If you want a clearer view of what's going on try the foreign press.

From Germany: Bush: The Great Failure
Really sounds complimentary doesn't it?

From the Financial Times Analysis: Bush tries to buy some time
What for? Why, to try to wash the blood off his hands.

From The Yemen Observer, Yemen
Gulf States Must Avoid American Recklessness
This really inspires confidence.

From Tunis Hebdo, Tunisia
Sacrilege Against Islam:
This is how the whole region sees Shrub's 'plan'.

Is This What Bush Wants?

Who you gonna bomb? Bomb Persia!! (Iran)

Shrub is pushing. Cheyeny is pushing. Condy is buying shoes...
...So who is going to come to their senses and stop this insanity, before Shrub causes that world wide terrorism he keeps prattling about.
If we attack Iran, we will really have screwed the pooch.
Jeff Huber at Pen and Sword

In case you hadn't noticed, we're being manipulated toward another war. The run-up to an attack on Iran is in full swing, and the justification for it is shifting as fast as the justification for invading Iraq did. And it appears that the media is being as compliant in echoing the Bush administration's message on Iran as it was in supporting their Iraq propaganda.

Thanks to Steven D of Booman Tribune for calling our attention to this scintillating piece of propaganda from a CNN report posted on Wednesday:

Iranian-U.S. tensions have been ratcheted up recently, with two U.S. officials theorizing about the possibility that Iran was involved in a January 20 attack that killed five U.S. soldiers.

Two officials from separate U.S. government agencies said Tuesday the Pentagon is investigating whether the attack on a military compound in Karbala was carried out by Iranians or Iranian-trained operatives.

[...]We've become so inured to hearing from "unnamed sources" that we hardly question any more why the sources are left unidentified or how credible they are, or what their motivations in talking to the media might be.

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This is so very wrong. This should be grounds for impeachment.

Troops are being taken from their families and sent halfway around the world to serve their country. When, or if they return, this is the thanks they get. For this reason alone Bush, Cheney and all their rancid cohort must, as Shrub likes to put it, "receive justice".
Bob Geiger

Jonathan Schulze was a United States Marine.

He died earlier this month at the age of 25 -- not in Iraq, but back home, in Minnesota.

He died of wounds received during his seven-month tour of duty in Iraq, wounds different from the ones that earned Schulze two purple hearts. This young man died of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, of wounds to the soul and not the flesh. He died because the government that was there to send him far away to fight in 2004 wasn't there for him when he got home.

[...]On January 11, 2007, accompanied by his parents, he went to the VA hospital in St. Cloud, Minnesota and told people at that VA facility that he was thinking of killing himself. They told Schulze that they could not admit him as a patient and sent him on his way.

The next day, January 12, Schulze called the VA, reiterating that he was feeling suicidal. He was told that he was number 26 on the waiting list.

A man who had risked his life in Iraq and done everything that was asked of him by the United States government, was told by that same government that his sacrifice would be repaid by being 26th on a list of Veterans similarly crying out for help.

[...]On January 16, Schulze called his family and told them that he was going to do it -- he was going to kill himself. His family called the local police, who raced to his house, kicked in his door and found him hanging from an electrical cord.

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Global Climate Change, even the scientists who disagreed now agree. It's coming!

Carl at Simply Left Behind

The smartest quote I've seen about global warming is in this article:

"Hell, we buy fire insurance based on a 1 per cent chance," [Professor Stephen Schneider, a climate consultant to the US government for more than 30 years] said. "If we're going to be risk averse … we cannot dismiss the possibility of potentially catastrophic outliers and that includes Greenland and West Antarctica [ice sheets breaking up], massive species extinctions, intensified hurricanes and all those things. "There's at least a 10 per cent chance of that. And that to me for a society is too high a risk … My value judgement when you're talking about planetary life support systems is that 10 per cent, my God, that's Russian roulette with a Luger."

More at My Left Wing

I'm done trying to explain to every subscriber of National Review exactly why it is that thickening of the center of the Antarctic ice sheet is actually evidence of global warming, rather than a refutation. I'm sick of laying out the evidence once again why this isn't just a "natural fluctuation."

So I'll tell you what I'm going to do next: make them defend themselves to me, using the 1% doctrine.

For those of you who don't know what the "1% doctrine" is, allow me to explain: it's supposedly the foreign policy doctrine conceived by Dick Cheney and can be explained as follows:

In his heralded new book, "The One Percent Doctrine," Ron Suskind writes that Vice President Dick Cheney forcefully stated that the war on terror empowered the Bush administration to act without the need for evidence or extensive analysis.

Suskind describes the Cheney doctrine as follows: "Even if there's just a 1 percent chance of the unimaginable coming due, act as if it is a certainty. It's not about 'our analysis,' as Cheney said. It's about 'our response.' ... Justified or not, fact-based or not, 'our response' is what matters. As to 'evidence,' the bar was set so low that the word itself almost didn't apply."

[...]I'm done being scientific and rational. I think it's time to operate on the "fear" principle instead. After all: if your average Republican can continue to justify spending $500 billion and the lives of over 3,000 American soldiers to supposedly justify averting the 1% risk of another September 11th, how much more, then, should we all be willing to spend--or perhaps even sacrifice our lives?--to avert the possibility of seeing Ground Zero under water?

[...]From now on, the next time I hear a conservative lament the effect that the Kyoto protocol, or raising CAFE standards, or any other such admission of responsibility, would do to our economy, I won't try to argue back. I'll just say:

I'd like to see how well the NYSE performs underwater.

FBI 'Hoovering' the internet. What kind thoughts have you expressed about Chairman Dubya lately?

After reading this, you might want to re-read this post.

Declan McCullagh at CNet News

The FBI appears to have adopted an invasive Internet surveillance technique that collects far more data on innocent Americans than previously has been disclosed.

Instead of recording only what a particular suspect is doing, agents conducting investigations appear to be assembling the activities of thousands of Internet users at a time into massive databases, according to current and former officials. That database can subsequently be queried for names, e-mail addresses or keywords.

Such a technique is broader and potentially more intrusive than the FBI's Carnivore surveillance system, later renamed DCS1000. It raises concerns similar to those stirred by widespread Internet monitoring that the National Security Agency is said to have done, according to documents that have surfaced in one federal lawsuit, and may stretch the bounds of what's legally permissible.

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Do you really think that this DOJ under this AG, in this (mis)Administration cares if it's not legally permissible?

Our little Churchills

If you don't think Dubya is the greatest thing since sliced bread... You must be a 'terrist' sympathiser!

Glenn Greenwald at Unclaimed Territory
We've now arrived at the point where the White House and its followers reflexively characterize any criticism of the Leader's war of any kind as aid to the Enemy and an attack on our troops. They don't even bother any more to pretend that some types of criticism are "acceptable." It is now the duty of every patriotic American to cheer enthusiastically for the President's decisions. Anything else is tantamount to siding with the Enemy.

Yesterday, Hillary Clinton, whose criticism of the war has been as muted and restrained as can be, "accused President Bush of trying to pass the problems in Iraq on to the next president and described his actions as 'the height of irresponsibility.'" The White House's immediate response: that is a "partisan attack that sends the wrong message to our troops, our enemies and the Iraqi people." That's the only response the Bush movement now even bothers to make: those who speak against the Leader hate the troops and help the Enemy.

