Drinking Liberally®

Please make it stop! Good old Fletch the Wretch is making news again, and not the good kind. This time his clowning caught the attention of the U.S. News and World Report.

Ky. Governor Takes Limo Across the Street

By ROGER ALFORD
Associated Press Writer

FRANKFORT, Ky. (AP) -- When Gov. Ernie Fletcher's day is over, he leaves his Capitol office, climbs into a Lincoln Town Car driven by a state trooper and returns to the Governor's Mansion - which is just across the street.

Meanwhile, his administration is encouraging Kentuckians to get out and walk more for their health.

The Republican governor - a physician by training - makes no apologies for riding back and forth to work. "I think that's been a tradition for a long time," he said. "That's what security likes."

But his do-as-I-say, not-as-I-do example irks some politicians.

"I just think it's incredible," said Democratic state Sen. Ernesto Scorsone, a marathon runner and frequent critic of Fletcher. "The governor should practice what he's preaching. Otherwise it smacks of being hypocritical."
[...]
In Kentucky, the Fletcher administration has begun running radio announcements across the state, calling on people to walk or bike more. In his State the Commonwealth address earlier this year, Fletcher announced the kickoff of a fitness program to help fight obesity, diabetes and heart disease.

"He has an opportunity to really set a good example for good health, and he's not doing it," Scorsone said. "If anything, he's setting a bad example."

Posted by vicki at 01:11 PM | Comments (2)

Senator Jim Bunning, W-(ingnut) KY. He is the wanker of the week by a near unanimous vote. See blog entry below for the entire story. Money quote by Bunning, on why the Times commited treason:

Bunning equated the Times' story last week on the bank records to publishing the phone number of Osama bin Laden, saying the al-Qaida leader would be tipped and change his number immediately.

"In my opinion, that is giving aid and comfort to the enemy, therefore it is an act of treason," Bunning said of the story, which detailed how the government is analyzing a massive database on international money transfers.

The runner up would be Ernie Fletcher (one vote) for banning Liberal blogs on State office computers. But get a load of what he told reporters yesterday about his support in the state: "I think you saw that when I was in Louisville. There was a tremendous amount of support. We got multiple standing ovations"

Hahahahahahahahaha.

Posted by vicki at 03:06 PM | Comments (4)

Hahahahahaha. Should we take a field trip to Utah? http://www.utne.com/pub/2006_136/promo/12159-1.html

A Toast to Dissent
Activist beer makers deliver politics in a bottle
—By Leif Utne, Utne magazine
July / August 2006 Issue

Politics and alcohol have been intimate friends for centuries. Galvanizing figures from Samuel Adams to Adolf Hitler built their movements in pubs and beer halls long before taking over the halls of power. Even "The Star-Spangled Banner" was adapted from an old drinking song. Now a growing number of brewers are using beer itself to make a political point.

One such brew is Evolution Amber Ale, from the Wasatch Brewery in Park City, Utah. As state legislators pushed to add "intelligent design" to the public school science curriculum, Wasatch owner Greg Schirf responded by renaming his award-winning "Unofficial" Amber Ale, reports Amanda Chesworth in the Skeptical Inquirer (March/April 2006). Launched last November, the ale's new label sports a "Darwin Approved" stamp with the tagline "created in 27 days, not 7." A poster for the beer bills it as "a most intelligently designed ale."

This is not Schirf's first time brewing up controversy. Earlier, he gained international attention when he tweaked Utah's Mormon population with another Wasatch line dubbed Polygamy Porter. "Why have just one?" the label asks.

Posted by vicki at 10:55 AM

Once again the Supremes step in to hand elections over to the Republican party. Not content with taking away the right of the State of Florida to count legally cast votes for Al Gore, they have now approved of egregious Republican gerrymandering in Texas. But that's not all. This same court approved Republican gerrymandering in Pennsylvania in 2004 and in the very same year struck down Democratic gerrymandering in Georgia. If that isn't judicial activism, I don't know what is. So, states are free to redistrict only if they favor republicans.

Top court rules states free to redistrict

By DAVID ESPO
AP Special Correspondent

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A fractured Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that states are free to redraw congressional districts whenever they want, largely blessing Tom DeLay's bitterly contested handiwork in Texas and the gains it gave national Republicans.

With Justice Anthony M. Kennedy playing the role of majority maker, the court ruled the 2003 Texas plan violated the rights of Hispanics in the area around Laredo and ordered a lower court to review that part of the case.

But the justices imposed no timetable, and it was not clear whether Democrats would be able to win any changes in the Republican-drafted plan before the November elections.

Additionally, the justices rejected a claim that Texas Republicans had violated the rights of black voters by breaking up a congressional district in the area around Fort Worth.

And they ruled more broadly that the Constitution does not bar states from redrawing political lines when one party or the other senses an advantage.

"With respect to a mid-decade redistricting to change districts drawn earlier in conformance with a decennial census, the Constitution and Congress state no explicit prohibition," Kennedy wrote.

COURT UPDATE

The SCOTUS overturned Justice John Roberts earlier ruling that sided with Bu$hCo. Hahahahahaha. Wingnut justices have to swallow this one

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that President Bush overstepped his authority in ordering military war crimes trials for Guantanamo Bay detainees.

The ruling, a rebuke to the administration and its aggressive anti-terror policies, was written by Justice John Paul Stevens, who said the proposed trials were illegal under U.S. law and international Geneva conventions.

Posted by vicki at 08:11 AM | Comments (3)

Herbert wrote this in his New York Times column yesterday: click here for more

If hell didn't exist, we'd have to invent it. We'd need a place to send the public officials who are playing politics with the lives of the men and women sent off to fight George W. Bush's calamitous war in Iraq.

The administration and its allies have been mercilessly bashing Democrats who argued that the U.S. should begin developing a timetable for the withdrawal of American forces. Republicans stood up on the Senate floor last week, one after another, to chant like cultists from the Karl Rove playbook: We're tough. You're not. Cut-and-run. Nyah-nyah-nyah!

“Withdrawal is not an option,” declared the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, who sounded like an actor trying on personas that ranged from Barry Goldwater to General Patton. “Surrender,” said the bellicose Mr. Frist, “is not a solution.”

Any talk about bringing home the troops, in the Senate majority leader's view, was “dangerous, reckless and shameless.”

But then on Sunday we learned that the president's own point man in Iraq, Gen. George Casey, had fashioned the very thing that ol' blood-and-guts Frist and his C-Span brigade had ranted against: a withdrawal plan.

Are Karl Rove and his liege lord, the bait-and-switch king, trying to have it both ways? You bet. And that ought to be a crime, because there are real lives at stake.

The first significant cut under General Casey's plan, according to an article by Michael Gordon in yesterday's Times, would occur in September. That, of course, would be perfect timing for Republicans campaigning for re-election in November. How's that for a coincidence?

“If executed, the plan could have considerable political significance. The first reductions would take place before this fall's Congressional elections, while even bigger cuts might come before the 2008 presidential election.”

The general's proposal does not call for a complete withdrawal of American troops, and it makes clear that any withdrawals are contingent on progress in the war (which is going horribly at the moment) and improvements in the quality of the fledgling Iraqi government and its security forces.

The one thing you can be sure of is that the administration will milk as much political advantage as it can from this vague and open-ended proposal. If the election is looking ugly for the G.O.P., a certain number of troops will find themselves waking up stateside instead of in the desert in September and October.

I wonder whether Americans will ever become fed up with the loathsome politicking, the fear-mongering, the dissembling and the gruesome incompetence of this crowd. From the Bush-Rove perspective, General Casey's plan is not a serious strategic proposal. It's a straw in the political wind.

Posted by vicki at 10:03 AM | Comments (1)

Where to begin with this towering idiot? There's a good reason Bunning is ranked in the top 5 worst U.S. Senators. Remember how that great patriot refused to debate his Democratic opponent man to man? How he ran off to D.C. falsely claiming he had a important vote to cast? It was a lie. Then, instead of answering questions posed by the press on his own, he used a teleprompter for his answers. What a guy! Now he claims that although he doesn't read newspapers, except when he does, that the Times has committed treason for reporting government snooping. I've got a news flash for Bunning: Your services are no longer necessary in Washington since Congress provides no oversight to an out of control Executive Branch. Bu$h simply uses signing statements to go around any legislation Congress writes, so there is no need for Congress. Try not to laugh yourself silly as you read this.

Bunning: New York Times committed treason with story
Information helps terrorists, he says

By James R. Carroll
jcarroll@courier-journal.com
The Courier-Journal

WASHINGTON — The New York Times committed treason by revealing an anti-terrorism program that checks international banking records of Americans and others, U.S. Sen. Jim Bunning said yesterday.

"That the press wouldn't have better sense than to leak critical information on terrorists so that they know what we're doing -- that scares the devil out of me," Bunning told reporters in a conference call.

The Kentucky Republican said Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez should empanel a grand jury to decide whether the New York Times' publisher, editors and writers who were involved in the story should be indicted for treason.

Bunning also said prosecutors should examine whether to charge those who leaked the story and journalists involved in earlier stories on the existence of a National Security Agency program involving eavesdropping on Americans' telephone calls.

Bunning's call for Justice Department action was not endorsed by other Kentucky and Indiana lawmakers who commented on the issue.

Rep. Ben Chandler, D-Ky., said in a statement that he supports President Bush's efforts to fight terror as long as they are legal.

As for prosecuting journalists, he said, "While I believe the media should exercise extreme caution and judgment when reporting on programs designed to protect our national security, I also believe in protections provided by our Constitution, namely freedom of speech and of the press."

At the Justice Department, spokesman Bryan Sierra declined to comment on Bunning's remarks.

Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times, was on vacation yesterday. His executive assistant, Diane Ceribelli , said Keller's letter to readers Sunday made his arguments.

Keller wrote that the newspaper did not tip the terrorists to anything they wouldn't have known because the Treasury Department has "trumpeted" its efforts to track the international network that pays for terror operations.

