 80, overweight, sedentary, a long-term lung cancer survivor, and is still smoking. Yes, she has COPD, but her heart is fine, her blood pressure is fine, and if it weren't for the cigarettes she would probably live to be 100. My father is 82, overweight, and doesn't get much if any exercise. He just had a physical and the doctor said everything is fine. My father-in-law was EXTREMELY obese, also smoked, and he made it to 79, which is not a terribly long life in my book, but for someone with the Media Medical Double Whammy™ isn't too shabby.

(Sorry, guys, about the revelations, but I need them to prove a point.)

Jim Fixx, who popularized running among the general population, took up running at the age of 35, lost 60 pounds, quit smoking, and died of a massive heart attack at the age of 52. He had three arteries that were at least 50% blocked. Turns out he came from a family with bad heart history, with a father whose first heart attack was at 35 and the second, fatal one at 42. So much for the "magic bullet" of how to ensure long life. Yes, Fixx' lifestyle changes possibly added ten years to his life. But they weren't a magic bullet.

Science continues to scratch its collective head about said magic bullet -- a sure-fire way to live a long and healthy life. Every paper, every piece of advice that comes out of the scientific community, continues to insist that weight loss is that magic bullet, no matter how confounding the so-called "evidence" might be:

About two years ago, a group of federal researchers reported that overweight people have a lower death rate than people who are normal weight, underweight or obese. Now, investigating further, they found out which diseases are more likely to lead to death in each weight group.

Linking, for the first time, causes of death to specific weights, they report that overweight people have a lower death rate because they are much less likely to die from a grab bag of diseases that includes Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, infections and lung disease. And that lower risk is not counteracted by increased risks of dying from any other disease, including cancer, diabetes or heart disease.

As a consequence, the group from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Cancer Institute reports, there were more than 100,000 fewer deaths among the overweight in 2004, the most recent year for which data were available, than would have expected if those people had been of normal weight.

Their paper is published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The researchers also confirmed that obese people and people whose weights are below normal have higher death rates than people of normal weight. But, when they asked why, they found that the reasons were different for the different weight categories.

Some who studied the relation between weight and health said the nation might want to reconsider what are ideal weights.

“If we use the criteria of mortality, then the term ‘overweight’ is a misnomer,” said Daniel McGee, professor of statistics at Florida State University.

“I believe the data,” said Dr. Elizabeth Barrett-Connor, a professor of family and preventive medicine at the University of California, San Diego. A body mass index of 25 to 30, the so-called overweight range, “may be optimal,” she said.

Others said there were plenty of reasons that being overweight was not desirable.

“Health extends far beyond mortality rates,” said Dr. JoAnn Manson, chief of preventive medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

Dr. Manson added that other studies, including ones at Harvard, found that being obese or overweight increased a person’s risk for any of a number of diseases, including diabetes, heart disease and several forms of cancer. And, she added, excess weight makes it more difficult to move about and impairs the quality of life.

“That’s the big picture in terms of health outcomes,” Dr. Manson said. “That’s what the public needs to look at.”

Is that all ya got? "It's more difficult to get around?" Ask Melina if I had trouble getting around the cavernous McCormick Place convention center at Yearly Kos, even with with a bigass backpack holding a bigass laptop adding at least 20 pounds to the load.

It would be fun watching these so-called "experts" jump through hoops trying to justify the continuation of a diet industry that essentially peddles snake oil if it weren't for the fact that these are very real people being sold what is often utter horseshit by their own doctors, based on "evidence" that is loaded with prejudgments, sloppy scientific methodology, and often based on emotion rather than common sense. I've written here about my gynecologist, who was wonderfully cool about weight, with a viewpoint that as long as you're healthy, your blood pressure and cholesterol numbers are good, you're fine -- until her 30th high school reunion was approaching and then a fad crash diet became what she advocated for all her overweight patients. I won't be able to tell you if she gains back all of the 40 pounds she lost in two months because I'm not going back to her.

I've never been an athlete, and I have no interest in participating in sports. I walk, I bike, and I do yoga. I have no trouble with my feet, my knees are fine, and occasional lower-back stiffness in the morning seems to be addressed very nicely by light stretching in the morning. I am, after all, 52. I walk faster than most thin people I know, mostly because of a lifetime of taking two steps to most people's one. I don't gorge on chocolate, I've all but banished cookies (my own personal uncontrollable food) from my life except for an occasional treat, I've made changes in the amount I eat to accommodate my slowing metabolism. I eat lean meats, reduced-fat cheeses, and lots of fruits and vegetables. I read labels and avoid high fructose corn syrup and white flour products, and when I do have bread or pasta, it is of the whole grain variety. If I go out for dinner, I take half of it home. I suspect I'm not much different from many overweight people, especially when I go over to Kate's blog and read the comments there.

At least there are some doctors like Dr. Mitchell Gail, who published the paper cited in the above article, and has not lost his common sense in the face of some need in the medical community to find a one-size-fits-all approach:

“If you are in the pink and feeling well and getting a good amount of exercise and if your doctor is very happy with your lab values and other test results, then I am not sure there is any urgency to change your weight.”

Labels: weight

Call Congressman Dennis Kucinich what you will: Hobbit. Keebler Elf. Leprechaun. Tinfoil-hatted flying saucer enthusiast. Fringe candidate. One thing that you can’t call him is Dennis the Menace. And you Hillary, Obama and Edwards supporters are partly to blame for that.

