a New Orleans prostitute will provide details of her 4 month relationship with senator David Vitter.
Once again, Larry Flynt is going to be holding the presser.
Wonder if the diaper rumors are true.
Category: Corruption
This is Called Listening to Your Generals, I guess
The UK delayed their withdrawal from Basra because of American political pressure.
“In April we could have come out and done the transition completely and that would have been the right thing to do but politics prevented that,” Bashall, 44, told the paper.
“The Americans asked us to stay for longer,” he said, adding the decision to stay in the city was a result of “political strategy being played out at highest level.”
What Cheney wants, Cheney gets.
Self Hating Gay Republican Update
This is from Counterpunch.org, which is a highly controversial source. That being said, Mike Rogers of Blog Active and Down with Tyranny also confirm this, so there is backup.
It looks like two more conservative ‘family values’ Republican senators may be ‘outed’ soon. Mike Rogers, the same blogger who originally fingered Craig, claims that South Carolina Sen. Lindsay Graham is gay.
This has got to be the worst kept secret in Washington, D.C., it’s common knowledge in the Baltimore area too.
Howie Klein meanwhile claims that, ‘Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s quick expulsion from the Army—for fondling a private’s privates—is finally being discussed in Kentucky.’ He notes that McConnell, discharged after just 10 days in the Army in 1967, ‘has consistently prevented anyone from seeing his military discharge papers’ but a Freedom of Information suit may bring them to light.
To be fair, even if the reason for discharge is true, McConnell might not be gay.
If I were a draftee in 1967, and I were given the choice to go to Viet Nam, or pretending to be gay, I might very well go that route to stay out of Nam.
I make no claims to personal bravery. Had I not been exempt from the draft by reason of being 5 years old, I probably would have kissed my CO full on the lips to stay out of South East Asia.
Of course, I’m not sure that an admission of cowardice would help good the distinguished gentlemen from Kentucky.
FWIW, taking down McConnell needs to be a priority, as payback for going after Daschle*, which was unprecedented.
*Truth be told, I’m glad that Harry Reid is now in control of the Senate. On his worst day, he’s better than Daschle on his best day.
Petraeus US surge has ‘not worked out’, Just Not to Congress
Well, here is no surprise, Bush’s hand picked stalking hours on Iraq, David Petraeus is saying that the surge has not worked out in a letter to troops in his command.
General David Petraeus, the commander of United States forces in Iraq, admitted on Friday that sending 30 000 more troops into the war zone in January had failed to yield the desired results. “It has not worked out as we had hoped,” the general said.
The acknowledgement by Petraeus that the situation in Iraq is “exceedingly complex” and that progress had been “uneven” came on the eve of his testimony to Congress on the state of the war. He offered the assessment in a letter to US forces serving in Iraq that was obtained by the Washington Post.
Not quite what he said before congress, huh.
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.
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.
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?
More Republican Corruption
Some of those guys are really going to regret their efforts to make our federal prisons hell holes.
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.
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.
Justice Dept. Investigating Gonzales’s Testimony – washingtonpost.com
The Justice Deptartment is investigating Gonzales’s testimony, the question is whether this is a legitimate investigation, or simply an attempt for the the DoJ and Bush and His Evil Minions™ to create an ongoing investigation in order to stonewall congress.
My money is on the latter.
Google, Yahoo! and Amazon sued over email patent | The Register
In yet another case of IP gone stupid, patent troll Polaris has sued for infringing their patent on rules based mail filtering.
To quote Ars Technica:
The patent, titled “Automatic message interpretation and routing system,” is unsurprisingly general. It was filed in 1998 and awarded to a company called Brightware, Inc. in 2002, and it basically describes an autoresponder. “The method for automatically interpreting an electronic message may also include the step of retrieving one or more predetermined responses corresponding to the interpretation of the electronic message from a repository for automatic delivery to the source,” reads the patent.
The company, Polaris IP, has no products. It’s an IP troll.
Note that Procmail, a rather powerful rules based email delivery agent, was released in 1990, and that auto-responders date to before 1980.
Hopefully, this will get thrown out, but if not, one hopes that the court will obey the recent Supreme court precedent, and not grant an injunction.
Our patent system needs to be fixed.
Confronted With Truth Bush and His Evil Minions™ Squeal Like Stuck Pigs
Well, it looks like the Bush admin and his toadies in the Pentagon are claiming that the GAO report calling Iraq a failure was just too tough.
Tell that to dead and maimed troops, and their loved ones, butcher boy.
RNC Doing Intelligence in Green Zone?
Seriously, when reps Moran and Tauscher went to Iraq, the found that thousands of flyers, describing them in terms sounding like opposition research, were circulating in the Green Zone.
Bush and His Evil Minions™ have infiltrated every level of US government, and we are going to need de-Bushification when he is gone if we want our government to work.