Keller said the newspaper published the story after weeks of discussions with the Bush administration, which contended that the program is legal and effective and that making it public would endanger the program.

"A reasonable person, informed about this program, might well decide to applaud it," Keller wrote. "That said, we hesitate to pre-empt the role of legislators and courts, and ultimately the electorate, which cannot consider a program if they don't know about it."

[...]

Bunning has said he doesn't read newspapers, but his spokesman said the senator "relies on far more reliable sources for his news than The New York Times, but did read the article after seeing reports of this treasonous act."

He is singling out the New York paper because it was first with the story, said spokesman Mike Reynard.

But when told that the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times and New York Times published similar stories on the same news cycle, Reynard said: "The New York Times was the one to go with it. The New York Times drove this story."
'Aid and comfort'?

Bunning equated the Times' story last week on the bank records to publishing the phone number of Osama bin Laden, saying the al-Qaida leader would be tipped and change his number immediately.

"In my opinion, that is giving aid and comfort to the enemy, therefore it is an act of treason," Bunning said of the story, which detailed how the government is analyzing a massive database on international money transfers.

"What you write in a war and what is legal to do for the federal government, or state government, whoever it is, is very important in the winning of the war on terror."

Asked if that could be a recipe for government abuse of civil liberties, Bunning responded: "It could be."

Hahahahahahahahahahaha

Posted by vicki at 09:00 AM | Comments (1)

Nuke the Messenger

Hoo, Boy! I thought Pat Roberts W-(ingnut,) Kansas, was gonna have a stroke on live TV by freaking out about the Times running yet another story about how Bu$hCo has once again skirted the Constitution and the law by snooping, without warrants on bank records at home and abroad. Puleeze! The WH announced years ago that it would try to track down and cut off funding to terrorist organizations. No news there, but doing so outside of the law IS news. To hear that yahoo tell it, the Times (other major papers got let off the hook) is getting people killed, destroying Intel opperations and aiding terrorists. Yes, the GOP thinks we are stupid beyond measure. The WaPo gives us this: GOP gone wild!

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Tuesday, June 27, 2006; 1:34 PM

In accusing the press -- and specifically, the New York Times -- of putting American lives at risk, President Bush and his allies have escalated their ongoing battle with the media to nuclear proportions.

Here's what Bush had to say yesterday: "We're at war with a bunch of people who want to hurt the United States of America, and for people to leak that program, and for a newspaper to publish it does great harm to the United States of America."

Here's Vice President Cheney: "The New York Times has now made it more difficult for us to prevent attacks in the future."

Here's press secretary Tony Snow: "The New York Times and other news organizations ought to think long and hard about whether a public's right to know, in some cases, might overwrite somebody's right to live, and whether, in fact, the publications of these could place in jeopardy the safety of fellow Americans."

It's a monstrous charge for the White House to suggest that the press is essentially aiding and abetting the enemy. But where's the evidence?

The White House first began leveling this kind of accusation immediately after a New York Times story revealed a massive, secret domestic spying program conducted without congressional or judicial oversight. See, for instance, Bush's December 17, 2005 radio address , in which he said the disclosure put "our citizens at risk."

But not once has the White House definitively answered this question: How are any of these disclosures actually impairing the pursuit of terrorists?

Terrorists already knew the government was trying to track them down through their finances, their phone calls and their e-mails. Within days of the Sept. 11 attacks, for instance, Bush publicly declared open season on terrorist financing.

As far as I can tell, all these disclosures do is alert the American public to the fact that all this stuff is going on without the requisite oversight, checks and balances.

How does it possibly matter to a terrorist whether the government got a court order or not? Or whether Congress was able to exercise any oversight? The White House won't say. In fact, it can't say.

By contrast, it does matter to us.

This column has documented, again and again , that when faced with a potentially damaging political problem, White House strategist Karl Rove's response is not to defend, but to attack.

Posted by vicki at 08:38 PM | Comments (2)

Great article in yesterday's C-J. We have a clear choice in Louisville to vote our values this November. This city needs to vote based on issues, not commercials this fall. Read it here. What the article failed to point out, and I think it's critical, is that Northup rakes in gobs of money from republican PACS ( Tom DeLay hearts her) and collects tons of Corporate contributions and votes for their interests above the well being of her constituents. Her horrible environmental record springs to mind. Do a Google search and see for yourself. John Yarmuth must rely on small, individual donations for the most part.

Different views on money

While the two candidates have similar financial standing, Yarmuth said they are far apart on issues related to wealth, from personal investment ethics to tax cuts.

Northup supports making tax cuts permanent, Yarmuth said, while he opposes tax cuts for the richest Americans. She opposes raising the $5.15-an-hour minimum wage; he favors an increase. And while she favors eliminating estate taxes, he says estates valued from $3 million to $5 million and up should be taxed because of the record national debt.

"She votes for every tax policy that favors herself, and I vote for ones that don't favor me," said Yarmuth, who spent $40,000 in tax cut benefits he received on his sale of LEO three years ago running television ads denouncing the tax cuts.

If he wins the election, Yarmuth has pledged to donate his congressional salary -- which would be $168,500 next year -- to local charity.

Northup declined to be interviewed about her personal financial statement, but Carmack said the candidates' disagreement over taxes and other economic issues reflects their backgrounds.

"What the Northups have is the result of years and years of hard work, and what John Yarmuth has appears to be the result of a multimillion-dollar inheritance. That's a big difference," Carmack said.

Northup believes the way to cut the national debt and to grow the economy is through lower taxes, Carmack said, adding that "voters will have a clear choice."

Yarmuth declined to say how much money he inherited after the 1975 death of his father, Stanley Yarmuth, a founder of the conglomerate National Industries, which was later sold.

He said his grandfather, Samuel Klein, a civic leader and wealthy banker, and his mother bequeathed bank stock to him over the years -- it's now BB&T stock valued from $500,000 up to $1 million on his report.

Yarmuth said the vast majority of his wealth comes from three businesses -- LEO, and the two others operated by his brothers. "My two brothers and I worked very hard to build successful companies that had nothing to do with inheritance," he said.

His two largest assets, listed in the financial report as being valued from $1 million to $5 million each, are a 150-restaurant chain, Sonny's, based in Orlando, Fla., and operated by Robert Yarmuth, and Almost Family, a home-health-care company based in Louisville and headed by William Yarmuth.

John Yarmuth reported income of at least $1 million from the restaurant chain and a total of $6,600 in earned income from television commentary.

Northup's earned income last year was $155,709, her congressional salary, while dividends from her husband's company, Radio Sound Inc., which supplies radios to Harley-Davidson Motorcycles, brought in at least $1 million. His salary was not required or listed in the report.

She listed stocks in some 70 diverse companies, including oil companies Exxon Mobil and Chevron Texaco, pharmaceutical giants Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, and Pfizer; and communications corporations Time Warner and Viacom.

Yarmuth said he believes her holdings present conflicts "when she is casting votes that directly affect companies she has substantial interests in." Citing her listing of Exxon Mobil stock valued at a minimum of $50,000, he said that she voted for an energy bill that provided subsidies and tax breaks for oil companies. [my bold]

Posted by vicki at 06:34 PM | Comments (2)

So now Bu$hCo wants to silence the press? Big surprise for this administration. They want to spy on every aspect of our lives outside of what the law and the Constitution allows and if the press exposes it, they face jail. Bu$h uses taxpayer financed propaganda with impunity, outs a CIA agent by leaking to Bob Novak, a supposed *jpornalist*, but wants to jail reporters who expose WH crimes. This is nothing but creeping fascism. Read the rest of the Salon.com article here

Treason and the Times

The New York Times' Eric Lichtblau and James Risen reported last year that the Bush administration was monitoring telephone calls without the warrants required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Last week, they broke the news that the Bush administration has been monitoring and examining the bank records of thousands of American citizens.

You might call Lichtblau and Risen "journalists," and good ones at that. Rep. Peter King has another name for them: "recidivists."

King, a Republican from New York, said over the weekend that he wants to see the Times prosecuted for running the bank-monitoring story and thereby "putting its own arrogant, elitist, left-wing agenda before the interests of the American people."

Responsible Republicans would like to put a lid on that kind of blame-the-messenger craziness, right? Well, you'd think, but it's not playing out that way. The president said today that the media's decision to go with the bank records story -- the Times wasn't the only news outlet to get it -- was "disgraceful" and "does great harm to the United States of America." White House press secretary Tony Snow went even farther, saying that the "New York Times and other news organizations ought to think long and hard about whether a public's right to know in some cases might override somebody's right to live." [/end snip]

Keep reading for Tony Snowjob's explaination for why the WH and General Casey are not "cut and run" traitors.

Posted by vicki at 06:02 PM | Comments (2)

It is just intollerble how badly Bu$/Cheney and Rummy have blown it in Iraq. Now even the wealthiest, formerly peaceful neighborhoods in Baghdad are falling to insurgents (not Al Qaeda) one by one. The civil war in Iraq is completely obvious to everyone but Bu$hCo. It is heartbreaking that Bu$h has wasted to lives of over 2,515 service members, countless innocent Iraqis and blown Iraq to bits for absolutely no good reason. Is This what Bu$h and the GOP want to "stay the course" for?

Fear Invades a Once-Comfortable Iraqi Enclave

By SABRINA TAVERNISE
Published: June 24, 2006

BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 23 — Mansour is Baghdad's Upper East Side. It has fancy pastry shops, jewelry stores, a designer furniture boutique and an elite social club.

An Iraqi soldier at a checkpoint on a street in Mansour, where many local businesses have closed because of surging violence. "It's falling to the terrorists," the director of a local social club said about the neighborhood.

But it is no longer the address everyone wants.

In the past two months, insurgents have come to Mansour to gun down a city councilman, kidnap four Russian Embassy workers, shoot a tailor dead in his shop and bomb a pastry shop.

Now, Mansour, a religiously mixed area just three miles from the fortified Green Zone, feels more like wartime Beirut than Park Avenue, and its affluent residents worry that the wave of violence that has devoured large swaths of Baghdad has begun encroaching on them.

