President Wiggum

This pose is suppose to make him look smart.


But in reality he is trying to eat the frames.


(REUTERS/White House/Eric Draper/Handout)

Looking for an Enema, er, Enemy

Planned all along...from no longer neo-Con ("Guilty Con"?) Francis Fukuyama via Matt Yglesias:

During the 1990s "There was actually a deliberate search for an enemy because they felt that the Republican Party didn't do as well" when foreign policy wasn't on the issue agenda.

As Kevin Drum notes this started out with an overplayed "crisis" with China and the airplane, but after 9/11 settled comfortably in the PANC vision for "transforming" the Middle East via bombing, shooting, and torturing (and profiting). I still think Cheney's behavior at the Hu's visit was more hubris than absent-mindedness from Bag-o-Hammers Dick.

And there voluntary war on the "Iraq-o-terrst" sure has worked hasn't it?

Terror attacks and kidnappings worldwide exceeded 10,000 for the first time last year, propelled in part by a surge in Iraq, according to government figures to be released soon.

Mr. Powerful

Nice to know there is no policy beyond saber-rattlin' and photo-oppin'.

US President George W. Bush has warned rising oil prices will mean a "tough summer" for US consumers as the high cost of gasoline (petrol) showed signs of becoming a big political issue.

But even as more Americans expressed discontent over the price of filling up their gas tanks, Bush suggested there was little his government could do in the short term about the problem.

"We're going to have a tough summer because people are beginning to drive now during tight supply," Bush said as he toured a California facility developing hydrogen-powered vehicles.

"The American people have got to understand what happens elsewhere in the world affects the price of gasoline you pay here."

I think most of us do understand Georgie, which is why we are so "delighted" you enjoy poking Iran with a stick so much. Your Middle East adventure so far has really paid off.

So, is this keeping it Real?

Republican style?


"I can call you an asshole if I want to!"

Breaking News from Osama

Apparently, Bin Laden has released a new tape (aka -- "Oh my God we are down to 33% engage Osama tape).

I'm not fluent in Arabic, but I believe he announced he is succeeding Exxon-Mobil CEO Lee Raymond.

"Nothin' says Earth Day"

Like flying thousands of miles in your 747 and back to talk about fuel conservation on Earth Day.


(AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

An informative and depressing game

Juan Cole has a game for hypocrites everywhere -- but especially for Republicans.

Balance of Betrayal

Larry Johnson on the firing of a CIA employee for allegedly telling Dana Priest about secret CIA prisons in eastern europe:

I am struck by the irony that Mary McCarthy may have been fired for blowing the whistle and ensuring that the truth about an abuse was told to the American people. There is something potentially honorable in that action; particularly when you consider that George Bush authorized Scooter Libby to leak misleading information for the purpose of deceiving the American people about the grounds for going to war in Iraq. While I'm neither a fan nor friend of Mary's, she may have done a service for her country. She was a lousy manager in my experience, but she is not a traitor and has not betrayed the identity of an undercover intelligence officer. That dirty work was done by the minions of George Bush and Dick Cheney. It is important to keep that fact in the forefront as the judgment on Mary McCarthy's acts is rendered.

Shut Up!

If I hear one more Democrat bitch about "message" I'm going to scream.

Look the Party's problem isn't picking a message, it is picking which of the dozens of calamitous fuck ups to single out against the GOP and figuring which fuck ups are not so catastrophic that they can be fixed.

Bush and the GOP Congress have managed to screw up so many things, to have so many disasters that they all get lost in a "fog of incompetence". We progressives always think, "this is the one that will bring him down" when in fact there are now virtually so many things every week piling on top of each other that individual matters don't get a chance to play out. The ONLY thing they could crow about is the "non-prosperous" economic recovery -- well when gas is more than $2.50 a gallon how hollow is that crowing?

The GOP didn't win control of the House in 1994 because of the damn "Contract with America" they won because the public was, at that time, angry with Clinton (far more than they would be during Monica-gate) and sick of corruption in the House. Change was in the air, not change because of some GOP platform, but change for change sake.

If you don't think that is in the air this Spring you are not alive.

