Is anyone else spoilin' for a god-damned fight???

If you ain't pissed off enough to skip aerobics this morning, keep reading. I intend to make you mad enough to take to the streets with pitchforks and torches...okay, maybe we'll have to settle for patio Tiki's and garden hoes, but WTF, mate? You get the idea....

The Little Idiot's Splendid Wars™ are costing this country $15.8 Billion dollars...Every. Single. Month.

"This cost of this war is approaching $15 billion a month, with the Army spending $4.2 billion of that every month," Sen. Ted Stevens (Alaska), the ranking Republican on the Appropriations defense subcommittee, said in a little-noticed floor speech Dec. 18. His remarks came in support of adding $70 billion to the omnibus fiscal 2008 spending legislation to pay for the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, as well as counterterrorism activities, for the six months from Oct. 1, 2007, through March 31 of next year.

Come March, Dave Petraeus will be back in front of Congress and passing the hat for more money to continue the fruitless occupation of Iraq.

I, for one, am loud and clear about threatening the political lives of all my congressional representatives. (Fuck civility, Mayor Cleaver. I want someone right now with no qualms about deliverin' a knee-cappin' with a hickory stick to the feckless chickenhawk fuckers still backing the biggest cock-up since Suez.)

No more fucking around.

Turn off the god-damned money tap.

Or we, the electorate, will turn off yours.

We are, after all, 70% of the American electorate.

Get the fucking picture yet, Senators and Congressmen?

The aWol motherfucker is as good as gone.

Unless you want to join him, stand the fuck up, right fucking now.

March is coming.

We are watching.

And come November...WE ARE VOTING!!!

Congressional Dems...have you been paying the least bit of attention?

Apparently not.

After weeks of posturing and tough talk, the Congressional Dems are set to bravely cave in to the bloodthirsty jackals of the Republican party.

But cave they will, because if we learned anything from FISA, it is that congressional vacations are sacred and can't be fucked with. Congress getting their sixty-ninth vacation break of the year will take precedence over the will of the people on this, just like it did in August when they simply had to get to the beach, and the hell with the Fourth Amendment.

Here is a sneak-peek at the plot-line for Pelosi's little scene-chewing operetta that will open this week:

• First, the House will pass a version of the omnibus spending bill that will not include any war funding.
• Next, it's to the Senate, where Majority Leader Milquetoast Reid will allow those craven fucks on the repugnant side of the aisle to attach a spending amendment to fund the war. It will have no timelines.
• After the amendment is attached, the bill will go to conference where compromise language for the legislation will be hammered out.
• Finally, Pelosi will allow it to pass quietly - without timelines - probably late on the last day before the Christmas break.

All this disgustingly transparent little ploy will be missing is a balcony and an overwrought anthem bleated out by Madonna.

DoE will miss legislatively-mandated security deadlines

Over a year after congress told the Department of Energy to get their house in order and fortify the security measures around the nations stores of fissile materials (and over five years after Condi Rice breathlessly warned us that that we didn't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud) at least five of the eleven nuclear facilities in question will miss their deadlines - some of them by years.

The DoE has reportedly delayed compliance at some facilities with an eye to consolidating material handling to fewer sites. However, the Government Accountability Office testified in a Senate briefing that that project was also likely to run way behind schedule. Of course, there is an element of politics that comes into play. Everyone agrees that centralizing the nuclear fuel supply is a good idea, but Robert Alvarez, who served as an adviser to the Secretary of Energy in the Clinton administration explains why actually getting it done is like herding cats: “There’s a lot of pushback about moving fissile materials from a site, because then you lose a portion of your budget and prestige.”

Danielle Brian, executive director for the private group The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) was prepared to hold the DoE accountable. She admitted that congress had set a tight deadline, but maintained that if the Energy Department “had taken seriously consolidating and making this an expedited effort, they wouldn’t be having these problems now.”