"It's falling to the terrorists," said Hasaneen F. Mualla, director of the Hunting Club, Mansour's social center. "They are coming nearer to us now. No one is stopping them."

For most of the past six months, Iraq drifted without a government and its security forces largely stood by and watched at crucial moments, like the one in February when Shiite militias killed Sunnis after the bombing of a sacred shrine.

Now, as Iraqi leaders in the Green Zone savor their recent successes — the naming of the first full-term government since the fall of Saddam Hussein and the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Iraq's most wanted guerrilla leader — Iraqis outside its walls are more frightened than ever. Neighborhood after neighborhood in western Baghdad has fallen to insurgents, with some areas bordering on anarchy. Bodies lie on the streets for hours. Trash is no longer collected. Children are home-schooled.

The paralysis that shut down life in western Baghdad is creeping ever closer to the heart of the city, and Iraqis in still-livable areas are frantic for the government to halt its advance, something the new leadership pledged to do when it started its new security plan for Baghdad last week.

"It's like a cancer, spreading from area to area," said a guard at Delta Communications, a Mansour cellphone shop that has been shuttered since a bomb blast in front of it last month.

Mansour is an area of stately homes, elaborately trimmed hedges and people who can afford guards. In recent weeks, that has not seemed to matter. Homemade bombs have struck two sport utility vehicles belonging to the former Iraqi exile leader, Ahmad Chalabi, a Mansour resident, twice in the past month. Gangs have kidnapped the United Arab Emirates ambassador and the Russian Embassy workers, whom Al Qaeda claimed to have killed this week. The Hunting Club now tells wedding parties to bring guards.

Posted by vicki at 09:27 AM | Comments (1)

Jeepers H. Christmas! Nothing is beyond the reach of the Bu$h Admin. You know, if their motives and methods were so pure, why not comply with the law and Constitution? Now they are secretly stealing banking data at home and abroad without warrants, court supervision, Congressional oversight or subpoenas. They are lawless! We have an out of control Congress who is willing to look the other way and toss our basic rights overboard to protect the White House. They think the public-at-large are utter morons. I think they know their red state base all too well. The rest of us? Not so much.

The Times defied the WH effort to kill This story

Posted by vicki at 06:43 PM | Comments (1)

Does this fool get anything right? I think we can all agree that employers have every right to insist that web surfing be confined to lunch hours or break times. I have no problem with offices blocking, say, porn or militia sites. But it's another thing altogether when Fletcher blocks Liberal political sites yet allows Rush, Drudge, and the RNC sites to be accessed by employees. McConnell must be so proud of backing this petty hack for Governor. From today's Times

As if there were not already enough problems for Gov. Ernie Fletcher of Kentucky, who has been indicted in a political patronage case, he now has political bloggers and First Amendment lawyers after him too.

The watchdog group Public Citizen said yesterday that it might sue Mr. Fletcher, a first-term Republican, on free-speech grounds for blocking state employees' access to certain political blogs.

The ban was instituted Wednesday, a day after an article in The New York Times quoted Mark Nickolas, a Democratic blogger, as saying the governor's administration was "peddling ludicrous conspiracy theories." BluegrassReport.org, Mr. Nickolas's site, was one of the first to be blocked, but others frequently critical of Republicans were added soon thereafter.

"The timing of this caught our eye," said Jennifer Moore, a First Amendment lawyer in Louisville who is working with Public Citizen.

Mr. Nickolas's site "has been around for a year," she said, "but only now has the administration decided to block it."

Ms. Moore filed an open-records request with the administration yesterday seeking documents that would explain why some political sites had been blocked and others not.

Jill Midkiff, spokeswoman for the agency that oversees Internet technology decisions for state government, denied any intention to limit free speech or to single out Mr. Nickolas or other bloggers of similar political leanings.

"But using state computers to view some of these sites on state time is not an efficient use of state tax dollars or state resources," Ms. Midkiff told local reporters Wednesday in Frankfort, Kentucky's capital.

Yet in addition to allowing state employees to read Web sites of newspapers and television stations, the administration has continued to allow access to at least some Republican sites. Ms. Midkiff did not return phone calls seeking an explanation yesterday.

"My site and a number of other Democratic sites are blocked while conservative blogs belonging to Rush Limbaugh and Matt Drudge, not to mention the Republican National Committee's own blog, are still accessible," said Mr. Nickolas

Posted by vicki at 11:32 AM | Comments (3)

Senator Rick Santorum, wanker for the ages. The runner up is Tony Snow(job). Santorum wins for this piece of wankerdom:

Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) took to the microphone today to announce a shocking discovery — that WMD have been found in Iraq:

"Congressman Hoekstra and I are here today to say that we have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, chemical weapons. … Since 2003, coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent. Despite many efforts to locate and destroy Iraq’s pre-Gulf War chemical munitions, filled and unfilled pre-Gulf War chemical munitions are assessed to still exist. "

What a moron! The runner up, WH press secretary Tony Snowjob gets dishonorable mention for this:

Asked what the WH reaction was to the announcement that the 2,500th military service member died in Iraq, Snow answered s follows:

" It's only a number."

So there you have it! Keep your sharp minds on high alert for the dumbest thing you've heard all week from a political figure for next week's "Bushie" award.

Posted by vicki at 04:27 PM

Let's get this straight. Bu$h and his supporters led this country and our military into a useless war (invasion, actually) based on deliberate falsehoods. It was so poorly planned for and executed that tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis are dead, their country destroyed and they are now in a civil war. 2,5000+ of our armed forces are dead and well over 10,000 gravely wounded and the Republicans call for more of the same. They have no plan for sucess and no exit strategy. So, they just plan to smear the Democratic opposition. Heck of a job, Bu$hies!

G.O.P. Decides to Embrace War as Issue

By JIM RUTENBERG and ADAM NAGOURNEY
Published: June 22, 2006

WASHINGTON, June 21 — Just a few weeks ago, some Republicans were openly fretting about the war in Iraq and its effect on their re-election prospects, with particularly vulnerable lawmakers worried that its growing unpopularity was becoming a drag on their campaigns.

But there was little sign of such nervousness on Wednesday as Republican after Republican took to the Senate floor to offer an unambiguous embrace of the Iraq war and to portray Democrats as advocates of an overly hasty withdrawal that would have grave consequences for the security of the United States. Like their counterparts in the House last week, they accused Democrats of espousing "retreat and defeatism."

That emerging Republican approach reflects, at least for now, the success of a White House effort to bring a skittish party behind Mr. Bush on the war after months of political ambivalence in some vocal quarters. As President Bush offered another defense of his Iraq policy during a visit to Vienna on Wednesday, Republicans acknowledged that it was a strategy of necessity, an effort to turn what some party leaders had feared could become the party's greatest liability into an advantage in the midterm elections.

The approach might yet be upended by more problems in Iraq, as Republicans were reminded this week with reports about two American servicemen who were abducted, tortured and apparently killed. Some polls show a majority of Americans continue to think that entering Iraq was a mistake, and pollsters say independent voters are particularly open to the idea of setting some sort of timetable for withdrawal, the very policy Democrats have embraced and Republicans are now fighting.

But people who attended a series of high-level meetings this month between White House and Congressional officials say President Bush's aides argued that it could be a politically fatal mistake for Republicans to walk away from the war in an election year.

White House officials including the national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, outlined ways in which Republican lawmakers could speak more forcefully about the war. Participants also included Mr. Bush's top political and communications advisers: his deputy chief of staff, Karl Rove; his political director, Sara Taylor; and the White House counselor, Dan Bartlett. Mr. Rove is newly freed from the threat of indictment in the C.I.A. leak case, and leaders of both parties see his reinvigorated hand in the strategy.

The meetings were followed by the distribution of a 74-page briefing book to Congressional offices from the Pentagon to provide ammunition for what White House officials say will be a central line of attack against Democrats from now through the midterm elections: that the withdrawal being advocated by Democrats would mean thousands of troops would have died for nothing, would give extremists a launching pad from which to build an Islamo-fascist empire and would hand the United States its must humiliating defeat since Vietnam.

Republicans say the cumulative effect would be to send a message of weakness to the world at a time of new threats from Iran and North Korea and would leave enemies controlling Iraq's vast oil reserves, the third largest in the world. (The book, including a chapter entitled "Rapid Response" with answers to frequent Democratic charges, was sent via e-mail to Republican lawmakers but, in an apparent mistake, also to some Democrats.)

Posted by vicki at 10:51 AM | Comments (1)

None can say for sure whether the two U.S. soldiers who were brutally tortured by Iraqi insergents would have met the same fate had the U.S. not made a practice of torturing and killing Iraqis held in Gitmo and Abu Graib, but it certainly doesn't put us on the high moral ground we once held, either. I hope and pray this doesn't become common practice. This is hard to read.

U.S. Says 2 Bodies Retrieved in Iraq Were Brutalized

By Dexter Filkins
BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 20 — The American military said Tuesday that a search team had found what appeared to be the remains of the two American soldiers captured by insurgents last week during an ambush south of the capital, and a senior Iraqi defense official said the two men had been "brutally tortured."

The New York Times

Two bodies were found near a power plant in the vicinity of Yusefiya.

An American military official in Baghdad, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that both bodies showed evidence of "severe trauma" and that they could not be positively identified. The search team spotted the bodies on Monday night, but it took 12 hours to get to them because soldiers had to make their way through "numerous" bombs along the road leading to the bodies, and around the bodies themselves, the official said.

Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the American military spokesman, said "the remains" were found Monday night near a power plant in the vicinity of Yusufiya, about three miles from the site were the Americans had been captured by insurgents.

General Caldwell declined to speak in detail about the physical condition of the bodies, but said the cause of death could not be determined. He said the remains of the men would be sent to the United States for DNA testing to determine their identities definitively.

That seemed to suggest that the two Americans had been wounded or mutilated beyond recognition.

"We couldn't identify them," the American military official in Baghdad said.