...Churchill would have recoiled -- he did recoil -- at their argument that criticism of the Leader and the war are improper and hurts the war effort. Churchill repeatedly made the opposite argument -- that one of the strengths of democracies is that leaders are held to account for their decisions and that those decisions are subject to intense and vigorous debate, especially in war. In January, 1942, Britian had suffered a series of defeats and failures (which Churchill candidly acknowledged and for which he took responsibility), and he therefore addressed the House of Commons and insisted that a public debate be held in order to determine whether he still had the confidence of the House of Commons in his conduct of the war (h/t MD):

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As he takes you away, in the night, with no witnesses, the cop said " got yer Habeas Corpus right here!"

This is as plain as it gets. You really need to reflect on this one. You could easily end up in Syria with wires connected to your genitals and needles under your fingernails. And. No. One. Need. Know. Anything. At. All.

Larry Beinhart in Huffington

"Don't really care who you claim to be, and the charge is none of your business," says the more talkative of the two officers, or soldiers, or whoever is grabbing you.

"Wait, let me tell my family and call my lawyer," you say.

"Not a chance," says the friendly police person, cuffing you and throwing a bag over your head.

"Blouff, blouff, blouff," you cry through the hood.

"That'll teach you to sneer at the president," says the talkative officer, kicking you to make you move. "And undermine his War on Terror!"

"It's not against the law to sneer," you try to say, but they can't hear you. And neither will anyone else, because you have no right of Habeas Corpus.

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It's good to know that there will always be Commissars. Dubya has created a new crop!

Steven D at Booman Tribune

You remember the Commissar from old Cold War era movies, don't you? He or she was a political officer attached to a department of the Soviet government (including the Soviet military) to ensure compliance with the official dictates of the Communist party by all government employees and soldiers. Well, guess what Mr. Unitary Executive has just gone and adopted by executive order, straight out of the Stalinist-Leninist handbook (via The New York Times):

In an executive order published last week in the Federal Register, Mr. Bush said that each agency must have a regulatory policy office run by a political appointee, to supervise the development of rules and documents providing guidance to regulated industries. The White House will thus have a gatekeeper in each agency to analyze the costs and the benefits of new rules and to make sure the agencies carry out the president’s priorities.

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Look out for the not-so-Back Door Draft

Steve at The News Blog

I have written many times about the erosion of the United States Army's capability to wage large scale war. Our equipment is in shambles (one major reason why it is taking so long to get a mere 21,000 soldiers deployed) and our end strength is a wreck. While everyone parses statements to support one side of this argument or the other, I tend to look at the actions. And the actions show a Country's military in desperate need of help.

One of these actions is the back door draft of the Individual Ready Reserve. The purpose of this post is to educate people to the wide expanse of this program; basically taking untrained civilians who after years of being out of the military, are being forced back in and being "retrained" for new jobs.

[...]So, you now see that the military is continuing its Back Door Draft with a vengenance. Publicly they say it is because of the "unique skills" we have in the IRR but as I have proven, many are being reclassed into skills they are untrained for. And, in the end, good men and women are dying.

Once they run out of these soldiers, which will be very soon, they will come after your sons and daughters in a full draft. It is only a matter of time unless you do something to stop it.

and from the comments

Remembering Challenger

Sunday January 28th was the 21st aniversary of the Challenger disaster.
How many of us watched our dreams of space take a horrible new direction on that day?
Danny Miller at Huffington

When the space shuttle program began in the early 1980s, it seemed to reinvigorate the passion we all had for manned spaceflight. But this new era was no longer dependent on the pioneering astronauts of my youth. Who knew? Maybe one day soon regular people like me would be able to travel in space.

[...]

I can't remember a news event that affected me so viscerally before or since. I couldn't even imagine the grief that the families and friends of the astronauts experienced as they watched the live broadcast of their loved ones' completely unexpected and terribly violent deaths. Christa McAuliffe felt like a friend, a colleague, and I still had the image of her trusting, excited husband and young children in my head. That night, in a national address, Ronald Reagan expertly delivered the famous words that speechwriter Peggy Noonan had borrowed from a World War II-era sonnet. Despite my huge misgivings about Reagan's policies and political views, I believed his sincerity and emotion when he said:

"We will never forget them this morning as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God."

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aYou really need to get to know your legislators.

The latest thing to give them a piece of your mind about: The Bush Health Insurance Proposal.
Robert Pear, The New York Times

Paul Fronstin, director of health research at the Employee Benefit Research Institute, a nonpartisan organization, said: “The president’s proposal would mean the end of employer-based benefits as we know them. It gives employers a way out of providing the benefits because their employees could get the same tax break on their own.”

[...]

“The president’s proposal addresses inequities in the tax code that provide an open-ended subsidy for premiums paid by employers,” said Robert D. Reischauer, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office. “If your employer does not provide health insurance and you have to buy it on your own, you get no tax benefit at all. The president’s plan would eliminate that distinction.”

But Mr. Reischauer said, “A glaring problem with the president’s plan is that he did not call for any stronger regulation of the individual insurance market.” In that market as it now exists in most states, insurers can deny coverage or charge higher rates to sick people.

[...]

Representative John D. Dingell, the Michigan Democrat who is the chairman of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, said, “The president’s proposal would do little to help the uninsured, but would undermine the employer-based system through which 160 million people get coverage.”

Richard J. Umbdenstock, president of the American Hospital Association, agreed. “The tax proposal would have the effect of driving people to the small-group insurance market — a market that has proved unstable,” Mr. Umbdenstock said. “For many people, even with a tax break, coverage would remain unaffordable.”

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Maureen Dowd on 'Daffy' Cheney.

Borrowed from Welcome to Pottersville

Dick Durbin went to the floor of the Senate on Thursday night to denounce the vice president as “delusional.”

It was shocking, and Senator Durbin should be ashamed of himself.

Delusional is far too mild a word to describe Dick Cheney. Delusional doesn’t begin to capture the profound, transcendental one-flew-over daftness of the man.

Has anyone in the history of the United States ever been so singularly wrong and misguided about such phenomenally important events and continued to insist he’s right in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary?

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Whar Dubya doesn't want you to know about Iran's nuclear program

It's not what he's been telling you. Remember all those atomic bombs that Saddam 'had'? The Iranians don't have them either, and they're not about to.
Steven D at Crooks and Liars

...Iran is a very, very long way from producing enough bomb grade nuclear material needed to make even one small explosive device, much less bombs that can be used as the warheads of ballistic missiles. How far away? The Guardian, in this report, lays bare the details of the true nature of Iran's nuclear program as a primitive, chaotic shambles:

Iran's uranium enrichment programme has been plagued by constant technical problems, lack of access to outside technology and knowhow, and a failure to master the complex production-engineering processes involved. ...

...a number of Western diplomats and technical experts close to the Iranian programme have told The Observer it is archaic, prone to breakdown and lacks the materials for industrial-scale production.

Peter Beaumont, foreign affairs editor of the Guardian, writes that there are a number of reasons for Iran's current setbacks with respect to the uranium enrichment technology it is seeking to master, the P-1 and P-2 centrifuge designs obtained from Pakistan. First, it can no longer obtain the necessary "high quality bearings required for the centrifuges' carbon-fibre 'top rotors' - spinning dishes within the machines - from foreign companies in Malaysia." Those sources dried up two years ago, and Iran has been trying to manufacture the needed bearings itself, but has repeatedly failed in its attempts to do so.

