Out of My Mind

"Drop dead."

The wingnuts don't care about other than enabling dopes who put them and leave them in power.

Are we better off than we were before our leaders stole office in the 2000 coup?

From Cornell University's Legal Information Institute:

LEAGUE OF UNITED LATIN AMERICAN CITIZENS v.PERRY (Nos. 05-204,
05-254, 05-276 and 05-439)
Web-accessible at:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/05-204.ZS.html

Argued: March 1, 2006 -- Decided: June 28, 2006
Opinion author: Kennedy
===============================================================

The 1990 census resulted in a 3-seat increase over the
27 seats previously allotted the Texas congressional delegation.
Although the Democratic Party then controlled 19 of those
27 seats, as well as both state legislative houses and
the governorship, change was in the air: The Republican
Party had received 47% of the 1990 statewide vote, while
the Democrats had received only 51%. Faced with a possible
Republican ascent to majority status, the legislature drew
a congressional redistricting plan that favored Democratic
candidates. The Republicans challenged the 1991 Plan as
an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander, but to no avail.


The 2000 census authorized two additional seats for the
Texas delegation. The Republicans then controlled the governorship
and the State Senate, but did not yet control the State
House of Representatives. So constituted, the legislature
was unable to pass a redistricting scheme, resulting in
litigation and the necessity of a court-ordered plan to
comply with the U. S. Constitution's one-person, one-vote
requirement. Conscious that the primary responsibility
for drawing congressional districts lies with the political
branches of government, and hesitant to undo the work of
one political party for the benefit of another, the three-judge
Federal District Court sought to apply only 'neutral' redistricting
standards when drawing Plan 1151C, including placing the
two new seats in high-growth areas, following county and
voting precinct lines, and avoiding the pairing of incumbents.
Under Plan 1151C, the 2002 congressional elections resulted
in a 17-to-15 Democratic majority in the Texas delegation,
compared to a 59% to 40% Republican majority in votes for
statewide office in 2000, thus leaving the 1991 Democratic
gerrymander largely in place.

In 2003, however, Texas Republicans gained control of both
houses of the legislature and set out to increase Republican
representation in the congressional delegation. After a
protracted partisan struggle, the legislature enacted a
new congressional districting map, Plan 1374C. In the 2004
congressional elections, Republicans won 21 seats to the
Democrats' 11, while also obtaining 58% of the vote in
statewide races against the Democrats' 41%. Soon after
Plan 1374C was enacted, appellants challenged it in court,
alleging a host of constitutional and statutory violations.
In 2004 the District Court entered judgment for appellees,
but this Court vacated the decision and remanded for consideration
in light of Vieth v. Jubelirer, 541 U. S. 267 . On remand,
the District Court, believing the scope of its mandate
was limited to questions of political gerrymandering, again
rejected appellants' claims.

Held: The judgment is affirmed in part, reversed in part,
and vacated in part, and the cases are remanded.

399 F. Supp. 2d 756, affirmed in part, reversed in part,
vacated in part, and remanded.

Justice Kennedy delivered the opinion of the Court with
respect to Parts II-A and III, concluding:

1. This Court held, in Davis v. Bandemer, 478 U. S. 109
, that an equal protection challenge to a political gerrymander
presents a justiciable case or controversy, although it
could not agree on what substantive standard to apply,
compare id., at 127-137, with id., at 161-162. That disagreement
persists. The Vieth plurality would have held such challenges
nonjusticiable political questions, but a majority declined
to do so, see 541 U. S., at 306, 317, 343, 355. Justiciability
is not revisited here. At issue is whether appellants offer
a manageable, reliable measure of fairness for determining
whether a partisan gerrymander is unconstitutional. P.
7.

2. Texas' redrawing of District 23's lines amounts to vote
dilution violative of sec. 2 of the Voting Rights Act of
1965. Pp. 17-36.

(a) Plan 1374C's changes to District 23 served the dual
goals of increasing Republican seats and protecting the
incumbent Republican against an increasingly powerful Latino
population that threatened to oust him, with the additional
political nuance that he would be reelected in a district
that had a Latino majority as to voting age population,
though not a Latino majority as to citizen voting age population
or an effective Latino voting majority. The District 23
changes required adjustments elsewhere, so the State created
new District 25 to avoid retrogression under sec. 5 of
the Act. Pp. 17-18.

(b) A State violates sec. 2 'if, based on the totality
of circumstances, it is shown that the political processes
leading to nomination or election ... are not [as] equally
open to ... members of [a racial group as they are to] other
members of the electorate.' 42 U. S. C. sec. 1973(b). Thornburg
v. Gingles, 478 U. S. 30 , identified three threshold conditions
for establishing a sec. 2 violation: (1) the racial group
must be 'sufficiently large and geographically compact
to constitute a majority in a single-member district';
(2) the group must be 'politically cohesive'; and (3) the
white majority must 'vot[e] sufficiently as a bloc to enable
it ... usually to defeat the minority's preferred candidate.'
The legislative history identifies factors that courts
can use, once all three threshold requirements are met,
in interpreting sec. 2's 'totality of circumstances' standard,
including the State's history of voting-related discrimination,
the extent to which voting is racially polarized, and the
extent to which the State has used voting practices or
procedures that tend to enhance the opportunity for discrimination
against the minority group. See id., at 44-45. Another
relevant consideration is whether the number of districts
in which the minority group forms an effective majority
is roughly proportional to its share of the population
in the relevant area. Johnson v. De Grandy, 512 U. S. 997
. The district court's determination whether the sec. 2
requirements are satisfied must be upheld unless clearly
erroneous. See Gingles, supra, at 78-79. Where 'the ultimate
finding of dilution' is based on 'a misreading of the governing
law,' however, there is reversible error. De Grandy, supra,
at 1022. Pp. 18-20.

(c) Appellants have satisfied all three Gingles requirements
as to District 23, and the creation of new District 25
does not remedy the problem.

The second and third Gingles factors-Latino cohesion, majority
bloc voting-are present, given the District Court's finding
of racially polarized voting in the District 23 and throughout
the State. As to the first Gingles precondition-that the
minority group be large and compact enough to constitute
a majority in a single-member district, 478 U. S., at 50-appellants
have established that Latinos could have had an opportunity
district in District 23 had its lines not been altered
and that they do not have one now. They constituted a majority
of the citizen voting age population in District 23 under
Plan 1151C. The District Court suggested incorrectly that
the district was not a Latino opportunity district in 2002
simply because the incumbent prevailed. The fact that a
group does not win elections does not resolve the vote
dilution issue. De Grandy, 512 U. S., at 1014, n. 11. In
old District 23 the increase in Latino voter registration
and overall population, the concomitant rise in Latino
voting power in each successive election, the near victory
of the Latino candidate of choice in 2002, and the resulting
threat to the incumbent's continued election were the very
reasons the State redrew the district lines. Since the
redistricting prevented the immediate success of the emergent
Latino majority in District 23, there was a denial of opportunity
in the real sense of that term. Plan 1374C's version of
District 23, by contrast, is unquestionably not a Latino
opportunity district. That Latinos are now a bare majority
of the district's voting-age population is not dispositive,
since the relevant numbers must account for citizenship
in order to determine the group's opportunity to elect
candidates, and Latinos do not now have a citizen voting-age
majority in the district.

The State's argument that it met its sec. 2 obligations
by creating new District 25 as an offsetting opportunity
district is rejected. In a district line-drawing challenge,
'the first Gingles condition requires the possibility of
creating more than the existing number of reasonably compact
districts with a sufficiently large minority population
to elect candidates of its choice.' Id., at 1008. The District
Court's finding that the current plan contains six Latino
opportunity districts and that seven reasonably compact
districts, as proposed by appellant GI Forum, could not
be drawn was not clearly erroneous. However, the court
failed to perform the required compactness inquiry between
the number of Latino opportunity districts under the challenger's
proposal of reinstating Plan 1151C and the 'existing number
of reasonably compact districts.' Ibid. Section 2 does
not forbid the creation of a noncompact majority-minority
district, Bush v. Vera, 517 U. S. 952 , but such a district
cannot remedy a violation elsewhere in the State, see Shaw
v. Hunt, 517 U. S. 899 . The lower court recognized there
was a 300-mile gap between the two Latino communities in
District 25, and a similarly large gap between the needs
and interests of the two groups. The court's conclusion
that the relative smoothness of the district lines made
the district compact, despite this combining of discrete
communities of interest, is inapposite because the court
analyzed the issue only in the equal protection context,
where compactness focuses on the contours of district lines
to determine whether race was the predominant factor in
drawing those lines. See Miller v. Johnson, 515 U. S. 900
. Under sec. 2, by contrast, the injury is vote dilution,
so the compactness inquiry considers 'the compactness of
the minority population, not ... the compactness of the contested
district.' Vera, 517 U. S., at 997. A district that 'reaches
out to grab small and apparently isolated minority communities'
is not reasonably compact. Id., at 979. The lower court's
findings regarding the different characteristics, needs,
and interests of the two widely scattered Latino communities
in District 23 are well supported and uncontested. The
enormous geographical distances separating the two communities,
coupled with the disparate needs and interests of these
populations-not either factor alone-renders District 25
noncompact for sec. 2 purposes. Therefore, Plan 1374C contains
only five reasonably compact Latino opportunity districts,
one fewer than Plan 1151C. Pp. 20-29.

