Saturday, September 09, 2006

Bush continues to piss on the constitution


And of course Congress will roll over for this right after Arlen Specter gets to have a little hissy fit and then calm down and vote for the damn thing.

ADAM LIPTAK, NY TIMES - Many of the harsh interrogation techniques repudiated by the Pentagon on Wednesday would be made lawful by legislation put forward the same day by the Bush administration. And the courts would be forbidden from intervening. The proposal is in the last 10 pages of an 86-page bill devoted mostly to military commissions, and it is a tangled mix of cross-references and pregnant omissions.

The proposed legislation takes pains to try to ensure that the Supreme Court will not have a second bite at the apple. "The act makes clear," it says in its introductory findings, "that the Geneva Conventions are not a source of judicially enforceable individual rights."

Rumsfeld rejected planning for post-invasion Iraq



Reading this makes me wonder how this guy can even stand to be himself?????

September 8, 2006
"HE WOULD FIRE THE NEXT PERSON THAT SAID THAT"....Today, via Orin Kerr, comes a remarkable interview with Brigadier General Mark Scheid, chief of the Logistics War Plans Division after 9/11, and one of the people with primary responsibility for war planning. Shortly after the invasion of Afghanistan, he says, Donald Rumsfeld told his team to start planning for war in Iraq, but not to bother planning for a long stay:

"The secretary of defense continued to push on us ... that everything we write in our plan has to be the idea that we are going to go in, we're going to take out the regime, and then we're going to leave," Scheid said. "We won't stay."

Scheid said the planners continued to try "to write what was called Phase 4," or the piece of the plan that included post-invasion operations like occupation.

Even if the troops didn't stay, "at least we have to plan for it," Scheid said.

"I remember the secretary of defense saying that he would fire the next person that said that," Scheid said. "We would not do planning for Phase 4 operations, which would require all those additional troops that people talk about today.

"He said we will not do that because the American public will not back us if they think we are going over there for a long war."

...."In his own mind he thought we could go in and fight and take out the regime and come out. But a lot of us planners were having a real hard time with it because we were also thinking we can't do this. Once you tear up a country you have to stay and rebuild it. It was very challenging."

Friday, September 08, 2006

Tony goes down.....


"Over in England Prime Minister Tony Blair has decided he will step down in May. Looks like President Bush has toppled another foreign government."---Jay Leno

Thursday, September 07, 2006

New Climate Change 'Time Bomb' Detected


Looks like things might be getting a whole lot worse a whole lot faster than scientists thought...... [The picture here is of a huge hole caused by melting permafrost in Alaska.

WASHINGTON (Sept. 7) - Global warming gases trapped in the soil are bubbling out of the thawing permafrost in amounts far higher than previously thought and may trigger what researchers warn is a climate time bomb.

"The higher the temperature gets, the more permafrost we melt, the more tendency it is to become a more vicious cycle," said Chris Field, director of global ecology at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, who was not part of the study. "That's the thing that is scary about this whole thing. There are lots of mechanisms that tend to be self-perpetuating and relatively few that tend to shut it off."

"I don't think it can be easily stopped; we'd really have to have major cooling for it to stop," Walter said.

Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Karl Rove: Lunatic


























How do squirrely people like this come to control millions of people???

06 Sep 2006 08:17 am

This nugget from the Karl Rove biography seems too weird to be true:

Soon after Rove moved into his new office in the West Wing, previously occupied by Hillary Clinton, he invited three top Catholic priests to conduct a ceremony to purge the room of evil spirits. "It was an actual liturgical ceremony," says participant Deal Hudson. "We sat at the table, we prayed. A priest said a series of prayers, including a blessing."

Deal Hudson, however, is not likely to make this up. Maybe it was just a blessing. Whatever, it's not exactly reassuring about what drives the Bush administration, is it?

Tuesday, September 05, 2006

Condi takes historical analogies to an absurd level


Next will they compare the Iraq Occupation to Star Wars???


Secretary of State Rice compared the Iraq war with the American Civil War, telling a magazine that slavery might have lasted longer in this country if the North had decided to end the fight early.
"I'm sure there are people who thought it was a mistake to fight the Civil War to its end and to insist that the emancipation of slaves would hold," Rice said in the new issue of Essence magazine.
"I know there were people who said, 'Why don't we get out of this now, take a peace with the South, but leave the South with slaves?'" Rice said.
Now, I know that Rice, like much of today's Republican Party, is desperate. I realize that this appears to be a challenging campaign cycle for the GOP, and they're willing to engage in whatever demagoguery necessary to survive the next 10 weeks.
But to suggest, out loud, on the record, that critics of the war in Iraq are similar to those who would approve of slavery is perhaps the most breathtakingly stupid remark ever uttered by a Bush administration official. And given the competition, that's no easy feat.

Monday, September 04, 2006

Want Bush to Kiss Your Ass?????

It may not be effective but it can't hurt!


http://kissmyassgeorge.com/

Sunday, September 03, 2006

Goodbye Andre!




Thanks for the memories!

Here is an excerpt from SI today...

Reflections on Andre
Agassi a great tennis player ... and a regular guy

THE LOCKER ROOM SUPERVISOR: "I've been in the men's locker room here for the past 23 years," says Carl Munnerlyn, the locker room supervisor at the U.S. Open. "Andre Agassi's style in the locker room is very loose. He'll speak to just about anybody. If you're a person even he's not particular close with but he knows you, he'll have a conversation with you. He's a nice guy. First-class all the way. When I see young players come in, I see them stare at him. They respect him by the way they look at him. I'm not going to say it's awe, but they acknowledge his stardom and how he goes about his business. His locker here is No. 238. I gave him that locker. It's not so much the number but the area he likes. He got here last Saturday and we kind of looked at each other. I said, 'You want the same locker, Andre?' He said, 'Yeah, you know the drill.' And I do know the drill."