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The Sundance movie to see, and take your conservative friends to see.

Nicole Belle at Crooks and Liars

The one thing that frustrates me about the mainstream media allowing the administration and their flunkies to continue to obsfuscate the situation in Iraq is that the truth is out there. This article in Yahoo about yet another documentary entitled No End in Sight on the clusterf#@k that is Iraq intrigued me.

Salon suggests that you take your remaining Bush supporter family members to see this documentary, making major waves at Sundance:

This is no left-wing screed; Ferguson himself says he was initially optimistic about America's foray into Iraq. His interviewees include former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, retired Gen. Jay Garner (the first coalition governor of Iraq) and the principal author of the 2004 National Intelligence Estimate, which tried to warn the Bush administration about the bottomless, nightmarish money pit that lay ahead. That was the document described by George W. Bush as "guesswork," even though (its authors say) the president had not read it or even seen it.

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"My country, righr or wrong"? Bush's New Authorization to Kill Iranian Operatives in Iraq

Chris Floyd at Empire Berlesque Friday, 26 January 2007

Troops Authorized to Kill Iranian Operatives in Iraq (WP)
The Bush administration has authorized the U.S. military to kill or capture Iranian operatives inside Iraq as part of an aggressive new strategy to weaken Tehran's influence across the Middle East and compel it to give up its nuclear program, according to government and counterterrorism officials with direct knowledge of the effort...

The real story here is the story behind the story. After all, George W. Bush has already authorized his agents to kill American citizens -- without arrest, charge, trial, or even any warning -- if the victim has been designated -- arbitrarily, at the whim of the "Leader," outside any judicial process or oversight -- as an "enemy combatant." This "authority," claimed by Bush in October 2001 (I first wrote about it in print in November 2001) extends to every person on earth, not just Americans, so Iranian "agents" or "Revolutionary Guards" or anyone else Bush or his minions decide to kill has always been fair game. The only new wrinkle here is the specific authority given to the U.S. military to carry out these "extrajudicial" assassinations -- a license to kill that had hitherto been reserved for the security organs.

For assassination -- Phoenix-program style -- is definitely what we're talking about here. Let's be very clear about this, and not get tangled up in all the euphemistic jargon that Beltway reporters are so enamored of. Who decides that an Iranian in Iraq is an "operative" with ill intent, a member of a Revolutionary Guard or an accomplice to the insurgency (which, by the way, is led almost entirely by Sunni Arabs, the sworn enemies of the Shiite Persians)? And will these "operatives" be arrested, charged and tried, provided with defense counsel? No; the story makes clear -- and is intended by the White House to make clear -- that Iranian "operatives" are to be killed outright; indeed, "Bush administration officials have been urging top military commanders to exercise the authority." Thus any one of the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of Iranians who stream across the border into Iraq each year, almost all of them involved in either religious rites or trade, can be arbitrarily denounced by someone for any reason -- good or bad, personal, political, ideological, financial -- and then be shot dead by U.S. forces. This is what Bush's direct "authorization" means, this is what it is: an order to commit murder outside all bounds of legality, morality and military honor.

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Chuck Norris - “Should Not Have Been In Film”

From Think Progress

Conservative actor Chuck Norris filled in for Sean Hannity last night on Hannity & Colmes. (He should really stick to martial arts.)

Norris commented on Hannity’s plans to broadcast the fictitious scenes that ABC cut from its controversial docudrama, “The Path to 9/11.” In one fabricated scene, which ABC acknowledges was “improvised,” former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger is shown refusing to give the order to the CIA to take a clear shot at Osama bin Laden.

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pending attack on Iran 6 years in the planning. Before, of course, 9/11.

Larisa Alexandrovna and Muriel Kane at Raw Story

The escalation of US military planning on Iran is only the latest chess move in a six-year push within the Bush Administration to attack Iran, a RAW STORY investigation has found.

While Iran was named a part of President George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” in 2002, efforts to ignite a confrontation with Iran date back long before the post-9/11 war on terror. Presently, the Administration is trumpeting claims that Iran is closer to a nuclear weapon than the CIA’s own analysis shows and positing Iranian influence in Iraq’s insurgency, but efforts to destabilize Iran have been conducted covertly for years, often using members of Congress or non-government actors in a way reminiscent of the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal.

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Molly Ivins - One of the best of the left!

RJ Eskow in Crooks And Liars reports that Molly is in the hospital, battling breast cancer.

The great Molly Ivins is in the hospital . My wife Janet won't mind if I tell you that I love Molly. Have for years.

"I am not anti-gun," she once said. "I'm pro-knife." Right away she sounds like a gal after my own heart.

She went on to explain why, in the context of gun control: "Consider the merits of the knife. In the first place, you have to catch up with someone in order to stab him. A general substitution of knives for guns would promote physical fitness. We'd turn into a whole nation of great runners. Plus, knives don't ricochet. And people are seldom killed while cleaning their knives."

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I've read Molly for years. Some of the best laughs I've had have come from her column in some of the darkest hours.
I'll be thinking of her.

Finally, Congress has a chance to redeem itself for the evil credit card bills they afflicted upon us.

Bonddad at The Agonist

You mean credit card companies might engage in questionable marketing practices? Say it isn't so! And the Bush administration hasn't done anything about it? I'm shocked!

Seriously -- it's about time we looked at these companies' practices. And while Dodd is obviously looking to get some press for his presidential run with these hearings, it's still a really good thing to see. This is something I'm going to try and follow for however long it goes on.

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The record companies are starting to read the writing on the wall!

Victoria Shannon at The News Blog

CANNES, France, Jan. 22 — As even digital music revenue growth falters because of rampant file-sharing by consumers, the major record labels are moving closer to releasing music on the Internet with no copying restrictions — a step they once vowed never to take.

Executives of several technology companies meeting here at Midem, the annual global trade fair for the music industry, said over the weekend that at least one of the four major record companies could move toward the sale of unrestricted digital files in the MP3 format within months.

Most independent record labels already sell tracks digitally compressed in the MP3 format, which can be downloaded, e-mailed or copied to computers, cellphones, portable music players and compact discs without limit.

The independents see providing songs in MP3 partly as a way of generating publicity that could lead to future sales.

For the major recording companies, however, selling in the MP3 format would be a capitulation to the power of the Internet, which has destroyed their control over the worldwide distribution of music.

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One more thing to thank Dubya for...

Thanks to all the bloodletting in Iraq there is a new strain of virulent drug-resistant microbe being spread around the world.

Nicole Bell of Crooks & Liars

Okay, normally, I tend to discount the hysterics surrounding new pathogens, but this one does scare me quite a bit and just adds more fuel to the fire of my belief that we have screwed up this country enough and need to get out.

Raw Story: (h/t Rasputin)

A drug-resistant bacteria that is infecting wounded US soldiers in Iraq — and has spread to civilian hospitals in parts of Europe — accidentally evolved in US military hospitals in Iraq, Wired Magazine will report in a massive expose on Monday, RAW STORY has learned.

The several thousand word expose is set to bring uncomfortable new light to the bacteria Acinetobacter baumannii that Pentagon officials previously said was likely a product of Iraqi soil.