(d) The totality of the circumstances demonstrates a sec.
2 violation. The relevant proportionality inquiry, see
De Grandy, 512 U. S., at 1000, compares the percentage
of total districts that are Latino opportunity districts
with the Latino share of the citizen voting-age population.
The State's contention that proportionality should be decided
on a regional basis is rejected in favor of appellants'
assertion that their claim requires a statewide analysis
because they have alleged statewide vote dilution based
on a statewide plan. Looking statewide, there are 32 congressional
districts. The five reasonably compact Latino opportunity
districts amount to roughly 16% of the total, while Latinos
make up 22% of Texas' citizen voting-age population. Latinos
are, therefore, two districts shy of proportional representation.
Even deeming this disproportionality insubstantial would
not overcome the other evidence of vote dilution for Latinos
in District 23. The changes there undermined the progress
of a racial group that has been subject to significant
voting-related discrimination and that was becoming increasingly
politically active and cohesive. Cf., e.g., id., at 1014.
Against this background, the Latinos' diminishing electoral
support for the incumbent indicates their belief he was
unresponsive to their particularized needs. In essence,
the State took away their opportunity because they were
about to exercise it. Even accepting the District Court's
finding that the State's action was taken primarily for
political, not racial, reasons, the redrawing of District
23's lines was damaging to its Latino voters. The State
not only made fruitless the Latinos' mobilization efforts
but also acted against those Latinos who were becoming
most politically active. Although incumbency protection
can be a legitimate factor in districting, see Karcher
v. Daggett, 462 U. S. 725 , not all of its forms are in
the interests of the constituents. If, as here, such protection
means excluding some voters from the district simply because
they are likely to vote against the officeholder, the change
is to benefit the officeholder, not the voters. This policy,
whatever its validity in the political realm, cannot justify
the effect on Latino voters. See Gingles, supra, at 45.
Pp. 29-36.

(e) Because Plan 1374C violates sec. 2 in its redrawing
of District 23, appellants' First Amendment and equal protection
claims with respect to that district need not be addressed.
Their equal protection claim as to the drawing of District
25 need not be confronted because that district will have
to be redrawn to remedy the District 23 violation. Pp.
36-37.

Justice Kennedy concluded in Part II that because appellants
have established no legally impermissible use of political
classifications, they state no claim on which relief may
be granted as to their contention that Texas' statewide
redistricting is an unconstitutional political gerrymander.
Justice Souter and Justice Ginsburg joined Part II-D. Pp.
7-15.

(a) Article I of the Constitution, sec. sec. 2 and 4, gives
'the States primary responsibility for apportionment of
their ... congressional ... districts,' Growe v. Emison, 507
U. S. 25 , but sec. 4 also permits Congress to set further
requirements. Neither the Constitution nor Congress has
stated any explicit prohibition of mid-decade redistricting
to change districts drawn earlier in conformance with a
decennial census. Although the legislative branch plays
the primary role in congressional redistricting, courts
have an important role when a districting plan violates
the Constitution. See, e.g., Wesberry v. Sanders, 376 U.
S. 1 . That the federal courts sometimes must order legislative
redistricting, however, does not shift the primary responsibility
away from legislative bodies, see, e.g., Wise v. Lipscomb,
437 U. S. 535 , who are free to replace court-mandated
remedial plans by enacting redistricting plans of their
own, see, e.g., Upham v. Seamon, 456 U. S. 37 . Judicial
respect for legislative plans, however, cannot justify
legislative reliance on improper criteria for districting
determinations. Pp. 7-10.

(b) Appellants claim unpersuasively that a decision to
effect mid-decennial redistricting, when solely motivated
by partisan objectives, presumptively violates equal protection
and the First Amendment because it serves no legitimate
public purpose and burdens one group because of its political
opinions and affiliation. For a number of reasons, that
test is unconvincing. There is some merit to the State's
assertion that partisan gain was not the sole motivation
for replacing Plan 1151C: The contours of some contested
district lines seem to have been drawn based on more mundane
and local interests, and a number of line-drawing requests
by Democratic state legislators were honored. Moreover,
a successful test for identifying unconstitutional partisan
gerrymandering must do what appellants' sole-motivation
theory explicitly disavows: show a burden, as measured
by a reliable standard, on the complainants' representational
rights. See Vieth, supra, at 292-295, 307-308. Appellants'
sole-intent standard is no more compelling when it is linked
to the circumstance that Plan 1374C is mid-decennial legislation.
The Constitution's text and structure and this Court's
cases indicate there is nothing inherently suspect about
a legislature's decision to replace mid-decade a court-ordered
plan with one of its own. Even if there were, the fact
of mid-decade redistricting alone is no sure indication
of unlawful political gerrymanders. Appellants' test would
leave untouched the 1991 Texas redistricting, which entrenched
a party on the verge of minority status, while striking
down the 2003 redistricting plan, which resulted in the
majority Republican Party capturing a larger share of the
seats. A test that treats these two similarly effective
power plays in such different ways does not have the reliability
appellants ascribe to it. Pp. 10-14.

(c) Appellants' political gerrymandering theory that mid-decade
redistricting for exclusively partisan purposes violates
the one-person, one-vote requirement is rejected. Although
conceding that States operate under the legal fiction that
their plans are constitutionally apportioned throughout
a decade, see, e.g., Georgia v. Ashcroft, 539 U. S. 461
, n. 2, appellants contend that this fiction should not
provide a safe harbor for a legislature that enacts a voluntary,
mid-decade plan overriding a legal court-drawn plan. This
argument mirrors appellants' attack on mid-decennial redistricting
solely motivated by partisan considerations and is unsatisfactory
for the same reasons. Their further contention that the
legislature intentionally sought to manipulate population
variances when it enacted Plan 1374C is unconvincing because
there is no District Court finding to that effect, and
they present no specific evidence to support this serious
allegation of bad faith. Because they have not demonstrated
that the legislature's decision to enact Plan 1374C constitutes
a violation of the equal-population requirement, their
subsidiary reliance on Larios v. Cox, 300 F. Supp. 2d 1320,
summarily aff'd, 542 U. S. 947 , is unavailing. Pp. 14-16.


Justice Kennedy, joined by The Chief Justice and Justice
Alito, concluded in Part IV that the Dallas area redistricting
does not violate sec. 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Appellants
allege that the Dallas changes dilute African-American
voting strength because an African-American minority effectively
controlled District 24 under Plan 1151C. However, before
Plan 1374C, District 24 had elected an Anglo Democrat to
Congress in every election since 1978. Since then, moreover,
the incumbent has had no opposition in any of his primary
elections, and African-Americans have consistently voted
for him. African-Americans were the second-largest racial
group in the district after Anglos, but had only 25.7%
of the citizen voting age population. Even assuming that
the first Gingles prong can accommodate appellants' assertion
that a sec. 2 claim may be stated for a racial group that
makes up less than 50% of the population, see, e.g., De
Grandy, supra, at 1009, they must show they constitute
'a sufficiently large minority to elect their candidate
of choice with the assistance of cross-over votes,' Voinovich
v. Quilter, 507 U. S. 146 . The District Court committed
no clear error in rejecting questionable evidence that
African-Americans have the ability to elect their candidate
of choice in favor of other evidence that an African-American
candidate of choice would not prevail. See Anderson v.
Bessemer City, 470 U. S. 564 . That African-Americans had
influence in the district does not suffice to state a sec.
2 claim. If it did, it would unnecessarily infuse race
into virtually every redistricting, raising serious constitutional
questions. See Georgia v. Ashcroft, 539 U. S. 461 . Id.,
at 480, 482, distinguished. Appellants do not raise a district-specific
political gerrymandering claim against District 24. Pp.
37-41.

The Chief Justice, joined by Justice Alito, agreed that
appellants have not provided a reliable standard for identifying
unconstitutional political gerrymanders, but noted that
the question whether any such standard exists-i.e., whether
a challenge to such a gerrymander presents a justiciable
case or controversy-has not been argued in these cases.
The Chief Justice and Justice Alito therefore take no position
on that question, which has divided the Court, see Vieth
v. Jubelirer, 541 U. S. 267 , and join the plurality's
Part II disposition without specifying whether appellants
have failed to state a claim on which relief can be granted
or failed to present a justiciable controversy. Pp. 1-2.


