The "other" Shrill one

Bob Herbert,

If George W. Bush could have been removed from office for being a bad president, he would have been sent back to his ranch a long time ago.

If incompetence were a criminal offense, he'd be behind bars...

...The worst thing he did, of course, was to employ a massive campaign of deceit to lead the nation into a catastrophic war in Iraq -- a war with no end in sight that has already claimed tens of thousands of lives and inflicted scores of thousands of crippling injuries...

...The sins of the Bush administration are so extensive and so egregious, they could never be adequately addressed in a newspaper column. History will be the final judge. But I've no doubt about the ultimate verdict.

Remember the Clinton budget surplus?

It was the largest in American history. President Bush and his cronies went after it like vultures feasting in a field of carcasses. They didn't invest the surplus. They devoured it.

Remember how most of the world responded with an extraordinary outpouring of sympathy and support for America in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11?

Mr. Bush had no idea how to seize that golden opportunity to build new alliances and strengthen existing ones. Much of that solidarity with America has morphed into outright hostility.

Blaming the Clenis somehow...priceless

My our children certainly have had a lot of their future spent to accomplish a hell of a disaster:

The cost of the war in Iraq will reach $320 billion after the expected passage next month of an emergency spending bill currently before the Senate, and that total is likely to more than double before the war ends, the Congressional Research Service estimated this week.

The analysis, distributed to some members of Congress on Tuesday night, provides the most official cost estimate yet of a war whose price tag will rise by nearly 17 percent this year. Just last week, independent defense analysts looking only at Defense Department costs put the total at least $7 billion below the CRS figure.

Once the war spending bill is passed, military and diplomatic costs will have reached $101.8 billion this fiscal year, up from $87.3 billion in 2005, $77.3 billion in 2004 and $51 billion in 2003, the year of the invasion, congressional analysts said. Even if a gradual troop withdrawal begins this year, war costs in Iraq and Afghanistan are likely to rise by an additional $371 billion during the phaseout, the report said, citing a Congressional Budget Office study. When factoring in costs of the war in Afghanistan, the $811 billion total for both wars would have far exceeded the inflation-adjusted $549 billion cost of the Vietnam War.

The cost of occupying Iraq is twice the cost of invading too. Good thing they never thought about the occupying at the White House.

Good job, once again, C-Plus Augustus.

Droopy tries to act independent

Those Ned Lamont numbers in Connecticut (or more accurately those George Bush numbers in Connecticut) must really be speaking to whiny Joe Lieberman:

Hurricane Katrina's latest fatality should be FEMA, the nation's disaster response agency, a Senate inquiry concluded in calling for a government overhaul to avoid future failures like those the devastating storm exposed...

...Though the proposed changes do not place blame on any official or government agency, Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., will offer "additional views" to the panel's findings in a statement accusing President Bush of failing "to provide critical leadership when it was most needed."

And when Lieberman makes his statement it will lose all force and impact because every word ever uttered by Joe Lieberman has no force and no impact. Can you imagine the stunning proposal Lieberman must have given his wife Hadassah? Must have been stirring. I don't speak Hebrew (not a lot of call for it in Minnesota) but does Hadassah mean "lower your expectations"? Lieberman really is Fredo's Fredo.

Oh please, oh please!

From Raw Story:

REPORT: ROVE RECEIVED TARGET LETTER

"Hold on a minute, I think that puddle isn't just from Scotty, it IS Scotty."

(AP Photo/Ron Edmonds)

Keep Pulling The String

Apparently the fourth circuit court of appeals, not known as a bastion of liberal thought, doesn't like this whole unitary executive theory (the fourth circuit is the court that wouldn't just let DOJ hold detainee Jose Padilla four years without due process then dismiss the case to transfer him to another jurisdiction). Yesterday the court ordered a trial judge to review whether a recent conviction may have been tainted by information obtained from secret and warrantless wiretaps, as reported in the NYT.

WASHINGTON, April 25 — An appellate court on Tuesday directed a lower court to consider statements by a Muslim cleric in northern Virginia that he had been illegally wiretapped under the warrantless eavesdropping program that President Bush authorized.
The ruling opened the door to what could be the first ruling by a federal court on whether information obtained under the program, operated by the National Security Agency, had been improperly used in a criminal prosecution.

The cleric, Ali al-Timimi, who was sentenced to life in prison last year for inciting his Muslim followers to violence, is challenging his conviction because he says he suspects that the government failed to disclosed illegal wiretaps of his e-mail messages and telephone conversations.