And TRex at Firedoglake

In many ways, the Bush Administration's "War on Terror" has been able to accomplish things that the terrorists themselves could only dream of. It has divided the American public against each other. It has stretched our military so thin that we would be helpless in the face of a real national emergency. And now, it has bred its own drug-resistant biological weapons, one of which is rapidly making its way through civilian hospitals from California to Canada, on to Germany and Anbar Province. It's called acinetobacter baumannii and the US military not only created the conditions that led to its development, but the Pentagon has played an active role in exporting it to the world and in the suppression of information that could have led to its containment.

[...]like every other problem that has arisen in our nation's prosecution of the Bush Administration's "Great War on Terror", rather than deal with the issue in a frank, open, and effective manner, the government has chosen instead to lie, obfuscate, and cover up, thereby placing more and more lives at risk.

Go to this site.

Welcome to Pottersville - Behind Blue Eyes

When Bush's own people tell you we are going to attack Iran, it's time to listen. Then Stop him!

Steven D at Booman Tribune

There are plans to attack Iran, and they aren't merely "contingency plans" that the US Military prepares for all potential adversaries, as many claim. How do I know this? Why is Harry Reid warning the President? Read on ...

US contingency planning for military action against Iran's nuclear programme goes beyond limited strikes and would effectively unleash a war against the country, a former US intelligence analyst said on Friday.

"I've seen some of the planning ... You're not talking about a surgical strike," said Wayne White, who was a top Middle East analyst for the State Department's bureau of intelligence and research until March 2005.

"You're talking about a war against Iran" that likely would destabilise the Middle East for years, White told the Middle East Policy Council, a Washington think tank.

"We're not talking about just surgical strikes against an array of targets inside Iran. We're talking about clearing a path to the targets" by taking out much of the Iranian Air Force, Kilo submarines, anti-ship missiles that could target commerce or US warships in the Gulf, and maybe even Iran's ballistic missile capability, White said.

When people who served in Bush's administration speak out we ought to take them seriously. Time after time, however, the media has either ignored these voices (General Shinseki, General Zinni) or attempted to marginalize and smear them (Richard Clarke, David Kuo, Paul O'Neill). Well, it's long past time for that sort of behavior. Mr. White's claims about Bush's war plan for Iran should be front page news on every major American newspaper, but they were not.

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What normal person would say things like this?

Cynk Uygur at Huffington

I should be used to it by now, but I am still flabbergasted every time I see yet another example of how painfully stupid our president is. This time it was during an interview with Jim Lehrer on PBS. Lehrer asked the president if he'd asked anyone but the troops to sacrifice for the Iraq War.

Watch his pathetic response here.

Come on, man. "I think a lot of people are in this fight. I mean, they sacrifice peace of mind when they see the terrible images of violence on TV every night." Are you kidding me? So, the rest of us sacrifice by watching TV? Wow, don't ask us for too much.

[...]

In the end, I was left wondering if the president is so monstrously unsympathetic to the real plight of our troops in Iraq that he can't understand why these words might seem uncaring or if he is so monstrously stupid that he thinks making light of their sacrifice will go over well with the rest of us. Then I realized, of course, the answer is both.

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Surgin' an' Purgin' with Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman explains why the administration has suddenly begun firing federal prosecutors:

Surging and Purging, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: There’s something happening here, and what it is seems completely clear: the Bush administration is trying to protect itself by purging independent-minded prosecutors.

[...]

Since the middle of last month, the Bush administration has pushed out at least four U.S. attorneys, and possibly as many as seven, without explanation. The list includes Carol Lam ... who successfully prosecuted Duke Cunningham, a Republican congressman, on major corruption charges. The top F.B.I. official in San Diego ...[said] that Ms. Lam’s dismissal would undermine multiple continuing investigations. ...

[S]uch a wholesale firing of prosecutors ... isn’t normal... Why, then, are prosecutors that the Bush administration itself appointed suddenly being pushed out? The likely answer is that for the first time the administration is really worried about where corruption investigations might lead.

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Don't you just love this line? "A Fool's Erranhttp://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifd"

John Holusha at The New York Times

A panel of retired generals told a United States Senate committee today that sending 21,500 additional troops to Iraq will do little to solve the underlying political problems in the country.

“Too little and too late,” is the way Gen. Joseph P. Hoar, a former chief of the Central Command, described the effort to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The additional troops are intended to help pacify Baghdad and a restive province, but General Hoar said American leaders had failed to understand the political forces at work in the country. “The solution is political, not military,” he said.

“A fool’s errand,” was the judgment of Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, who commanded troops in the first Gulf War. He said other countries had concluded that the effort in Iraq was not succeeding, noting that “our allies are leaving us and will be gone by summer.”

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It appears that only 'Big Oil' and Bush don't get it.

Andrew Gumbel in The Independent

An unprecedented coalition of blue-chip US companies and environmental lobby groups will urge President Bush next week to get serious about global warming, calling for caps on carbon dioxide emissions that would cut greenhouse gases by 10-30 per cent over 15 years.

The group, called the US Climate Action Partnership, will unveil the details of its plan on the eve of President Bush's State of the Union speech on Tuesday. The companies involved include some of the old-fashioned pollution-generating industries normally associated with anti-environmental policies and politicians - the chemical giant DuPont, the bulldozer company Caterpillar, the aluminium producer Alcoa and the US subsidiary of BP.

They, and environmental lobby groups such as Environmental Defense and the Natural Resources Defense Council, said yesterday they will call for "swift federal action on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and speeding the adoption of climate-friendly technology".

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So... George what side are we on in Iraq?

Larry Johnson in No Quarter

We have four basic choices confronting us in Iraq:

1. Fight the Sunni insurgents (there are at least 15 separate groups) and risk alienating the Saudis, the Jordanians, and the Turks.
2. Fight the Shia insurgents/militia, which means we will engage 60% of Iraq's population (and strengthen the hand of Shia-led Iran).
3. Fight both the Sunni and Shia and put ourselves in the middle of the civil war.
4. Retire from Iraq and let the Sunni and Shia sort things out among their various sectarian factions.

There really are no other logical options. It looks like Bush chose Option 3.

By engaging both Sunni and Shia we will have a surge--a surge in U.S. casualties that is. But we are not going to be fighting two separate insurgencies. Nope. It is worse than that. We will be faced with in excess of 20 separate insurgent groups. Some cooperate with each other but most do not.

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A way Of Looking At The Economic Cost of War

Nicole Belle at Crooks & Liars

I'm pretty good at math, but I cannot conceive a number that high. What a horrible, tragic waste, first and foremost in lives–both Iraqi and American–but also in potential of what we could have done with that money. To wit…

NYTimes:

The way to come to grips with $1.2 trillion is to forget about the number itself and think instead about what you could buy with the money. When you do that, a trillion stops sounding anything like millions or billions.

For starters, $1.2 trillion would pay for an unprecedented public health campaign - a doubling of cancer research funding, treatment for every American whose diabetes or heart disease is now going unmanaged and a global immunization campaign to save millions of children's lives.

Combined, the cost of running those programs for a decade wouldn't use up even half our money pot. So we could then turn to poverty and education, starting with universal preschool for every 3- and 4-year-old child across the country. The city of New Orleans could also receive a huge increase in reconstruction funds.

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Earth monitoring satellites about to be kaput,

Thomas Leavitt at Seeing The Forrest

Apparently, Bush and the Republican Congress have allowed the nation's earth monitoring satellite infrastructure to degrade to an alarming degree, such that one critical tool used to forcast hurricanes and the El Nino phenomenon "could become inoperable at any time", and that without action, pretty much the entire system could vanish from the sky by the end of the next decade, according to a report issued by the National Research Council on Monday...