Justice Scalia, joined by Justice Thomas, concluded that
appellants' claims of unconstitutional political gerrymandering
do not present a justiciable case or controversy, see Vieth
v. Jubelirer, 541 U. S. 267 (plurality opinion), and that
their vote-dilution claims premised on sec. 2 of the Voting
Rights Act of 1965 lack merit for the reasons set forth
in Justice Thomas's opinion concurring in the judgment
in Holder v. Hall, 512 U. S. 874 . Reviewing appellants'
race-based equal protection claims, Justice Scalia, joined
by The Chief Justice, Justice Thomas, and Justice Alito,
concluded that the District Court did not commit clear
error in rejecting appellant GI Forum's assertion that
the removal of Latino residents from District 23 constituted
intentional vote dilution. Justice Scalia, joined by The
Chief Justice, Justice Thomas, and Justice Alito, subjected
the intentional creation of District 25 as a majority-minority
district to strict scrutiny and held that standard satisfied
because appellants conceded that the creation of this district
was reasonably necessary to comply with sec. 5 of the Voting
Rights Act of 1965, which is a compelling state interest,
and did not argue that Texas did more than that provision
required it to do. Pp. 2-11.

Kennedy, J., announced the judgment of the Court and delivered
the opinion of the Court with respect to Parts II-A and
III, in which Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer, JJ.,
joined, an opinion with respect to Parts I and IV, in which
Roberts, C. J., and Alito, J., joined, an opinion with
respect to Parts II-B and II-C, and an opinion with respect
to Part II-D, in which Souter and Ginsburg, JJ., joined.
Stevens, J., filed an opinion concurring in part and dissenting
in part, in which Breyer, J., joined as to Parts I and
II. Souter, J., filed an opinion concurring in part and
dissenting in part, in which Ginsburg, J., joined. Breyer,
J., filed an opinion concurring in part and dissenting
in part. Roberts, C. J., filed an opinion concurring in
part, concurring in the judgment in part, and dissenting
in part, in which Alito, J., joined. Scalia, J., filed
an opinion concurring in the judgment in part and dissenting
in part, in which Thomas, J., joined, and in which Roberts,
C. J., and Alito, J., joined as to Part III.


Notes:
*
Together with No. 05-254, Travis County, Texas, et al.
v. Perry, Governor of Texas, et al., No. 05-276, Jackson
et al. v. Perry, Governor of Texas, et al., and No. 05-439,
GI Forum of Texas et al. v. Perry, Governor of Texas, et
al., also on appeal from the same court.

Salon's War Room has it: You kick them in the nuts. Hard. These guys are posturing fakes that really, really can't take it, only dish it.

As we reported yesterday, the campaign for Republican Sen. George Allen of Virginia has gone on the attack against Democratic challenger Jim Webb for saying that he would have voted against the constitutional amendment. But rather than taking it quietly in the mode of John Kerry in 2004, Webb's campaign is giving Allen -- and a lot of timid Democrats -- a lesson in how you fight back.

The Allen campaign said that Webb's position on flag burning exposed him as "liberal" and put him in the same camp as "John Kerry, Ted Kennedy and Charles Schumer." Those are fighting words in the Commonwealth, and Webb isn't taking them sitting down. Returning fire, Webb's camp said Wednesday that "George Felix Allen Jr. and his bush-league lapdog, [campaign manager] Dick Wadhams, have not earned the right to challenge Jim Webb's position on free speech and flag burning." They noted that Webb, the secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan, served in Vietnam and "fought for our flag and what it stands for," while "George Felix Allen Jr. chose to cut and run."

Allen turned 18 in 1970, but he did not serve in Vietnam, staying in college and spending summers at what the Webb campaign calls a "dude ranch in Nevada."

"When he and his disrespectful campaign puppets attack Jim Webb they are attacking every man and woman who served," the Webb campaign press release continued. "Their comments are nothing more than weak-kneed attacks by cowards."

The Allen campaign responded by saying that it never meant to question Webb's patriotism.

Webb's approach was plainly designed to get under Allen's skin. Among other things, the senator is said to hate his middle name; apparently, "Felix" doesn't really fit the cowboy-boots-and-Confederate-flag style Allen has adopted for himself. But as the National Journal's Hotline explains, the blowback may have been a preemptive strike against further attacks on Webb's patriotism or military service. Allen strategist Chris Lacivita served as a media advisor for the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

DeLay hawks 'em:

“Who wants a beaver?” asked DeLay, whom attendees said looked happier and more relaxed than ever. Hoots and hollers followed.

The Hammer continued with lines such as, “Everybody likes beaver, even women” and, as a couple of people in the crowd recall, “The best thing about it, it’s a shaved beaver!” (Though two others, both of them DeLay supporters and protectors, said they think they remember DeLay saying it was “sheared beaver,” not “shaved beaver.”)

At one point, as the bidding went up, DeLay pointed in the crowd to Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) as he held up the fur vest and said, “Sen. Burr, they don’t have beaver like this down in North Carolina.”

And this is to whom he was speaking: Pro-extintionists -- who are providing an appointee to the Department of the Interior. Foxes guarding the henhouse: mthat's Bushydo.

Yet still top editor at the Times. Keller has no clue that it was OK to run the piece on the secret SWIFT data mining operation because it wasn't a secret. (Actually, the Times-owned Boston Globe knew what Keller didn't -- or in an effort to suck up to our leaders declined to mention.)

Meanwhile, even if Keller can't defend the coverage with any intelligence, two ex-Timesmen do.

Gerrymandering is legal again, without any restrictions. Electoral maps that disempower Blacks are legal again. So says the current Supreme Court, where a majority believes in party orders, not the law.

A classic conservative (Pre-wingnut) riff that burns my ass
is the one about all the good we did for our allies after WWII and how they
reward us by dissing us and criticizing us and so on and so forth.

Please note that everything for which the rest of the world should be
grateful is stuff the crying wingnuts were adamantly against at the time. And
now they want eternal gratitude for what they fought, Makes no sense but
wingnuts never due.

Living in the Bushydo era, is this what it was like in
early 1930s Germany? Big Media full of fulsome praise for their leaders, their
anti-democratic, in every sense of the word, leaders, reading and listening to
the spew and knowing that the mainstream media got it very, very wrong, that
the leadership was no god for the country, that nothing good was going to come
from the Hitler administration? (Yes, kids, you are allowed to compare our
leaders with the Nazi era, just remember that there is a difference in degrees
and, yes, it may be a relatively crucial difference. Thing is, though, as the
Nazis were not good for Germany, our current leaders, at the end of the day,
are absolutely no good for America.)

Matt is wrong about Iraq being a waste of money. (His point isn't that the war is wrong but that a lot of money is being wasted on top of that as it were.)

For Our Leaders, wasting public money is never wrong if it helps bankrupt the public sector, which will force small gummint on us, particularly if it also enrisches cronies. So in that sense there is nothing about overspending in the Iraq fandango that is wasteful. It all works towards the ultimate goal.

Of course, one could call that disgraceful.

Do a good ded and click here.

All the ass-kissing by the Times of our leaders gets them this: zero rspect. And deservedly so.

President Bush on Monday condemned as "disgraceful" the disclosure last week by The New York Times and other newspapers of a secret program to investigate and track terrorists that relies on a vast international database that includes Americans' banking transactions.

(If you can't access the Times, same story, mor or less, is here.)

Competition: Come up with instances where our leaders have been disgraceful.

Here are my first two:

Coming no where close to preventing 9/11 because of sheer, total incompetence and/or lack of caring.

Deliberate disregard for the presidential oath of office by explicitly refusing to enforce laws of the United States. (Well, maybe that's not disgraceful but simple treason.)

And there's this from the very same front page of the Times as the above quote. Of course, it's old news how much our leaders hate their armed forces, at least the ones on active duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. Why, some could call that disgraceful.

I thought it was swearing to uphold the Constitution and then having absolutely no respect for the law....

Even the proto-Republican would hate this administration:

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.
- Thomas Jefferson

That people have feet of clay, are, well, human, is certainy not something I take any offence too.

When theyact to force a Christian theocracy on me while they themselves do not awfully Christian-like -- that I have a major problem with.

So the latest GOP hypocrite who, were he to walk the walk, would be begging for condemnation and engage in contrition instead of being a lying f#ck is this guy, a molester of two little girls -- by little, I mean they're about 15 now.

More here, another 3 upstanding examples of the new master race.

No need for a link, story's all over the place. But that terrorist cell in Miami -- are they for real, a credible threat?

