Light blogging this morning, folks...I am setting up a temporary template to use until I get the new, improved, gorgeous, template up and running and not as slow as molasses like this one. So if you're having trouble loading this blog, please try again later or tomorrow morning. I suspect that this template has problems with multiple YouTube videos, but I'm tired of trying to figure out the problem with this template. So just bear with me and stay tuned. Thanks.

(UPDATE: Have I mentioned today how much I hate blog templates? After spending hours and hours that I don't have to spare and that should have been spent writing about the parade of horrors that today in the Bush years represented, or doing yoga or other more productive projects, trying to customize templates that just didn't want to behave, I found this fantabulous tool for generating templates. You can see what I was able to generate just using this tool here. With any luck at all, I'll be able to put in all my gewgaws and gadgets and widgets and other nonsense, as well as Haloscan commenting. And with any luck at all, those of you who have had load problems may see an improvement. Bear with me folks, relief is coming.)

(12/7 UPDATE: Well, the new template looks great in Firefox, not so great in IE. We should be up no later than Monday and hopefully sooner. If this doesn't solve the load problems, I'm sticking my head in the oven.)

Labels: blogging

(h/t jurassicpork, who insists it's for real)

Labels: You can't make this shit up

Keith Olbermann nails George W. Bush to the door of the White House:

There are few choices more terrifying than the one Mr. Bush has left us with tonight.

We have either a president who is too dishonest to restrain himself from invoking World War Three about Iran at least six weeks after he had to have known that the analogy would be fantastic, irresponsible hyperbole — or we have a president too transcendently stupid not to have asked — at what now appears to have been a series of opportunities to do so — whether the fairy tales he either created or was fed, were still even remotely plausible.

A pathological presidential liar, or an idiot-in-chief. It is the nightmare scenario of political science fiction: A critical juncture in our history and, contained in either answer, a president manifestly unfit to serve, and behind him in the vice presidency: an unapologetic war-monger who has long been seeing a world visible only to himself.

After Ms Perino’s announcement from the White House late last night, the timeline is inescapable and clear now.

In August, the President was told by his hand-picked Major Domo of intelligence, Mike McConnell, a flinty, high-strung-looking, worrying-warrior who will always see more clouds than silver linings, that what “everybody thought” about Iran might be, in essence, crap.

Yet on October 17th the President said of Iran and its president, Ahmadinejad:

“I’ve told people that if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from have the knowledge to make a nuclear weapon.”

And as he said that, Mr. Bush knew that at bare minimum there was a strong chance that his rhetoric was nothing more than words with which to scare the Iranians.

Or was it, sir, to scare the Americans?

Does Iran not really fit into the equation here? Have you just scribbled it into the fill-in-the-blank on the same template you used to scare us about Iraq?

In August, any commander-in-chief still able-minded or uncorrupted or both, sir, would have invoked the quality the job most requires: mental flexibility.

A bright man, or an honest man, would have realized no later than the McConnell briefing that the only true danger about Iran was the damage that could be done by an unhinged, irrational Chicken Little of a president, shooting his mouth off, backed up by only his own hysteria and his own delusions of omniscience.

Not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Mr Bush.

The Chicken Little of presidents is the one, sir, that you see in the mirror.

[snip]

The Bushian etymology was tracked by Dan Froomkin at the Washington Post’s website.

It is staggering.

March 31st: “Iran is trying to develop a nuclear weapon…”

June 5th: Iran’s “pursuit of nuclear weapons…”

June 19th: “consequences to the Iranian government if they continue to pursue a nuclear weapon…”

July 12th: “the same regime in Iran that is pursuing nuclear weapons…”

August 6th: “this is a government that has proclaimed its desire to build a nuclear weapon…”

Notice a pattern?

Trying to develop, build or pursue a nuclear weapon.

Then, sometime between August 6th and August 9th, those terms are suddenly swapped out, so subtly that only in retrospect can we see that somebody has warned the President, not only that he has gone out too far on the limb of terror — but there may not even be a tree there…

McConnell, or someone, must have briefed him then.

August 9th: “They have expressed their desire to be able to enrich uranium, which we believe is a step toward having a nuclear weapons program…”

August 28th: “Iran’s active pursuit of technology that could lead to nuclear weapons…”

October 4th: “you should not have the know-how on how to make a (nuclear) weapon…”

October 17th: “until they suspend and/or make it clear that they, that their statements aren’t real, yeah, I believe they want to have the capacity, the knowledge, in order to make a nuclear weapon.”

Before August 9th, it’s: “Trying to develop, build or pursue a nuclear weapon.”

After August 9th, it’s: “Desire, pursuit, want… knowledge, technology, know-how to enrich uranium.”

And we are to believe, Mr. Bush, that the National Intelligence Estimate this week talks of the Iranians suspending their nuclear weapons program in 2003…And you talked of the Iranians suspending their nuclear weapons program on October 17th…

And that term suspending is just a coincidence?

And we are to believe, Mr. Bush, that nobody told you any of this until last week?

Your insistence that you were not briefed on the NIE until last week might be legally true — something like “what the definition of ‘is’ is” — but with the subject matter being not interns but the threat of nuclear war.

Legally, it might save you from some war crimes trial… but ethically, it is a lie.

It is indefensible.

You have been yelling threats into a phone for nearly four months, after the guy on the other end had already hung up.

You, Mr. Bush, are a bald-faced liar.

And more over, you must have realized that John Bolton, and Norman Podhoretz, and the Wall Street Journal Editorial board, are also bald-faced liars.

We are to believe that the Intel Community, or maybe the State Department, cooked the raw intelligence about Iran, falsely diminished the Iranian nuclear threat, to make you look bad?

And you proceeded to let them make you look bad?

You not only knew all of this about Iran, in early August, but you also knew it was all accurate.

And instead of sharing this good news with the people you have obviously forgotten you represent, you merely fine-tuned your terrorizing of those people, to legally cover your own backside, while you filled the factual gap with sadistic visions of — as you phrased it on August 28th: a quote “nuclear holocaust” — and, as you phrased it on October 17th, quote: “World War III.”

My comments, Mr. Bush, are often dismissed as simple repetitions of the phrase “George Bush has no business being president.”

Well, guess what?