Dennis Kucinich is like a brand of health food cereal that you guiltily slink past in aisle four. From at least a cardiovascular standpoint, you know damned good and well that those boxes of twigs, burrs, brambles and thistles are the healthiest breakfast food you can eat. So saith all those anonymous doctors and nutritionists that we also ignore.

And no matter how much they jazz up the packaging, the cereal makers, God bless ’em, will never completely sell us on the idea of a box of twigs that doesn’t have free gifts inside, puzzles on the back, exciting promotional gimmicks or a substance that gives one an erection for at least four hours. Not even a handful of desiccated marshmallows in cute little shapes? Get that shit away from me!

Plus, we can’t get past the stigma that goodness and health carries with it like a disease. Hell, unless you soak the shit in a bowl of milk overnight, the content will rasp your gums, chip your teeth and Rotor-Rooter your esophagus on the way down and for the princely sum of over $5 a box. So, obviously, health food is an acquired taste.

But so is corruption and the Old Boy network that it inevitably engenders.

So, while we avert our eyes and skulk past Dennis Kucinich like a guilty pleasure that’s in danger of getting exposed, we head like famished lemmings to where the brand names are. We cherry-pick what the popular candidates say that we like and deliberately disregard like an inedible garnish the troubling comments.

We nod and shake our heads in unison like penguins in a zoo following a darting flashlight and say, “Well, Hillary does make a good point about fiscal responsibility…”

…while blithely ignoring the glaringly obvious fact that this self-same, carpetbagging New York “Democrat” just blew $42,000,000 defeating a joke of a challenger with the transparent intention of hanging on to a springboard Senate seat for just the next two years (That’s $21,000,000 a year to hang on to a job that pays $162,500 per annum).

We clap like cymbal chimps when Obama talks about how he wouldn’t have voted for the Iraq War resolution and paying no attention to the fact that his Wednesday morning quarterbacking in telling us how he wouldn’t have voted five years ago (remember George W. Bush telling Al Gore during a debate that it would be stupid to invade a foreign nation and impose our will on them?) isn’t germane and should not be the reason why we’d vote for him.

What we ought to concern ourselves with is what a President Obama would do after next year. And, before you retort with, “But it’s an ever-changing world. Obama won’t know what the world will be like in 2009”, allow me to remind you that the biggest problems facing us today will still be around. Like our crushing debt and deficit, the subprime lending crisis and Iraq the war will still be around, if not Iraq the nation. George W. Bush and company went to great pains to ensure all that will be dropped into the lap of the next president.

And we get a little thrill when we hear Hillary insulting Bush in faux populist language about Iraq and other things in her best scolding mother voice. But if you listen closely, you’ll note that what Hillary’s really saying is not that the Iraq invasion and occupation is a bad thing, only that it’s being managed badly. Which neatly explains why she continues to refuse to apologize for her vote for the IWR.

Kucinich, on the other hand, is telling us what we want (and, more importantly, what we need) to hear:

The necessity for a universal, single-payer health care plan, something not specifically designed to further bloat an already bloated health care and pharmaceutical industry.

Removal of all troops from Iraq within weeks of the presidential inauguration.

The repeal of NAFTA within hours of the presidential inauguration.

86ing the USA PATRIOT Act. Campaign financing and lobbyist reform.

And, of course, impeachment, impeachment, impeachment.

I’m not saying that Dennis Kucinich is showing us the way to the Promised Land. But at the very least, he’s showing us that pinprick of light at the end of the long, dark tunnel in which Bush and his cronies have buried us. It could be that he’s the Leonardo DaVinci of politicians: He can think of brilliant and necessary concepts but lacks the engineering skills to realize them. But how will we know which he is unless we ask him more substantial questions than whether or not he’d seen a UFO over Shirley MacLaine’s house?

It’s no secret that I like Mike Gravel as well as Dennis Kucinich. Gravel’s wisdom, honesty and faith in the goodness and intent of the American people is like a blast of fresh, bracing air from Juneau. But there’s something unnerving about a 76 year-old man who appears ready at any minute to hurl his podium at the first candidate who says something stupid (which, of course, is only inevitable).

Kucinich is easily young enough yet mature enough to assume the huge mantle of responsibility that comes with the presidency. His thoroughly liberal, progressive agenda, his proposals for sweeping changes may make him a target of the most hostile bipartisan Congress eager to maintain the status quo.

And when we hear about so-called Democrats doing that just that, maintaining the status quo on things like torture, Iraq and Afghanistan war funding, health care for uninsured children, etc. I keep hearing whining about “Why, O why cannot we have more progressive-minded Democrats in Congress who’ll sign on to Kucinich’s HR 333?” without once becoming even passingly familiar with the irony of such a statement.

Kucinich is good for you. Eat of him. We desperately need some political Eucharist if we’re going to finally justify our whining about Old Boy network politics corrupting and bogging down a very necessary progressive agenda that can right our ship of state. And when Kucinich takes the stage at the next debate, I don’t want to hear, “But… but (whine) the granola (winge) factor!”