Posted by vicki at 03:04 PM | Comments (1)

Take walk on the "Dark Side" of Big Dick Cheney. The Frontline program examines how "In the initial stages of the war on terror, Tenet's CIA was rising to prominence as the lead agency in the Afghanistan war. But when Tenet insisted in his personal meetings with the president that there was no connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq, Cheney and Rumsfeld initiated a secret program to re-examine the evidence and marginalize the agency and Tenet. Through interviews with DoD staffers who sifted through mountains of raw intelligence, FRONTLINE tells the story of how questionable intelligence was "stovepiped" to the vice president and presented to the public." Click here for more chilling details

Thanks to Hank for the heads up.

Posted by vicki at 09:34 AM | Comments (4)

Another GOP friendly yet incompetent compny has blown tens of millions of taxpayer dollars in the "rebuilding" of Iraq. Your tax dollars: hard at work, or hardly working? Click the link for more.

Army Cancels Contract for Iraqi Prison

By JAMES GLANZ
Published: June 20, 2006

BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 19 — The Army Corps of Engineers said Monday that it had canceled a $99.1 million contract with Parsons, one of the largest companies working in Iraq, to build a prison north of Baghdad after the firm fell more than two years behind schedule, threatened to go millions of dollars over budget and essentially abandoned the construction site.

The move is another harsh rebuke for Parsons, only weeks after the corps canceled more than $300 million of the company's contracts to build and refurbish hospitals and clinics across Iraq. A federal oversight office had found that some of the clinics were little more than empty shells and that only 20 of 150 called for in the contract would be completed without new financing.

But the prison, originally scheduled to be completed this month, appears to be the largest single rebuilding project canceled for failing to achieve its goals under the $45 billion American rebuilding program for Iraq. The corps said Parsons officials had recently estimated that it could not be completed before September 2008, and would cost an additional $13.5 million.

"I have other contractors that hold to their schedules," said Maj. Gen. William H. McCoy Jr., commander of the corps' Gulf Region Division. "And when they hold to their schedules, there's no problem."

In the case of the prison contract, General McCoy said, "I've got to stop the bleeding."

The corps says it intends to complete 3,700 rebuilding projects. But that number is much smaller than once planned and there is no independent overall assessment of their success. For example, among the water and sanitation projects, only 49 of the 136 projects originally envisioned are expected to be completed, according to Stuart W. Bowen Jr., who leads the office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, an independent federal oversight office.

Posted by vicki at 09:04 AM | Comments (1)

The GOP is headed by an AWOL Prez, a chicken hawk VP and a Sec Def who never saw combat. They love to call war veterans and war heros, such as Kerry and Murtha, cowards and "Cut-And Runers." That's called *projection.* This WH has done more to damage the reputation of the U.S. and endangered our rights and the Constitution than any other in our history. These folks are vile to the core.

Murtha, a War Critic, Assails Rove Over Speech

By RAYMOND HERNANDEZ
Published: June 19, 2006 New York Times

WASHINGTON, June 18 — Representative John P. Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat and Vietnam War veteran pushing for a quick withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, on Sunday mocked Karl Rove, the president's senior adviser, for championing the war while "sitting in his air-conditioned office on his big, fat backside."

Mr. Murtha, in an appearance on the NBC News program "Meet the Press," was responding to a speech Mr. Rove delivered in New Hampshire last week attacking Democrats for what he called "that party's old pattern of cutting and running."

When Mr. Murtha was asked on Sunday for his reaction to Mr. Rove's remarks, he said: "He's making a political speech. He's sitting in his air-conditioned office on his big, fat backside saying, 'Stay the course.' That's not a plan."

Mr. Murtha spoke as the Bush administration pressed ahead with its campaign to seize the political offensive on Iraq — a push that included President Bush's surprise visit to Baghdad early last week.

Posted by vicki at 05:13 PM | Comments (1)

The C-J reporter who is writing a series of articles, James Bruggers, has a blog with numerous resources to check out. Check it out Here

He also recommends this one: "I test-drove several of the Web sites, but one appeared quite credible: SafeClimate.net. It’s run by the reputable and data-centric analysts at the World Resources Institute, and it involves entering actual energy use information from home utility bills, as well as details about driving and flying habits.

Posted by vicki at 10:31 AM | Comments (1)

Posted by vicki at 10:35 AM

Northup votes to gut the CPB budget yet again. The choice is funding Public Broadcasting or doling out massive tax breaks for the poor, suffering super rich. Hmmm, what's a COMPASSIONATE CONSERVATIVE to do?

http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060617/OPINION01/606170369/1055/OPINION

Big Bird season.

Congress is taking aim, one more time, at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the system it serves all over the country. The House Appropriations Committee has voted to reduce CPB's budget for next year by $95 million.

Rep. Anne Northup and the members of her Appropriations subcommittee had earlier cut $20 million more than that.

Rep. Northup has a point. Her subcommittee was choosing between public broadcasting and such line items as cancer research and job training. Since she and her GOP colleagues refuse to stop giving tax breaks to people who don't need them, or stop loading the federal budget with re-election-friendly earmarked projects, there's not enough cash to go around, and they have to prioritize. [my bold]

It's a shame they don't put a priority on raising enough money to reduce the federal debt and run the federal government effectively.

Nobody really wants to plug, or unplug, Big Bird, but as CPB president Patricia Harrison pointed out, "Anything less than full funding will not only present public broadcasting with an unfunded federal mandate to convert to digital broadcasting, but it will also undermine its ability to both offer essential educational services and provide a backbone for a national emergency alert system." Funds for the PBS "Ready to Learn" program will remain zeroed out.

Polls taken during the abortive effort to brand public broadcasting as "too liberal" showed the public doesn't buy that lie. The system has broad and deep support. MoveOn.org quickly gathered more than 1.5 million online signatures for a petition that says, "Congress must save NPR, PBS and local public stations. We trust them for in-depth news and educational children's programming. It's money well spent."

The full House, or the Senate if necessary, should tune in to the people who have turned on to public broadcasting.

Posted by vicki at 12:28 PM

My head hurts. This time wasting GOP Congress seems determined to to blow off their legislative duty in favor of gay bashing, flag burning (what flag burning?) and now this bull. We need to throw the bums out!

Partisan Fight Over Iraq War Erupts on Hill

By ROBIN TONER and KATE ZERNIKE
Published: June 16, 2006

WASHINGTON, June 15 — The House and the Senate engaged in angry, intensely partisan debate on Thursday over the war in Iraq, as Republicans sought to rally support for the Bush administration's policies and exploit Democratic divisions in an election year shadowed by unease over the war.
It was one of the sharpest legislative clashes yet over the three-year-old conflict, and it came after three days in which President Bush and his aides had sought to portray Iraq as moving gradually toward a stable, functioning democracy, and to portray Democrats as lacking the will to see the conflict through to victory.

In the House, lawmakers moved toward a vote Friday after more than 11 hours of debate on a Republican resolution promising to "complete the mission" in Iraq, prevail in the global fight against terrorism and oppose any "arbitrary date for withdrawal." In the Senate, lawmakers voted overwhelmingly to shelve an amendment calling on the United States to withdraw most troops by the end of this year, although Democrats vowed to revisit the debate next week.

Both actions were carefully engineered by the Republicans in charge, and for the moment put both chambers on a path to rejecting Congressional timetables for withdrawal .

House Republicans asserted that their resolution was essential to assure American troops and the world that the United States was behind the war in Iraq and the broader struggle against terrorism, conflicts they said were inextricably intertwined.

Speaker J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois opened the formal debate on a war that, the government announced Thursday, had claimed the lives of 2,500 American troops. "It is a battle we must endure and one in which we can and will be victorious," he said of the fight in Iraq and beyond. "The alternative would be to cut and run and wait for them to regroup and bring the terror back to our shores." [ My bold]

He said the American troops in Iraq knew their cause was noble. "It is time for this House of Representatives to tell the world that we know it, too, that we know our cause is right and that we are proud of it." Democrats, divided over the wisdom of the war but more or less united in condemning Mr. Bush's management of it, countered that the Republican resolution was a political ploy, "a press release for staying the course in Iraq," as Representative Jane Harman, Democrat of California, put it.

Posted by vicki at 10:49 AM

Thanks to Barbara Hedspeth for passing this along:

The Sierra Club has gotten permission from the manager at the Baxter Avenue Theatres to have a short discussion, question/answer session in the time after the 7:45 showing before the 9:30 showing begins on Friday, June 16th. Sarah Lynn Cunningham, an environmental engineer and local activist will be there and we will have a table and some materials about what folks can do to save energy so we don't burn so much fossil fuel.

Posted by Maria at 01:00 PM | Comments (1)

From dear DL friend Judy and LPAC:

Tolling the Bells for 2,500 US Dead in Iraq


(Louisville, KY) We have marked another sad milestone with today's announcement that 2,500 US troops have been killed in Iraq. Louisville Peace Action Community and Interfaith Paths to Peace have asked all places of worship in the city to toll their bells to honor the memory of US troops and Iraqi civilians & military who have lost their lives in the Iraq war. Contact tatduende2@yahoo.com for more info.

May they and their loved ones rest in Peace.

Posted by vicki at 11:48 AM

Supposed "Bu$h Brain" KKKarl Rove squirmed out of an indictment by the honorable special prosecuter, Mr. Fitzgerald, who chose NOT to go all Ken Starr on his ass. Then Bu$h decided to sneak into Iraq under an elaborate and disgusting publicity stunt. Yes, America, the GOP thinks you are stupid beyond measure. Here is the best email I've gotten in years for your reading pleasure. Hits the nail on the head.

How Much Did Bush's Photo-op In Iraq Cost the Taxpayers? Ah. what's a few million when we've already spent well over $300 billion dollars of OUR tax dollars on Bush's bloody folly?

There's a connection between Bush's craven Green Zone Iraqi photo-op and the news that Karl Rove won't be indicted.

Thanks, Mike F. You the man.