Tonight: hanged by your own words and convicted by your own deliberate lies…

You, sir, have no business being president.

This, my Democratic friends in Washington, is how it's done.


Video at (where else?) Crooks and Liars.

Labels: Keith Olbermann

Dick Cheney still says that if you really, really, really believe in fairies, Tinkerbell will live:

Vice President Cheney today predicted Iraq will be a self-governing democracy by the time he leaves office, calling the current U.S. surge strategy “a remarkable success story” that will be studied for years to come.

In an interview with Politico, Cheney offered a remarkably upbeat view of Iraq, despite continued violence and political paralysis in the war-torn nation.

Cheney, who has been widely criticized for overly optimistic — and sometime flat wrong — projections in the past, sounded as confident as ever that the Bush administration will achieve its objectives in Iraq.

“I am fairly confident we’ll have [Iraq] in a good place, where we’ll be able to look back on it and say, 'That was the right decision. It was a sound decision going into Iraq,'” Cheney told us in a 40-minute White House interview.

Sounding a note of caution, the vice president said: "We've got a lot of work to do. We're sort of halfway through the surge, in a sense. We'll be going back to pre-surge levels over the course of the next year."

But Cheney said that by the middle of January 2009, it will be clear that “we have in fact achieved our objective in terms of having a self-governing Iraq that’s capable for the most part of defending themselves, a democracy in the heart of the Middle East, a nation that will be a positive force in influencing the world around it in the future.”

All of that by 2009? “Yes, sir,” he replied.

Why does anyone take this man seriously anymore, and why isn't he locked up in a hospital for mentally ill criminals? If nothing else shows that the man isn't capable of performing the tasks of his office, this does.

Labels: delusion, Dick Cheney

First, get your mind out of the gutter. I'm referring to Little Duce's nasty tendency, like that of the current president, to spout lies without batting an eye.

Rudy would have you believe that the Iranians were so frightened by looking at the Manly Gown of Ronald Reagan in 1980, that they immediately decided to release the American hostages they'd been holding.

Even if you don't believe in the October Surprise, the fact is that it wasn't Iranian boot-quaking at the prospect of the Gipper that caused them to release the hostages; it was wimpy ol' Jimmy Carter's people (sic) who engineered the release:

According to a comprehensive New York Times account from the time, the Iranians reached out to the United States in September of 1980, nearly two months before Reagan won the White House. "Washington received a secret message from the West German Government that [the Iranian negotiator] Tabatabai wanted to meet urgently in Bonn with a senior American official to discuss possible terms for releasing the hostages," the Times reported. At the first meeting in Bonn, "Mr. Tabatabai said that Iran wanted to resolve the problem quickly and that if an agreement could be achieved, the Americans would be free in a relatively short time."

In short, Reagan had nothing to do with it. All that was left was haggling over the details. Then Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher hoped, according to the article, that the release would come hours before Reagan took office, but there was some last-minute confusion over the details of an escrow agreement. Then, Christopher said, there was an apparent problem rounding up the hostages. "Mr. Christopher believes that the Iranians, at the last moment, had problems rounding up the hostages and this, rather than an effort to embarrass Mr. Carter, delayed their freedom until a half hour after Ronald Reagan was President," the story reports.

So why would Giuliani release an ad that is so patently misleading? The answer is simple: He is not trying to get the historian vote. He is trying to get the Daddy Party vote. He is trying to show that he is to Hillary Clinton (if not George W. Bush) what Reagan was to Carter: a tougher guy. And as anyone knows who has ever been in a bar fight, the facts don't matter much when manhood is on the line. Look tomorrow for a bunch of newspaper stories pointing out that Giuliani is misrepresenting history. Then look for Giuliani's response. It will be something like, "What did you say, pencil neck? You wanna step outside with me?"

Of course the facts won't matter one iota to Republican voters, who need their illusion of a Big Tough Man in the White House keeping them safe from the monsters lurking under the bed. Even if that tough guy is the kind of authoritarian who would beat anyone to death who dared look at him crosswise. He isn't Bernie Kerik's BFF for nothing.

Labels: Rudy Giuliani, utter horseshit

Skippy has a post about how on Thursday, striking writers will be taking donations of items for care packages to be sent to soldiers in the Middle East.

And passes on this video to show another group that is striking in solidarity:

Labels: WGA strike

I guess it took a sex scandal for the media to take a look at the more unsavory aspects of Saint Rudy of 9/11's business dealings. This month's Vanity Fair has a fairly comprehensive compendium of them:

In the businesses that Giuliani built and bought these last six years, more deals have yet to be examined, more dots connected in the picture of his great financial success. But enough are there already, with lines between them, for a shape to have clearly emerged. It’s a picture of a politician leading a parade, as Mayor Giuliani so often did. Only the marchers behind him aren’t drum majorettes or wartime veterans or firefighters or police. They’re a ragtag band of Texas lawyers and energy lobbyists, penny-stock sharpies and security-industry entrepreneurs, agog with visions of the ultimate pay-to-play presidency.

But more importantly, the Qatar Qonnection (sic) has finally hit the major media, via Newsweek:

When Giuliani signed the contract with Qatar, he was acting as an international businessman—a role drawing increased scrutiny as he runs for president. After leaving office as New York mayor in 2002, Giuliani and close associates formed Giuliani Partners, a privately owned management-consulting firm that has proven lucrative: Giuliani earned $4.1 million from his firm between January 2006 and May of this year. He has insisted his business dealings are "totally legal, totally ethical." But he has never disclosed all of his clients, raising inevitable questions about financial ties that face all presidential candidates. Some campaign-finance experts say Giuliani's current posture—maintaining a major interest in a privately held international firm while seeking the presidency—is potentially unprecedented. "I can't think of another situation like this," says Kenneth Gross, a Washington lawyer who specializes in campaign finance and ethical issues (and who is not affiliated with a campaign).

So far, most attention has swirled around the Qatar contract. Although the country is now viewed by the White House as a strong ally in the War on Terror, that was not always the case. In 1996, FBI agents tried to arrest a top terror suspect, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (later mastermind of the 9/11 attacks) who at the time was being employed by the Qatari Water Department. But the bureau's plans fell apart when he suddenly fled; FBI agents were convinced that a member of the royal family tipped him off. The contract between Giuliani Security, a division of Giuliani Partners, and Qatar "is a huge conflict of interest," says Bob Baer, a former CIA officer who tracked Mohammed. "He is metaphorically taking money from the same accounts that paid KSM." Giuliani Security officials involved in the Qatari business say the minister suspected of protecting Mohammed no longer has an active role in running the country.