Suck my dick. I don’t want to fucking hear it. You want a way out of this mess? Listen to the man and don’t waste his time and trivialize him with questions of little green men. Maybe he’s trying to write checks that he can’t cash. But if you’re going to fall for someone hook, line and sinker, why bother trusting someone who promises to extend the war in Iraq by another year or four, someone who's accepted more money from more people and corporations in the last year than Jerry Lewis in the last 40?

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to pour myself a bowl of gravel, er Grape Nuts.

Look, I think Rosie O'Donnell's heart is in the right place, but I don't think she's exactly an effective spokesperson for our side.

But even as Rachel Maddow is a more prominent presence on MSNBC, Dan Abrams can't see what's right before his very eyes, apparently eyeing someone else who may generate more press, but little prestige, to continue the network's profitable leftward lean:

Riding a ratings wave from “Countdown With Keith Olbermann,” a program that takes strong issue with the Bush administration, MSNBC is increasingly seeking to showcase its nighttime lineup as a welcome haven for viewers of a similar mind.

Lest there be any doubt that the cable channel believes there is ratings gold in shows that criticize the administration with the same vigor with which Fox News’s hosts often champion it, two NBC executives acknowledged yesterday that they were talking to Rosie O’Donnell about a prime-time show on MSNBC.

During the nine months she spent on “The View” before departing abruptly last spring, Ms. O’Donnell raised viewership notably. She did so while lamenting the unabated casualties of the Iraq war and advocating the right to gay marriage, among other positions.

Under one option, Ms. O’Donnell would take the 9 p.m. slot each weeknight on MSNBC, pitting her against “Larry King Live” on CNN and “Hannity & Colmes” on Fox News.

But even without Ms. O’Donnell, MSNBC already presents a three-hour block of nighttime talk — Chris Matthews’s “Hardball” at 7, Mr. Olbermann at 8, and “Live With Dan Abrams” at 9 — in which the White House takes a regular beating. The one early-evening program on MSNBC that is often most sympathetic to the administration, “Tucker” with Tucker Carlson at 6 p.m., is in real danger of being canceled, said one NBC executive, who, like those who spoke of Ms. O’Donnell, would do so only on condition of anonymity.

If you want a lesbian, activist, experienced voice, then Rachel Maddow brings far more gravitas to the table -- and none of Rosie's baggage -- and also a sense of humor. If, like me, you think these "talks" are about to squander the best opportunity to add a quality reality-based program to the MSNBC lineup, send e-mail to viewerservices@msnbc.com or snail mail to:

Phil Griffin
Senior Vice President
NBC News
30 Rockefeller Plaza
New York, N.Y. 10112

Labels: MSNBC, Rachel Maddow

First, a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee from over a dozen intelligence, diplomatic, law enforcement, and military professionals, including Larry Johnson, James Marcinkowski, Joseph Wilson, Valerie Plame Wilson, and Coleen Rowley:

MEMORANDUM FOR: Chairman and Ranking Member Senate Committee on the Judiciary

FROM: Former U.S. Intelligence Officers

SUBJECT: Nomination of Michael Mukasey for Attorney General

Dear Senators Leahy and Specter,

Values that are extremely important to us as former intelligence officers are at stake in your committee’s confirmation deliberations on Judge Michael Mukasey. With hundreds of years of service in sensitive national security activities behind us, we are deeply concerned that your committee may move his nomination to the full Senate without insisting that Mukasey declare himself on whether he believes the practice of waterboarding is legal.

We feel this more acutely than most others, for in our careers we have frequently had to navigate the delicate balance between morality and expediency, all the while doing our best to abide by the values the vast majority of Americans hold in common. We therefore believe we have a particular moral obligation to speak out. We can say it no better than four retired judge advocates general (two admirals and two generals) who wrote you over the weekend, saying: “Waterboarding is inhumane, it is torture, and it is illegal.”

Judge Mukasey’s refusal to comment on waterboarding, on grounds that it
would be “irresponsible” to provide “an uninformed legal opinion based on
hypothetical facts and circumstances,” raises serious questions. There is
nothing hypothetical or secret about the fact that waterboarding was used by U.S. intelligence officers as an interrogation technique before the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004. But after Alberto Gonzales became attorney general in
February 2005, Justice reportedly issued a secret memo authorizing harsh
physical and psychological tactics, including waterboarding, which were
approved for use in combination. A presidential executive order of July 20,
2007 authorized “enhanced interrogation techniques” that had been banned for use by the U.S. Army. Although the White House announced that the order provides “clear rules” to govern treatment of detainees, the rules are classified, so defense attorneys, judges, juries — and even nominee Mukasey — can be prevented from viewing them.

Those are some of the “facts and circumstances.” They are not hypothetical; and there are simple ways for Judge Mukasey to become informed, which we propose below.

Last Thursday, President George W. Bush told reporters it was unfair to ask Mukasey about interrogation techniques about which he had not been briefed.

“He doesn’t know whether we use that technique [waterboarding] or not,” the president said. Judge Mukasey wrote much the same in his October 30 letter, explaining that he was unable to give an opinion on the legality of
waterboarding because he doesn’t know whether it is being used: “I have not been made aware of the details of any interrogation program to the extent that any such program may be classified and thus do not know what techniques may be involved in any such program.” Whether or not the practice is currently in use by U.S. intelligence, it should in fact be easy for him to respond. All he need do is find out what waterboarding is and then decide whether he considers it legal.