A Little Truth in Speechifyin'

Let's put the truth in the slogans:


(REUTERS/Jim Young)

Becomes...



Once again may I point out, you don't get this kind of quality photomanipulation from your Josh Marshalls, your Brad DeLongs, your Jane Hamshers or Christy Hardin Reddhedds.

I don't know why, you'll have to ask them.

The DECIDER strikes again

Here's some real leadership:

As oil prices hit a record, drivers worried about $3-a-gallon gas and politicians feared the impact on elections, President Bush on Friday acknowledged the pain but seemed resigned to being able to do little about it.

That will be good for the ol' 33% rating.

At least the Gropinator had a busy day:


Bonehead Summit.

(REUTERS/Larry Downing)


Followed by,




Plastic Surgery victim Class Action Summit

That's right, Kenny & Bush have the same tailor. What of it?

Write your own jokes

Former White House Chef Walter Scheib, apparently let go because the Bush's don't like scallops (they're insane!) dishes on Bush's eating habits:

Which means guests at some D.C. fetes lately are being treated to revelations about what the commander in chief orders for lunch (peanut butter-and-honey sandwiches are in heavy rotation) and the menu at breakfast meetings (cereal for President Bush, which prompted cabinet members to follow suit).

Wow, there's a sophisticated palate. What cereal, I'm betting it isn't Special K or Grape Nuts.

Cocoa-Bananas Puffs?

Captain Bunnypants Crunch?

The dinner is a riff on White House noshes past: rack of lamb, which was Mrs. Clinton's favorite; her daughter's curried sweet-potato soup; and a salad featuring the roasted beets both first ladies adored. The goat-cheese tart was wrapped in a thin skin of ground corn. "We tip our hat to the Bushes with the tamale dough,'' Mr. Scheib said.

Not apparent is anything the Bushes' twin daughters may have inspired. "There's a tequila glaze on the lamb,'' Mr. Scheib said with a wink, in a not-so-subtle reference to the young women's documented penchant for partying.

Another monumental contribution to society by the Bush twins.

Well this is disturbing

At yesterday's lunch for the Chinese leader Hu (Bush asked him to perform "Happy Jack" in honor of Abramoff) one of the guests was Michelle Kwan. Kwan as many of you may know, and those of you with daughters between 10 and 15 certainly know is an American figure skater.

Now Watertiger pretty much already captioned the monosodium glutamate out of this "official" visit, but there is something rather disturbing about Bush's interaction with Kwan. Disturbing as if he is thinking of adding her to his Billy Jack inspired harum of wives (I bet Elaine Cho is pissed about it too).

It is as if Bush is asking Michelle to accompany him somewhere that he knows neither Jenna nor Not-Jenna can go with him.

A "Purity Ball":


That should go over well.

Unrequited

Half a year ago, this woman was claimed by Bush to be the "MOST" qualified person in America to be on the Supreme Court. A compliment which caused Harriet Meiers to say, "AWESOME!".

And now, the former Supreme Court nominee is may be getting dumped by her boyfriend's new hottie.

Joshua B. Bolten, the new White House chief of staff, has raised the possibility of moving Harriet E. Miers from her job as President Bush's counsel as part of a continuing shake-up of the West Wing, an influential Republican with close ties to Mr. Bolten said Thursday...

...Mr. Bolten is said by a number of Republicans in Washington to feel that Ms. Miers is indecisive, a weak manager and slow in moving vital paperwork through the system. She came to the White House in January 2001 as the staff secretary and then held one of Mr. Bolten's former jobs, deputy chief of staff for policy, before Mr. Bush appointed her as White House counsel in November 2004.

Plus Harriet has all sorts of pictures of Bush up on her wall, many not featuring his hands.

NeoFucks

The Neocon cabal headed by Cheney is just a bunch of fucks. Today TPM linked to an interesting piece by Kevin Drum that highlights opportunities missed with Iran due largely to the neocons running the executive branch policy apparatus. While we're at it, let's not forget how we have conducted ourselves in the aftermath of 9/11 and in conducting the so-called war on terra. Jane Mayer wrote a superb article in the New Yorker a couple of months back that is quite stunning and well worth a complete read.