And yesterday's New York Times revealed how he lobbied for a bill that even the Bush Administration regarded as a threat to antiterrorism efforts.

Given how intransigent Giuliani wants people to believe he is about anything even remotely connected with terrorism, his willingness to overlook even past terrorist connections -- or buy the Qatari royal family's assurance that its members no longer support terrorists -- indicates that his "tough on terrorism" wide stance becomes highly fungible when there's money finding its way into his pocket.

Labels: corruption, greed, Rudy Giuliani

If you think Bush gets testy, and you think the Bush Administration regards itself as not to be questioned, wait till you get a load of Rudy Giuliani.

This is from a Staten Island town meeting in June 2001, attended by union bus drivers:


(thanks to jara, for the e-mail to this)

Labels: fascism, insanity, Rudy Giuliani

Tristero over at Digby's place has done a great job on this story, which until now has been (predictably) ignored by the mainstream media. But now, with Mike Huckabee surging in Iowa, the MSM has for some reason decided that the story is important. Brian Ross at ABC picks it up, and will have the story on Good Morning America this morning (video when I find it). CBS News picked it up yesterday.

My theory is that because Huckabee is a theocrat rather than a corporatist, the companies that own the media want to stop him, but it doesn't matter. The Dumond story is so ugly, and so emblematic of the kind of Clinton Derangement Syndrome that infects the entire Republican Party, that whatever the motivation, I'm glad it's getting out.

In 1988, the campaign of George H.W. Bush ran this ad against Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis:


The ad worked, and Dukakis' reputation as "soft on crime" never recovered.

But with Huckabee, you have a convicted rapist not just released for weekend furloughs, but outright released, and for only one reason: because wingnuts insisted that because the woman Dumond raped initially was a distant cousin of Bill Clinton's, that by definition that meant Dumond was railroaded, and therefore should be released. The Arkansas parole board, after being pressured by Huckabee, released Dumond was released, who went on to rape and murder at least one, and possibly two more women.

If there had been exculpatory evidence, Huckabee's decision might have been understandable. But the fact is that Dumond was released from prison for only one reason -- because the woman he raped had the misfortune to be distantly related to the man Republicans hate most in the entire universe -- more than Fidel Castro, more than they did Saddam Hussein, more than they hate Osama bin Laden, more than they hate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. And therefore that meant anyone who raped her was by definition innocent.

What does THAT say about Republicans' ability to reason?

It should be well-known by now that I have no great love for the Clintons. But the level of insanity that has arisen around them goes beyond political differences and enters the realm of the pathological. And clemency for Wayne Dumond is what happens when Republicans let their fear and loathing get in the way of rationality.

Wayne Dumond should be hung, bodily, around Huckabee's neck for the remainder of this campaign. Huckabee may counter with the notion that mercy is a Christian trait. But when mercy only extends to rapists, but when victims who are related to Bill Clinton can go fuck themselves, THAT lack of judgment is a disqualification for the presidency.

(UPDATE: Murray Waas has even more. No way Huckabee can weasel out of this one. And it's just another reason why not one of these schticks dreck Republicans is fit to occupy the White House.)

(AND ANOTHER UPDATE: The letters Mike Huckabee received from Wayne Dumond's victims -- the letters he didn't take into account while lobbying for Dumond's release because the victim for whose rape he was in prison was a relative of Bill Clinton's, are here.)

Labels: Clinton Derangement Syndrome, Mike Huckabee, Wayne Dumond

Knut is one year old today!

Labels: Knut

Here's what Hersh wrote in that July 2006 article:

Inside the Pentagon, senior commanders have increasingly challenged the President’s plans, according to active-duty and retired officers and officials. The generals and admirals have told the Administration that the bombing campaign will probably not succeed in destroying Iran’s nuclear program. They have also warned that an attack could lead to serious economic, political, and military consequences for the United States.

A crucial issue in the military’s dissent, the officers said, is the fact that American and European intelligence agencies have not found specific evidence of clandestine activities or hidden facilities; the war planners are not sure what to hit. “The target array in Iran is huge, but it’s amorphous,” a high-ranking general told me. “The question we face is, When does innocent infrastructure evolve into something nefarious?” The high-ranking general added that the military’s experience in Iraq, where intelligence on weapons of mass destruction was deeply flawed, has affected its approach to Iran. “We built this big monster with Iraq, and there was nothing there. This is son of Iraq,” he said.

“There is a war about the war going on inside the building,” a Pentagon consultant said. “If we go, we have to find something.”

[snip]

Inside the Pentagon, senior commanders have increasingly challenged the President’s plans, according to active-duty and retired officers and officials. The generals and admirals have told the Administration that the bombing campaign will probably not succeed in destroying Iran’s nuclear program. They have also warned that an attack could lead to serious economic, political, and military consequences for the United States.

A crucial issue in the military’s dissent, the officers said, is the fact that American and European intelligence agencies have not found specific evidence of clandestine activities or hidden facilities; the war planners are not sure what to hit. “The target array in Iran is huge, but it’s amorphous,” a high-ranking general told me. “The question we face is, When does innocent infrastructure evolve into something nefarious?” The high-ranking general added that the military’s experience in Iraq, where intelligence on weapons of mass destruction was deeply flawed, has affected its approach to Iran. “We built this big monster with Iraq, and there was nothing there. This is son of Iraq,” he said.

“There is a war about the war going on inside the building,” a Pentagon consultant said. “If we go, we have to find something.”

And as much crap as I'm going to take for this, a guy named "Seymour Hersh" is allowed to say it, and I'm allowed to quote it, because here's where it's coming from:

The Israelis have insisted for years that Iran has a clandestine program to build a bomb, and will do so as soon as it can. Israeli officials have emphasized that their “redline” is the moment Iran masters the nuclear fuel cycle, acquiring the technical ability to produce weapons-grade uranium. “Iran managed to surprise everyone in terms of the enrichment capability,” one diplomat familiar with the Israeli position told me, referring to Iran’s announcement, this spring, that it had successfully enriched uranium to the 3.6-per-cent level needed to fuel a nuclear-power reactor. The Israelis believe that Iran must be stopped as soon as possible, because, once it is able to enrich uranium for fuel, the next step—enriching it to the ninety-per-cent level needed for a nuclear bomb—is merely a mechanical process.