The conundrum created to justify the nominee’s silence on this key issue is a synthetic one. It is within your power to resolve it readily. If Mukasey
continues to drag his feet, you need only to facilitate a classified briefing for him on waterboarding and the C.I.A. interrogation program. He will then be able to render an informed legal opinion. We strongly suggest that you sit in on any such briefing and that you invite the chairman and the ranking member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to take part as well. Receiving the same briefing at the same time (and, ideally, having it taped) should enhance the likelihood of candor and make it possible for all to be—and to stay—on the same page on this delicate issue.

If the White House refuses to allow such a briefing, your committee must, in our opinion, put a hold on Mukasey’s nomination. We are aware that the
president warned last week that it will be either Mukasey as our attorney
general or no one. So be it. It is time to stand up for what is right and require from the Executive the information necessary for the Senate to function responsibly and effectively. It would seem essential not to approve a nominee who has already made clear he is reluctant to ask questions of the White House. How can a person with that attitude even be proposed to be our chief law enforcement officer?

We strongly urge that you not send Mukasey’s nomination to the full Senate before he makes clear his view on waterboarding. Otherwise, there is considerable risk of continued use of the officially sanctioned torture techniques that have corrupted our intelligence services, knocked our military off the high moral ground, severely damaged our country’s standing in the world, and exposed U.S. military and intelligence people to similar treatment when captured or kidnapped. One would think that Judge Mukasey would want to be briefed on these secret interrogation techniques and to clarify where he stands.

The most likely explanation for Mukasey’s reticence is his concern that, should his conscience require him to condemn waterboarding, this could cause extreme embarrassment and even legal jeopardy for senior officials this time not just for the so-called “bad apples” at the bottom of the barrel. We believe it very important that the Senate not acquiesce in his silence—and certainly not if, as seems the case, he is more concerned about protecting senior officials than he is in enforcing the law and the Constitution.

It is important to get beyond shadowboxing on this key issue. In our view,
condoning Mukasey’s evasiveness would mean ignoring fundamental American values and the Senate’s constitutional prerogative of advice and consent.

At stake in your committee and this nomination are questions of legality,
morality, and our country’s values. And these are our primary concerns as well. As professional intelligence officers, however, we must point to a supreme irony—namely, that waterboarding and other harsh interrogation practices are ineffective tools for eliciting reliable information. Our own experience dovetails well with that of U.S. Army intelligence chief, Maj. Gen. John Kimmons, who told a Pentagon press conference on September 6, 2006: “No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tells us that.”

Speaking out so precisely and unequivocally took uncommon courage, because Kimmons knew that just across the Potomac President Bush would be taking quite a different line at a press conference scheduled to begin as soon as Kimmons finished his. At the White House press conference focusing on interrogation techniques, the president touted the success that the C.I.A. was having in extracting information from detainees by using an “alternative set of procedures.” He said these procedures had to be “tough,” in order to deal with particularly recalcitrant detainees who “had received training on how to resist interrogation” and had “stopped talking.”

The Undersigned
(Official duties refer to former government work.)

Brent Cavan
Intelligence Analyst, Directorate of Intelligence, CIA

Ray Close
Directorate of Operations, CIA for 26 years—22 of them overseas; former Chief of Station, Saudi Arabia

Ed Costello
Counter-espionage, FBI

Michael Dennehy
Supervisory Special Agent for 32 years, FBI; U.S. Marine Corps for three years

Rosemary Dew
Supervisory Special Agent, Counterterrorism, FBI

Philip Giraldi
Operations officer and counter-terrorist specialist, Directorate of Operations, CIA

Michael Grimaldi
Intelligence Analyst, Directorate of Intelligence, CIA; Federal law enforcement officer

Mel Goodman
Division Chief, Directorate of Intelligence, CIA; Professor, National Defense University; Senior Fellow, Center for International Policy

Larry Johnson
Intelligence analysis and operations officer, CIA; Deputy Director, Office of Counter Terrorism, Department of State

Richard Kovar
Executive Assistant to the Deputy Director for Intelligence, CIA: Editor, Studies In Intelligence

Charlotte Lang
Supervisory Special Agent, FBI

W. Patrick Lang
U.S. Army Colonel, Special Forces, Vietnam; Professor, U.S. Military Academy, West Point; Defense Intelligence Officer for Middle East, Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA); founding director, Defense HUMINT Service

Lynne Larkin
Operations Officer, Directorate of Operations, CIA; counterintelligence; coordination among intelligence and crime prevention agencies; CIA policy coordination staff ensuring adherence to law in operations

Steve Lee
Intelligence Analyst for terrorism, Directorate of Intelligence, CIA

Jon S. Lipsky
Supervisory Special Agent, FBI

David MacMichael
Senior Estimates Officer, National Intelligence Council, CIA; History professor; Veteran, U.S. Marines (Korea)

Tom Maertens
Foreign Service Officer and Intelligence Analyst, Department of State; Deputy Coordinator for Counter-terrorism, Department of State; National Security Council (NSC) Director for Non-Proliferation

James Marcinkowski
Operations Officer, Directorate of Operations, CIA by way of U.S. Navy

Mary McCarthy
National Intelligence Officer for Warning; Senior Director for Intelligence Programs, National Security Council

Ray McGovern
Intelligence Analyst, Directorate of Intelligence, CIA; morning briefer, The President’s Daily Brief; chair of National Intelligence Estimates; Co-founder, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)

Sam Provance
U.S. Army Intelligence Analyst, Germany and Iraq (Abu Ghraib); Whistleblower

Coleen Rowley
Special Agent and attorney, FBI; Whistleblower on the negligence that facilitated the attacks of 9/11.