And more importantly, does it make up for pre-9/11 bungling? Is that the point of busting them? Bonus rhetorical question: Were they busted with and solely as a result of the illegal wiretapping and phone surveillance?

Ah, screw it, BuzzFlash broke down this Incredibly Major Threat From Which Our Leaders Saved Us, Atoning For 9/11:

No terrorist connections:

Group "never met Bin Laden or had any contact with the terror kingpin's henchmen… In fact, they had no connection to any known terrorist organization." (NY Daily News)

No actual terrorist actions:

No bomb making materials were found in the raids." (CNN.com)

"Only overt acts described in the indictments were swearing oaths of allegiance to Al Qaeda and taking video footage of the F.B.I office." (NY Times)

Six of the seven men indicted "are described only as driving (the leader) or the informer places or as attending meetings between the two." (NY Times)

"Only devised a plot on paper." (Chicago Sun-Times)

Officials dismiss serious risk:

Chicago Police: There was "No credible threat… They had no capability to (destroy the Sears tower). They never got to that point – or could have." (NY Daily News)

Sears Tower executive: "Law enforcement continues to tell us that they have never found evidence of a credible terrorism threat against Sears Tower that has gone beyond criminal discussions." (Chicago Sun-Times)

Senior federal law-enforcement source: "No means" to attack Sears Tower or other buildings. "There was no threat at all." (Chicago Tribune)

Chicago Office of Emergency Management and Communication Executive Director: "The plan developed in Florida was never an actual plan, and therefore, nobody was in danger" (CBS News)

Thought I posted something about how safe and stable we've made Iraq that our own non-military people are de facto rpisoners. But I can't find the post. So at risk of running a summer re-run....

'Wash Post' Obtains Shocking Memo from U.S. Embassy in Baghdad

By Greg Mitchell

Published: June 19, 2006 6:20 PM ET
NEW YORK The Washington Post has obtained a cable, marked "sensitive," that it says shows that just before President Bush left on a surprise trip last Monday to the Green Zone in Baghdad for an upbeat assessment of the situation there, "the U.S. Embassy in Iraq painted a starkly different portrait of increasing danger and hardship faced by its Iraqi employees."

This cable outlines, the Post reported Sunday, "the daily-worsening conditions for those who live outside the heavily guarded international zone: harassment, threats and the employees' constant fears that their neighbors will discover they work for the U.S. government."

It's actually far worse than that, as the details published below indicate, which include references to abductions, threats to women's rights, and "ethnic cleansing."

A PDF copy of the cable shows that it was sent to the SecState in Washington, D.C. from "AMEmbassy Baghdad" on June 12. 2006. The typed name at the very bottom is Khalilzad -- the name of the U.S. Ambassador, though it is not known if this means he wrote the memo or merely approved it.

The subject of the memo is: "Snapshots from the Office -- Public Affairs Staff Show Strains of Social Discord."

As a footnote in one of the 23 sections, the embassy relates, "An Arab newspaper editor told us he is preparing an extensive survey of ethnic cleansing, which he said is taking place in almost every Iraqi province, as political parties and their militiast are seemingly engaged in tit-for-tat reprisals all over Iraq."

Among the other troubling reports:

-- "Personal safety depends on good relations with the 'neighborhood' governments, who barricade streets and ward off outsiders. The central government, our staff says, is not relevant; even local mukhtars have been displaced or coopted by militias. People no longer trust most neighbors."

-- One embassy employee had a brother-in-law kidnapped. Another received a death threat, and then fled the country with her family.

-- Iraqi staff at the embassy, beginning in March and picking up in May, report "pervasive" harassment from Islamist and/or militia groups. Cuts in power and rising fuel prices "have diminished the quality of life." Conditions vary but even upscale neighborhoods "have visibly deteriorated" and one of them is now described as a "ghost town."

-- Two of the three female Iraqis in the public affairs office reported stepped-up harassment since mid-May...."some groups are pushing women to cover even their face, a step not taken in Iran even at its most conservative." One of the women is now wearing a full abaya after receiving direct threats.

-- It has also become "dangerous" for men to wear shorts in public and "they no longer allow their children to play outside in shorts." People who wear jeans in public have also come under attack.

-- Embassy employees are held in such low esteem their work must remain a secret and they live with constant fear that their cover will be blown. Of nine staffers, only four have told their families where they work. They all plan for their possible abductions. No one takes home their cell phones as this gives them away. One employee said criticism of the U.S. had grown so severe that most of her family believes the U.S. "is punishing populations as Saddam did."

-- Since April, the "demeanor" of guards in the Green Zone has changed, becoming more "militia-like," and some are now "taunting" embassy personnel or holding up their credentials and saying loudly that they work in the embassy: "Such information is a death sentence if overheard by the wrong people." For this reason, some have asked for press instead of embassy credentials.

-- "For at least six months, we have not been able to use any local staff members for translation at on-camera press events....We cannot call employees in on weekends or holidays without blowing their 'cover.'"

-- "More recently, we have begun shredding documents printed out that show local staff surnames. In March, a few staff members approached us to ask what provisions would we make for them if we evacuate."

-- The overall environment is one of "frayed social networks," with frequent actual or perceived insults. None of this is helped by lack of electricity. "One colleague told us he feels 'defeated' by circumstances, citing his example of being unable to help his two-year-old son who has asthma and cannot sleep in stifling heat," which is now reaching 115 degrees.

-- "Another employee tell us that life outside the Green Zone has become 'emotionally draining.' He lives in a mostly Shiite area and claims to attend a funeral 'every evening.'"

-- Fuel lines have grown so long that one staffer spent 12 hours in line on his day off. "Employees all confirm that by the last week of May, they were getting one hour of power for every six hours without. ... One staff member reported that a friend lives in a building that houses a new minister; within 24 hours of his appointment, her building had city power 24 hours a day."

-- The cable concludes that employees' "personal fears are reinforcing divisive sectarian or ethnic channels, despite talk of reconciliation by officials."

The final line of the Cable is: KHALILZAD

Wow, what great news! Sure glad Big Media picked it up and is following up with it....

Just another post on the no end in site war plan is here....

But for those too lazy to click, let's do the regreatbly simple math.

Presumably, we aren't leaving until the ursurgency or whatever is crushed. Or maybe a table government is established. Or the oil can flow freely.

But let's presume the first goal is the primary goal. Let's then look at Israel and it's lack of success fighting its equivalent, the Palestinian infitidah. That's been going on far longer, the Israelis are far more brutal in fighting back, and thier success has been... still awaited.

Even if our leaders have other goals, can anyone foresee, at least any Republican, pulling out before the insurgency is brought under control?

Assuming, of course, any Republican administration has any intent for a full pull-out.

But what else is new?

Have Our Leaders ever been honest about anything. (If so, those rare occasions elude me at the moment.)

And Tony Snow-Job was hired solely because he's a more effective slime artist, so to speak, than Scott McClellan.

Josh has parsed and sliced and diced one Snow job:

(June 21, 2006 -- 01:17 PM EDT)

Okay, back on Monday we discussed Tony Snow's comments about how if polls had been taken during World War II's Battle of the Bulge people would probably have been pushing for a change in the course of the war as they are now in Iraq.

That's actually an insult to the American people generally, as well as the men who fought World War II and those who supported them on the homefront.

In any case, Snow clearly believes he can get away with this malarkey because he thinks polls weren't taken at the time.

But he's wrong. They were taking them. And they pretty clearly belie Snow's whole point.

My great friend and former graduate student colleague James Sparrow dropped me a line last night to tell me that "Hadley Cantril, at Princeton, did secret polling for FDR throughout the war on public support for the war, and specifically focused on trendlines, noting shifts from event to event."

This morning we managed to dig up a helpful chart that shows the polling Cantril did (click the image below for a full sized picture).



As you can see, there was no downtick in public support for the war around the time of the Battle of the Bulge. Approval for President Roosevelt's conduct of the war continued at around 70% where it had been for years. The number of people who said they had a clear idea of what the war was about was at about the same level and appears to have been rising. Support for a negotiated peace with Hitler remained around the anemic levels it had been for years -- at around 15%.

The only slight movement in the polls was a brief uptick in the number of people who would be willing to negotiate a peace with the German Army if they got rid of Hitler. That went up to the mid-30s before falling down again into the 20s. Keep in mind too that this was a much more primitive period for the collection of public opinion data. So a lot of the small wobbles in the trendlines are probably within the polls' then-larger margins of error. But the basic picture is clear: the American people then, as they will now, will stick through a lot of adversity if they think the war they're fighting matters and that their president knows what he's doing.

Then they did. Now they don't.

Also, this isn't just a gotcha on Tony Snow, showing the existence of polls he wasn't aware of, and so forth. There's a serious underlying point here about the administration's basic frivolousness in its conduct of the war.

