Why else would Russia plan to establish a Moonbase?
Year: 2007
Where I Call Out Oliver Willis on the Blue Dogs
Willis suggests that the campaigns against the Bush Dogs Dems is a waste of resources, and we should focus on places like Donna Edward’s challenge to Al Wynne.
He is completely wrong.
The “Bush Dog” Challenge is almost entirely about the war. There are other issues in the mix, but the war is the 800 pound gorilla in the room, and getting out of Iraq is a winner for Democrats, as the overwhelming majority of Americans, including Republicans want us out now.
They are pushing this position out of cowardice and stupidity, and getting them back on track serves to strengthen, not weaken the Democratic hold on their seats.
In addition, letting them be stupid and craven without consequence serves to destroy what is already pathetically weak Democratic party discipline.
Bush Knew that There Were No WMDs Before Invasion
Sidney Blumenthal saysthat Bush was explicitly briefed on this fact.
On Sept. 18, 2002, CIA director George Tenet briefed President Bush in the Oval Office on top-secret intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, according to two former senior CIA officers. Bush dismissed as worthless this information from the Iraqi foreign minister, a member of Saddam’s inner circle, although it turned out to be accurate in every detail. Tenet never brought it up again.
He wanted his war out of some Oedipal conflict with his dad, and now, to further compensate for his feeling of masculine inadequacy, he is planning to use nuclear weapons on Iran.
He must be stopped, and to paraphrase Olbermann, Democrats in Congress and those few Republicans who actually give a damn about America need to do it today, and set about removing Bush and Cheney from office and turning them over to the Hague for prosecution.
Bigots on Holiday
Normally, I am loath to comment on the internal workings of someone else’s religion, but in this case, I’ll make an exception.
NAIROBI, Aug. 30 — Two American priests were consecrated Thursday as Anglican bishops in Kenya, the latest in a string of conservative priests who are defecting to African churches in a dispute over gay clergy.
Bill Atwood of Texas and William Murdoch of Massachusetts left the Episcopal Church — the U.S. branch of the worldwide Anglican Communion — because it allows the ordination of gay priests.
People who feel that they have to hate in order to serve God should not be delivering your mail, much less seeing to your spiritual well-being.
Victory for Free Speech and IP Common Sense
The 10th circuit court of appeals overruled the dismissal of the case Golan v. Gonzalez in the context of works previously in the public domain.
The background is as follows, following the Sonny Bono copyright extension act, the Supreme court ruled that it’s pretty much the exclusive purview of Congress what a “limited time” is under that clause of the Constitution.
However, it also ruled that there could be a 1st amendment challenge if there were an action taken that “altered the traditional contours of copyright protection.”
The Uruguay Round Agreements Act (URAA) brought US intellectual property law in line with that of other countries. In so doing, it removed a number of works from the public domain, and placed them back under copyright, where people who had previously used them found that they had to pay (frequently exorbitant) license fees.
Lawrence Lessig Lessig argued that putting public domain works back under copyright was unprecedented in US law, and hence it significantly altered the “traditional contours of copyright protection”, and overruled the dismissal, remanding the case to the lower court.
This, along with Kahle v. Gonzalez, which argues that the change from opt-in copyright to opt out-copyright alters the “traditional contours of copyright protection”.
My guess is that the current Supreme Court will rule for the rich pigs, but there are a number of people who have reevaluated the role of IP in our society following the Crackberry case.
Oh My F*&^ing God!!!
Scratch that, it appear that God has nothing to do withreligiously justified pimping your kid to pedophiles.
I’m speechless.
The Fred Thompson Clown Show
In the past few weeks a number of senior Thompson campaign staffers have left. Just a few weeks before a formal announcement.
This churn has been going on for some time.
This campaign is looking to be more of a fiasco than John McCain’s.
A Sensible Fix for the Mortgage Mess
David Laibson has a good start, outlawing the prepayment penalty.
The prepayment penalty allows for “loss leader” loans, because it it offers an incentive to provide “loss leader” loans, because it makes it prohibitively expensive to get out of those abusive loans.
I would add outlawing, or severely limiting, points, which provide a similar incentive.
Congress could do this tomorrow, and it would help a lot of people now and in the future, while not bailing out bad actor lenders.
A Do-Over in Iraq???
There is now a report saying that that the Iraqi Police are so compromised that they need to be disbanded and reformed.
They are in essence wings of the Shiite militias.
Does it surprise anyone that Bush and His Evil Minions™ have screwed this up too?
What Olbermann Said
Perhaps the only journalist left on TV in the US, with the possible exception of employees of Comedy Central.
Riverbend Has Left Iraq
She’s safe, and the trip was as uneventful as it could be when it involves becoming a stateless refugee.
Fuck you George Bush.
Bush Intends to Use Nuclear Weapons Against Iran
Read Larry Johnson’s analysis:
- B-52s deploying to Barksdale is not unusual.
- The only time a plane has nukes on it is when it’s on alert, or it’s tasked to move it to a specific site.
- Barksdale AFB is a staging base for the Middle East.
- Someone on the inside obviously leaked the information, as mishaps with nukes are kept WELL under cover until well after they are resolved.
- Why would someone leak this if it were an honest accident?
Mr. Johnson is far more circumspect that I am. The Bush admin not only has plans for a nuclear strike on Iran, it is their preferred tactic.