Joseph Wilson
Foreign Service Officer, U.S. Ambassador and Director of Africa, National Security Council.

Valerie Plame Wilson
Operations Officer, Directorate of Operations

Now, click the media player just below to appropriately set the atmosphere for the next opinion, from Sen. Charles Schumer of New York:



(h/t for use of this particular sound clip in this context: Sam Seder Show)

Now we're ready:

I AM voting today to support Michael B. Mukasey for attorney general for one critical reason: the Department of Justice — once the crown jewel among our government institutions — is a shambles and is in desperate need of a strong leader, committed to depoliticizing the agency’s operations.

The department has been devastated under the Bush administration. Outstanding United States attorneys have been dismissed without cause; career civil-rights lawyers have been driven out in droves; people appear to have been prosecuted for political reasons; young lawyers have been rejected because they were not conservative ideologues; and politics has been allowed to infect decision-making.

We are now on the brink of a reversal. There is virtually universal agreement, even from those who oppose Judge Mukasey, that he would do a good job in turning the department around. My colleagues who oppose his confirmation have gone out of their way to praise his character and qualifications. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, for one, commended Judge Mukasey as “a brilliant lawyer, a distinguished jurist and by all accounts a good man.”

Most important, Judge Mukasey has demonstrated his fidelity to the rule of law, saying that if he believed the president were violating the law he would resign.

Should we reject Judge Mukasey, President Bush has said he would install an acting, caretaker attorney general who could serve for the rest of his term without the advice and consent of the Senate. To accept such an unaccountable attorney general, I believe, would be to surrender the department to the extreme ideology of Vice President Dick Cheney and his chief of staff, David Addington. All the work we did to pressure Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to resign would be undone in a moment.

[snip]

Judge Mukasey’s refusal to state that waterboarding is illegal was unsatisfactory to me and many other members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. But Congress is now considering — and I hope we will soon pass — a law that would explicitly ban the use of waterboarding and other abusive interrogation techniques. And I am confident that Judge Mukasey would enforce that law.

On Friday, he personally made clear to me that if the law were in place, the president would have no legal authority to ignore it — not even under some theory of inherent authority granted by Article II of the Constitution, as Vice President Cheney might argue. Nor would the president be able to evade a clear pronouncement on the subject from the courts. Judge Mukasey also pledged to enforce such a law.

[snip]

Even without the proposed law in place, Judge Mukasey would be more likely than a caretaker attorney general to find on his own that waterboarding and other techniques are illegal. Indeed, his written answers to our questions have demonstrated more openness to ending the practices we abhor than either of this president’s previous attorney general nominees have had.

And that is how low the bar has been set? He's more open than Alberto Gonzales?

Now, whom do you think is operating in the the reality-based community? Chuck Schumer's World of Pure Imagination™, or the expertise and experience of over a dozen experts in the area of interrogation?

Labels: Chuck Schumer, Michael Mukasey, waterboarding

Yes, I'm going to keep bringing this up: Why are conservatives sniffing around the home of families like the Frosts be make sure they "deserve" help from SCHIP, but don't seem to care about boondoggles like this:

More than a year after the Parsons Corporation, the American contracting giant, promised Congress that it would fix the disastrous plumbing and shoddy construction in barracks the company built at the Baghdad police academy, the ceilings are still stained with excrement, parts of the structures are crumbling and sections of the buildings are unusable because the toilets are filthy and nonfunctioning.

The project, where United States inspectors found giant cracks snaking through newly built walls and human waste dripping from ceilings, became one of the most visible examples of a $45 billion American reconstruction program that is widely seen as a failure.

The project also became an argument for the value of government oversight when, in response to the inspectors’ findings, a Parsons executive told Congress in September 2006 that the company would fix the problems at no cost to the United States. Parsons now says that it did so, directing an Iraqi subcontractor to correct deficiencies at no additional charge.

But Iraqi police recruits, instructors and officers at the Parsons-built barracks and classrooms on Sunday complained bitterly about the buildings’ condition, calling the contractor negligent and asking why the problems had not yet been fixed. The structures were refurbished or built from scratch at an overall cost of $72 million in American taxpayer money.

Recruits in some of the buildings had recently been ordered not to use any of the toilets on the upper floors because the urine and fecal matter consistently leaked onto the lower floors, several American officials at the academy said.

An American officer affiliated with a major new project to fix the problems said he shared the unhappiness of many of the Iraqis.

“What I’ve seen here disgusts me as a taxpayer,” said the officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the project. “When it’s for something good, I don’t mind flipping the dime, but this money just went from my pocket to a contractor.”

$72 billion. That's nearly TWICE the amount that George W. Bush said this country couldn't afford for providing health coverage to American children. We can't afford health coverage for American kids, but we can afford to shovel $72 billion of taxpayer cash into the pockets of a company like Parsons, which New Jersey residents have known for years can't find its own ass to wipe itself.