No one thinks you can fight a war or conduct any project of great consequence by following minor oscillations in polls. But long term and imbedded trends in public opinion mean something. In this case, the public can see President Bush doesn't know what he's doing.

Having his flacks go out and compare him to great wartime leaders of the past and insult the American people in the process doesn't change that.

Certainly can't accuse him of being a faddist... I mean, the wingnuts can but they'd be full of crap (then, when aren't they?).

[SOLEDAD] O’BRIEN: In 2004 you came out very strongly in support of John Kerry and performed with him - your fellow guitarist, I think is how you introduced him to the crowd. And some people gave you a lot of flack for being a musician who took a political stand. I remember…

SPRINGSTEEN: Yeah, they should let Ann Coulter do it instead.

O’BRIEN: There is a whole school of thought, as you well know, that says that musicians – I mean you see it with the Dixie Chicks - you know, go play your music and stop.

SPRINGSTEEN: Well, if you turn it on, present company included, the idiots rambling on on cable television on any given night of the week, and you’re saying that musicians shouldn’t speak up? It’s insane. It’s funny.

O’BRIEN: As a musician though, I’d be curious to know if there is a concern that you start talking about politics, you came out at one point and said, I think in USA Today listen, the country would be better off if George Bush were replaced as President. Is there a worry where you start getting political and you could alienate your audience?

SPRINGSTEEN: Well that’s called common sense. I don’t even see that as politics at this point. So I mean that’s, you know, you can get me started, I’ll be glad to go. […] You don’t take a country like the United States into a major war on circumstantial evidence. You lose your job for that. That’s my opinion, and I have no problem voicing it. And some people like it and some people boo ya, you know?

And the video's here as well.

Why Democrats Lose
By Robert Parry
June 7, 2006

At dinner a few weeks ago, a well-placed Republican political operative was oozing confidence about GOP prospects in the November elections, not because the voters were enamored of George W. Bush but because the Democrats and liberals had done so little to improve their ability to reach the public with their message.

By contrast, he described to me a highly sophisticated Republican system for pouncing on Democratic “bad votes” and verbal gaffes and distributing the information instantaneously to a network of pro-Republican media outlets that now operates down to the state, district and local levels.

The rest is here.

Myself, never thought it was rocket science.

First, the Dems have to give up this mid-twentieth century thing of being a party of conflicting beliefs such as the party of integrationists and segregationists, both, of war-time leadership and the anti-war movement. It's OK at times but kind of makes the concept of a single position on an issue difficult.

Lookee at Iraq. Them: 9/11. Us: Duh....

Great.

Second: Slick Willie showed us the way and the DVD is still availeable.

I speak of the War Room. They pull the crap Parry discusses above, we're ready. What you can call (if you're old enough) fast, fast, fast relief.

The wingnuts have whole network or web of this but we...? The DNC doesn't even have a meaningful system set up.

A lot of this is semantics and communication. Our communication sucks, only in part because we also unsure what to say.

Of course, there's also the issue of the corruption of our pols, but that's another issue for another post, another day....

One ally in our the Total War against Terror:

....Uzbekistan, one of the world's most repressive nations.

Here's the story (but it's easy to Google). Makes you proud to be lead by our fabulous freedom-loving leaders.

From here. Freedom spreads. What the %$#@ was wrong with rule of law?

Library chief draws cops' ire
Thursday, June 22, 2006

By MERRY FIRSCHEIN
STAFF WRITER

HASBROUCK HEIGHTS -- Library Director Michele Reutty is under fire for refusing to give police library circulation records without a subpoena.

Reutty says she was only doing her job and maintaining the privacy of library patrons. But the mayor called it "a blatant disregard for the Police Department," which needed her help to identify a man who allegedly threatened a child.

Reutty, the director for 17 years, now faces possible discipline by the library board. Members of the Borough Council have suggested she receive punishment ranging from a letter of reprimand in her personnel file to a 30-day unpaid suspension. But the Library Board of Trustees said it would reserve judgment until a closed-door hearing next month.

Police received a report May 10 that a 12-year-old borough girl was allegedly sexually threatened by a man outside the municipal building. The library is on the second floor. The girl told her parents, who called police.

The suspect, who has been identified as a 23-year-old Hackensack man, did not molest the girl, said borough Police Chief Michael Colaneri. The investigation is ongoing through the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office, Colaneri said.

The girl told police the man was carrying a library book with a certain title. The next day, borough police detectives asked Reutty to tell them who took out that book.

Reutty said she refused to give the information to police without a subpoena -- in accordance with New Jersey state statutes governing access of private information from libraries, she said.

Police came back with a subpoena later that day. Reutty conducted the search and told police she could not find a book with that title.

So, police asked her to show them all the records of everyone who took out or renewed a book for the previous 10 days. Reutty asked for another subpoena because those records are computerized and not kept at the library.

On May 12, Reutty said, she complied with the second subpoena -- which required a special computer program by the Bergen County Cooperative Library System. Police found the information right away, which helped them to identify the suspect, according to Colaneri.

But borough officials say Reutty intentionally stonewalled the police investigation by putting the library first. They also charged that she did not follow procedure by contacting the borough's attorney when she received the subpoena. Instead, she called a lawyer from the state library association.

The whole episode is "shocking," Reutty said Wednesday. "I followed the law. And because I followed the law, at the end of the day, the policemen's case is going to hold strong. Nobody is going to sue the library and nobody is going to sue the municipality of Hasbrouck Heights because information was given out illegally."

On Tuesday, about 20 librarians from around the state attended a joint meeting of the Borough Council and the library Board of Trustees in a show of support for Reutty.

The group included the executive director of the New Jersey Library Association, who told borough officials that the organization would revise its rules governing subpoenas.

"I will ask the Attorney General's Office and the [state] Police Association to sit down with us and look at those regulations," said NJLA head Patricia Tumulty.

Reutty is the first vice president/president-elect of the librarians' organization.

Several residents spoke in Reutty's defense, saying she must have been confused about the borough's rules.

But Reutty dismissed that interpretation. "The main issue here is privacy of information, and all of this could have been handled by education," she said.

Reutty did the right thing, said Arthur Miller, her lawyer. "At no time did Michele Reutty say to any police officer or anybody else that she would not give the information if it was properly requested," Miller told the council. "She said you've got to get proper court authorization."

Borough labor lawyer Ellen Horn, who also represented the library trustees, said Reutty was "more interested in protecting" her library than helping the police.

"It was an absolute misjudgment of the seriousness of the matter," Horn said at Tuesday's meeting.

Reutty said the issue has grown to encompass a larger issue.

"I think it would have been so easy for me to just resign when all of this started happening," she said. "But it's not just me anymore. This is so that other librarians, when faced with a subpoena, will do the right thing."

I know, people who want freedom should move to Iraq.

Go here and see how crooked and what a thief your senator or congress-person is.

Newly-renamed AT+T hates you and wants to give you up to the government. None of the servics it provides you is in fact private.

And slashdot.org summarizes it:

VikingThunder writes "The San Francisco Chronicle reports that AT&T has revamped its privacy policy, in an effort to head off future consumer lawsuits, with changes taking effect this Friday. AT&T is introducing a new policy that gives it more 'latitude' when it comes to sharing your browsing history with government agencies. Notable changes include notification that AT&T will track viewing habits of customers of its new video services Homezone and U-Verse, which is forbidden for cable and satellite companies, as well as explicitly stating that the customer's data belongs to the company: 'While your account information may be personal to you, these records constitute business records that are owned by AT&T. As such, AT&T may disclose such records to protect its legitimate business interests, safeguard others, or respond to legal process.'"

And it even gets worse:

First this from salon: just how actively AT+T's giving you up.

And then, you know AT+T's not the only one doing this....

Frank Rich, from the 6/18/2006 N.Y. Times:

As long as the Democrats keep repeating their own mistakes, they will lose to the party whose mistakes are, if nothing else, packaged as one heckuva show. It's better to have the courage of bad convictions than no courage or convictions at all. 

(Emphasis added.)

From an email sub:

Forgotten History - Tuesday, June 20, 2006
"Little known facts and overlooked history"
------------------------------------------------------------

O'Reilly and the Truth
By Denis Mueller

On Thursday evening Bill O'Reilly joined the ranks of the
ignorant, not the first time and chances are not the last,
when he said that it was American troops who had committed
the following massacre. He was spinning his spin in the
defense of the marines, who seem by all accounts to have
committed a horrible massacre in Haditha, but have not been
charged of anything as yet. We must be careful here because
we do not all the facts yet. Here is the real story and the
story of another liar, Joe McCarthy, who also misrepresented
the facts.