Posted by vicki at 12:35 PM | Comments (5)

Here is a great website to check out before the opening of An Inconvenient Truth on Friday. Join DL, LPAC, Sierra Club, Liberal Lounge and more for the 7:45 showing at the Baxter Ave. Theaters on Friday, June 16.

Planet Earth needs your help.

Posted by vicki at 08:00 AM | Comments (1)

How ironic that the ruling GOP, so quick to challange the patriotism of their opponents and led by the Worst President Ever, have done incredible damage to our reputation the world over. The war mongering, religious zeallot embracing, immigrant hating GOP bears the entire blame for this situation. The NY Times article Makes you wanna holler.

Global Image of the U.S. Is Worsening, Survey Finds

By BRIAN KNOWLTON
Published: June 14, 2006

WASHINGTON, June 13 — As the war in Iraq continues for a fourth year, the global image of America has slipped further, even among people in some countries closely allied with the United States, a new opinion poll has found.

Favorable views of the United States dropped sharply over the past year in Spain, where only 23 percent said they had a positive opinion, down from 41 percent last year, according to the survey. It was done in 15 nations, including the United States, this spring by the Washington-based Pew Research Center.

Other countries where positive views dropped significantly include India (56 percent, down from 71 percent); Russia (43 percent, down from 52 percent); and Indonesia (30 percent, down from 38 percent). In Turkey, only 12 percent said they held a favorable opinion, down from 23 percent last year.

Declines were less steep in France, Germany and Jordan, while people in China and Pakistan had a slightly more favorable image of the United States this year than last. In Britain, Washington's closest ally in the Iraq war, positive views of America have remained in the mid-50-percent range in the past two years, down sharply from 75 percent in 2002, before the war.

Support for the fight against terrorism led by the United States is also down, Pew found.

Although strong majorities in several countries expressed worries about Iran's nuclear intentions, in 13 of 15 countries polled, most people said the war in Iraq posed more of a danger to world peace. Russians held that view by a 2-to-1 margin.

"Obviously, when you get many more people saying that the U.S. presence in Iraq is a threat to world peace as say that about Iran, it's a measure of how much Iraq is sapping good will to the United States," said Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center.

Posted by vicki at 07:23 AM | Comments (1)

The comments by Bu$h's General and others in the administration about the suicides of 3 Gitmo captives affirms their utter contempt for human life, the law and common decency. This Guardian article points out the terrible damage done to our country's reputation (and Great Britton) by keeping this prison open. The Guardian hopes for justice by the SCOTUS but I have no confidence in that wingnut packed court.

Cruel and illegal

Leader
Monday June 12, 2006
The Guardian

The demented logic of Dr Strangelove hung like a ghost this weekend over the US military's response to the suicide of three prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. Announcing the news, the first successful suicides since detainees began to arrive in 2002, the camp's commander, Rear-Admiral Harry Harris, said the deaths were "not an act of desperation but an act of asymmetric warfare committed against us". That cold and odious language lacked the humanity present even in President Bush's expression of "serious concern", but is entirely in keeping with the clinical illegality of America's treatment of terror suspects since 2001.

Article continues
In one sense, the three deaths change nothing: international law and opinion has already condemned Guantánamo Bay as a disgrace to a country which claims to fight its battles on behalf of freedom. In practical terms the policy of extracting suspects from around the world and holding them indefinitely without legal process has been established as a shameful failure: most of the prisoners have had minimal or no connection to terror and America's claim to hold an al-Qaida hardcore has never been tested in court. Almost certainly, it never will be, given that their conditions of capture and detention, including torture, make the judicial prosecution of suspects now a near- impossibility. One by one, Guantánamo Bay's defenders have fallen away and the camp has become a burden even to the people who set it up. President Bush now says he wants it emptied - though that hardly sits with the current construction of a $30m new detention facility.

Suicide has a primal potency which can shock in a way other human acts do not. This was true, in a very different context, of the death of Dr David Kelly and it makes it probable that the deaths of the three detainees, two Saudi and one Yemani, will redouble attention on Guantánamo. In the Arab world, it will further darken America and Britain's reputations, already sullied by images of abuse at Abu Ghraib and the orange suits, shackles and hoods of Camps X-Ray and Delta. The US military has argued that the 41 unsuccessful suicide attempts at the base so far, together with hunger strikes - including eight prisoners now - are a political act intended to capture world opinion. In that sense, Rear-Admiral Harris's distasteful remarks are nothing new: but whether the act is calculated or not, the effect on world opinion will be the same.

What is most horrific about Guantánamo is not the way prisoners are treated physically - though details of forced feeding through the nose in the UN's recent report are grotesque - but the abandonment of judicial process by a nation whose identity is built on constitutional rights.

Posted by vicki at 10:40 AM | Comments (1)

Jeepers H. Christmas. Now Afghanistan is a FUBAR, too. This deadly incompetence has got to stop. People have been dying for years under Bu$hCo's arrogant and utterly abusive misuse of the military and disasterous lack of a plan for success. Read it and weep!

Afghanistan, June 10 — A large springtime offensive by Taliban fighters has turned into the strongest show of force by the insurgents since American forces chased the Taliban from power in late 2001, and Afghan and foreign officials and local villagers blame a lack of United States-led coalition forces on the ground for the resurgence.

kate Brooks/Polaris, for The New York Times

American forces are handing over operations in southern Afghanistan to a NATO force of mainly Canadian, British and Dutch troops, and militants have taken advantage of the transition to swarm into rural areas.

Coalition and Afghan forces now clash daily with large groups of Taliban fighters across five provinces of southern Afghanistan. In their boldest push, the Taliban fought battles in a district just less than 20 miles outside the southern city of Kandahar in late May, forcing hundreds of people to abandon their villages for refuge in the city and in other towns as coalition forces resorted to aerial bombardment.

The Taliban are running checkpoints on secondary roads and seizing control of remote district centers for a night or two before melting away again. In the most blatant symbol of their dominance of rural areas, the Taliban have even conducted trials under Islamic law, or Shariah, outside official Afghan courts, and recently carried out at least one public execution.

"The situation is really, in the last four years, the most unstable and insecure I have seen," said Talatbek Masadykov, who is in charge of the United Nations assistance mission in Kandahar.

But he said accounts of just how bad the security situation was differed, particularly after a surge of fighting just west of Kandahar in recent weeks.

"From different tribal people we are hearing that the Taliban are regrouping," he said, "and from government officials that security is improving."

One international security official in Kandahar, who has several years of experience in Afghanistan and asked not to be named because of the nature of his information, said members of American and Canadian Special Forces units had told him that they were "not winning against the Taliban."

Posted by vicki at 02:50 PM

I REALLY hope this comes to pass. I've been Railimg against the PNAC since they took power in the Coup of 2000 . It seems like no one else beleives me, but now that is in the Washington Post.. maybe some SERIOUS light will shine on the blood-suckers from the PNAC. They are like vampires that have been sucking this country dry....

this morning Al Kamen in WaPo notes PNAC’s passing:

Mission Accomplished?

The doors may be closing shortly on the nine-year-old Project for a New American Century, the neoconservative think tank headed by William Kristol, former chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle and now editor of the Weekly Standard, which is must reading for neocon cogitators and agitators.

The PNAC was short on staff — having perhaps a half-dozen employees — but very long on heavy hitters. The founders included Richard B. Cheney, Donald H. Rumsfeld, Paul D. Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, William J. Bennett, Zalmay Khalilzad and Quayle.

The goal was to continue the Reaganite, muscular approach to projecting American power and “moral clarity” in a post-Cold War world, the group’s manifesto said. The targets were liberal drift and conservative isolationism.

PNAC and its supporters dominated the Bush administration’s foreign policy apparatus and championed a policy to get rid of Saddam Hussein long before Sept. 11, 2001.

In its famous 1998 letter to President Bill Clinton, PNAC said “removing Saddam Hussein and his regime . . . now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy.” Clinton was urged to use all diplomatic, political and military means to topple him.

Despite the happy chatter before the Iraq invasion about cheering crowds and bouquets and cakewalks and how the war was going to pay for itself, the signatories wrote that “we are fully aware of the dangers of implementing this policy.”

There had been debate about PNAC’s future, but the feeling, a source said, was of “goal accomplished” and it looks to be heading toward closing. Former executive director Gary J. Schmitt, who had been executive director of President Ronald Reagan’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, left recently for a post at the American Enterprise Institute. (Not a big move. Actually, only five floors up from PNAC.) Still, seems like a short century.

Posted by Mojo at 09:03 AM

Editorial New York Times
The Deaths at Gitmo

Published: June 12, 2006

The news that three inmates at Guantánamo Bay hanged themselves should not have surprised anyone who has paid the slightest attention to the twisted history of the camp that President Bush built for selected prisoners from Afghanistan and antiterrorist operations. It was the inevitable result of creating a netherworld of despair beyond the laws of civilized nations, where men were to be held without any hope of decent treatment, impartial justice or, in so many cases, even eventual release.

It is a place where secret tribunals sat in judgment of men whose identities they barely knew and who were not permitted to see the evidence against them. Inmates were abused, humiliated, tormented and sometimes tortured. Some surely are very dangerous men, committed to a life of terrorism and deserving of harsh justice. But only 10 of the roughly 465 men at the camp have been charged with crimes. The others, according to senior officers who served there, were foot soldiers of the Taliban or men who just happened to live in a country invaded by the United States after the 9/11 attacks.

Inmates at Guantánamo Bay have tried seeking help from the American courts, and one case has reached the Supreme Court. But most of these appeals were thwarted by claims of national security. Any new appeals will fall under a shocking new law that deprives the inmates of the centuries-old right to challenge their imprisonment. Government lawyers have even tried to use that law retroactively, to dismiss all pending appeals.

Guantánamo Bay and other American detention centers have sparked outrage around the world — deeply harming America's image as the defender of humanity against just these sorts of abuses. Last month a United Nations panel called for the prisons to be shut down. But the administration's response to all of this has been defiance.