Israeli intelligence, however, has also failed to provide specific evidence about secret sites in Iran, according to current and former military and intelligence officials. In May, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert visited Washington and, addressing a joint session of Congress, said that Iran “stands on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons” that would pose “an existential threat” to Israel. Olmert noted that Ahmadinejad had questioned the reality of the Holocaust, and he added, “It is not Israel’s threat alone. It is a threat to all those committed to stability in the Middle East and to the well-being of the world at large.” But at a secret intelligence exchange that took place at the Pentagon during the visit, the Pentagon consultant said, “what the Israelis provided fell way short” of what would be needed to publicly justify preventive action.

With Rudy Giuliani as Bush's anointed successor, and with Rudy having the lunatic rantings of Norman Podhoretz in his ear, and with Dick Cheney pulling the strings, it's clear that until this NIE was released, we were on a collision course with a foreign policy blunder that would make Iraq look like stumbling on a sidewalk -- that is, if anyone were still around after the resulting worldwide conflagration to even write history. As it is, Preznit Delusional is sticking with Cheney's One Percent Doctrine; that if Iran had a weapons program before, that means that there is a chance they will have one again (and that Rudy Giuliani, who's the candidate most likely to continue Bush's insane bellicosity in the Middle East, will crash and burn and if he's not the nominee, not even the California Electoral Theft Initiative can make him president), and therefore we have to attack NOW -- before Bush leaves office and "lesser men" get, to quote Margaret Thatcher, all wobbly.

Last night Joe Biden drew a line in the proverbial sand on Hardball, saying that THIS TIME, if Bush attacks Iran, he would push the House to impeach:



Of course Biden voted for the original 2002 AUMF, and has never gone as far as John Edwards has done in admitting that he made a mistake, so his words are somewhat disingenuous now. What's important right now is not to promise dire consequences for this president if he goes ahead with an attack on Iran, but to somehow find a way to stop him from doing so in the first place. My suspicion is that the decision to release the NIE came from Robert Gates, in conjunction with Old Man Bush and James Baker, in a last-ditch attempt to keep the Family Shithead from blowing the entire family's legacy to smithereens.

Labels: Iran

Via TPM comes these insane ravings of the lunatic Norman Podhoretz:

A new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), entitled “Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities,” has just dealt a serious blow to the argument some of us have been making that Iran is intent on building nuclear weapons and that neither diplomacy nor sanctions can prevent it from succeeding. Thus, this latest NIE “judges with high confidence that in fall 2003 Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program”; it “judges with high confidence that the halt was directed primarily in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure resulting from exposure of Iran’s previously undeclared nuclear work”; it “assesses with moderate confidence that Tehran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007”; it assesses, also with only “moderate confidence that the halt to those activities represents a halt to Iran’s entire nuclear weapons program”; but even if not, it judges “with high confidence that Iran will not be technically capable of producing and reprocessing enough plutonium for a weapon before about 2015.”

[snip]

I must confess to suspecting that the intelligence community, having been excoriated for supporting the then universal belief that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, is now bending over backward to counter what has up to now been a similarly universal view (including as is evident from the 2005 NIE, within the intelligence community itself) that Iran is hell-bent on developing nuclear weapons. I also suspect that, having been excoriated as well for minimizing the time it would take Saddam to add nuclear weapons to his arsenal, the intelligence community is now bending over backward to maximize the time it will take Iran to reach the same goal.

But I entertain an even darker suspicion. It is that the intelligence community, which has for some years now been leaking material calculated to undermine George W. Bush, is doing it again. This time the purpose is to head off the possibility that the President may order air strikes on the Iranian nuclear installations. As the intelligence community must know, if he were to do so, it would be as a last resort, only after it had become undeniable that neither negotiations nor sanctions could prevent Iran from getting the bomb, and only after being convinced that it was very close to succeeding. How better, then, to stop Bush in his tracks than by telling him and the world that such pressures have already been effective and that keeping them up could well bring about “a halt to Iran’s entire nuclear weapons program”—especially if the negotiations and sanctions were combined with a goodly dose of appeasement or, in the NIE’s own euphemistic formulation, “with opportunities for Iran to achieve its security, prestige, and goals for regional influence in other ways.”

Yes! That's it! The CIA is plotting against poor widdwe Georgie to keep him from having the war he wants. Because their plotting against him has been so effective in keeping him from dropping bombs all over the Middle East for the last seven years.

And this is the guy Rudy Giuliani is relying on as a foreign policy expert? Yeesh. If Little Duce and his Queen take the White House, we may look as nostalgically back at the Bush years as we do now when thinking of Nixon.

That is if we haven't all been incinerated by then.

Labels: insanity, Norman Podhoretz, Rudy Giuliani

I guess Katie "Some People Say" Couric wasn't working that night, and that's why this story about the California petition drive to reallocate the state's electoral votes by district ran on her Suck Up To Bush Evening News:



This is what happens when you have an ill-informed electorate. I've done canvassing where I couldn't even get a signature for a candidate's ballot petition because I couldn't convince the person that the signature wasn't a cmmitment to vote for that candidate. Yet here you have people throwing in a petition for a law that if enacted, would essentially put this country's executive branch into the hands of Republicans -- presumably all of them with George Bush's notion of absolute power -- in perpetuity. Do they even know what they're signing?

Labels: 2008 election, Republicans

He's not "confused." He doesn't "misspeak". He lies. He told us lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq so he could get his war there -- a war one of the unintended consequences of which is the persecutions of his precious Christians in Iraq as well as the many intended consequences, like bankrupting America's future and setting up a private army. And time and time again, he's told us lies about Iran having a current program to develop nuclear weapons...like here:


Condi Rice engages in projection (Note Matt Lauer's use of the current journalistic convetion of "Some people say..."):


And Sir Keith, of course, weighs in:


But as ThinkProgress notes, Stephen Hadley spilled the beans a few times yesterday that Bush has known for months about the NIE that was released yesterday revealing that Iran stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

So the question is, why did the Administration allow this report to be released?