On December 17, 1944, near the hamlet of Baugnez on the
height half-way between the town of Malmédy and Ligneuville
in Belgium, elements of Waffen-SS Kampfgruppe Peiper
encountered the American 285th Field Artillery Observation
Battalion. After a brief battle, the Americans surrendered.
About 150 of the prisoners of war were disarmed and sent to
stand in a field near the crossroads. Peiper and his leading
armored units then continued their advance.

A tank pulled up, and a truck shortly thereafter. A single
SS officer pulled out a pistol and shot a medical officer
standing in the front row, and then shot the man standing
next to the medical officer. Other soldiers joined in with
machine guns. It is not known why this happened; there is
no record of an order by an SS officer. While the shooting
of POWs was common on the Eastern front, such incidents
were rare on the Western front.

O'Reilly who is the biggest moron on television, a blowhard
jerk if there ever was, in an argument with Wesley Clark
claimed that it was American troops who were the ones at
fault. This was not the first time someone had
misrepresented the truth. O'Reilly and Ann Coulter, she
wolf of the right wing, has championed another liar Joseph
McCarthy in her book. But before going on maybe we should
look at what McCarthy had said.

That was in McCarthy's disgusting 1949 campaign on behalf
of Nazi S.S. officers who were convicted of war crimes for
the massacre of American troops during the Battle of the
Bulge. American prisoners of war had been murdered by
Waffen S.S. machine-gunners and the S.S. officers were
sentenced to death. But McCarthy insisted that the entire
case was a lie and the S.S. confessions were obtained by
torture. McCarthy decided intervened in the Senate hearings
on the case and lied repeatedly during his defense of the
Nazi murderers. I guess you could say, once and facist
always a facist, but his most outrageous claim was that
the American investigators had crushed the testicles of
German prisoners. McCarthy was later shown to have served
as the pawn of neo-Nazi's who were using the Malmedy case
to whip up anti-American sentiment in postwar Germany.

Sounds like some pretty bad stuff but we must realize that
these liars are the ones desecrate the memories of our
troops. Our troops are locked in a hopeless campaign
started by our frat boy President. This is again another
example why history is important. We can check the facts
and call out liars like O'Reilly and McCarthy and present
them with the truth. I do not blame the troops who are
stationed in Iraq; who were called to duty and then called
again and again for what has happened. I blame Bush and
Cheney who sent them there.

To SUBSCRIBE visit: http://www.gophercentral.com/sub/history.html
Subscribe

 

ow, this is leadership, this is what makees W great and beloved.

From Salon's WarRoom:

Ron Suskind, George W. Bush and the Aug. 6, 2001, PDB

Ron Suskind's "The One Percent Doctrine" is out this week, and the Washington Post's Barton Gellman says it's full of "jaw-dropping stories" about the Bush administration's war on terror.

Or lack thereof.

We've known for years now that George W. Bush received a presidential daily briefing on Aug. 6, 2001, in which he was warned: "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." We've known for almost as long that Bush went fishing afterward.

What we didn't know is what happened in between the briefing and the fishing, and now Suskind is here to tell us. Bush listened to the briefing, Suskind says, then told the CIA briefer: "All right. You've covered your ass, now."

-- Tim Grieve

To paraphrase Ronnie Raygun, are the Iraqis better off than they were before sanctions? It's inevitable they will be but when? A decade? A generation? More? And of course the great unanswerabele, but guessable: Will they be better off sooner for our invasion than they would have been in the natural course.

Anyway, a new milestone, in toto:

Iraq's disastrous 'black oil' swamps
By James Glanz The New York Times
MONDAY, JUNE 19, 2006

BAGHDAD An environmental disaster is brewing in the heartland of Iraq's northern Sunni-led insurgency, where Iraqi officials say that in a desperate move to dispose of millions of barrels of an oil refinery byproduct called "black oil," the government pumped it into open mountain valleys and leaky reservoirs next to the Tigris River and set it on fire.

The resulting huge black bogs are threatening the river and the precious groundwater in the area. The suffocating plumes of smoke are carried as far as 65 kilometers, or 40 miles, downwind to Tikrit, the provincial capital that formed Saddam Hussein's base of power.

An Iraqi environmental engineer who has visited the area described it as a kind of black swampland consisting of oil-saturated terrain and large standing pools of oil stretching across several mountain valleys. The clouds of smoke, said the engineer, Ayad Younis, "were so heavy that they obstructed breathing and visibility in the area and represent a serious environmental danger."

At Iraq's damaged and outdated refineries, as much as 40 percent of what is produced pours forth as this heavy, viscous substance, which used to be extensively exported to more efficient foreign operations for further refining. But the insurgency has stalled government- controlled exports from the area containing Iraq's major northern refinery complex at Bayji, the officials say.

So the backed-up black oil - known to the rest of the world as the lower grades of fuel oil - was sent along a short pipeline from Bayji and dumped in a mountainous area, called Makhool.

A series of complaints handed up the Iraqi government chain were conveyed to oil industry officials, and as of last weekend the fires had at least temporarily stopped, but black oil was still being poured into the valleys, according to Younis, who works in the province's Department of Environment and Health Safety.

With few options for disposing of Bayji's current production of black oil and so much at stake for the Iraqi economy, it is unclear whether the government will be able to hold the line on the burning at Makhool. A U.S. official in Baghdad said last week that Bayji was still turning out about 90,000 barrels a day of refined products, which would yield about 36,000 barrels a day of black oil.

Iraq's refineries will grind to a halt if the black oil does not go somewhere.

"Unless we find a way of dealing with the fuel oil, our factories will not work," said Shamkhi Faraj, director of economics and marketing affairs at the Oil Ministry.

The dumping and burning has embarrassed officials in the Oil Ministry and exposed major gaps in the American-designed reconstruction program.

Mussab al-Dujayli, a technical expert at the State Oil Marketing Organization, which he directed until March, said that the disposal defied sound engineering practice.

"The consequences of it are dreadful," Dujayli said. "God forbid."

Still, the complaints that halted the burning, however temporarily, represent something virtually unheard of in a country that has long had few if any checks on pollution by government industries: a backlash by local political and environmental officials.

Last month, motivated by citizen complaints and whistle-blowing employees at Bayji, the elected governor of the province that contains Bayji and Tikrit formed a technical committee that investigated and wrote a report warning of severe environmental consequences if the practice was not stopped.

The governor, Hamad Hmoud al- Qaisi, said in an interview that he was outraged by what his committee had found was happening in the mountains at Makhool. "I call upon the United Nations and the United States administration to make haste in saving the people of Bayji and Tikrit from an environmental catastrophe," Qaisi said.

"The wastes there are untreatable because the terrain is rocky and contains many caves that allow these wastes to slip through and eventually reach the groundwater where nearby towns depend on wells," Qaisi said.

The concerns quickly reached Narmin Othman Hasan, the minister of the environment, who said in an interview that she had written to oil officials complaining of the practice. After that, the fires went out.

Adel al-Qazzaz, manager of state- owned North Oil, which has immediate responsibility for operations in the north, repeatedly declined to respond to questions on the fuel oil after he was reached by phone and e-mail in Kirkuk.

The American official who discussed Bayji's level of oil production said the black oil could be taken out by truck and that one of the state-owned marketing companies had undertaken to do so.

But Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloum, who served two stints as oil minister between September 2003 and January 2006, said that plan probably had not been fully worked through. The roads in the Sunni badlands of the north are dangerous and sometimes impassable. And about 150 large tankers would have to leave Bayji fully loaded every day to remove the current production of black oil. Simply finding that number of working vehicles and loading them in a timely fashion would be challenging under the best of circumstances, Uloum said.

A tasteless joke but the punchline warrants a pass on good taste.

"Anybody here from New Zealand? They have a big, new attraction.
It's a live sex show in New Zealand. They have actual bulls
mounting a simulated cow. Good to see Ann Coulter getting some
work."
---David Letterman

We're doing such a good job bringing democracy amd freedom to Iraq that even our non-military peronnel there live without it.

Every one of them. Sane people couldn't have accomplished what these sick #!*&s have.

Josh does the work for me:

With all the efforts now to disassociate President Bush from conservatism, I am starting to believe that conservatism itself -- not the political machine, mind you, but the ideology -- is heading toward that misty land-over-the-ocean where ideologies go after they've shuffled off this mortal coil. Sort of like the way post-Stalinist lefties used to say, "You can't say Communism's failed. It's just never really been tried."

But as it was with Communism, so with conservatism. When all the people who call themselves conservatives get together and run the government, they're on the line for it. Conservative president. Conservative House. Conservative Senate.

What we appear to be in for now is the emergence of this phantom conservatism existing out in the ether, wholly cut loose from any connection to the actual people who are universally identified as the conservatives and who claim the label for themselves.