More Republican Corruption
Some of those guys are really going to regret their efforts to make our federal prisons hell holes.
John Edwards Calls Out Congress on War
Needless to say, the Washington DC Journamalist press corps will use this to claim that Edwards is too far out there*, but in reality the fact that that congress should not fund the war without a withdrawal timetable is actually pretty safe.
More than 90% of the primary voters, and more than 70% of those folks who are not Republican Dead Enders™ support this. It’s a natural vote getter.
My recommendation to any Democratic presidential candidate is to state loudly and clearly that escalation by attacking Iran is a bad thing. It would destabilize the region, provide popular support to the Iranian theocracy, and put more American lives at risk.
In fact, I would suggest that a candidate should suggest that this is a reason to initiate immediate impeachment proceedings.
What Rox Populi Said: Journamalism
She has a good post taking just one quote of Andrew Glass, a particularly brain-dead journamalist working for the Politico1.
I would add one thing though, which that good Ms. Populi misses, that Glass screws up on his Swiss neutrality analogy.
He likes to think that the Swiss are a bunch of chocolate and cuckoo clock making people holding hands and singing “Kumbaya”. They aren’t, and they never were.
They gained national identity when they were the most feared mercenaries in Europe. They were not neutral, they were rented for a fee.
Following the abolition of merc armies, they became aggressively neutral, building an impressive citizen army, mobilizing their population, and shooting and capturing anything that crossed their borders.
They had no territorial ambitions, but they were people that you did not want to f$#% with.
1But I’m repeating myself.
Larry Craig Does Not Appear to Be Done Yet.
It appears that Larry Craig is not definitively out1 as Idaho’s US Senator.
It appears, according to a voice mail left at the wrong number, that his intent to resign is just that, intent, and not a promise.
He’s hired a high priced lawyer, and he will be fighting to overturn his guilty plea for disorderly conduct.
While my initial reaction is, “pass the popcorn”, this can actually be rather significant.
Seeing as how this will going on at the same time that the Pentagon’s “war room” is ramping up it’s likely to suck2 all the oxygen out of the media room, and so this media offensive is likely to get little notice, and hence little traction.
The voice mail mentions that he has support of Arlen Spector, which rather surprizes me, as the distinguished gentleman from Pennsylvania always bent over backwards3 to support the Republican agenda when push comes to shove4.
It’s possible that Spector had a polite statement of support that was misinterpreted, or possibly he’s trying to queer the deal in order to extract some sort of payback against the Republican Senate leadership by queering5 their efforts on the Iraq war, but I am unaware of any specific bad blood between him and Mitch McConnell.
It will be interesting seeing if the Republicans actually demand an ethics investigation to get to the bottom6 of this.
1Pun not intended.
2Really, I mean it, pun not intended.
3Oh, for Pets’s sake!!!! Pun not intended.
4Oh…I just give up, I’m punning.
5Well, that was liberating.
6OK, I admit it. I have a problem. My name is Matthew Saroff, and I am a punster.
More Ways that the US Invasion of Iraq Screws Up the Middle East
Bush and His Evil Minions™ Lust for Another Terror Attack
It used to be that reading the New York Times was not like reading HP Lovecraft.
Now, they make the man who is arguably the greatest horror writer of the 20th century (at least the first half) look like a piker, as in this New York Times magazine article. You should read it for yourself, but here are the high (low?) points in this article about former Bush administration official and major right wing legal scholar Jack Goldsmith, and his new book The Terror Presidency.:
- That the administration unecessarily took a broad “go it alone” view toward executive power.
- Legal decisions were not made at DoJ, but by the White House Council (Gonzalez), and the general counsel of the Defense Department.
- These policies, and the policy making process were so out of line that it honked off John Ashcroft.
- In response to a fairly straightforward legal opinion, Goldsmith’s assisistant said, “They’re going to be really mad. They’re not going to understand our decision. They’ve never been told no.”
- In response to this decision, David Addington, then Vice President Cheney’s legal adviser and now his chief of staff “You cannot question his decision“.
- Addington later confronted him and said, “If you rule that waythe blood of the hundred thousand people who die in the next attack will be on your hands.” (Have I mentioned that these people are really paranoid nuts?)
- He felt compelled to resign immediately after issuing a more restrictive interrogation policy, “So he made a strategic decision: on the same day that he withdrew the opinion, he submitted his resignation, effectively forcing the administration to choose between accepting his decision and letting him leave quietly, or rejecting it and turning his resignation into a big news story.”
- Goldsmith recalls that Addington (and Addington does not fart without getting Cheney’s approval) saying, “We’re one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious [FISA] court“. They really want another attack.
- That the badgering of Ashcroft in the hospital was so bad that his wife stuck her tongue at them. (Yes, I know that it sounds mild, but I doubt that she would use profanity if threatened with death)
These folks are completely divorced from reality.
Hat tip to Glenn Greenwald for finding this article.
Felix the Cat 5
The strength of this hurricane has caught forecasters by surprise, but it’s an artifact of the increasingly warm summer Caribbean.
I could not resist the pun in the title, sorry.
Bush Caught Lying About Disbanding Iraq Military
Well, it appears that contrary to his statements, Bush specifically endorsed dismantling the Iraqi army.
One wonders if the Washington press corps will be upset about this as they were about a blowjob.