(C&L has more, including the Best Substitute Talking Head in the Universe talking to the Best Correspondent Would Either MSNBC Or CNN Give This Dame A Show Already.)

Labels: Iran

I love New York Magazine. The new one came today with our Rudy on the cover, and Chris Smith unraveling the myth that is 9-11 hero, Rudy. And though it seems like its fish-barrel time, this stuff bears repeating to anyone out there who doesn't know this all by heart already. I can't imagine how many more people that old Rudy can piss off, but he seems to have nailed down every single last one of the 8-10 million New Yorkers and ex-New Yorkers out here, creating more and more material all the time,and Leaving New York Magazine's editorial board no choice but to put him on the cover every other month in terms only as damning as his actions. But then, its really not hard to damn Rudy when you know him like we do.

And really, how much better can it get than: "Rudy has Seen the Enemy and He...is Us," "Rudy Vs. NY," and "Rudy is Running Against the City he Claims to have Saved. He Knows better. So do We." The banner headlines of the piece, quite truthfully, say that the only way for Rudy to fully be the hero that he needs to be in order to win the republican nomination, is to demonize the NYC that was before he became mayor. It was one thing, living through what we lived through after he came to power, to hear his laughable claims, and imagine how fun it would be when the tape started to roll on a tearful Donna Hanover out front of Gracie Mansion, having just found out that he was leaving her on TV, but its quite another when he needs to paint our city and us, as some sort of depraved animals hanging out in sex shops and smoking our crack pipes in alleys. Remember, it was Rudy who was schtupping his Goomah on our dime, the All Spin Zone has the details here....and it must be nice to have a police escort out to the Hamptons, for Christ' sake...that is the most expensive and public place around and he boldly put the tab on revolving city agencies, including an agency for the disabled; has he no shame? No...the answer is NO!

...but the condescending attitude is completely familiar to any New Yorker. The city in the nineties was far from perfect. But were we really living in the hellhole of depravity and despair that Giuliani describes without ever realizing it? And was he the man who single-handedly tamed 8 million misbehaving New Yorkers, delivering us from an economic and physical nightmare?

snip

fitting snugly between the invocation of his September 11 heroism and his mocking of Hillary Clinton: Rudy Giuliani is the man who saved New York. His campaign TV ads are a perfect distillation of the strategy. Before Mayor Rudy, the city was a black-and-white jungle-land of sex shops, violence, and crushing taxes. After Rudy, New York is Oz: sunshine, happy young couples, and shiny gold-plated statues. The message, which Giuliani hammers in his appearances outside the city, is that he made big bad New York safe for the rest of the country. For the pitch to work, Giuliani has to demonize the city he inherited and claim all the credit for the improvements he left behind. The city itself is his original enemy.

snip

So far on the campaign trail, the genial Rudy has been showing his face. The city saw plenty of that other guy—the nasty, credit-hogging, conflict-addicted, wife-humiliating Rudy. The man who tried to put himself above the law and stay mayor after September 11. And we know he’s still in there.

The thing is that Rudy did clean up certain aspects of New York City that probably stayed in place due more to our firmly entrenched knee-jerk liberalism, than to what was best for regular New Yorkers. But Rudy took those problems of laxity and a need to tighten up the ship, and parlayed them into an excuse to expunge all texture and individuality, along with most of the middle class, from Manhattan, and to drive the regular folks further and further out, making the island one of rare wealth and wimpy sameness. He made the city safe for the rest of the country, as a tourist destination and an eastern arm of Disney; safe enough for just about anyone to visit without the classic fear of getting mugged on every street corner. But it was his methods that were a little more than questionable, not to mention his cronyism and his not-so-private private life.

As Mayor, Dave Dinkins, was probably not tough enough, and alot of what was going on needed some healthy adjustment. For instance, in Washington Square park, at the height of the crack epidemic, the police were instructed to only give bench warrants to the hundreds of drug dealers who boldly approached passersby. The warrants led to not much, because people didn't show up for their dates and the paperwork was out of control. The police would drive their squad cars into the park and sit there, moving the loitering crowds from one side to another, and the whole thing had a rather gauntlet-like feeling if one were, say, walking the dog or pushing the baby in the stroller. There were also cars parked every night along 8th st (where I lived on the 18th floor,) with huge speakers that, when cranked up, rattled the windows all the way up there. this went on, with the percussive bass going boom-boom-boom, until all hours of the morning, when upon going down to walk the dogs there would be stragglers urinating here and there, and every car window along Mercer street would often be broken...in a row...as the crack addicts who had little care for anything rifled through cars for anything that could be sold. I remember going round to Green street one morning and a strung out guy breaking the window of a car right in front of me. I went into the copy store and the car alarm was blaring...and no one came.

If your car got hit down there in those days, the best course of action was not to call the police, but to run east and look for your stuff laid out on blankets by the junk sellers that lined the streets of the east village in what we used to call the Real Reaganomics. It only took around 10 minutes for bikes and other goodies to end up laid out for sale. Important papers were dumped in garbage cans or dark doorways around the corner, and just running round fast enough one could probably recover the draft of the doctorate or whatever else had been stupidly left in the car. It was usually just replacing the side window that was a drag. I seem to remember that insurers wouldn't write windows into policies for cars that lived in the city, but I cant remember exactly.
Who hasn't bought a video camera box with a brick in it? I haven't, personally, but my ex-brother-in-law did when he first came to live in NYC. If you don't know what I'm talking about then you missed a tiny cultural phenomena that flickered through cities in the days before laptops and cell phones on every hip.

The crack epidemic was a huge problem and how to handle it was not to trust criminals to show up for a court date. The thing to do would have been to arrest truckloads of people over and over until they took it underground, as they tend to do in more controlled situations. The response was bound to be good, and it would look good, and I don't know why Dinkins didn't do more; were his hands tied by bureaucracy? Knowing the answers to my questions would take more time than is warranted, because it was all washed away in the flood of Rudy, who empowered the police to not only arrest the culprits, but also to bend probable cause into an art of gestures and glances, so that just about anyone could be thrown down and basically strip searched right there in Washington Square Park, (which I use as an example only because I can report first hand, having been there.) Throw in a little police brutality, of which we have heard the tales, and the drug dealers got alot more careful. They sort of moved back into the recesses and back to the project neighborhoods.