When dozens of inmates went on hunger strikes last year, the authorities strapped them into metal "restraint chairs" and ordered doctors to force-feed them. Military officials said they did this only to inmates on the brink of death, but The Times has reported that the restraint chair was used on all hunger strikers, regardless of their condition.

Medical groups were overwhelmingly appalled by this practice, but the Pentagon issued new rules this month reaffirming that military doctors can be ordered to force-feed prisoners. The only role for psychiatrists at Gitmo seems to be to help prepare prisoners for interrogation.

So it was not surprising in the least when inmates attempted suicide. Twenty-three tried to kill themselves over eight days in August 2003, but the military covered it up for 18 months. Now, three inmates have succeeded. Camp officials say one was a mid- or high-level Qaeda operative. One was captured in Afghanistan (doing what, we're not sure), and the other was from something the camp commander, Rear Adm. Harry Harris Jr., called a splinter group.

Admiral Harris's response was as appalling as the suicides. "I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us," he said. The inmates, he said, "have no regard for life, neither ours nor their own."

These comments reveal a profound disassociation from humanity. They say more about why Guantánamo Bay should be closed than any United Nations report ever could.

Posted by vicki at 07:52 AM

What Can You Say?

Posted by vicki at 09:07 PM

This is beyond the pale. Be careful what you type because Big Brother is definitely watching. This is chilling

Pentagon sets its sights on social networking websites

"I AM continually shocked and appalled at the details people voluntarily post online about themselves." So says Jon Callas, chief security officer at PGP, a Silicon Valley-based maker of encryption software. He is far from alone in noticing that fast-growing social networking websites such as MySpace and Friendster are a snoop's dream.

New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon's National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks. And it could harness advances in internet technology - specifically the forthcoming "semantic web" championed by the web standards organisation W3C - to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals.

Americans are still reeling from last month's revelations that the NSA has been logging phone calls since the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. The Congressional Research Service, which advises the US legislature, says phone companies that surrendered call records may have acted illegally. However, the White House insists that the terrorist threat makes existing wire-tapping legislation out of date and is urging Congress not to investigate the NSA's action.

Meanwhile, the NSA is pursuing its plans to tap the web, since phone logs have limited scope. They can only be used to build a very basic picture of someone's contact network, a process sometimes called "connecting the dots". Clusters of people in highly connected groups become apparent, as do people with few connections who appear to be the intermediaries between such groups. The idea is to see by how many links or "degrees" separate people from, say, a member of a blacklisted organisation.

By adding online social networking data to its phone analyses, the NSA could connect people at deeper levels, through shared activities, such as taking flying lessons. Typically, online social networking sites ask members to enter details of their immediate and extended circles of friends, whose blogs they might follow. People often list other facets of their personality including political, sexual, entertainment, media and sporting preferences too. Some go much further, and a few have lost their jobs by publicly describing drinking and drug-taking exploits. Young people have even been barred from the orthodox religious colleges that they are enrolled in for revealing online that they are gay.

"You should always assume anything you write online is stapled to your resumé. People don't realise you get Googled just to get a job interview these days," says Callas.

Other data the NSA could combine with social networking details includes information on purchases, where we go (available from cellphone records, which cite the base station a call came from) and what major financial transactions we make, such as buying a house.
"You should always assume anything you write online is stapled to your resumé"

Right now this is difficult to do because today's web is stuffed with data in incompatible formats. Enter the semantic web, which aims to iron out these incompatibilities over the next few years via a common data structure called the Resource Description Framework (RDF). W3C hopes that one day every website will use RDF to give each type of data a unique, predefined, unambiguous tag.

"RDF turns the web into a kind of universal spreadsheet that is readable by computers as well as people," says David de Roure at the University of Southampton in the UK, who is an adviser to W3C. "It means that you will be able to ask a website questions you couldn't ask before, or perform calculations on the data it contains." In a health record, for instance, a heart attack will have the same semantic tag as its more technical description, a myocardial infarction. Previously, they would have looked like separate medical conditions. Each piece of numerical data, such as the rate of inflation or the number of people killed on the roads, will also get a tag.

The advantages for scientists, for instance, could be huge: they will have unprecedented access to each other's experimental datasets and will be able to perform their own analyses on them. Searching for products such as holidays will become easier as price and availability dates will have smart tags, allowing powerful searches across hundreds of sites.

On the downside, this ease of use will also make prying into people's lives a breeze. No plan to mine social networks via the semantic web has been announced by the NSA, but its interest in the technology is evident in a funding footnote to a research paper delivered at the W3C's WWW2006 conference in Edinburgh, UK, in late May.

That paper, entitled Semantic Analytics on Social Networks, by a research team led by Amit Sheth of the University of Georgia in Athens and Anupam Joshi of the University of Maryland in Baltimore reveals how data from online social networks and other databases can be combined to uncover facts about people. The footnote said the work was part-funded by an organisation called ARDA.

Posted by vicki at 09:35 AM | Comments (1)

Worst Person In The World!

EEEEEEEEWWWWWW! I've never seen such a vile, hateful exchange on TV in my life. Here's the link for Media Matters For America where you can watch the clip and read a brief rundown of the despicable quotable quotes from the biggest bitch on earth. There should be no MSM forum for her vile sputterings. Try not to gag. as you watch the unhinged wingnut.

And on a related matter, here's a link to
*The Brad Blog* which has several links to news stories about Coulter's alleged Florida voter fraud. Voter fraud is a felony, which would bar Coulter from voting in Florida. Hahahahahahahaha!

"On her her Palm Beach, Florida voter registration form, which The BRAD BLOG also exclusively posted in April, she knowingly signed an "oath" below the section where she knowingly wrote the the address of her realtor's agent instead of her own.

That signature affirms that all the information on the form was true. And that, the purported constitutional attorney Coulter, understood "that if it is not true, I can be convicted of a felony of the third degree and fined up to $5,000 and/or imprisoned for up to five years."

And finally this, again from the NY Post article, which would seem to do little but add to both her personal PR problems (though we know she doesn't give a shit about that) and, more importantly, her legal problems:

She said the reporters who wrote about the case are "all retarded" and accused Palm Beach officials of having a sexually transmitted disease.

"I think the syphilis has gone to their brains," she said. "This is all false, I'm telling you."

Posted by vicki at 10:17 AM | Comments (3)

DL member, Robin Garr's restaurant reviews in Leo are well written and very informative. Check out the latest review of "Proof" restaurant. Hint: Lunch for a party of 4 was $150.00 Lunch, anyone?

Read before you make that reservation.

Posted by vicki at 09:50 AM

After much begging, wailing and gnashing of teeth, I've decided to give W one more chance to come to DL again. There are rules, however: No more *blow*, no excessive drinking and for God's sake, put some pants on!

Posted by vicki at 03:18 PM

Word! From the The Ostroy Report

The Busheviks and Gay Marriage: The Hypocrisy is Enough to Make You Sick

Yesterday I reported on President Bush's White House speech in support of the anti-gay marriage scam called the Marriage Protection Amendment, and how the NY Post said that a Bush pal told Newsweek that the president is using this purely as a political ploy, and couldn't "give a shit" about whether gays marry or not. That Bush is politicizing the issue, or that he's lying about it, is surely enough to anger and frustrate. But after an entire day of hearing about the speech, and seeing Bush repeatedly on network and cable news pandering to the right wing Christian conservative freaks, I'm now seething over this criminal, corrupt and ammoral administration.

The hypocrisy is enough to make you gag. Back in the 90's, well-known Repuglican philanderers like Bob Barr, Bob Livingston, Henry Hyde and Newt Gingrich shoved their mistresses to the side just long enough to impeach Bill Clinton over his marital indescretions. Supposedly closeted gays like Rep. David Dreier (R-CA) and RNC chair Ken Mehlman discriminate against gays at every possible political turn. How about "Randy Randy" Cunningham, the Viagra-poppin' geriatric former congressman who cavorted in DC hotel suites with his Repuglican pals and a bevvy of prostitutes courtesy of GOP sycophant Brent Wilkes? And let's not forget male sex whore Jeff Gannon, who somehow managed to cop himself highly coveted White House press credentials, let alone a likely feel from some high-up Bushevik (or maybe the prez himself??). Or the countless congressmen and senators who are cheating on their wives with lobbyists, staffers and pages. Whatever happened to that wise old adage, "people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones?"

I am disgusted by this hypocrisy, and by what's happening in our country today. By how the Repuglicans have used hatred and prejudice to divide and conquer and turn American against American for political purposes. I am sick and tired of the Bushevik monarchy's lies. The deception. The arrogance. The self-righteousness. The double-standards. Their do-as-I-say, not-as-I-do mantra. This is a gang that would make the Roman Emperor Tiberius proud.

The GOP had the unmitigated gall to send its press secretary, Tony SnowJob, before reporters Monday to arrogantly declare that those seeking to ban gay marriage are fighting for "civil rights." I thought gays fighting for civil rights was a civil rights issue. Pardon my confusion.

It's time we say to the Bush administration and to the Repuglican party, stop insulting us with this gay-marriage non-issue. Enough. We're mad as hell, and we're not gonna take it anymore. And you're gonna see that in the polls come November. Focus your time and energies on fixing what you broke in this country. End the damn war. Shore up homeland security. Bring down the debt. Get gas prices back to reasonable levels. Stop insulting our intelligence with this asinine campaign to distract voters from the real problems in this country. And stop using gays as your political pinatas. They are some of the brightest, most creative, caring and endearing people I've met in my life. You could learn from them. They are not the problem. You are. If you're so worried about the sanctity and preservation of your precious marriages, keep your roving dicks in your pants. This may come as a shock to you, but cheating on your wife will cause a lot more damage to your marriage than two gay dudes tying the knot up in Massachusettes.

Posted by vicki at 08:58 AM | Comments (2)

I had no idea there was such a thing as full time workers being homeless. What a disgrace. Meanwhile, the Senate is gearing up to do away with the estate tax for the super rich and the House is voting on cuts in school aid, health programs and social programs. Makes me want to holler! Here's the rest of the story.