Why would the folks governing our society be so irresponsible? Perhaps because the data produced are politically inconvenient... you'll recall that earlier this year, NASA eliminated the promise "to understand and protect our home planet" from its mission statement. Prominent NASA scientist and global warming expert James Hansen stated to the New York Times that ""They're [the Bush Administration] making it clear that they ... prefer that NASA work on something that's not causing them a problem."

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Healing the world's politics. Is that possible?

Chris Floyd at Truthout

...a quiet announcement at London's Hammersmith Hospital at the turning of the new year heralded a breakthrough that has the potential to be one of the most transformative developments ever seen in global affairs: a positive change on a par with - or even surpassing - the world-altering malignancies of war, greed and strife. But this boon could be strangled in its cradle by the vast corporate interests threatened by its radical new approach to both health care and business.

The approach is called "ethical pharmaceuticals," and it was unveiled on January 2 by Sunil Shaunak, professor of infectious diseases at Imperial College, and Steve Brocchini of the London School of Pharmacy, the Guardian reports. Their team of scientists in India and the UK, financed by the prestigious Wellcome with technical assistance from the UK government, have developed a method of making small but significant changes to the molecular structure of existing drugs, thereby transforming them into new products, circumventing the long-term patents used by the corporate giants of Big Pharma to keep prices - and profits - high. This will give the world's poorest and most vulnerable people access to life-saving medicines - now priced out of reach - for mere pennies.

But the breakthrough is not merely biochemical. Shaunak's team is proposing a new model for the pharmaceutical business. The patent of the transformed drug they have developed is held by non-profit Imperial University. And because their methods are hundreds of millions dollars cheaper than the mammoth development costs of the big pharmaceutical companies - whose spending on marketing and advertising often dwarfs their funding of scientific research - Shaunak and his colleagues can market their vital medicines for infectious diseases at near-giveaway levels, yet still stay in business. How so? By foregoing the profit motive as the ultimate value of their work.

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The arms contractors LIKE the Iraq war, and the possibility of an Iranian one too!

Booman gives us a heads up on how well Lockheed is doing. (That means you and I have Lockheed's hand in our pockets.)

Richard Cummings has an article in Playboy entitled Lockheed Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. The piece examines the rotating door between Lockheed Martin, the Pentagon, the White House, K Street, and Congressional staff. It also looks at the results: bigger military budgets, huge profits for Lockheed, and permawar. It's a good read, despite being horribly edited (Playboy, are you hiring?). There is one part of the article that is particularly illustrative of just how bad things are. It involves a meeting between (then) Deputy National Security advisor Stephen Hadley and a relatively little-known neo-conservative (and Lockheed executive) named Bruce P. Jackson. (You can see Jackson's PNAC biography here).

In November of 2002, Stephen J. Hadley, deputy national security advisor, asked Bruce Jackson to meet with him in the White House...

...according to Jackson, Hadley told him that "they were going to war and were struggling with a rationale" to justify it. Jackson, recalling the meeting, reports that Hadley said they were "still working out" a cause, too, but asked that he, Jackson, "set up something like the Committee on NATO" to come up with a rationale.

Here's what Jackson came up with.

What Bruce Jackson came up with for Hadley this time, in 2002, was the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. The mission statement of the committee says it was "formed to promote regional peace, political freedom and international security by replacing the Saddam Hussein regime with a democratic government that respects the rights of the Iraqi people and ceases to threaten the community of nations."

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Be sure to thank George for the coming fine economic climate.

It will be just about like the environmental climate. In a word... Screwed!!

Michael Roston at The Raw Story

"The picture I will lay out for you today is not a pretty one and it’s getting worse with the passage of time," said David M. Walker, Comptroller General of the United States, in a Thursday morning hearing of the Senate's Budget Committee. "Continuing on our current fiscal path would gradually erode, if not suddenly damage, our economy, our standard of living, and ultimately even our domestic tranquility and our national security," he warned.

[...]

The head of the GAO also warned that if no action is taken now to control government spending, severe tax hikes could be necessary. He stated that, "balancing the budget in 2040 could require actions as large as cutting total federal spending by 60 percent or raising federal taxes to 2 times today’s level."

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Has The United States jumped the shark?

The president is YOUR employee. He is subject to law. While he has a great many perogatives he is subject BY LAW to oversight by the congress, who, by the way is you, by proxy.

So then, where does this president find the gall to say that he will ignore those constitutional strictures if the congress "votes wrong". Congress makes laws, which , by definition, are correct.

A law may be declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, (by the way, another restraint on the president) but a president is not above established law. This president is creating a massive constitutional crisis. Whether the people, his boss, object to dishonesty, malfeasance, incredible ineptness and absolute disregard for the law of the land, remains to be seen. If we the people do not demand an end to this travesty, we have jumped the shark, and are well on our way to being a banana republic.

Cenk Uygur at Daily KOS

I can't imagine any other president saying he has the right to do what he pleases even if Congress makes it illegal. What does "if he thinks Congress has voted the wrong way" mean? Wrong, according to whom? The fact that it is a law makes it right by definition, by our democracy, by our constitution.

The president can veto laws he thinks Congress voted the wrong way on. But if they override his veto, it is not within his authority to ignore that law. This is so fundamental that it's unbelievable that it has to be spelled out.

If you asked whether a president could do this in an eighth grade civics class and anyone answered -- "Yes, a president can exercise his own authority if he thinks Congress voted the wrong way." -- you would unquestionably fail them. That is not the correct answer. At least not in our system of government.

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Keep telling yourself, "It's not about the oil".

It really has been about the oil.
Chris Floyd at Empire Berlesque

The reason that George W. Bush insists that "victory" is achievable in Iraq is not because he is deluded or isolated or ignorant or detached from reality or ill-advised. No, it's that his definition of "victory" is different from those bruited about in his own rhetoric and in the ever-earnest disquisitions of the chattering classes in print and on-line. For Bush, victory is indeed at hand. It could come at any moment now, could already have been achieved by the time you read this. And the driving force behind his planned "surge" of American troops is the need to preserve those fruits of victory that are now ripening in his hand.

At any time within the next few days, the Iraqi Council of Ministers is expected to approve a new "hydrocarbon law" essentially drawn up by the Bush Administration and its UK lackey, the Independent on Sunday reports. The new bill will "radically redraw the Iraqi oil industry and throw open the doors to the third-largest oil reserves in the world," say the paper, whose reporters have seen a draft of the new law. "It would allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil companies in the country since the industry was nationalized in 1972." If the government's parliamentary majority prevails, the law should take effect in March.

As the paper notes, the law will give Exxon, BP, Shell and other carbon cronies of the White House unprecedented sweetheart deals, allowing them to pump gargantuan profits from Iraq's nominally state-owned oilfields for decades to come... Bush's Petro-Cartel Almost Has Iraq's Oil and The U.S. Takeover of Iraqi Oil.

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Ignor Sun Tzu at your own peril.

Jeff Huber at Pen and Sword

The ancient Chinese general and philosopher Sun Tzu said "Every battle is won before it is ever fought."

Sun Tzu also said "There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare."

And: "When you engage in actual fighting, if victory is long in coming, then men's weapons will grow dull and their ardor will be damped. If you lay siege to a town, you will exhaust your strength."