We can even go a bit beyond this though. The big claim now is that President Bush isn't a conservative because he hasn't shrunk the size of government and he's a reckless deficit spender.

But let's be honest: Balanced budgets and shrinking the size of government hasn't been part of conservatism -- or to be more precise, Movement Conservatism -- for going on thirty years. The conservative movement and the Republican party are the movement and party of deficit spending. And neither has any claim to any real association with limited or small government. Just isn't borne out by any factual record or political agenda. Not in the Reagan presidency, the Bush presidency or the second Bush presidency. The intervening period of fiscal restraint comes under Clinton.

Take the movement on its own terms and even be generous about it. What's it about? And has it delivered?

Aggressive defense policy? Check.

Privatization of government services? Check.

Regulatory regimes favoring big business? Check.

Government support for traditional mores and values on sex and marriage? Check.

That about covers it. And Bush has delivered. The results just aren't good.

It only changed it's name and lowered it's profile -- 'til all this illegal wiretapping stuff.... Too bad; the logo was so cool....

Pope Adolph explains how the Holocaust was an attack against Christianity. Does explain why so few Christians were hurt in the process. Or how his predecessor maybe kind of helped enable it just a little bit. Maybe this one needs an encyclopedial to reiterate his infallibility since he's so, you know, absolutely, 100% full of crap dead wrong.

Here are the highlights:

But it is as a Christian that the pope most surprises. Here is how he defined the Nazi aim in murdering Jews: ``Deep down, those vicious criminals, by wiping out this people . . . by destroying Israel, they ultimately wanted to tear up the tap root of the Christian faith." As if to dramatize this astounding claim that the ``ultimate" Nazi target at Auschwitz was the church, Benedict greeted 32 camp survivors, all but one of whom were Polish Catholics. A lone Jew represented the more than one million Jews who died there. With no apparent embarrassment, the pope prayed, ``Why, Lord, did you remain silent?"

Before Benedict became pope, the Catholic Church had begun a far deeper reckoning with Christian roots of the Holocaust, and that led to a profound shift in basic claims made about the Jewish religion. Most importantly, the church had affirmed the permanent integrity of God's covenant with the Jewish people, leading to the renunciation of the ancient impulse to convert Jews. But last March, in an address delivered at St. Peter's Square, Benedict issued ``a summons to all Israel to conversion," urging Jews ``to allow themselves to be reunited in a new covenant, full and perfect accomplishment of the old."

These are not minor matters. If the Holocaust is remembered as having been the work of a small ``ring of criminals," with no relation to the deep structures of Western Civilization's attitude toward ``the other," as centrally represented by Christian contempt for Jews, then sources of future crimes against ``the other" remain protected. Roots of anti-Semitism, in particular, can sprout again. Against this, the doctrines of Christian belief that made such hatred sacred must continue to be revised. The church must continue to affirm the independent integrity of the Jewish religion. Christians must continue to recall what their triumphalism led to in the past, because religious triumphalism still threatens the future. Pope Benedict XVI, heir to what his predecessors began, is the custodian of the most precious transformation in Christian history, but it is a fresh lit candle, and can be extinguished.

The rest is here. And the complete spew is here. (Aside to supporters of the corrupt Big Media: this is how you do it in these times: if you don't want to be objective, give the audience enough to reach an independent opinion. But of course, I know nothing since I'm an amateur and not a professional.)

And for those of you who freaked over Rupert's lies about the Iranian yellow star program, here's the real deal.

Required viewing.

-- 'cause we need it.

Another hypocritical Republican needs to tell us how to live our lives while he forgets the part about being a decent human being, you know, in the normal course of life.

My new theory about politicians is that they're alpha males (females to a lesser degree) too incompetent to do anything more productive with their alphaness other than to be panderers or worse.

And, wow, yet another exemplar!

And here is perhaps the king of the chickenhawks himself:

Shot:

"They may be with you for the first few bullets but they won't be there for the last tough battles."

-- Karl Rove, on John Kerry and John Murtha, Reuters, 6/13

Chaser:

"Except for a lapse of several months, Selective Service records show presidential adviser Karl Rove escaped the draft for nearly three years at the height of the Vietnam War using student deferments. " [Walsh, Salt Lake Tribune, 9/18/2004]

Rove's (non-)draft history includes a period where he claimed a student deferment even though he had dropped out of school.

Sounds a little loopy to me if for no other reason we just don't have the resources -- they all went into an oversized network of foreign bases. And even if our leaders can pull off another civilian-"powered" war -- i.e. overly relying on reserves and national guard troops a la Iraq -- am certain there really, rally will be hell to pay to the GOP. And whoever runs on the GOP ticket in 08 will be running on pro-war ticket.

Anyway, nothing before the November elections, of course.

And loopy or prescient, you read it here first.

God, our leaders are awesome!

Almost achieving our level of two rigged and stolen presidential elections in a row:

Palestine parliament, government buildings set on fire

2006-06-13 08:00:35
Ramallah, June 13 (Xinhua) Fatah militants set fire to the Hamas-led cabinet offices and the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) building in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

The rest of the story is here.

How they do it. The bullshit never stops....

Checks and balances weaken a little bit more....

And then there's this as well, the same fascist that illegally put the current administrtion in power chips away at freedom and democracy and the rule of law again (from the good ol' New York Times):

June 16, 2006
Court Limits Protection Against Improper Entry
By LINDA GREENHOUSE

WASHINGTON, June 15 — Evidence found by police officers who enter a home to execute a search warrant without first following the requirement to "knock and announce" can be used at trial despite that constitutional violation, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday.

The 5-to-4 decision left uncertain the value of the "knock-and-announce" rule, which dates to 13th-century England as protection against illegal entry by the police into private homes.

Justice Antonin Scalia, in the majority opinion, said that people subject to an improper police entry remained free to go to court and bring a civil rights suit against the police.

More here, but really, this is enough....

[Snarky comments deleted but suffice to say he ranks at at the very near top of this blog's Enemies of the State list.]

And another example where a clearly illegal act possibly will not be litigated and stablished to be illegal. Therefor, it stands as legal as it cannot be proven illegal. The Bushydo legal system: rule of law, out, rule by fiat, in.

-- to fascism (there's no other word for it).

The leaders of American democracy clearly hate it and are using their best efforts to destroy it. An here's another example.

Anyone understand why the federal government is going against guys who reported on the BALCO steroid matter? WTF does that have to do with anything of any importance to the country fom a gevernmental perspective?

Nothing and everything.

By this way, a clearly illegal action of the government turns into a legal one by establihing precedent when this matter is not sufficiently and vigorously opposed. (In all liklihood, there will be some sort of compromise that will leave some sort of precedent for the next time.)

The piece that follows shows that rightwing yahoos have it completely wrong: Big Government is not per se the fear. It's not size of government but the sheer evil of our elected officials that is the danger. The worst Big Government can do (other than the fear of same enabling nutjobs to get elected) is to temporarily damage the economy. The anti-government leaders we have now have done, are doing and will do far worse amnd more lasting harm.

Example: Putting an active-service general in as the leader of the nation's primary ciilian intelligence agency.

Example: The 2000 election, more particularly the Supreme Court's decision. To overly simplify Justice Scalia's decision: "Of course this decision is legally wrong but it's the one five of us want to make."

Example: Read this and weep, from the New York Law Journal (sub only, maybe someone posted the whole thing for free on the web):

Communications and Media Law
James C. Goodale
05-30-2006

If it wasn't clear before that President George W. Bush has declared war on the press, it is now. Two reporters in San Francisco are facing possible jail time for refusing to disclose their source for a series of articles in 2004 about the "baseball" steroid investigation. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has suggested he is "seriously" considering indictment of The New York Times. The FBI is reported to have been tapping reporter's phones. The FBI is seeking 20-year-old classified documents from the estate of Jack Anderson. The government is seeking to turn an 89-year-old law, The Espionage Act, into an official secrets act.

This is a chilling list. It is hard to believe it is coincidental.

Appearing on ABC's "This Week" on May 21, 2006, Attorney General Gonzales stated the administration's objectives: It will indict the press if necessary and send its reporters to jail when the administration thinks it's appropriate.

The New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for publishing a story on the National Security Agency's (NSA) domestic wiretapping program. The Times got the story from a leak. Mr. Gonzales believes there is a law on the books that makes that publication criminal.

The law in question, §798 of the U.S. Code, primarily criminalizes the publication of codes. The Times did not publish codes. This law does not mention the First Amendment.

Under the First Amendment, Mr. Gonzales' interpretation of this law would be unconstitutional. It would have to show a publication "will surely result in direct, immediate, and irreparable damage to our Nation or its people."

Mr. Gonzales could not meet that test in the NSA leak case. He is apparently not a friend of the First Amendment.