Working, but still homeless
Number needing help on the rise in Louisville, new report finds

By Marcus Green
magreen@courier-journal.com
The Courier-Journal

It wasn't long ago that Jenifer Haysley was a methamphetamine addict who slept wherever she could find a place to crash, with friends and family and strangers -- even living out of an ex-boyfriend's car when she had nowhere else to turn.

Now the 25-year-old former exotic dancer works full time as a cook for Bristol Catering and heads home each day to a two-bedroom apartment as part of a Society of St. Vincent de Paul program that offers transitional housing for the homeless.

Haysley is among the more than 3,000 people who last year made up Louisville's working homeless, a growing segment of the estimated 11,251 men, women and children who received homeless services in 2005.

"I don't like being a statistic," said Haysley, who hopes someday to buy a house and attend college. "It doesn't make me feel great. But at the same time, you know, I do what I can do -- and I got myself in this situation."

It's a situation that more people find themselves in around Louisville. The number of people using homeless services such as shelters and soup kitchens grew 2 percent last year and is up 8 percent since 2002, according to the latest census of the city's homeless.

The annual report, to be released this morning by the Coalition for the Homeless, suggests that Louisville's homeless population is rising slower than the national average, but it contains an increasing number of high school graduates and workers.

The coalition, an umbrella agency that coordinates 27 service providers and other members, says the 2005 report indicates that more people in the city's shelters and programs are employed -- but working for low wages.

"A lot of them work but they work minimum wage, so as long as we pay just $5.15 an hour, they're going to be homeless the rest of their life," said Sister Mary Kathleen Sheehan, director of the St. John Center on Muhammad Ali Boulevard, which serves 160 to 200 men each day.

More than one-quarter of the homeless surveyed said they were working part- or full-time jobs, up slightly from the year before, the report says. One-third of those workers earned less than $10 an hour.

That's less than the $10.83 an hour a worker needs to rent an average two-bedroom apartment in metro Louisville, according to the coalition.

It's likely that Louisville's total homeless count is much higher than the census shows because those who didn't seek services or who were turned away because shelters were full weren't counted -- nor were about 1,000 Hurricane Katrina evacuees who received homeless services.

Also, said coalition spokeswoman Rachel Hurst, the number of people younger than 17 who live on their own was more accurately reflected than in the past.

The homeless census showed more single men and women who used services last year, but fewer children in families.

More people with high school degrees used homeless services -- about 30 percent, compared with 21 percent in 2004.

There also was a nearly 2 percent rise in homeless people who identified themselves as veterans.

Marlene Gordon, the coalition's executive director, said she's particularly concerned about the rise of women military veterans. That group rose to 40 in 2005 from the just one the year before.

"That's a tremendous increase," she said.

Veteran Joan "Jackie" Miller, 59, became homeless last year after her mother died and she suffered a bout of depression.

Miller, who said she served in the Army, now works a third-shift job repairing cell phones and receives counseling services. She lives in a tidy apartment as part of a transitional housing program for women veterans managed by Interlink Counseling Services.

Posted by vicki at 08:02 AM | Comments (1)

It's BAAAAAAAAAAck! From last week's blog. Robert Kennedy's article in the Rolling Stone.

Was the 2004 Election Stolen? [ummmmm, yeppers!]

Finally! A respectable inquirey into another questionable election result! Is nothing sacred where our votes don't count due to vote suppresion and voter fraud? See post down thread detailing how the GOP plans even more voter suppression in '08. The right calls us un-American? Really good read, here.

Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House. BY ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.

Like many Americans, I spent the evening of the 2004 election watching the returns on television and wondering how the exit polls, which predicted an overwhelming victory for John Kerry, had gotten it so wrong. By midnight, the official tallies showed a decisive lead for George Bush -- and the next day, lacking enough legal evidence to contest the results, Kerry conceded. Republicans derided anyone who expressed doubts about Bush's victory as nut cases in ''tinfoil hats,'' while the national media, with few exceptions, did little to question the validity of the election. The Washington Post immediately dismissed allegations of fraud as ''conspiracy theories,''(1) and The New York Times declared that ''there is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale.''(2)

But despite the media blackout, indications continued to emerge that something deeply troubling had taken place in 2004. Nearly half of the 6 million American voters living abroad(3) never received their ballots -- or received them too late to vote(4) -- after the Pentagon unaccountably shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations.(5) A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states,(6) was discovered shredding Democratic registrations.(7) In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes,(8) malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots.(9) Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, as many as 1 million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment -- roughly one for every 100 cast.(10)

Posted by vicki at 09:49 PM

How much more abuse are we expected to take from the Republicans refusal to stand up for our rights? Specter had promised to hold hearings about the phone companies spying on us and collecting data without court warrents. He lied. Again. He backs down every time the WH tells him to. Somebody needs to tell these folks they swore to uphold the Constitution. Instead, they hold it in contempt. Do we have to BRIBE them to make them do thier jobs?

By John Diamond, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — A last-minute deal Tuesday with Vice President Cheney averted a possible confrontation between the Senate Judiciary Committee and U.S. telephone companies about the National Security Agency's database of customer calling records.

The deal was announced by Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., the committee chairman, and Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah. They said Cheney, who plays a key role supervising NSA counterterrorism efforts, promised that the Bush administration would consider legislation proposed by Specter that would place a domestic surveillance program under scrutiny of a special federal court.

In return, Specter agreed to postpone indefinitely asking executives from the nation's telecommunication companies to testify about another program in which the NSA collects records of domestic calls.

If passed, Specter's legislation would give the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court power to oversee the NSA program and render an opinion on the constitutionality of conducting domestic surveillance without a warrant. The court, established by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), normally considers case-by-case requests by intelligence agencies to conduct surveillance inside the USA.

The deal prompted protests from Democratic lawmakers, who said the Republican-controlled Congress had refused to challenge the administration's expansion of presidential authority. "Why don't we just recess for the rest of the year, and the vice president will just tell the nation what laws we'll have?" said Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, ranking Democrat on the committee.

Specter has challenged the administration to justify the legality of intelligence programs inside the country.

After the hearing, Specter said his hand had been forced by the telephone companies' refusal to discuss classified programs. Representatives of more than one company — which ones were not specified in the meeting — agreed to appear, Specter said, but told the panel they would not talk about classified information. Hatch said President Bush "is willing to work with us as long as it doesn't detract from the president's constitutional powers."

Posted by vicki at 10:14 AM | Comments (1)

They don't even bother being subtle about it. It doesn't get more un-American than this. Full Editorial here

Editorial
Block the Vote, Ohio Remix
Published: June 7, 2006

If there was ever a sign of a ruling party in trouble, it is a game plan that calls for trying to win by discouraging voting.

The latest sign that Republicans have an election-year strategy to shut down voter registration drives comes from Ohio. As the state gears up for a very competitive election season this fall, its secretary of state, J. Kenneth Blackwell, has put in place "emergency" regulations that could hit voter registration workers with criminal penalties for perfectly legitimate registration practices. The rules are so draconian they could shut down registration drives in Ohio.

Mr. Blackwell, who also happens to be the Republican candidate for governor this year, has a history of this sort of behavior. In 2004, he instructed county boards of elections to reject any registrations on paper of less than 80-pound stock — about the thickness of a postcard. His order was almost certainly illegal, and he retracted it after he came under intense criticism. It was, however, in place long enough to get some registrations tossed out.

This year, Mr. Blackwell's office has issued rules and materials that appear to require that paid registration workers, and perhaps even volunteers, personally take the forms they collect to an election office. Organizations that run registration drives generally have the people who register voters bring the forms back to supervisors, who can then review them for errors. Under Mr. Blackwell's edict, everyone involved could be committing a crime. Mr. Blackwell's rules also appear to prohibit people who register voters from sending the forms in by mail. That rule itself may violate federal elections law.
[...]

Mr. Blackwell and other politicians who insist on making it harder to vote never say, of course, that they are worried that get-out-the-vote drives will bring too many poor and minority voters into the system. They say that they want to reduce fraud. However, there is virtually no evidence that registration drives are leading to fraud at the polls.

But there is one clear way that Ohio's election system is corrupt. Decisions about who can vote are being made by a candidate for governor. Mr. Blackwell should hand over responsibility for elections to a decision maker whose only loyalty is to the voters and the law.

Posted by vicki at 08:43 AM | Comments (1)

Zippity-Do-Da! Joe Lieberman is getting dissed.

From Yahoo news, but check out all the links to the *right* side of this page to grasp the righteous anger and indignation at Lieberman's support for the Iraq invasion and a whole host of Bu$h initiatives to get the full picture of why Liberals have deserted him. He's no Liberal! And he doesn't represent the values of his constituents. Article in entirety here

Lieberman faces showdown over Iraq

By John Whitesides, Political Correspondent Mon Jun 5, 3:46 PM ET

Challenger Ned Lamont's underdog bid to unseat Lieberman in Democratic-leaning Connecticut could offer an early gauge of the intensity of anti-war sentiment ahead of November's midterm elections, along with a measure of the influence of the Internet activists and bloggers who have flocked to his cause.

"Senator Lieberman has cheered on the president every step of the way when it comes to the invasion of Iraq, and he is too quick to compromise on core Democratic principles," Lamont, a businessman and former Greenwich town selectman, told Reuters.

"He's wrong on the big issues of the day and he is not challenging the Bush administration," added Lamont, who qualified for the August 8 primary ballot by winning 33 percent of the delegates at the state party convention last month.

Lieberman, who has not faced a tough re-election race since entering the U.S. Senate 18 years ago, has been stirred by the challenge, stepping up his state schedule and launching a television ad attacking Lamont for votes he cast in Greenwich.

Lieberman acknowledges his support for the war runs counter to sentiment in Connecticut, where a recent poll found more than 60 percent of voters believe the war is wrong. But he also points to a poll showing just 15 percent of state voters would support a candidate based solely on his position on Iraq.

"On the war, I've done what I thought was right for my country. I obviously haven't done it for political reasons," Lieberman told Reuters.

Hahahahahahahahaha! Oh really?