Qahtani had been subjected to a hundred and sixty days of isolation in a pen perpetually flooded with artificial light. He was interrogated on forty-eight of fifty-four days, for eighteen to twenty hours at a stretch. He had been stripped naked; straddled by taunting female guards, in an exercise called “invasion of space by a female”; forced to wear women’s underwear on his head, and to put on a bra; threatened by dogs; placed on a leash; and told that his mother was a whore. By December, Qahtani had been subjected to a phony kidnapping, deprived of heat, given large quantities of intravenous liquids without access to a toilet, and deprived of sleep for three days. Ten days before Brant and Mora met, Qahtani’s heart rate had dropped so precipitately, to thirty-five beats a minute, that he required cardiac monitoring.
***
In Morello’s office, Mora saw what he now refers to as “the package”—a collection of secret military documents that traced the origins of the coercive interrogation policy at Guantánamo. It began on October 11, 2002, with a request by J.T.F.-170’s commander, Major General Michael Dunlavey, to make interrogations more aggressive. A few weeks later, Major General Geoffrey Miller assumed command of Guantánamo Bay, and, on the assumption that prisoners like Qahtani had been trained by Al Qaeda to resist questioning, he pushed his superiors hard for more flexibility in interrogations. On December 2nd, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld gave formal approval for the use of “hooding,” “exploitation of phobias,” “stress positions,” “deprivation of light and auditory stimuli,” and other coercive tactics ordinarily forbidden by the Army Field Manual. (However, he reserved judgment on other methods, including “waterboarding,” a form of simulated drowning.) In Mora’s memo, Morello is quoted as saying that “we tried to stop it.” But he was told not to ask questions.
***
Mora was less impressed. Beaver’s brief, his memo says, “was a wholly inadequate analysis of the law.” It held that “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment could be inflicted on the Guantánamo detainees with near impunity”; in his view, such acts were unlawful. Rumsfeld’s December 2nd memo approving these “counter-resistance” techniques, Mora wrote, “was fatally grounded on these serious failures of legal analysis.” Neither Beaver nor Rumsfeld drew any “bright line” prohibiting the combination of these techniques, or defining any limits for their use. He believed that such rhetorical laxity “could produce effects reaching the level of torture,” which was prohibited, without exception, under both U.S. and international law.Mora took his concerns to Gordon England, the Secretary of the Navy, who is now the Deputy Secretary of Defense. Then, on December 20th, with England’s authorization, Mora went to William Haynes, the Pentagon’s general counsel; they met in Haynes’s office, an elegant suite behind vault-like metal doors.

In confronting Haynes, Mora was engaging not just the Pentagon but also the Vice-President’s office. Haynes is a protégé of Cheney’s influential chief of staff, David Addington. Addington’s relationship with Cheney goes back to the Reagan years, when Cheney, who was then a representative from Wyoming, was the ranking Republican on a House select committee investigating the Iran-Contra scandal. Addington, a congressional aide, helped to write a report for the committee’s Republican minority, arguing that the law banning covert aid to the Contras—the heart of the scandal—was an unconstitutional infringement of Presidential prerogatives. Both men continue to embrace an extraordinarily expansive view of executive power. In 1989, when Cheney was named Secretary of Defense by George H. W. Bush, he hired Addington as a special assistant, and eventually appointed him to be his general counsel. Addington, in turn, hired Haynes as his special assistant and soon promoted him to general counsel of the Army.