One would hope that once this bunch of criminals is gone from the scene (assuming they plan to leave, which will become far more doubtful if the Daniel Levin story by some miracle gains any traction) this race to privatize military activities will end. Meanwhile, it would help if boondoggles like this received the same amount of media coverage, hammering home the point if necessary, as cleavages, haircuts, and beefcake photos of presidential candidates.

Labels: corruption, greed, Iraq, privatization

"Extraconstitutional measures."

That's the wording Condoleeza Rice used yesterday when commenting on the situation in Pakistan:

"The U.S. has made clear it does not support extraconstitutional measures because those measures take Pakistan away from the path of democracy and civilian rule," Rice said after attending an Iraq neighbors conference in Istanbul, Turkey. "Whatever happens we will be urging a quick return to civilian rule."

Martial law is now "extraconstitutional measures." I suspect the Administration is monitoring the situation in Pakistan very carefully -- not so much as it relates to the risk of terrorists getting their hands on nuclear weapons, but as a test case of what they themselves might be able to get away with here.

(h/t: Richard Blair)

Labels: Pakistan, parsing

Keith Olbermann continued to top himself last night with another special comment on how, in light of the news that a Deputy Attorney General who was fired after allowing himself to be waterboarded and determining that yes, the practice is torture, it means that the Administration's entire purpose has become keeping George W. Bush out of jail:

The presidency of George W. Bush has now devolved into a criminal conspiracy to cover the ass of George W. Bush.

All the petulancy, all the childish threats, all the blank-stare stupidity;

All the invocations of World War Three, all the sophistic questions about which terrorist attacks we wanted him not to stop, all the phony secrets; all the claims of executive privilege, all the stumbling tap-dancing of his nominees, all the verbal flatulence of his apologists…

All of it is now — after one revelation last week — transparently clear for what it is: the pathetic and desperate manipulation of the government, the re-focusing of our entire nation, towards keeping this mock president, and this unstable vice president, and this departed wildly self-over-rating Attorney General — and the others — from potential prosecution for having approved or ordered the illegal torture of prisoners being held in the name of this country.

Crooks and Liars has the video here.

How the hell did I miss this story? Perhaps it's because only one American mainstream news outlet covered it. This from the ABC News web site:

A senior Justice Department official, charged with reworking the administration's legal position on torture in 2004 became so concerned about the controversial interrogation technique of waterboarding that he decided to experience it firsthand, sources told ABC News.

Daniel Levin, then acting assistant attorney general, went to a military base near Washington and underwent the procedure to inform his analysis of different interrogation techniques.

After the experience, Levin told White House officials that even though he knew he wouldn't die, he found the experience terrifying and thought that it clearly simulated drowning.

Levin, who refused to comment for this story, concluded waterboarding could be illegal torture unless performed in a highly limited way and with close supervision. And, sources told ABC News, he believed the Bush Administration had failed to offer clear guidelines for its use.

The administration at the time was reeling from an August 2002 memo by Jay Bybee, then the head of the Office of Legal Counsel, which laid out possible justifications for torture. In June 2004, Levin's predecessor at the office, Jack Goldsmith, officially withdrew the Bybee memo, finding it deeply flawed.

When Levin took over from Goldsmith, he went to work on a memo that would effectively replace the Bybee memo as the administration's legal position on torture. It was during this time that he underwent waterboarding.

In December 2004, Levin released the new memo. He said, "Torture is abhorrent" but he went on to say in a footnote that the memo was not declaring the administration's previous opinions illegal. The White House, with Alberto Gonzales as the White House counsel, insisted that this footnote be included in the memo.

But Levin never finished a second memo imposing tighter controls on the specific interrogation techniques. Sources said he was forced out of the Justice Department when Gonzales became attorney general.

Now whether this story actually made it onto ABC's World News Tonight I do not know. But it sure as hell didn't penetrate the rest of the media. If you do a search on "Daniel Levin" on Google News, the only major news organization you'll find is this ABC News story. The closest the Newspaper of Record, the New York Times, got to it is this passage buried deeply in an October 4 article about how torture became OK after Alberto Gonzales became Attorney General:

If President Bush wanted to make sure the Justice Department did not rebel again, Mr. Gonzales was the ideal choice. As White House counsel, he had been a fierce protector of the president’s prerogatives. Deeply loyal to Mr. Bush for championing his career from their days in Texas, Mr. Gonzales would sometimes tell colleagues that he had just one regret about becoming attorney general: He did not see nearly as much of the president as he had in his previous post.

Among his first tasks at the Justice Department was to find a trusted chief for the Office of Legal Counsel. First he informed Daniel Levin, the acting head who had backed Mr. Goldsmith’s dissents and signed the new opinion renouncing torture, that he would not get the job. He encouraged Mr. Levin to take a position at the National Security Council, in effect sidelining him.

Not even MSNBC, Olbermann's own network, is covering the story as news. Apparently it isn't newsworthy that anyone who doesn't let this man who used to shove M-80's up the asses of frogs because he enjoyed watching them explode and branding fraternity pledges with a hot iron use his power to escalate his torture rush by using techniques acknowledged as torture as far back as the Inquisition (hardly surprising given his affinity for religious fanatics like Erik Prince) gets fired. Instead, we have a lead on the mudslide in Mexico (which at least is a reasonably significant international event instead of what Britney Spears is up to), and ironically, a #2 story titled "Anti-Bush activists irate, but lack recourse."