Posted by vicki at 11:43 AM | Comments (2)

666 Indeedy. Cheered on by Bu$hCo, Congress is itching to break the bank again to aid the poor, suffering super rich. Awww, the humanity!

Editorial
The Estate Tax, Back on the Agenda

Published: June 6, 2006

Still giddy over the passage last month of a $70 billion income tax cut for affluent Americans, Senate Republicans are hoping this week to go further, and gut the federal estate tax. And they'll probably try to accomplish this gift to the super-rich under the guise of compromise.

Their fondest wish would be to permanently repeal the tax. But planning, during a time of war, to give away nearly $1 trillion over 10 years may look too radical even for this crowd. So the senators are also considering a so-called middle-of-the-road approach. Sponsored by Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona, the "compromise" would drastically raise the thresholds at which the estate tax kicks in, while slashing the estate tax rate. Together, those changes would cut taxes for the wealthiest families by $652 billion between 2012 and 2021, the first full decade of the proposed cut. Because the government would need to borrow to make up for that lost revenue, the tax cut would also cost all taxpayers some $175 billion in higher interest payments.

And for what? Fully 71 percent of the additional benefits would go to people who stand to inherit more than $10 million. Almost all of the rest would apply to estates worth more than $5 million.

Posted by vicki at 07:04 AM | Comments (2)

Thanks to Larry Hovekamp for passing this along.

DAMAGED CARE

The Acclaimed TV Movie about "in-Humana" medical care- the story about local physician and HMO critic Dr. Linda Peeno and her fight against corporate malpractice!!!

Dr. Peeno, who appeared on numerous television documentaries, news programs, talk shows and U.S. and Canadian commissions, will speak and present this film!!

Starring Laura Dern

-Free- discussion to follow

Wednesday, JUNE 7 - 6:30 p.m.
James Lee Presbyterian Church
1741 Frankfort Ave.

Sponsored by Kentuckians for Single-Payer Healthcare

Posted by Maria at 10:38 PM

It is depressing that the GOP controled Congress has utterly failed their Constitutional duty to act as a check on executive branch of government. They have stood by as Bu$h treats legislation they pass as meaningless. The only time they have reacted negatively to Bu$h's law breaking and Constitution shredding is when one of their own became a victim of of his overreach. Into the void comes the American Bar Association The Boston Globe reports:

Meeting in New Orleans, the board of governors for the world's largest association of legal professionals approved the creation of an all-star legal panel with a number of members from both political parties.

They include a former federal appeals court chief judge, a former FBI director, and several prominent scholars -- to evaluate Bush's assertions that he has the power to ignore laws that conflict with his interpretation of the Constitution.

Bush has appended statements to new laws when he signs them, noting which provisions he believes interfere with his powers.

Among the laws Bush has challenged are the ban on torturing detainees, oversight provisions in the USA Patriot Act, and ``whistle-blower" protections for federal employees.

The challenges also have included safeguards against political interference in taxpayer-funded research.

Bush has challenged more laws than all previous presidents combined.

The ABA's president, Michael Greco, said in an interview that he proposed the task force because he believes the scope and aggressiveness of Bush's signing statements may raise serious constitutional concerns. He said the ABA, which has more than 400,000 members, has a duty to speak out about such legal issues to the public, the courts, and Congress.

``The American Bar Association feels a very serious obligation to ensure that when there are legal issues that affect the American people, the ABA adopts a policy regarding such issues and then speaks out about it," Greco said. ``In this instance, the president's practice of attaching signing statements to laws squarely presents a constitutional issue about the separation of powers among the three branches."

The signing statements task force, which was recruited by Greco, a longtime Boston lawyer who served on former Governor William F. Weld's Judicial Nominating Council, includes several Republicans. Among them are Mickey Edwards , a former Oklahoma representative from 1977 to 1993, and Bruce Fein , a Justice Department official under President Reagan.

In interviews, several of the panel members said they were going into the project with an open mind, but they expressed concerns about Bush's actions.

``I think one of the most critical issues in the country right now is the extent to which the White House has tried to expand its powers and basically tried to cut the legislative branch out of its own constitutionally equal role, and the signing statements are a particularly egregious example of that," Edwards said. ``I've been doing a lot of speaking and writing about this, and when the ABA said they were looking to take a position on signing statements, I said that's serious because those people carry a lot of weight."

Posted by vicki at 11:24 AM | Comments (2)

The date for the opening of An Inconvenient Truth has been changed to June 16 at the Baxter Ave. Theater. Enjoy the trailer. It should be an awesome DL event. More details and updates to come.

Click here

Posted by vicki at 10:38 AM | Comments (1)

" [I]f only the non-Fox press didn't concentrate on car bombs in Baghdad."

Frank Rich, of the New York Times, lays it out for you. Under the supposed *leadership* of Commander In Incompetence, Bu$h, Iraq is a total FUBAR. Here's a snip:

Now more than 70 journalists have died in Iraq, more than in any modern war, including two members of a CBS News crew killed in the bombing that injured the correspondent Kimberly Dozier. This tragedy also took place on Memorial Day, which Ms. Dozier was honoring by trying to do one of those Iraq "good news" stories that the administration faults the press for ignoring: the story of an American soldier who, despite having been injured, was "fighting on in memory of those who have fallen," as she had e-mailed colleagues. Once that good-news story died in the bombing, so, one imagines, did the administration strategy of pinning the bad news in Iraq on the reporters who risk their lives to hang in there. Or so, in the name of simple decency, we might hope.

Those reporters, at least, have the right to leave. Not so the troops. General Batiste's observation about the "almost surreal" disconnect between the home front and the war is damningly true, even in Washington. As the violence in both Iraq and Afghanistan spiraled before and after Memorial Day, Congress kept its eye on its own ball. In a bipartisan display of honor among thieves, Democrats and Republicans banded together to decry the F.B.I. for searching the office of a Democratic congressman, William Jefferson, who had been accused of hiding $90,000 in questionable cash in his freezer. Even more ludicrously, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales — a man who damaged our troops incalculably by countenancing an official policy of torture — finally threatened to resign on principle. The principle he was standing up for, however, was not the Geneva Conventions but the F.B.I.'s right to raid Mr. Jefferson's office.

Contrast these clowns with J. W. Fulbright, a senator who convened hearings to challenge presidents from both parties during Vietnam, changing the nation's course. The current Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, has proudly put on this month's legislative agenda constitutional amendments to stop same-sex marriage and flag burning. "Right now people in this country are saying it's O.K. to desecrate that flag and to burn it," he said on Fox News last Sunday, though it's not clear exactly who these traitors are. A Nexis search turns up only one semi-recent American flag-burning incident — by a drunk and apparently apolitical teenager in Mr. Frist's home state, Tennessee, in 2005.

The marriage-amendment campaign will be kicked off tomorrow with a Rose Garden benediction by the president. Though the amendment has no chance of passing, Mr. Bush apparently still thinks, as he did in 2004, that gay-baiting remains just the diversion to distract from a war gone south. [my bold]

So much for the troops. For all the politicians' talk about honoring those who serve, Washington's record is derelict: chronic shortages in body and Humvee armor; a back-door draft forcing troops with expired contracts into repeated deployments; inadequate postwar health care and veterans' benefits. And that's just the short list. Now a war without end is running off the rails and putting an undermanned army in still greater jeopardy. "Today, the Americans are just one more militia lost in the anarchy," Nir Rosen, who has covered Iraq since the invasion, wrote in The Washington Post last weekend.

We can't pretend we don't know this is happening. It's happening in broad daylight. We know that "as the Iraqis stand up, we'll stand down" is fiction, not reality. We know from the Pentagon's own report to Congress last week that attacks on Americans and Iraqis alike are at their highest since American commanders started keeping count in 2004. We know that even as coalition partners like Italy and South Korea bail out, we are planning an indefinite stay of undefined parameters: the 104-acre embassy complex rising in the Green Zone is the largest in the world, and the Decider himself has said that it's up to "future presidents and future governments of Iraq" to decide our exit strategy.

Actually, the current government of Iraq already is. On Thursday the latest American-backed Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, whom Mr. Bush is "proud to call" his "ally and friend," invited open warfare on American forces by accusing them of conducting Haditha-like killing sprees against civilians as a "regular" phenomenon. If this is the ally and friend we are fighting for, a country that truly supports the troops has no choice but to start bringing them home. [end snip]

We need to un-elect the folks who back this mis-administration.!

Posted by vicki at 12:32 PM | Comments (2)

In case you missed Countdown with Kieth Olberman because you were Drinking Liberally with us, here is the video and partial transcript of the smackdown. Bill O'Reilly is an ignorant bully and a horses ass. Keith gave him exactly what he had coming. From Crooks and Liars website.

Posted by vicki at 10:32 AM | Comments (2)

I guess this flew under the radar for me. Evangelical prisons? Get OUT of here! More Constitution busting by Bu$hCo. Tell me again what impeachment is supposed to be a remedy for. Once again this admin spits at the constitution's seperation of church and state to satisfy the extrexist fundies. OY.

Court Rejects Evangelical Prison Plan Over State Aid

By NEELA BANERJEE
Published: June 3, 2006

WASHINGTON, June 2 — A federal judge in Iowa ruled Friday that a state-financed evangelical Christian program to help inmates re-enter society was "pervasively sectarian" and violated the separation of church and state.

The decision has set the stage for an appeals process that is expected to explore more broadly the constitutionality of the Bush administration's religion-based initiative programs, according to plaintiffs, defendants and legal experts.

Prison programs run by religious groups have increased over the last decade or so, as policy makers, prison and law enforcement officials and prisoner advocates have focused on the high rates of recidivism when inmates return to society, said Robert Tuttle, a law professor at George Washington University who is an expert on religion-based initiatives. Proponents of such programs in prisons have said that the transformative experience of religion can counter recidivism.

In April, the Justice Department announced plans to begin a religious-based program, offered in a single faith, in at least a half-dozen federal prisons, according to legal analysts and critics of the program.

The case was filed more