And: "If the campaign is protracted, the resources of the State will not be equal to the strain."

And: "Contributing to maintain an army at a distance causes the people to be impoverished."

And: "In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy's country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good. So, too, it is better to recapture an army entire than to destroy it, to capture a regiment, a detachment or a company entire than to destroy them."

And: "It is only one who is thoroughly acquainted with the evils of war that can thoroughly understand the profitable way of carrying it on."

And: "In war the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory."

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On military matters to whom would you listen? George Bush or Wesley Clark

Wesley Clark in The Independent:

Well before the 2003 invasion, the administration was sending signals that its intentions weren't limited to Iraq; Syria and Iran were mentioned as the next targets. Small wonder then that Syria and Iran have worked continuously to meddle in Iraq. They had reason to believe that if US action succeeded against Iraq, they would soon be targets themselves. Dealing with meddling neighbours is an essential element of resolving the conflict in Iraq. But this requires more than border posts, patrols and threatening statements. Iran has thus far come out the big winner in all of this, dispensing with long-time enemy Saddam, gaining increased influence in Iraq, pursuing nuclear capabilities and striving to enlarge further its reach. The administration needs a new strategy for the region now, urgently, before Iran can gain nuclear capabilities.

America should take the lead with direct diplomacy to resolve the interrelated problems of Iran's push for regional hegemony, Lebanon and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Isolating adversaries hasn't worked. The region must gain a new vision, and that must be led diplomatically by the most powerful force in the region, the United States.

Without such fundamental change in Washington's approach, there is little hope that the troops surge, Iraqi promises and accompanying rhetoric will amount to anything other than "stay the course more". That wastes lives and time, perpetuates the appeal of the terrorists, and simply brings us closer to the showdown with Iran. And that will be a tragedy for not just Iraq but our friends in the region as well.

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Some of the 'Surge' troops in Iraq wil come from... Afghanastan!

Scarecrow at Firedoglake:

David Wood of the Baltimore Sun (by way of Boston Globe) summarizes what we're not supposed to be watching: Commanders seek more forces in Afghanistan. Not only are the US and NATO forces already stretched for enough troops to deal with a resurgent Taliban, but some of the US troops already there are scheduled to be part of the "surge" into Iraq.

[...] To sum up, we're about to have three surges simultaneously (nice parallel with King Abdullah's three civil wars scenario, which is also on track, but that's another story). We will surge US troops into Iraq; to allow that, we will surge US troops out of Afghanistan; to take advantage of that, the Taliban will surge all over Afghanistan. Symmetry.

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http://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifHave you noticed how well lil' Georgie listens to his Generals?

Scarecrow at Firedoglake

President Bush has said on previous occasions that when it comes to deciding whether more US troops should be added to Iraq or withdrawn, "I listen to the generals on the ground." But apparently he meant only when the generals on the ground are carrying out his wishes. When those same generals advocate a different policy, it's time to replace them.

[...]

Prior to the elections, the White House seemed more than happy to adopt this strategy, or to at least claim that it was supporting it. WH officials repeatedly dangled the possibility of US troop reductions before the electorate, and they encouraged General Abizaid, the leader of the Central Command in the Middle East, and General Casey, the head of the US/International Forces in Iraq, to discuss the strategy with reporters and before Congress.

[...]

Now however, the elections have passed. The strategy is no longer needed to win the election — in fact, it failed to do that. So the strategy is being abandoned by the White House, leaving the generals the unhappy choice of either defending it openly, in opposition to their Commander in Chief and civilian leadership, or agreeing to implement a different policy they do not support.

[...]

In coming weeks and months, we will likely hear again from these generals, and many others like them, who have found it necessary to speak out against their Commander in Chief. Only this time, they won't be speaking only on CNN or MSNBC's Hardball. They'll be testifying before Congress, in front of Committees headed by Democrats, who will be very interested in what they have to say. I expect the nation's media will be riveted on the spectacle of watching senior military officials explain why their recommendations were ignored by an increasingly unpopular President and his men.

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Two posts on the Pelosi/Reid letter.

Read the text of the letter. Finally an Earth to Bush moment.

Here

and

Here

Here is what can be done about the right wing wackos.

Mike Stark at Daily KOS

When I started CallingAllWingnuts, one of the hundreds of bloggers that came by to introduce themselves was Spocko of Spockosbrain (now defunct, for reasons soon to become revealed). Spocko was doing some work related to my own in his own market in California's Bay Area. His target? KSFO, home of Melanie Morgan, Lee Rogers, Brian Sussman and other poisonous 2nd rate talk show wingers.

Since this is Spocko's gig, I'm gonna pretty much use his words to explain what's gone down. Before the flip, to give you something to chew on as you click to the full story, I can tell you this much: you're gonna love what you read. Spocko has actually cost Disney money - he chased away advertisers and forced them to pay a law firm to intimidate his ISP. The story isn't all good though - Spocko's broke and can't afford to wage the legal battle, so he's shut down. That said, maybe we can use this space to buck up his spirits a little bit and see if there are any lawyers that want to file a Rule 11 motion against Disney's unscrupulous lawyers...

Read the rest Then consider what to do about this

To paraphrase John Lenon, "We'd All Love To See A Plan"

Tom at TomDispatch

Every now and then, you have to take a lesson or two from history. In the case of George Bush's Iraq, here's one: No matter what the President announces in his "new way forward" speech on Iraq next week -- including belated calls for "sacrifice" from the man whose answer to 9/11 was to urge Americans to surge into Disney World -- it won't work. Nothing our President suggests in relation to Iraq, in fact, will have a ghost of a chance of success. Worse than that, whatever it turns out to be, it is essentially guaranteed to make matters worse.

Repetition, after all, is most of what knowledge adds up to, and the Bush administration has been repetitively consistent in its Iraqi -- and larger Middle Eastern -- policies. Whatever it touches (or perhaps the better word would be "smashes") turns to dross. Iraq is now dross -- and Saddam Hussein was such a remarkably hard act to follow badly that this is no small accomplishment.

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Why The Surge will be The Pits.

Steve Gilliard at The News Blog

As they hung Saddam, every man in that room was a Mahdi Army member.

Think about that.

When the state of Iraq decided to execute Saddam, the people who did it was the Mahdi Army.
Maliki rushed the execution on the orders of Sadr, and Sadr's people made sure the job was done.

Now, what exactly are US troops going to do? Secure Iraq from the militias?

Hello, the militias seem to be the state now.

The reason Bush dropped training is simple. We would be training the Mahdi Army.

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The right tries to paint the election rout as a call for commity. Look at the polls, Suckahs!

From the Carpetbagger:

...in what’s rumored to be a 50-50 nation, Democratic policy goals have broad support. They’re the kind of results that could, if Dems wanted, have a considerable effect on the process moving forward.

As (Matt) Stoller noted, “Nine out of eleven of these has more than 2:1 public support. Six out of eleven have 3:1 public support, and four out of eleven has 4:1 public support. This is a popular agenda. In other words, the arguments about bipartisanship put out by Bush, business lobbyists, insiders, and the pundits are just an excuse to ignore the public.”

I think that’s largely true. Results like these suggest the public actually wants Dems to do what they said they would do. This isn’t about how quickly Dems can compromise on their agenda; it’s about delivering a series of progressive policies that enjoy considerable public support.