I met David Dinkins a couple of years ago at the Waldorf at a lunch for Brooklyn Law School, which alma mater he shares with my grandfather. he was quite older than I had realized he would be, and he was very soft spoken and sweet. He talked to the kids, and told us about his kids and grandkids, and how he still played tennis. I realized how much I respected him for his pure liberal vision, but that he just wasn't cut out to play the heavy, and the climate at the time in NYC was one of great frustration. Still, crime had already begun to come down by the time Dinkins was finished and he did beef up the police force. It took Rudy to take the force to another level and give them the power to enforce his ideal of the police state that he envisioned.

At the same time, Rudy was cutting welfare in whatever ways he could. The thing that worked then, and what is working now where I'm living in CT, is to make the forms and process really difficult, and as harrowing as possible. How anyone can take credit for the dropping enrollment numbers, when we all know how he did it, is beyond me. In other words, they made it so hard to get into the system that people left for other towns. With them, left some of the most interesting facets of city life, and possibly those who would be the great city artists or politicians or city workers...we sent away our greatest resource, which used to be our young people raised in a city with public education and diversity...and access to culture and experience like no other place in the world. We sent them away because Rudy thought they were unsightly in how it all looked back then. That was a choice that he made for us; as he cruelly had the cops jostle the homeless off of the heat grates all night until they went away too.

There was no problem solving in that equation. In some cases, more real than urban legend, and confirmed to me by city workers, bus tickets were bought to help in the relocation of the poor. And at the time of the great do-over of Grand Central Station, I used to go on about how the homeless who used to line the walls there with palms outstretched like some old Calcutta film, were actually ground up and put into the concrete of the new walls and tiles and floors. Who wouldn't want to have the station be as nice as it is now? But what did they do with those people in that richest of rich cities? One wonders...and I'm sure there are many answers and alot of legends. My tin foil hat theory was that unused tunnels below the subways became a teeming city of under-dwellers with full, rich lives, who only surfaced from time to time to take in some light or to get supplies. I still study the dark recesses when the train slows to rumble through an old abandoned station, thinking that I will see a family slip into the shadows.

Rudy didn't fix us in the terms that he claims. He just applied a sort of marshal law as the crack epidemic was dying a natural death, and he made it really, really hard for the poor and the lower middle class to survive in the city. He rode a wave of numbers that began in the previous administration and made it his own. He played the heavy full tilt, but what he really did was to put the city into debt while pouring money into superficial and cosmetic fixes, without doing much for the infrastructure in human or mechanical terms. He basically kicked out those that he didn't want to deal with, all the while treating us all like we were some sort of rabble, and acting himself like he was the arbiter of what was acceptable as art, culture, religion, and values. And just like the hypocrite that he is, he held himself to a completely different standard than the rest of us.

So, this is what Rudy did; and meanwhile he was busy making glaring mistakes about security and communications. How rich of a concept it is, that Rudy is a security specialist, telling large corporations and Arab governments how to stay safe. Don't they even realize the nuts and bolts of his mistakes and how bad he was at the design of the security for the people of NYC? Hell, he almost got himself killed!



The truth is that Rudy is all bluster and bullshit. He comes off like a tough guy from the neighborhood, but I know that neighborhood, I grew up there, and most of those boys get dragged off by the ear when their mother found out what they've been up to. This guy is not qualified to be president. A few months ago I wouldn't have given it a second thought but then the ugly swift-boaters slithered out to test the air and see if it was time yet, and I realized that a Hillary Clinton or pretty much anyone (if it could be done to a decorated war hero, then anyone is in danger,)could be swift-boated before the dems could even turn around to fight back, and someone like Rudy could end up as president. I can't state strongly enough how dangerous I think that would be....and I know that a huge portion of the country knows this; but its the others who are just against Hillary or who just don't think that worry me.

...from New York but not of New York....a Republican in an overwhelmingly Democratic town, a prosecutor not a career politician, an outer-borough Roman Catholic in a Manhattan-centric, agnostic world. But that doesn’t mean he’s not a New Yorker. In fact, many of his character traits—his anger, his blind loyalty—come straight out of the tribal culture of New York’s old neighborhoods. On the presidential-campaign trail, Giuliani defines every issue and problem facing the country—not to mention his political competitors—as “enemies.” He sees an America besieged—by illegal aliens, by liberals, but most of all by Islamic terrorists....

snip

If I’m president of the United States, it will be crystal clear we will not allow Iran to become a nuclear power. We will take whatever action is necessary to stop them! We will not take the military option off the table. We will not beg to negotiate with them. We’re gonna make them beg to negotiate with us!

snip

Giuliani is suggesting he’d clean up Islamic terrorists like so many South Bronx crack dealers. He’s repeating one of his favorite phrases, that a President Giuliani would “keep us on offense” against terrorism. But it’s the way he says it that rings suddenly loud and clear. This was the man who told President Bush he wanted to personally push the button to execute Osama bin Laden.

And that's it, right there. This man cannot go further than Iowa or maybe New Hampshire. If the American people allow this to go on much beyond that, then we will have to just realize that this isn't really America anymore; the fringe has taken over and maybe its time to make other plans....maybe Stockholm or Denmark or Canada...But, I am going to try to hold onto Chris Smith and New York Magazine for one more cycle. He says that we, especially us New Yorkers, are wise to old Rudy. But how much sway do we have when the terra talk start in earnest and people want to hear the swagger and brag.

I was looking at my Bush Countdown key chain today. The battery went out a month or so ago and I was afraid that it might mean something. I felt so much better watching the days, minutes, and seconds tick away. It flashes back on from time to time but its set itself back in the 700 +/- range, so I'm just not putting stock in it anymore....but the thing I was thinking was: And then what? Whats next for us? The field is so strange on both sides, and I cant fathom what anyone can do besides start to unravel what amounts to a nightmare of chaos. I've put alot of my fear and anger into despising Bush and his people, but soon, everyone will say that we have to move forward and forget the past.

My fear is that in forgetting the past, we are condemned to repeat it. And if anyone is Bush-lite, its Rudy. So, keep those exposes coming boys! Something has to stick on this guy...or maybe just the mass of a million smaller things will take him down....but, as I say...and then what?