In an order released on Tuesday, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit did not rule on the merits of Mr. Timimi's assertions about the N.S.A. program, but sent the case back to the federal trial court in Alexandria, Va., for a rehearing.

The appellate court gave the trial judge in the case, Leonie M. Brinkema, broad latitude, saying the trial court could "order whatever relief or changes in the case, if any, that it considers appropriate."
***
But a lawyer for Mr. Timimi, Jonathan Turley, said the appellate order was a significant and "extraordinary step" because appellate courts did not generally order a rehearing in a criminal case while an appeal was pending.

"This is very good news for us, and we're eager to go back to Judge Brinkema to explore these troubling issues," Mr. Turley said in an interview.

The Justice Department has declined to say publicly whether National Security Agency wiretaps were used against Mr. Timimi or any other terrorism defendants. But Mr. Timimi's lawyers maintain that circumstantial evidence, including incriminating conversations between him and other suspects that were monitored after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, indicate that the eavesdropping program was used against him.

Wanna take bets? I think this is where it all starts to unravel. Federal judges with lifetime tenure may be just the kind of relief we need from those hearty souls in the senate.

Composed by Bush Adviser Fred Ziffel

(To the Green Acres theme)


Green zoning is the way to be.
Compound livin’s the life for me.

Bombs blowin' up so far and wide

Keep Al Qaeda, just give me that homicide.





Tehran's where I’d rather invade.
I'll get me better polls this way.

I just adore a smart-bombs view.
Baghdad I love you but time for Imam's gettin' screwed.

(dee dee dah dee dee)

The gore.
(dee dee dah dee dee)

More war.
(dee dee dah dee dee)

Fresh polls.
(dee dee dah dee dee)

"Assholes!"


Pretend you're my wife


Good bye, Muslim life.

Oh Green Zone we are there!

If you look at him the right way

You realize, "My God, we elected Mr. Haney"!

(AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)



And Cheney is really Arnold Ziffel...

Those linear shrub-mazes are hard work.

Bush loses track of the trail of pretzels leading him back to the White House.

(AFP/Tim Sloan)

And here cometh the bullshit...

These statements are truly becoming tragi-comedy, who believes these people anymore, other than mouthbreathers. A vast majority of the country now knows that everyday is opposite day for the White House:

At a news conference with Casey, Rumsfeld said Iraq is moving forward.

"This is a sovereign country, and they are making impressive progress," he said.

Here is today's "impressive progress" --

*BAGHDAD - Gunmen killed a senior judge in Baghdad's Amiriya district, Interior Ministry sources said. The judge, Ibrahim al-Hindawi, was the head of the main court responsible for the western Karkh sector of Baghdad.

*BAGHDAD - Police found the bodies of two men in eastern Baghdad on Tuesday. No more details were available.

BAGHDAD - Two people were killed and five wounded when a bomb planted inside a mini bus exploded in the Shi'ite Sadr city slum in eastern Baghdad, police said.

BAGHDAD - Four policemen were wounded when a car bomb exploded near a police checkpoint near Yarmouk hospital in western Baghdad, police said.

BAQUBA - Gunmen killed four people, including an eight-year-old girl, in separate incidents in religiously mixed Baquba, 65 km (40 miles) north of Baghdad, police said.

TAL QASIR - Four Iraqi policemen and two insurgents were killed on Monday when insurgents attacked a police station in Tal Qasir, 200 km ( 125 miles) north of Baghdad, police said.

NEAR KIRKUK - Gunmen shot dead two soldiers and a policeman who were out of duty on Monday near Kirkuk, 250 km (155 miles) north of Baghdad, police said.

KIRKUK - Gunmen killed a soldier working in the Oil Facility Protection Service on Monday in the main road between Tikrit and Kirkuk, police said.

And as Juan Cole notes this is a relatively light day of violence in Iraq.

How George Bush reacts to a crisis

When he can't bomb, apparently it's just talkin' points all the way:

Repeat every lousy pro-business, pro-not solving a fucking thing point he can make about the price of Gas.

1. No new refineries being built (um, that's because the oil companies don't want to build 'em, not because of any regulations)

2. Environmental regs in gas, oh, of course. And when gas was a dollar seven years ago (and for more than 15 years) under the same regulations that was the environmentalists fault too?

3. Ethanol. Oh yes, the great fucking boondoggle of ethanol. The fuel that takes more fossil fuel to make than it produces. The grand agricultural subsidy that accomplishes nothing.