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What are the Neocons selling?

Walrus Speaks at Sic Semper Tyrannis

...I would like to paraphrase what we have seen and can expect to see in future.

To do so, you need to understand what the NeoCons objectives have been from the outset. They are a little Like Kaiser Wilhelms' reasons for encouraging German militarism from about 1900.

1. Protect the existence and power of the "military Industrial Complex". This has been under threat since the demise of the Soviet Union because people started to demand a "peace Dividend". The result was the PNAC and the idea that America, now being the sole pre-eminent superpower, should maintain this position - in other words keep spending on defence.

2. Demonise Arabs, the existence of an enemy is a pretext by a ruling class for postponing any social change aimed at reversing the massive social inequities between rich and poor in America for example reforming taxation, social security, health care, education, etc. etc. "because we are at war". These issues threaten the rich.

In other words, the entire NeoCon thing is all about maintaining the status quo and keeping the lid on the pressures for reform.

Read the rest.

Why DID Negroponte step down and what does it REALLY mean?

There are two articles at No Quarter you need to read.

They are:
Why Did Negroponte Switch Jobs?

and

Taking Stock of the Intel Community Shake Up

And this one at Pen and Sword:

Bush Administration: New Names, Same Old Games

Looks like book cookin' time again at Intel.

For your consideration.

Imagine, Real news!

The economy is doing so well that the Euro is now worth more than the dollar. Way to go Bushie!

Bonddad at No Quarter
...the rise of the Euro internationally is another sign that the U.S. dollar is not what it used to be. There is increasing pressure on nations to buy and sell oil in euros, and anecdotal evidence suggests that drug dealers and money launderers now prefer euros to dollars. Historically, the underground cash economy has always sought the most stable and valuable paper currency to conduct business.

This is what happens when supply-side economics and rampant "shop 'til you drop" consumerism is the dominant economic policy of a nation.

The US government has run massive fiscal deficits for the last 6 years. Despite the accounting tricks used to mask the deficit's true size, the Bureau of Public Debt reports that total outstanding debt on September 30 2001 was $5,807,463,412,200.06 and currently stands at $8,593,076,179,156.67 -- an increase of 48% in six years. At the same time, the US government has cut taxes and gone to war, which has increased discretionary expenditures over 30%.

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The ideal Golfing twosome, Dubya and O.J.

James Moore in Huffington

There is probably not much chance that Mr. Bush and O.J. Simpson will ever get to play golf together, although there would be much convenience and symmetry to the round. O.J. could continue his quest to find the real killer of his wife and her lover and the former president could look in the rough for weapons of mass destruction. Instead, however, Mr. Bush will spend the last part of his life wielding a chainsaw cutting down cedar trees in one of the box canyons of his ranch along the hardscrabble Balcones Escarpment. He will, of course, still be oblivious to all the wrongs he has done to his country and the global community. Forever, this man's heart and soul will be separated from the harm he has caused and the lives he has ruined and he will continue to sleep the sleep of a child.

As he fades, though, even George W. Bush is likely to ask himself the glaring question of how he went from being the most influential man on planet Earth to a cedar chopper with a nice house, no friends, and a few government paid guards watching over him in boredom. The answer, of course, should he ever get around to asking, will be "democracy." In spite of all he did to destroy our constitution simply to serve his political ends, our democracy will survive and move past Mr. Bush.

And he will finally arrive at the ignominy he has so rightly earned.

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Is Dubya really stupid enough to call for "Sacrifice"?http://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif

James Wolcott writes:

...the call for sacrifice is a blade that cuts two ways. Moments after the word reaches the rafters from Bush's mouth, Madame Speaker Pelosi or Sir Harry of Reid or Chris Dodd or some other sharpie is going to say, "We applaud the president's call for sacrifice. Therefore it is only fitting that he sacrifice permanent tax cuts for the wealthy and tax breaks for corporations so that the top one percent can pitch in and do their part. It is only fair that sacrifice be shared."

As for the McCain Doctrine of Escalation, Bush may be adopting an orphan policy no one else is willing to raise. In his latest letter, Immanuel Wallerstein ticks off the tightening restrictions on any true movement on Bush's part in Iraq, noting that even the admission of a policy shift is being done under duress.

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The Democrats and morality: E.J. Dionne at The WaPo

The Democrats who take power in Congress on Thursday have been given an opportunity that has not come their party's way for a half-century: They can remake their own image -- and Congress's -- and they can begin to restore public confidence in government.

[...]

This allows the new Democratic majority, in principle at least, to come in with no commitments to doing business as it was done in the immediate past.

If Democrats don't seize this rare opportunity, their party will pay for a long time. Not only will they disillusion their own supporters, but, more important, the angry centrists of the Ross Perot stripe who voted the Republicans out last year will either go back to the GOP or seek other options.

The first opportunity in the House will come on the very first day, when a package of reforms comes up for a vote. The Senate will take its own steps soon after. At stake initially are new ethics and lobbying rules. Over time House and Senate leaders will have to prove their commitment to bringing more democracy to the way Congress is run. A country that claims a mission to democracy and transparent government in the rest of the world needs to get its own institutions in order.

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A Mythical View of Today From the Future

Rebecca Solnit writing in The Nation Blog has some questions for us all and especially Dubya.

Bush, the Accidental Empire Slayer

For a brief period, in the early years of that second decade of this chaotic century, a whole school of conspiracy theorists gained popularity by suggesting that Bush the Younger was actually the puppet of a left-wing plot to dismantle the global "hyperpower" of that moment. They pointed to the Trotskyist origins of the "neoconservatives," whose mad dreams had so clearly sunk the American empire in Iraq and Afghanistan, as part of their proof. They claimed that Bush's advisers consciously plotted to devastate the most powerful military on the planet, near collapse even before it was torn apart by the unexpected Officer Defection Movement, which burst into existence in 2009, followed by the next year's anti-draft riots in New York and elsewhere.

The Bush Administration's mismanagement of the US economy, while debt piled up, so obviously spelled the end of the era of American prosperity and power that some explanation, no matter how absurd, was called for--and for a while embraced. The long view from our own moment makes it clearer that Bush was simply one of the last dinosaurs of that imperial era, doing a remarkably efficient job of dragging down what was already doomed. If you're like most historians of our quarter-century moment, then you're less interested in the obvious--why it all fell--than in discovering the earliest hints of the mammalian alternatives springing up so vigorously with so little attention in those years.

Without benefit of conspiracy, what Bush the Younger really prompted (however blindly) was the beginning of a decentralization policy in the North American states. During the eight years of his tenure, dissident locales started to develop what later would become full-fledged independent policies on everything from queer rights and the environment to foreign relations and the notorious USA Patriot Act. For example, as early as 2004, several states, led by California, began setting their own automobile emissions standards in an attempt to address the already evident effects of climate change so studiously ignored in Washington.

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The avalanch is coming for George W. Bush.

Olbermann does it again. The cut is to the quick, and there is no staunching of the blood.
Booman at Booman Tribune

The country has finally turned on George W. Bush. The country is in a very bad and testy mood. At the extreme, tonight's Special Comment on Keith Olbermann's Countdown was the most blistering indictment of a sitting President in the history of broadcast television. I have never seen anything like it. It violated every law of Higher Broderism. It even passed into raw conspiracy theory at points. In different and more stable times, a rant like Olbermann's would mark the swift end of his career. But our nation has entered into a new stage. Olbermann will pay no price for his outburst because even though it was extreme, it was an extremism that has now entered the boundaries of acceptable discourse. The country has no more use for George W. Bush and it has no will to rally to his defense.

