Under the Bush Administration, reading is no longer fundamental. The Bush Administration has eliminated all funding for the program— which has been funded by every administration since 1975—in the 2009 proposed budget.

“If the House had nothing better to do, this futile partisan act would be a waste of time,” said Dana Perino, the White House spokeswoman. “The ’people’s House’ should reflect the priorities of the American people, not the fantasies of left-wing bloggers.”“

Thanks for caring, honey.

Oh, Congress held some administration officials in contempt. Good on them, I hope it’s backed up with some jail time.

Searing.  Read more 

My point: this is going on all over, from the Federal gov’t to the MIC complex to diplomatic agencies. I’m posting these two pieces because it gives us a glimpse into a culture of corruption the SCLM rarely covers, but is everywhere. A str8 Republican! No, really!

ouston, Texas) The district attorney who defended the Texas law criminalizing homosexuality before the US Supreme Court is desperately trying to keep his job following the discovery of e-mails containing sexually explicit videos, racist jokes and what is described as torrid love notes to his executive secretary.

Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal (R) is facing a state investigation into the emails which were discovered on his office computer.

…

Rosenthal who argued before the US Supreme Court that the Texas law against sodomy was upholding the moral values of the state and was in place to protect families. The case was Lawrence v Texas.  Read more 

Snicker. DCOW, but guess who has a crush on PonyBoi? Powerloin!

The folks at First Draft take an unfriendly look at President Bush’s extemporaneous comments in the Ramallah press conference yesterday. With equal parts humor and malice, they slice the comments into bite-sized morsels and provide appropriate headings for them. I think I understand the comments all too well and hope to take another look at his statement when I have a little more time.

UPDATE: I mistook First Draft for Professor Richard Landes’s The Second Draft. because you’re a moron with the reading comprehension skillz of a second grader, you cheeto-snapper. The folks at First Draft are among the sophisticates who refer to President Bush as “Chimpy.” Unfortunately, their take on President Bush’s Ramallah press conference is on target.  Read more 

Because life without humor is like sushine without warmth:

I had the pleasure of watching Chris Rock perform live stand up this New Year’s Eve at Madison Square Garden. It was raunchy and ridiculously politically incorrect, but also entertaining as hell. Rock was on fire and he did a lot of really strong topical material about the electoral process, the top contenders, and a lot of other major 2007 stories. Here are a few highlights:

On Elections: “Why would they have Election Day on a Tuesday? Would you hold a party on a Tuesday? No, cause you want people to come. They obviously don’t want you showing up.”

On Bush: “He’s made it hard for a white man to run for president. People are saying, ’After Bush, I’m not sure we can take another chance on a white guy.”

“He just doesn’t give a fuck about you. In the history of not giving a fuck no one has ever given less of a fuck.”  Read more 

Bush calls on Iran to “come clean”.

Leaving aside the obvious bad jokes, didn’t I just read something in the news about an NIE?  Read more 

And you America doubters-in-chief thought it would stop the drumbeat to war.

Watch as Bush explains it all, nice and slow for all the haters in the house:

I think the NIE makes it clear that Iran needs to be taken seriously as a threat to peace.

[…] I believed before the NIE that Iran was dangerous and I believe after the NIE that Iran is dangerous.

And I have said Iran is dangerous. And the NIE doesn’t do anything to change my opinion about the danger Iran poses to the world. Quite the contrary.

How could it be read any other way?

FDL:

There’s one other avenue that I’d like to see Rather’s attorneys pursue, if feasible: Bush’s W-2 records. An anonymous source points out that “[b]y dividing his total wages by his rate of pay at the time [a known quantity], we would finally know how many hours [Bush] worked in the Guard.”

So, Rather should subpoena Bush’s W-2s!

Assuming that those hours weren’t falsified, and that W-2s are subpoenable (a quick search suggests they are), this would be a simple, elegant way to prove whether Dubya actually fulfilled his obligations in the Alabama ANG, and therefore whether that aspect of Rather’s story was accurate. They might also come in handy if Rather wants to pursue the scrubbing rumors - there could be intriguing discrepancies between the W-2s and the ANG records.

A simple arithmetical process, eh?  Read more 

I’m no Villager, but it struck me there might be more than a few Beltway dog whistles in the following little story by Carl Hulse in the Times:

Fearing that President Bush would again use a Congressional recess to install disputed executive branch appointees without Senate confirmation, Democrats convened the Senate for the first of four microsessions to be held during the holiday break, precisely to thwart such an end run.