Cross Posted on RIPCoco

Labels: lies, NYC, Republicans, Rudy Giuliani

So the Iranians stopped developing nuclear weapons four years ago. Doesn't mean we can't bomb'em anyway:

A new assessment by American intelligence agencies concludes that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that the program remains frozen, contradicting judgment two years ago that Tehran was working relentlessly toward building a nuclear bomb.

The conclusions of the new assessment are likely to reshape the final year of the Bush administration, which has made halting Iran’s nuclear program a cornerstone of its foreign policy.

The assessment, a National Intelligence Estimate that represents the consensus view of all 16 American spy agencies, states that Tehran is likely keeping its options open with respect to building a weapon, but that intelligence agencies “do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons.”

Iran is continuing to produce enriched uranium, a program that the Tehran government has said is designed for civilian purposes. The new estimate says that enrichment program could still provide Iran with enough raw material to produce a nuclear weapon sometime by the middle of next decade, a timetable essentially unchanged from previous estimates.

But the new estimate declares with “high confidence” that a military-run Iranian program intended to transform that raw material into a nuclear weapon has been shut down since 2003, and also says with high confidence that the halt “was directed primarily in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure.”

The estimate does not say when American intelligence agencies learned that the weapons program had been halted, but a statement issued by Donald Kerr, the principal director of national intelligence, said the document was being made public “since our understanding of Iran’s capabilities has changed.”

Think this is going to make one difference in the Bush Administration's lust to attack Iran? Not when Cheney needs an ever-flowing supply of Middle Eastern blood just to survive and L'il Chimpy needs another war so he can put the flightsuit on again.

Labels: Iran

So Firedoglake went and did a complete redesign (something I need to do also, except that I am just one person with a few occasional posting partners and they are a Giant Blog Conglomerate™), and purged Yours Truly from their blogroll, after it took me three fucking years to get on it. In fact, I was blogging before they were, but I have been purged.

But I'm not bitter. No, not me. In true progressive fashion, this is my cue to go searching for new and fabulous people to blogroll. So welcome to blogbuds DistributorcapNY, and I Can't Believe It's Not a Democracy, who has the best damn categories in the blogosphere, like A fucking outrage, It's About Fucking Time, Cheap American Crap, I hate my fucking neighbors, and Who gives a shit? Definitely a soul sister.

Labels: bloggers

We've all been through recessions before. In my adult life, I've been through the oil embargo-fueled recession of 1973-75, the 1980 recession, the 16-month recession from July 1981 - November 1982 (during the sainted Reagan years), the 1990-1991 recession (during the King George I years), and the 2001 post-dot-com bust recession. Each one has meant some scary times, some scarier than others (like getting up at 4 AM to be on the line at the gas station by 5 to ensure being able to fill up the tank before the station runs out); and I hardly felt others. I suspect that many people's experiences are similar. If you can keep your income stream during a recession, it's historically been enough to largely insulate one from the recession's worst effects.

But the likely recession resulting from the housing bust and credit fiasco feels different; different to the point that I'm wondering why Paul Krugman doesn't just use the "D" (depression) word -- because that's what it's going to take before people wake up:

How bad is it? Well, I’ve never seen financial insiders this spooked — not even during the Asian crisis of 1997-98, when economic dominoes seemed to be falling all around the world.

This time, market players seem truly horrified — because they’ve suddenly realized that they don’t understand the complex financial system they created.

Before I get to that, however, let’s talk about what’s happening right now.

Credit — lending between market players — is to the financial markets what motor oil is to car engines. The ability to raise cash on short notice, which is what people mean when they talk about “liquidity,” is an essential lubricant for the markets, and for the economy as a whole.

But liquidity has been drying up. Some credit markets have effectively closed up shop. Interest rates in other markets — like the London market, in which banks lend to each other — have risen even as interest rates on U.S. government debt, which is still considered safe, have plunged.

[snip]

“What we are witnessing,” says Bill Gross of the bond manager Pimco, “is essentially the breakdown of our modern-day banking system, a complex of leveraged lending so hard to understand that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke required a face-to-face refresher course from hedge fund managers in mid-August.”

The freezing up of the financial markets will, if it goes on much longer, lead to a severe reduction in overall lending, causing business investment to go the way of home construction — and that will mean a recession, possibly a nasty one.

[snip]

But the innovations of recent years — the alphabet soup of C.D.O.’s and S.I.V.’s, R.M.B.S. and A.B.C.P. — were sold on false pretenses. They were promoted as ways to spread risk, making investment safer. What they did instead — aside from making their creators a lot of money, which they didn’t have to repay when it all went bust — was to spread confusion, luring investors into taking on more risk than they realized.

Why was this allowed to happen? At a deep level, I believe that the problem was ideological: policy makers, committed to the view that the market is always right, simply ignored the warning signs. We know, in particular, that Alan Greenspan brushed aside warnings from Edward Gramlich, who was a member of the Federal Reserve Board, about a potential subprime crisis.

And free-market orthodoxy dies hard. Just a few weeks ago Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary, admitted to Fortune magazine that financial innovation got ahead of regulation — but added, “I don’t think we’d want it the other way around.” Is that your final answer, Mr. Secretary?

Now, Mr. Paulson’s new proposal to help borrowers renegotiate their mortgage payments and avoid foreclosure sounds in principle like a good idea (although we have yet to hear any details). Realistically, however, it won’t make more than a small dent in the subprime problem.

The bottom line is that policy makers left the financial industry free to innovate — and what it did was to innovate itself, and the rest of us, into a big, nasty mess.

Here in Bergen County, the housing bust hasn't hit all that hard, at least not at the lower end of the "better" towns. What's known in the vernacular as a 1950's "POS Cape" or ranch, if maintained, can still sell if priced aggressively enough. But because this is an area with a sizable influx of undocumented immigrants, largely driven by the proliferation of landscaping companies and contractors, we're seeing towns creating intrusive ordinances designed to have the effect of preventing foreclosed and dumped houses from turning into warehouses for undocumented workers. One local town has an ordinance that if you add a fourth bedroom onto your house, you must have a two-car garage. The assumption is that if you add that fourth bedroom, the number of cars you have must be indicative of a larger family. Another is putting through an ordinance allowing inspectors to enter any premise if there is a suspicion that a homeowner is renting part of the house to an unrelated person.