One amusing/appalling note from the story above:
But even such tight control could not always filter out the bizarre world inside the barricades. At one point, the three were trying to discuss the state of Iraqi security forces with Iraq’s national security adviser, Mowaffak al-Rubaie, but the large, flat-panel television set facing the official proved to be a distraction. Rubaie was watching children’s cartoons.
When Moran asked him to turn it off, Rubaie protested with a laugh and said, “But this is my favorite television show,” Moran recalled.
Cover Up, Part Deux
Well it looks like the cover up masquerading as a court martial is finished.
So they acquitted Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan of everything but talking about the investigation, for which he will receive a reprimand.
So, no regular army officers, Jordan is a reservist, were convicted of anything, and the only thing an officer got was a slap on the wrist.
My someone with a star had to know, and explicitly approve of it, and someone at a higher level had to give tacit approval.
Based on reports, we already know that Rumsfeld viewed the Geneva conventions with contempt, and as the saying goes sh&% flows down hill.
Josh Marshall Is Funny as Hell
Not the delivery so much as the content, I think.
He’s noting that the while the party in power typically has the lead in corruption, because they are the ones with the ability to get corrupt stuff done, Republicans still hold a convincing muck advantage.
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Leaked GAO Report Says Iraq a Failure
It appears that a draft of a GAO report has been leaked to the Washington Post.
Iraq has failed to meet all but three of 18 congressionally mandated benchmarks for political and military progress, according to a draft of a Government Accountability Office report. The document questions whether some aspects of a more positive assessment by the White House last month adequately reflected the range of views the GAO found within the administration.
It’s been leaked because one of the writers knew that it would be censored by Bush and His Evil Minions™ in its final version.
In a related note, the Pentagon, “Said Wednesday that it won’t make a single, unified recommendation to President Bush during next month’s strategy assessment.”
This means that they don’t want to be Bush’s bitch on Iraq any more.
Iraq is Not their Catastrophe, Iraq is their Utopia
Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone cuts to the heart of the matter in their article, “The Great Iraq Swindle“.
It is a must read expose of the corruption in the contracting in Iraq, but it answers a bigger question, why did the Neocons want to go there in the first place?
Here is the money quote:
Operation Iraqi Freedom, it turns out, was never a war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. It was an invasion of the federal budget, and no occupying force in history has ever been this efficient. George W. Bush’s war in the Mesopotamian desert was an experiment of sorts, a crude first take at his vision of a fully privatized American government. In Iraq the lines between essential government services and for-profit enterprises have been blurred to the point of absurdity — to the point where wounded soldiers have to pay retail prices for fresh underwear, where modern-day chattel are imported from the Third World at slave wages to peel the potatoes we once assigned to grunts in KP, where private companies are guaranteed huge profits no matter how badly they f%$# things up.
And just maybe, reviewing this appalling history of invoicing orgies and million-dollar boondoggles, it’s not so far-fetched to think that this is the way someone up there would like things run all over — not just in Iraq but in Iowa, too, with the state police working for Corrections Corporation of America, and DHL with the contract to deliver every Christmas card. And why not? What the Bush administration has created in Iraq is a sort of paradise of perverted capitalism, where revenues are forcibly extracted from the customer by the state, and obscene profits are handed out not by the market but by an unaccountable government bureaucracy. This is the triumphant culmination of two centuries of flawed white-people thinking, a preposterous mix of authoritarian socialism and laissez-faire profiteering, with all the worst aspects of both ideologies rolled up into one pointless, supremely idiotic military adventure — American men and women dying by the thousands, so that Karl Marx and Adam Smith can blow each other in a Middle Eastern glory hole.
They could not do this in Afghanistan, there simply is not the money there, but Iraq, with its immense oil reserves served as the laboratory for their twisted vision of society.
Simply put, it’s scarier than you think. Iraq is not their catastrophe, Iraq is their utopia
Your Mouth to God’s Ear
This was from the comments section.
TPMmuckraker August 27, 2007 2:42 PM:
Now that the Justice department is finished with it’s house cleaning, The rest of the deal Bush made to spare himself impeachment will begin. The Cheney resignation will be forth coming within the time frame I estimated last week. There are three weeks left on that clock. If you look through obscure posts from three weeks ago until last week, you will see my original predictions about Rove (perfectly timed) and Gonzales (also one week prior as stated) Deny my accuracy and attribute it to coincedence or guessing if you like, but within three weeks from this day the dark one falls. The deal has been made and the substance of it is out. I am not a mystic and do not own a crystal ball. I do however own many devices that are able to communicate messages through the air. These have been put to great use.. Cheney is next, and you heard it here first. AS I STATED WITH MY OTHER POSTS MARK THIS ONE! Do not talk of it, Just mark it! It will be a great remebrance!
Me, I’m not such an optimist.
Two Years Ago, Grover Norquist Achieved His Goal
New Orleans, two years ago today.