After George W. Bush took office, Addington came to the White House with Cheney, and Haynes took his boss’s old job at the Pentagon. Addington has played a central part in virtually all of the Administration’s legal strategies, including interrogation and detainee policies. The office of the Vice-President has no statutory role in the military chain of command.
***
Haynes, again, didn’t say much in response, but soon afterward, at a meeting of top Pentagon officials, he mentioned Mora’s concerns to Secretary Rumsfeld. A former Administration official told me that Rumsfeld was unconcerned; he once more joked that he himself stood eight hours a day, and exclaimed, “Torture? That’s not torture!” (“His attitude was ‘What’s the big deal?’ ” the former official said.) A subordinate delicately pointed out to Rumsfeld that while he often stood for hours it was because he chose to do so, and he could sit down when he wanted.
***
A week later, Mora was shown a lengthy classified document that negated almost every argument he had made. Haynes had outflanked him. He had solicited a separate, overarching opinion from the Office of Legal Counsel, at the Justice Department, on the legality of harsh military interrogations—effectively superseding the working group.
***
The author of the opinion was John Yoo, a young and unusually influential lawyer in the Administration, who, like Haynes, was part of Addington’s circle. (Yoo and Haynes were also regular racquetball partners.) In the past, Yoo, working closely with Addington, had helped to formulate the argument that the treatment of Al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, unlike that of all other foreign enemies, was not covered by the Geneva conventions; Yoo had also helped to write the Torture Memo.

They are running the world, did you know?

"You're Leaving?"

"But I just bought a case of astroglide?"

Scotty's solo flight

"I just joined the mile-high club."


(REUTERS/Jason Reed )

Only two more weeks of these kind of hijinx

"Okay, Mr. President, now it's your turn to cough."


(REUTERS/Jim Young)

He may have arranged the Titanic's deck chairs

But the NY Times picked one up and is beating the Bush Administration about the head, neck and chest with it. Fred Hiatt of the Washington Post is liable to get some injuries too, what with him down on his knees in the same location.

It's too soon to say how history will judge this administration, but it does look as if the first thing this president will be remembered for is the disastrous way the war in Iraq was conducted under Donald Rumsfeld, who, of course, isn't going anywhere. If there's a second thing we think history will shake its head over, it's the administration's cavalier disregard for the civil liberties of American citizens and the human rights of American prisoners. Needless to say, nobody's being replaced at the Justice Department.

The third great disaster of the Bush administration is a fiscal policy that has turned a federal surplus into a series of enormous budget gaps and an economy that depends on loans from China to pay its bills. The administration is changing the fiscal team, but doing everything possible to send the signal that there are no new brooms in this venture — just the same old faces with new labels. Rob Portman will morph from being the trade representative into being the director of the White House budget office. Mr. Portman, a longtime Bush loyalist, used his nomination acceptance speech to champion all the policies that wrecked things in the first place. More tax cuts will be forthcoming, he vowed, and budget cuts will make things balance out in the end...

...The sudden exit of Scott McClellan, the press secretary, would be meaningless under normal circumstances. But in the current context, it really does send an important message. The president is like one of those people who pretend to apologize by saying they're sorry if they were misunderstood. He doesn't believe he's done anything wrong. It's our fault for not appreciating him.

Blame the victim.

George Bush has the broomstick and "We the People" are Abner Louima.

And this Summer, an election year, is going to require us remaining prone.

"Nobody anticipated the breaking of the budget"

"Jesus made me do it."

With the expected passage this spring of the largest emergency spending bill in history, annual war expenditures in Iraq will have nearly doubled since the U.S. invasion, as the military confronts the rapidly escalating cost of repairing, rebuilding and replacing equipment chewed up by three years of combat.

The cost of the war in U.S. fatalities has declined this year, but the cost in treasure continues to rise, from $48 billion in 2003 to $59 billion in 2004 to $81 billion in 2005 to an anticipated $94 billion in 2006, according to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. The U.S. government is now spending nearly $10 billion a month in Iraq and Afghanistan, up from $8.2 billion a year ago, a new Congressional Research Service report found.

Annual war costs in Iraq are easily outpacing the $61 billion a year that the United States spent in Vietnam between 1964 and 1972, in today's dollars.

And yet we have about one-quarter to one-third the number of troops that we had in Vietnam (plus a much as they underperformed the South Vietnamese military [which we funded] looks like a frickin' juggernaut in comparison to Iraqs)

Well, at least the Bush Administration displayed its stunning sense of accuracy by predicting the war wouldn't cost much...for just one example,

Rummy:

“Well, the Office of Management and Budget, has come up come up with a number that's something under $50 billion for the cost. How much of that would be the U.S. burden, and how much would be other countries, is an open question.” 1/19/2003

&

“I don’t know that there is much reconstruction to do.” - 4/11/2003