“I am glad to see the leadership stepped up here,” said Jim Webb, the junior senator from Virginia, called upon by the majority to open the Senate with a skeleton staff for the express purpose of immediately closing it down.

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, chose to schedule the so-called pro forma sessions because Mr. Bush took advantage of past recesses to install nominees including John R. Bolton, as ambassador to the United Nations, and, most recently, Sam Fox, a donor to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, as ambassador to Belgium. This time, Democrats were particularly suspicious of plans to appoint as surgeon general a nominee they oppose.

“This is the first time that pro formas have been used to block recess appointments,” said Jim Manley, a spokesman for Mr. Reid.

Mr. Reid said he would be willing to consider some of the president’s more contentious nominees as long as the White House moved forward with Democratic choices for regulatory bodies like the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Excellent. Now Reid should go ahead and block everything. The Republicans are; why shouldn’t we? Tit-for-tat is a highly successful strategy, after all, even though so far the Democrats have applied it only to members of their own caucus, and their base.

Anyhow, the possible dog-whistles:  Read more 

[Oopsie. Scottie walked it back. I guess it was just a cheap stunt to sell books. Who knew?]

Your case has re-opened. On Plame, what did Bush know, and when did he know it? ’Cause Scott “Sucker MC” McClellan dropped a dime:

E&P was first mainstream news outlet to report on Monday night that the McClellan excerpt [from his new tell-all book] reads:

“The most powerful leader [sic] in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So I stood at the White house briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.

“There was one problem. It was not true.

“I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration “were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice President, the President’s chief of staff, and the president himself.”

Chris Dodd—yay!—responds:  Read more 

A fake plan from Bush? Could it be? The always excellent James Fallows:

The plan announced with fanfare from the White House last week, to reduce airline delays by opening up military airspace, is preposterous. It will not make the slightest difference in airline delays or the general neuralgia of Thanksgiving travel. You think the media were gullible about Administration claims five years ago? Gee, it’s good to see that that will never happen again….

What’s wrong with this plan?

Let me guess: It’s purely rhetorical, based on false premises, and won’t solve the problem.  Read more 

Which is pretty funny, since as President, Bush seems to have pre-approved pardons for every war criminal with a Republican party card. McClatchy’s Joe Galloway has the money quote:

When George W. Bush was the governor of Texas, the state investigated, indicted, convicted and sentenced to prison for 10 years a county sheriff who, with his deputies, had waterboarded a criminal suspect. That sheriff got no pardon from Gov. Bush.

Of course waterboarding’s illegal. And that would make Bush a war criminal. No wonder Mukasey crawfished on torture—he didn’t want his boss to ever have to go before a tribunal. The only wonder, if it is, indeed, a wonder, is that Senate Judiciary members DiFi and Upchuck sold out Leahy and Feingold, and let Mukasey’s nomination proceed.

Of course waterboarding is torture. Galloway:

Is waterboarding torture?

The answer to all of these questions, put simply, is yes.

All of Judge Michael Mukasey’s artful dodging and word play to avoid acknowledging the obvious to the august members of Senate Judiciary Committee does nothing to change the fact.

Every member of the Senate Judiciary Committee knows that waterboarding is torture, even the majority who voted to send Judge Mukasey’s nomination to be attorney general, America’s chief law enforcement official, to the floor for a vote.

When you hog-tie a human being, tilt him head down, stuff a rag in his mouth and over his nostrils and pour water onto the rag slowly and steadily to the point where his lungs fill with water and he’s suffocating and drowning, that is torture.

For example:  Read more 

Froomkin:

“I’ve committed our troops into harm’s way twice, and it’s not a pleasant experience because I understand the consequences firsthand.

What does Bush know “first hand” about consequences to the troops, except when he’s using them for props in a photo-op, serving them fake turkey, or prancing around a flightdeck in a jumpsuit?  Read more 

The kind of headline we like to see:

Bush pleads for Mukasey’s confirmation

Make him plead some more!  Read more 

“If this were a dictatorship, it’d be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I’m the dictator.” — Washington, D.C., Dec. 19, 2000

Via TPM comes confirmation in the Times that everything we heard from the Village on torture was—and I know you’ll find this just as hard to believe as I did—kabuki, and that under the carefully crafted constititional Theory Of We Get To Do Whatever The Fuck We Want (or, in the original German, fuhrerprinzip), Bush is doing whatever the fuck he wants. Scott Shane, David Johnston and James Risen report:

Secret U.S. Endorsement of Severe Interrogations
When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations [Torture].