With many adjustable-rate mortgages resetting in 2008, the subprime fallout has barely begun. Proposed legislation to freeze "teaser" rates may help homeowners in the short term, but doesn't address the underlying problem. ARMs allow banks to lend at low rates with the mortgagee assuming the risk of rate hikes. If teaser rates are frozen, suddenly the lender is assuming the risk. Does anyone think that the banks will absorb this or bite the bullet and reduce profits? Hardly -- and I suspect that what we'll see is a hike in lending rates for those with good credit to subsidize those who bit off more than they could chew. The net result will be a drop in healthy lending and the whole thing comes to a standstill. Then those whose teaser rates are frozen will still find themselves sitting in a depreciating asset; one they still can't afford to sell no matter what the rate.

I'm not sure what the answer is, other than that we are all in for a complete world of shit in the next few years.

Labels: housing bubble

Stephen Heller, the Diebold employee who in 2004 exposed documents showing that the company planned to use illegal, uncertified software in their California voting machines, speaks out at Bradblog on the reduction of his conviction from felon to misdemeanor, and about the different standards of justice that seems to apply to Republicans vs. those who would expose their misdeeds:

In brief, I became known to some as the "Diebold Whistleblower" when, in January of 2004, I stole and exposed legal documents [PDF] proving that Diebold Election Systems, Inc. was using and planned to continue using illegal, uncertified software in their California voting machines. (By the way, Diebold recently changed its name to Premier Election Solutions, but don't let that fool you; it's still the same bunch of idiots.) Details about my case can be found here and here [PDF].

[snip]

Now, one year after my guilty plea, because I've stayed out of trouble and because I'm a first offender, the judge has reduced my felony to a misdemeanor. Sometime in 2008, my lawyers will petition the court to have my misdemeanor expunged.

[snip]

So Scooter's obstruction of justice protected people who did something George H.W. Bush described as treasonous. That's a very serious crime, at least as serious as violating attorney-client privilege, don't you think? But no punishment for Scooter Libby, because IOKIYAR.

Heller goes on to cite how Alberto Gonzales will get away with his crimes involving the fired U.S. attorneys and torture, how the telecommunications companies will get away with their crimes involving spying on Americans without a warrant and for no reason, and how Hans Von Spakowsky derailed investiations into 2004 Ohio voting shenanigans.

It may very well be that because Republicans place loyalty to party over their oaths of office to uphold the Constitution of the United States, and because they have vowed to filibuster anything that might hold this Administration's crimes to account, the Democrats cannot obtain any accountability. But even if they can't succeed, they owe it to the American people, whether said people want it or not, to hammer these crimes home day after day after day.

Whether it's willful ignorance or a lack of civics education in our schools and colleges, most Americans neither know about nor care enough about the provisions of the Constitution to make sure they're upheld. For the first few years after the 9/11 attacks, the willingness to allow this Administration to run amok could be chalked up to the trauma of an attack on American soil. But it's time for Americans to wake up and recognize the march toward tyranny that is happening in Washington DC; a march that is being aided and abetted by efforts to change how California's electors are allocated so as to ensure a Republican win, whether that Republican is the secular fascist Rudy Giuliani, the theocratic fascist Mike Huckabee, or the opportunistic fascist Mitt Romney.

Perhaps the most unfortunate side effect of the 9/11 attacks has been the change in the meaning of patriotism from love of country to a kind of cult of personality; in which blind loyalty to a president equals patriotism, with the country -- and the precepts on which it was founded, simply an afterthought at best. The documents that were hammered out so that a new nation could get out from under the tyrannical rule of a king seem now to be just so much archaic language that because it's not at a second-grade level, is just "too hard" to bother reading and understand. Perhaps, like the easy reading, so-called plain English Bibles that are becoming more popular, it's time for "Constitution for Dummies."

Labels: Bush Administration, Diebold, fascism

Last week Rachel Maddow revealed, after Dick Cheney's latest incident with his nonfunctioning heart, that her nightmare conspiracy theory is for Dick Cheney to step down and be replaced by Jeb Bush, who will then run as an incumbent vice president in the 2008 election.

I have to admit that I've had this nightmare conspiracy theory too, given the Bush family's royalistic tendencies and the old man's desire to not have Captain Fuckup be the family's political legacy. But today it may have become somewhat less likely:

A government money market debacle unfolding in Florida is raising questions about former governor and presidential brother Jeb Bush's possible involvement in the mess.

Florida froze withdrawals from a state investment fund earlier this week when local governments withdrew billions of dollars out of concern for the fund's financial stability.

In the past few days, municipalities have withdrawn roughly $9 billion, nearly a third of the $28 billion fund (which is similar to a money market fund) controlled by the Florida's State Board of Administration (SBA). The run on the fund was triggered by worries that a percentage of the portfolio contained debt that had defaulted.

A majority of this paper was sold to SBA by Lehman Brothers (nyse: LEH - news - people ). Bush, as the state's top elected official, served on a three-member board that oversaw the SBA until he retired as governor in January. In August, Bush was hired as a consultant to the bank. Lehman spokesperson Kerrie Cohen, speaking on behalf of Bush, said they had no comment and would not say when the bank had sold Florida the paper. SBA did not return calls.

While SBA wouldn't confirm, Bloomberg reported the amount of debt in default is around $900 million.

Stay tuned. This could get interesting.

Labels: corruption, Jeb Bush

It's a dreary, snowy day in New Jersey, with snow and sleet changing to freezing rain just in time to make tomorrow's drive to work just delightful. I'm half-asleep, I've somehow lost the entire weekend, I've been groggy all day because I stayed up too late last night watching the scrumptiously divine Marie Antoinette, and I'm too yin to even rant about the latest news about Rudy Giuliani's Fuck Fund. So in poking around YouTube today I found this teaser trailer for the "Harold and Kumar" sequel. So sue me....I can't wait:


I can't wait for the outrage from politicians, from William Donohue, from whomever these guys plan to outrage in this movie. John Cho...Kal Pen...and Rob Corddry...Let the assholery begin!

Labels: movies