Just in case you were tempted to think that what we found out last night thanks to Keith Olbermann was going to in any way make one iota of difference.

This president and his entire Administration are criminals -- and no one in Congress, that so-called bastion of checks and balances, is going to lift a finger to do anything about it. No, Chuck Schumer is going to vote to send Michael Mukasey, who either also hasn't heard about what Daniel Levin put himself through in what may be the most extraordinary gesture of being conscientious about his job in recorded history, or doesn't give a shit -- because after all, Mukasey is his boy. And Dianne Feinstein is going to vote to send the nomination through for reasons only she (and I suspect, George W. Bush) knows. Not even Russ Feingold is willing to filibuster this nomination. And so another Bush toady, whether out of deeply-held belief or because the Administration's wiretapping program has been less about monitoring the rest of us and more about getting dirt on recalcitrant Democrats (and Republicans, for that matter *cough* Lindsey Graham *cough*), will become the chief architect of law enforcement in the United States -- a country in which "law enforcement" has degenerated into a concept designed to protect ONLY the president and his vice-president -- and no one else. Not even American citizens.

People like me have been saying that the Republic fell on December 12, 2000, when the Supreme Court decided that to count the votes in Florida would hurt the guy they wanted in the White House. It turns out that we were right. And not one thing this bunch has done since then has proven us wrong.

Labels: George W. Bush, war crimes

What can you say about Keith Olbermann? He expresses our anger and outrage so fully, so completely, that you just want to shake his hand and say thank you. Tonight's comment covered Mukasey and waterboarding. Why we have to be discussing this is anyone's guess in this upside down administration. Its embarrassing and horrifying that grown men claim to know nothing of this practice and yet continue to allow it to be practiced in our names.
Thanks Kieth...History is going to remember you as the mouthpiece of a generation and a warrior against injustice.

Following is the transcript. Video to follow as soon as it is available.

Keith Olbermann's Special Comment
11-05-07

Finally tonight, as promised, a Special Comment on the meaning of the story of former U.S. Acting Assistant Attorney General Daniel Levin.

It is a fact startling in its cynical simplicity and it requires cynical and simple words to be properly expressed:

The Presidency of George W. Bush has now devolved into a criminal conspiracy to cover the ass of George W. Bush.












All the petulancy, all the childish threats, all the blank-stare stupidity;

All the invocations of World War Three, all the sophistic questions about which terrorist attacks we wanted him not to stop, all the phony secrets;

All the claims of executive privilege, all the stumbling tap-dancing of his nominees, all the verbal flatulence of his apologists...

All of it is now -- after one revelation last week -- transparently clear for what it is: the pathetic and desperate manipulation of the government, the re-focusing of our entire nation, towards keeping this mock president, and this unstable vice president, and this departed wildly self-over-rating Attorney General -- and the others -- from potential prosecution for having approved or ordered the illegal torture of prisoners being held in the name of this country.

"Waterboarding is torture," Daniel Levin was to write.

Daniel Levin was no theorist and no protestor.

He was no troublemaking politician.

He was no table-pounding commentator.

Daniel Levin was an astonishingly patriotic American, and a brave man.

Brave not just with words or with stances -- even in a dark time when that kind of bravery can usually be scared -- or bought -- off.

Charged -- as you heard in the story from ABC News last Friday -- with assessing the relative legality of the various nightmares in the Pandora's box that is the Orwell-worthy euphemism "Enhanced Interrogation," Mr. Levin decided that the simplest, and the most honest, way to evaluate them... was to have them enacted upon himself.

Daniel Levin took himself to a military base and let himself be water-boarded.

Mr. Bush -- ever done anything that personally courageous?

Perhaps when you've gone to Walter Reed and teared up over the maimed servicemen? And then gone back to the White House and determined that there would be more maimed servicemen?

Has it been that kind of personal courage, Mr. Bush, when you've spoken of American victims and the triumph of freedom and the sacrifice of your own popularity for the sake of our safety? And then permitted others to fire or discredit or destroy anybody who disagreed with you -- whether they were your own Generals, or... Max Cleeland, or... Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame… or Daniel Levin?

Daniel Levin should have a statue in his honor in Washington right now.

Instead, he was forced out as Acting Assistant Attorney General, nearly three years ago, because he had the guts to do what George Bush couldn't do in a million years: actually put himself at risk for the sake of his country, for the sake of what is right.

And they water-boarded him and he wrote that even though he knew those doing it meant him no harm, and he knew they would rescue him at the instant of the slightest distress, and he knew he would not die -- still, with all that reassurance, he could not stop the terror screaming from inside of him, could not quell the horror, could not convince that which is at the core of each of us -- the entity who exists behind all the embellishments we strap to ourselves, like purpose and name and family and love -- he could not convince his being… that he wasn't drowning.

Water-boarding, he said, is torture.

Legally, it is torture!

Practically, it is torture!

Ethically, it is torture!

And he wrote it down.

Wrote it down somewhere, where it could be contrasted with the words of this country's 43rd President: "The United States of America... does not torture."

Made you into a liar, Mr. Bush.

Made you into, if anybody had the guts to pursue it, a criminal, Mr. Bush.

Water-boarding had already been used on Khalid Sheik Mohammed and a couple of other men none of us really care about -- except, Sir, for the one detail you'd forgotten -- that there are rules, and even if we just make up these rules, this country observes them anyway, because we're Americans, Sir, and we're better than that.