So where will George Bush & Tom DeLay be?

A law that Bush signed when fucking up Texas has resulted in the killin' of a woman because she's too damned expensive.

The countdown has begun on the life of Andrea Clark, a patient at St. Luke's Hospital.

Six days left.

No, she's not terminal, her family says and she's not brain dead. Her sisters say that she wants to live. The Houston hospital is going to unilaterally remove a woman from life support, apparently based on the decision of a lone physician even though her family wants her to continue to receive care.

The central issue in the Andrea Clark case is the same as that in the Terri Schindler Schiavo case, whether the state should be able to sanction the removal of a human being from life support.

What's even more significant in the Clark case is that the Texas bill that allows health care providers to end a human life despite the wishes of the patient and the patient's family was signed into law in 1999 by President George W. Bush as Texas Governor. However, in 2005, he rushed back to the White House from Easter vacation to sign a bill rushed through Congress which was designed to save the life of Terri Schiavo because of his "presumption in favor of life".

Will Georgie drop all relaxing and sign a bill?

Will DeLay make a noise, since this is occuring in his home town?

Will the right-to-lifers and Randall Terry show up to act like assholes and fuck up 'Kumbaya'?

Of...

course...

not...

Incompetence Squared

Poor Iraq, so far from normal so frequently "surprised" with visits from Bush Administration clowns.

A double dip of douchebaggery that should be good for tweaking that approval rating one tenth of a point has Condi & Rummy coming to Baghdad and puttin' on a show of how great stuff is going. All so they can make a demonstration of progress by withdrawing troops before the mid-terms in salute to their disastrous policy.

Patrioticism

(To "God Bless America")


God Blessed America,

When he made me King.

I vacationed, and I relaxed,

I cause fright, night not too bright, kill to love.

Kill the Shiites, kill the Sunnis,

Kill the Persians, nuke 'em all

God blessed America, now scratch my balls!

God blessed America, I'll kill you all (except the blastocysts)!



(pictures from AP & Reuters)

My God, he can walk!

(AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

Dumb & Dumberer

Bush and Ahmadinejad (who I call "Bob") deserve each other:

Mr Ahmadinejad has drawn fierce criticism in the West for comments last October that cast doubt on the Holocaust and for saying that Israel should be "wiped off the map". Yesterday, he said: "We say that this fake regime [Israel] cannot logically continue to live."

How these two manage to demonstrate the existence of God is beyond me.

Unless God is a dick.

Truthiness

Your President (I know, I know, but it's not a bad dream, it's true) explains his decision-making process:

"I based a lot of my foreign policy decisions on some things that I think are true."

Now remember that Georgie believes dinosaurs are truly Jesus' Horses.


Try to get some sleep somehow.

Had It With Mr. Have Got

I don't know about you, but I'm up to my ears in Mr. Have Got telling me what "I've got" to understand.

"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 know what most of the people now understand is that when the moron in chief tells us what "we've got" to understand, it's usually just the opposite whatever snake oil he is trying to pawn-off. What he's got to understand is that the majority of Americans are showing him their middle finger--and it is only going to get worse.

Stupid is as Stupid Does

I'd try to cry crocodile tears for Michelle Malkin, but on the internets no one can see you pretend to cry.

However, while she is no doubt getting a taste of her own, stupidly prescribed medicine, enough is enough. IF she and Jesse were forced to move because their address was published (and sorry because of her track record of being overwrought and mendacious I'm not sure if she is making the whole thing up) then this is a classic case of two wrongs do not make a right. As an anonymous person on the internets I am not big on exposure. Anonymity gives you the freedom to do things you would never do if you were known, it is liberating (it can also be a license for doing the wrong thing too of course -- with no power comes no responsibility right Uncle Ben?). I would never be as snarky if I were exposed, sorry, but it is good for teh comedy.

Michelle Malkin is not anonymous, of course, but that doesn't mean there is not a degree of privacy associated with her and her family. Especially in that it should apply to her kids who haven't done squat. Her original listing of the private information of protesters was incredibly wrong, there is some justice to her exposure -- but that doesn't make it "just".

Okay, there endeth the moral posturing and here beginnith the snark.

Perhaps Michelle and Jesse can move here?

"C'mon Boys..."

"In the Navy
Come on protect the motherland
In the Navy
Come on and join your fellow man"





(REUTERS/Larry Downing)