Previous attorneys general recognized the First Amendment. Generally, they would not permit federal prosecutors to subpoena reporters for their sources.

The Justice Department set out guidelines many decades ago to prevent such subpoenas. Attorney General Gonzales has made all but a dead letter of these guidelines.

He personally authorized federal prosecutors to subpoena two reporters from The San Francisco Chronicle. He wants to know who the source was for their stories on steroids in baseball.

* * *

One suspects the real reason to threaten reporters with jail sentences and to threaten The New York Times with an indictment is that this administration wishes to criminalize the newsgathering process.

* * *

The First Amendment protects publication of over-classified material. Otherwise administrations could cover up malfeasance with a classification stamp.

Without a law to cover leaking, President Bush's administration has invented one: The Espionage Act of 1917. This law does not cover leaking or publication. Its legislative history is clear. Congress, in 1917, intentionally did not cover the press.

Nonetheless, the present administration is attempting to convert it into an official secrets act. It is prosecuting a lobbyist under it (The Aipac Case). It has threatened to use it against newspapers.

If the lobbyist is convicted, it could be a bad precedent for publications. The lobbyist did not commit espionage.

The apparent irrelevance of The Espionage Act to leaking has made the presiding judge in Aipac uneasy. He has set a hearing to determine whether it is constitutional.

ABC reporters have said their phones are tapped. In his ABC interview, Mr. Gonzales did nothing to dispel the view that he will tap reporter's phones under the appropriate circumstances. But his idea of appropriate circumstances is significantly broader than what the Constitution allows.

* * *

James C. Goodale is the former vice chairman of The New York Times and producer/host of the television program "Digital Age."

This is a hero -- and, of course, a tragic one, having a life ruined for the Iraq fiasco. Here, you read it here first: Iraq will end up with a relatively stable, sufficiently pro-Western government within a generation -- he same as it would have had had the western powers (well, us) not destabilized during the sanctions era and had the Saddam regime ended "naturally", that is, with the bastard's death. That is to say, things will get better there, eventually, no thanks to us.

But Blake Miller: our leaders have royally screwed him; the resource-strapped VA will not be able to give him what he needs. That's how our leaders treat their heroes. That's Bushydo.

I know I'm way late with this about the meme that will not die.

I refer to this "greatest generation" nonsense.

What is so great about a generation drafted into a global two front war -- WWII? Certainly we're not talking about a generation so eager to fight the fascists that it goaded the government into war. FDR was only elected as a war president once, in '44. Even in '40, he ran more or less against the European war.

So it's not a generation of great principle.

(Bravery, yes, of course but given the circumstances, it's besides the point.)

Post-war, they returned to a powerful economy with a depressed consumer sector -- much of the consumer economy had of course been directed to the war -- and devastated, that is, non-competitive, foreign economy. Do the math: a generation of unparalleled growth and breadth of wealth growth and distribution. (Even now, while we're at the end of a generation of wealth growth, the breadth has been, well, non-existent. Also unlike now, post-WWII, wealth was distributed downward.)

And what does the "greatest generation" raise? Materialistic dopes. Who inturn raise even dumber and more materialistic dopes.

The "greates generation's" kids, in their youth in the 60s or so were able to comprehend government lies. They grew up devoted to materialism and raised children to be little princes and princesses, unable to perceive and comprehend the modern leadership of this country. They either don't care, accept the Freeper gross and erroneous simplification that all government is bad or that actually think there is legitimacy, on any level, to the current administration.

So again, what's so great about the "greatest generation"?

From Salon's WarRoom:

Bush on Zarqawi, by the numbers

Thirteen: The number of times George W. Bush mentioned Abu Musab al-Zarqawi by name today during a 30-minute press conference with Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen.

One: The number of times Bush mentioned Zarqawi's name in public during the long run-up to the war in Iraq.

-- Tim Grieve

Scum. Patent lying scum.

Or have I said that before?

The Wall Street Journal has the latest act of anti-democratic power accretion by the America-haters who lead us. The whole article is here because it's important, off-limits to non-subscribers and will be unavailable except for a premium in a couple of weeks. The WSJ of all media outlets....

Battle Over Foreign-Aid Spending Heats Up

Bush's Plan to Centralize Efforts Runs Counter to Long-Held Congressional Oversight

By MICHAEL M. PHILLIPS and DAVID ROGERS
June 7, 2006; Page A4

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration and Congress are headed for a clash over how to spend U.S. aid for the developing world.

President Bush's decision to consolidate billions of dollars in foreign-aid programs under the State Department puts him at odds with Congress's age-old prerogative of earmarking foreign-aid funds for favorite issues, such as immunizing children or encouraging sexual abstinence for AIDS control.

"Both Congress and the executive branch want to decide where the money goes, and there's a struggle between the two," says Steve Radelet, senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, a Washington think tank.

The brewing storm over foreign aid is the latest fight this year between a weakened White House and congressional Republicans eager to show independence going into November's elections. Lawmakers can't be too assertive, since lobbying scandals have called into question the practice of inserting earmarks into spending bills. But because foreign aid helps define the U.S. image overseas, Congress believes it must retain a major say.

At the center of the struggle is Randall Tobias, a former Eli Lilly & Co. chief executive who is now the country's first director of foreign assistance. With marching orders from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Mr. Tobias is remodeling $16.6 billion in U.S. foreign-assistance programs to give the State Department more power to use aid to further American foreign-policy goals.

Under Ms. Rice's plan, State Department officials in Washington will identify their strategic priorities -- such as fighting terrorism and promoting economic growth -- in the 154 countries that receive U.S. aid. The U.S. ambassador in each country will determine which projects the U.S. will fund to achieve those goals. Mr. Tobias plans to have ambassadors in 35 countries test the approach this summer.

The administration is "trying to ensure we're bringing all U.S. government foreign aid into a strategic package," Mr. Tobias says. Right now, he says, foreign-aid decisions seem almost haphazard, a product of mandates from Congress and on-the-ground judgments by half a dozen U.S. agencies and departments.

Lawmakers, however, are loath to cede control. Sen. Sam Brownback (R., Kan.), a member of the Appropriations Committee, is drafting legislation that would require the administration to spend 50% of aid to Africa on such items as water wells, immunizations and teacher training. Mr. Brownback says he became disenchanted with how the administration is delivering foreign aid during a December trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo.

"It was like you were just taking a lot of money and scattering it around, and there was nothing real at the end of the day," says Mr. Brownback, who is part of a growing pro-aid movement among American Christian conservatives.

Mr. Tobias's team recently assembled a two-page internal analysis of spending patterns in U.S. aid, which jumped to $27.5 billion in fiscal 2005 from $10 billion in fiscal 2000. The patterns, they found, imply that the five major priorities of American policy are promoting security interests in the Middle East, fostering post-Cold War partnerships with Eastern Europe, fighting AIDS in Africa, countering narcotics in the Andes and providing humanitarian relief.

Mr. Tobias and his team say that while those issues are important, together they don't seem to reflect a coherent strategy of leveraging aid into foreign-policy achievements. "Aside from Iraq and Afghanistan, our foreign-assistance priorities haven't changed at all" since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, says one administration official. Mr. Tobias says the solution is to concentrate more authority with the executive branch. The administration's overarching goal, according to State Department documents, should be "helping to build and sustain democratic, well-governed states that will respond to the needs of their people and conduct themselves responsibly in the international system."

The administration's approach has rattled the private charities that distribute much U.S. aid in the field. While officials at the charities are careful not to appear opposed to the idea of overhaul, many were upset that Ms. Rice didn't seek their views.

Behind the charities' concern is a suspicion that the administration might direct more aid to foreign allies in the fight against Islamic extremism, and away from the world's neediest. "Poverty alleviation and long-term development approaches should not be the casualties of shorter-term strategic objectives," says Todd Shelton, director of public policy for InterAction, an umbrella group representing more than 160 development charities.

Meantime, prominent lawmakers continue to force the administration's hand by earmarking aid money. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R., Tenn.) helped set aside $200 million this year to be used for drinking-water supply projects, at least $50 million of which must be spent in Africa. Senate Majority Whip Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) has set aside money for matters such as human-rights and refugee causes in Burma, as well as a small Kentucky-based nonprofit, Voice for Humanity, which has received millions of dollars over the years and is represented by a former McConnell aide.

The practice is a bipartisan one. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D., Vt.), had a hand in setting aside $15 million for "neglected diseases" that get less attention than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis.

Mr. Tobias, who gets good marks from both parties, says he will gradually win Congress over as he did in his last job, running the president's huge AIDS initiative.

"My hope is Congress will see this strategic approach as a good substitute for a number of the earmarks we're dealing with today," he says.

Not.