We're better than you.

And the man your Justice Department selected to decide whether or not water-boarding was torture, had decided, and not in some phony academic fashion, nor while wearing the Walter Mitty poseur attire of flight-suit and helmet.

He had put his money, Mr. Bush, where your mouth was.

So, your sleazy sycophantic henchman Mr. Gonzales had him append an asterisk suggesting his black-and-white answer wasn't black-and-white, that there might have been a quasi-legal way of torturing people, maybe with an absolute time limit and a physician entitled to stop it, maybe, if your administration had ever bothered to set any rules or any guidelines…

And then when your people realized that even that was too dangerous, Daniel Le Vin was branded "too independent" and "someone who could (not) be counted on."

In other words, Mr. Bush, somebody you couldn't count on to lie for you.

So, Levin was fired.

Because if it ever got out what he'd concluded, and the lengths to which he went, to validate that conclusion, anybody who had sanctioned water-boarding, and who-knows-what-else… anybody -- you yourself, Sir -- you would have been screwed.

And screwed you are.

It can't be coincidence that the story of Daniel Levin should emerge from the black hole of this secret society of a presidency just at the conclusion of the unhappy saga of the newest Attorney General Nominee.

Another patriot somewhere, listened as Judge Mukasey mumbled like he'd never heard of water-boarding, and refuse to answer in words… that which Daniel Levin answered on a water-board somewhere in Maryland or Virginia three years ago.

And this someone also heard George Bush say "The United States of America does not torture"... and realized either he was lying or this wasn't the United States of America any more, and either way, he needed to do something about it.

Not in the way Levin needed to do something about it, but in a brave way nonetheless.

We have United States Senators who need to do something about it, too.

Chairman Leahy of the Judiciary Committee has seen this for what it is and said "enough."

Senator Schumer has seen it, reportedly, as some kind of puzzle piece in the New York political patronage system and he has failed.

What Senator Feinstein has seen, to justify joining Schumer in rubber-stamping Mukasey, I cannot guess.

It is obvious that both those Senators should look to the meaning of the story of Daniel Levin and recant their support for Mukasey's confirmation.

And they should look into their own committee's history and recall that in 1973, their predecessors were able to wring even from Richard Nixon, a guarantee of a Special Prosecutor (ultimately a Special Prosecutor of Richard Nixon!), in exchange for their approval of his new Attorney General, Elliott Richardson.

If they could get that out of Nixon, you -- before you confirm the President's latest human echo tomorrow -- you better be able to get a "yes" or a "no"… out of Michael Mukasey.

Ideally you should lock this government down financially until a special prosecutor is appointed -- or fifty of them -- but I'm not holding my breath. The "yes" or the "no" on water-boarding will have to suffice.

Because, remember... if you can't get it, or you won't... with the time between tonight and the next presidential election likely to be the longest year of our lives, you are leaving this country, and all of us, to the water-boards -- symbolic and otherwise -- of George W. Bush.

Ultimately, Mr. Bush, the real question isn't... who approved the water-boarding of this fiend Khalid Sheik Mohammed and two others.

It is: why were they water-boarded?

Study after study for generation after generation, sir, has confirmed that torture gets people to talk, torture gets people to plead, torture gets people to break, but torture does not get them to tell the truth.

Of course, Mr. Bush, this isn't a problem, if you don't care if the terrorist plots they tell you about, are the truth... or just something to stop the tormentors from drowning them.

If, say, a President simply needed a constant supply of terrorist threats to keep a country scared…

If, say, he needed phony plots to play hero during, and to boast about interrupting, and to use to distract people from the threat he**didn't** interrupt…

If, say, he realized that even terrorized people still need good ghost stories before they will let a President pillage the Constitution…

Well, heck, Mr. Bush, who better to dream them up for you… than an actual terrorist?

He'll tell you every thing he ever fantasized doing, in his most horrific of daydreams -- his equivalent of the day you "flew" onto the deck of the Lincoln to explain you'd won in Iraq.

Now if that's what this is all about -- you tortured not because you're so stupid you think torture produces confession -- but you tortured because you're smart enough to know it produces really authentic-sounding fiction -- well, then… you're going to need all the lawyers you can find… because that crime wouldn't just mean impeachment, would it Sir?

That crime would mean George W. Bush is going to prison.

Thus the master tumblers turn, and the lock yields, and the hidden explanations can all be perceived, in their exact proportions, in their exact progressions.

Daniel Levin's eminently practical, eminently logical, eminently patriotic way of testing the legality of waterboarding… has to vanish -- and him, with it.

Thus Alberto Gonzales has to use that brain that sounds like an old car trying to start on a freezing morning, to undo eight centuries of the forward march of law and government.

Thus Dick Cheney, has to ridiculously assert that confirming we do or do not use any particular interrogation technique, would somehow help the terrorists.

Thus Michael Mukasey, on the eve of the vote that will make him the high priest of the law of this land, cannot and must not answer a question, nor even hint that he has thought about a question, which merely concerns the theoretical definition of water-boarding as torture.

Because, Mr. Bush, in the seven years of your nightmare presidency, this whole string of events has been transformed…



c/p RIPCoco

Labels: Chuck Schumer, Keith Olbermann