But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion [so-called: Only a court can render an opinion], this one in secret.

As Congress moved toward outlawing “cruel, inhuman and degrading” [torture] treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion [sic], one most lawmakers did not know existed, current and former officials said. The Justice Department document declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard.

The classified opinions [sic], never previously disclosed, are a hidden legacy of President Bush’s second term and Mr. Gonzales’s tenure at the Justice Department, where he moved quickly to align it with the White House after a 2004 rebellion by staff lawyers that had thrown policies on surveillance and detention into turmoil.

It depends on what the meaning of torture is, doesn’t it? Don’t you wish for the happy, innocent days of the Clinton administration, when the entire Beltway was convulsed, for years, over a blowjob?

As with everything about the criminal Bush regime, the only question is whether it’s (1) awful or (2) vile beyond even our worst imaginings. Looks like the torture policies are behind door #2. So there’s really no story here, is there?

Anyhow, I thought it would be helpful to go through and extract the euphemisms for torture in the article, as a prophylactic against the exercise in politics and the English Language that we are about to see. I’d use the phrase “tortured denials,” but that wouldn’t really be funny, would it?

From the headline:

1. Severe interrogations. Syn. Torture.  Read more 

[Welcome, FDL readers!]

Now that’s news. What’s happening to this country?! Baltimore Sun:

Bush aides and campaigns have well-deserved reputations for screening people [or strip-searching them, or making them sign loyalty oaths] who get into the president’s events to make sure protesters don’t get in. And when they’ve managed to slip into an event in the past, they usually were quickly ushered out. [Or thrown out by party operatives posing as Secret Service agents. Or beaten. Or jailed.]

All of which makes it remarkable that a woman named Sherry Wolfe was able to get into, and apparently allowed to stay in, a Bush appearance in Lancaster, Pa. today at which he spoke to the local chamber of commerce about fiscal discipline.

Hilarity ensued, but here’s how the T-shirt read:  Read more 

This is shocking, in a way. Or rather, you’d think racist, fear-addicted Republican types would make more of a stink over it. The money quote:

“This is gutting the criminal program. Incomprehensible. Just plain dumb,” said one recently retired top FBI official who requested anonymity.
…
FBI insiders, reciting a litany of concerns, such as public corruption, violent crime and mortgage fraud, say the criminal program already has been cut to the bone.

“They are beyond looking at any body fat,” one said. “They are lopping off limbs.”

But wait, it gets worse:  Read more 

Multimillionaire Blackwater CEO Erik “With a K” Prince

Worse than we thought. As usual. McClatchy. It’s always nice to read real reporting. Fair use:

On Sept. 9, the day before Army Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. military commander in Iraq , and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker told Congress that things were getting better, Batoul Mohammed Ali Hussein came to Baghdad for the day.

A clerk in the Iraqi customs office in Diyala province, she was in the capital to drop off and pick up paperwork at the central office near busy al Khilani Square, not far from the fortified Green Zone, where top U.S. and Iraqi officials live and work. U.S. officials often pass through the square in heavily guarded convoys on their way to other parts of Baghdad. As Hussein walked out of the customs building, an embassy convoy of sport-utility vehicles drove through the intersection. Blackwater security guards, charged with protecting the diplomats, yelled at construction workers at an unfinished building to move back. Instead, the workers threw rocks. The guards, witnesses said, responded with gunfire, spraying the intersection with bullets.

Hussein, who was on the opposite side of the street from the construction site, fell to the ground, shot in the leg. As she struggled to her feet and took a step, eyewitnesses said, a Blackwater security guard trained his weapon on her and shot her multiple times. She died on the spot, and the customs documents she’d held in her arms fluttered down the street.

Before the shooting stopped, four other people were killed in what would be the beginning of eight days of violence that Iraqi officials say bolster their argument that Blackwater should be banned from working in Iraq.

Sounds like a bad case of Blackwater Fever, eh?  Read more 

So when will President Hillary invite Move On to the White House? President Edwards? President Obama? Anyone? Seeing as how Move On is all outrageous and evil and worse than Hitler, a sort of left-left-wing vanguard of the extreme left. In the same way that The Freepers are hard right extremist ideologues. I’m just wondering.

Traveling?  Read more 

And that’s what the guy’s friends say about him! Daily Telegraph covers Fox’s biography:  Read more