Read on...

Question the Bush White house: Why, no! A Whitewash, if you please!

Chris Floyd at Empire Berlesque

"Why are the American people such suckers? How could they -- or, to be more exact, how could a significant number of them -- ever have fallen for the transparent bullshit of such third-rate goobers as Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and all the rest? How could the American people be so ignorant and misinformed about what goes on in the world? How can they be so ignorant and misinformed of their own history, of the dirty deals done in their names for years on end? How can this be?"

Good folk, look no further, for we do indeed have the answer here. If you want to know precisely how the American people are kept deliberately ignorant, simply click on the link to this story in the nation's "newspaper of record," the journal which sets the standard for and largely determines the news agenda of the American press: The Defiant Despot Oppressed Iraq for More than 30 Years. There, in the stately pages of The New York Times, you will find some 5,200 words written by Neil MacFarquhar detailing the rise, reign and fall of the Iraqi dictator. You will thrill to the usual gory details of torture, murder and savagery; you will tut at the violent barbarism of the rural riff-raff who got so far above his raising; you will snarl with condemnation at the mad aggressor who launched "continual wars" in the region, as the diligent scribe informs us.

[The actual total number of wars launched by Saddam Hussein was, er, two: the same number launched by George W. Bush -- if, that is, you don't count the never-ending, ever-expanding, great googily-moogily "Global War on Terror and Extremists and Radicals," in which case, Bush's "continual wars" far exceed the two conflicts instigated by Saddam -- one of which was overtly approved by Reagan Administration, the other tacitly approved by the Bush I administration.]

But what you will not find is any detail or examination whatsoever of the prominent, direct and continuing role the United States government played in bringing Saddam to power, maintaining him in office, underwriting his tyranny, and rewarding his aggression. This decades-long history -- beginning with the CIA's assistance in not one but two coups that first brought the Baath Party to power then cemented the hold of Saddam's internal faction on the country through the journey to Baghdad by the obsequious Donald Rumsfeld who came bearing words of support, bags of cash and military high-tech for Saddam's chemical weapons attacks on Iran down to the delivery of money, WMD technology and other goods of war by George Herbert Walker Bush up to the very day before Saddam's long-threatened invasion of Kuwait, which Bush's personal representative had told the dictator was of no concern to the United States -- does not appear in McFarquhar's mountain of prose.

There's more

This is a very curious story. Some of it is probably true, some of it is patently false – and all of it is a massive, panicky CYA job by American officials. However, through the heavy fog of this assemblage of spin, it seems fairly obvious what has really happened: the same group of dim-witted fools, ideological cranks and violent sectarians who have driven the whole misbegotten enterprise in Iraq came up with yet another plan that they thought was a great idea. But as always, it turned out to be a botched job that has made a hellish situation even worse.

Two things stand out in this story by Burns and Santora – or rather, two salient facts lurk behind the furious spin that the reporters have assembled. First, that despite all the protestations by U.S. officials here, it was the Americans who actually had the final say in letting the execution go forward. And second, the rank lawlessness of the execution is in fact a direct emulation of American "democracy" under the Unitary Executive Decidership of George W. Bush.

Read the rest. There are lots of good links.

2007, Year of the NeoCon?

Jeff Huber at Pen and Sword

I don't like to fall into full-bore paranoia, but after watching the Bush administration for six years, I'm more inclined to credit conspiracy theories than I am to believe in coincidence. One the eve of Mr. Bush's New Year's announcement about his new Iraq strategy, I more than suspect that America is about to be pushed into a full bore neoconservative policy of militarization from which it will take decades or longer to extract ourselves.

Over at Juan Cole's Informed Comment, Larisa Alexandrovna paints a grim and all too likely scenario:

The administration is stalling as it supposedly weighs its Iraq options, when in fact they have already made their decision… One need only look at the slow leaks coming out, not the least of which was Joe Lieberman’s op-ed in the Washington Post, to understand that we are going to be sending more troops to Iraq…

In the meantime, naval carriers are deployed to send Iran “a warning,” as though the threats thus far and the passing of sanctions are not warning enough. Add to that the detainment of Iranian diplomats invited to Iraq by the Iraqi leadership. Why is the US arresting diplomats invited to a country that the US claims is a sovereign nation governing itself?

…given this entire context, ask yourself again why Saddam Hussein is being executed now, during Hajj even? What is the urgency?

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For Whom the Bell Tolls: Top Ten Ways the US Enabled Saddam Hussein

Juan Cole at Informed Comment has ten ways that the US aided and abbetted Saddam Hussain

1) The first time the US enabled Saddam Hussein came in 1959. In that year, a young Saddam, from the boondock town of Tikrit but living with an uncle in Baghdad, tried to assassinate Qasim. He failed and was wounded in the leg. Saddam had, like many in his generation, joined the Baath Party, which combined socialism, Arab nationalism, and the aspiration for a one-party state.

In 1959, Richard Sale of UPI reports,

' According to another former senior State Department official, Saddam, while only in his early 20s, became a part of a U.S. plot to get rid of Qasim. According to this source, Saddam was installed in an apartment in Baghdad on al-Rashid Street directly opposite Qasim's office in Iraq's Ministry of Defense, to observe Qasim's movements.

[...]

CIA involvement in the 1959 assassination attempt is plausible. Historian David Wise says there is evidence in the US archives that the CIA's "Health Alteration Committee" tried again to have Qasim assassinated in 1960 by "sending the Iraqi leader a poisoned monogrammed handkerchief."

2) After the failed coup attempt, Saddam fled to Cairo, where he attended law school in between bar brawls, and where it is alleged that he retained his CIA connections there, being put on a stipend by the agency via the Egyptian government. He frequently visited US operatives at the Indiana Cafe. Getting him back on his feet in Cairo was the second episode of US aid to Saddam.

Read the rest

It's convenient that Saddam is dead, considering all the aid the US has given him, he'd be a bitch of a witness in an investigationof Bush Whitehouses

Robert Parry at Consortium News

The hanging of Saddam Hussein was supposed to be – as the New York Times observed – the “triumphal bookend” to George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. If all had gone as planned, Bush might have staged another celebration as he did after the end of “major combat,” posing under the “Mission Accomplished” banner on May 1, 2003.

But now with nearly 3,000 American soldiers killed and the Iraqi death toll exceeding 600,000 by some estimates, Bush may be forced to savor the image of Hussein dangling at the end of a rope a little more privately.

Still, Bush has done his family’s legacy a great service while also protecting secrets that could have embarrassed other senior U.S. government officials.

He has silenced a unique witness to crucial chapters of the secret history that stretched from Iran’s Islamic revolution in 1979 to the alleged American-Saudi “green light” for Hussein to attack Iran in 1980, through the eight years of the Iran-Iraq War during which high-ranking U.S. intermediaries, such as Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates, allegedly helped broker supplies of war materiel for Hussein.

Hussein now won’t be around to give troublesome testimony about how he obtained the chemical and biological agents that his scientists used to produce the unconventional weapons that were deployed against Iranian forces and Iraqi civilians. He can’t give his perspective on who got the money and who facilitated the deals.

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