...Representative Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who has taken a particular interest in nuclear security, said in a statement, “The department seems to think that the terrorist threat to its nuclear facilities is no more serious than a Halloween prank, as evidenced by its failure — more than six years after the 9/11 attacks — to do what it must to keep our stores of nuclear-weapons-grade materials secure.” Mr. Markey said the delay was unsurprising but unacceptable.

One site that will miss its deadline by years is the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, which holds a large stock of weapons-usable uranium. The laboratory plans to dilute the uranium, but that will take until 2015, the auditors found.

Two other sites that will miss their deadlines are operated by the National Nuclear Security Administration, which is responsible for weapons security. The agency was established in 1999 after a number of security breaches in the weapons complex, and in January its director was forced to resign because of other security lapses.

Now we all know that practically the entire damned country went collectively insane about 10:45 eastern on 11 September 2001, and only now is society starting to get their metaphorical meds adjusted.

But by the evening of 12 September, my husband (a former Air Force nuke guy) and I were talking about getting a handle on the fissile material that is out there - way too much for either of us to be comfortable.

A mole or two of uranium gone missing is the stuff my nightmares are made of (and with an atomic weight of 238, a mole ain't much volume, but it's a lot of mass.)

So when the Department of Energy changed it's “design basis threat” for weapons facilities, we thought that was good news. (A design basis threat is the level of attacking force a facility is prepared to defend against.) These details always, of course, remain classified, but the new protocols specified a larger, better armed and more capable commando-type group of attackers.

To underscore the preparations and their importance, Congress passed into federal statute that DoE weapons facilities must submit plans detailing the steps they would take to meet the requirements. Knowint the department's history of missed deadlines, the Congress inserted into the law the specification that all delays and missed deadlines be approved by either the Secretary of Energy or the deputy secretary. The DoE reports that they have finally managed to meet the standards set in the 2003 dbt protocol changes, but are still lagging on meeting the newer standards that were adopted in 2005, although they are working toward them.

According to declassified portions of the DoE's first report to the Congress, which took place in 2006 said that more than $420 million had been spent in an aggressive program that up-armored the vehicles security personnel used, and provided them larger caliber guns. The DoE told Congress at that time that six of eleven sites will meet the 2008 deadline, but the GAO says that one of the six, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, will fail to meet the deadline.

Kinda makes you shake your head in wonderment that we ever managed to get our act together to do the whole Manhattan Project/Race to the Bomb in the first place, doesn't it?

Then the wonderment passes, and you're left feeling pissed. One thing is for damned sure - if that hyperventilating scenario of Condi's comes true, we'll know who to blame - a feckless administration that lacks the fortitude and the political will to even take the security of the nations fissile materials seriously.

Statistical Gymnastics Come Under Close Scrutiny, Outed as Bullshit

Recent assertions by the U.S. military that violence in Iraq has markedly decreased in recent months has come under severe scrutiny from experts both inside and outside the government. Consensus is that that statistics offered by the military are questionable at best, as the pattern emerged that the military simply ignores negative trends. (Before anyone screams "Outliers are tossed all the time!" let me save you the humiliation of a lecture - I actually know what an outlier is. For the record, an outlier is a data point that is more than three standard deviations from the mean. You can't just call any data point you don't like an outlier and omit it to get the result you want and expect your findings to be taken seriously.)

The administration has pinned everything on the reduction of violence metric to prove that finally they have a strategy that is working! That is what Gen. David Petraeus is going to say in front of congress next week when he comes to give his aWol's report on the state of security in Iraq. He is expected to try to convince the congress that there has been a 75% decrease in sectarian attacks. (Problem there: I do not think that word actually means what they want us to believe it means.)

When others look at the full range of data, they find that the military cherry-picks the data for positive indicators and ignores the negative. "Let's just say that there are several different sources within the administration on violence, and those sources do not agree," Comptroller General David Walker told Congress on Tuesday in releasing a new Government Accountability Office report on Iraq.

Meanwhile, military officials would have us believe that the CIA, DIA and GAO are all using flawed methodologies that give an inaccurate picture.

The intelligence community has its own problems with military calculations. Intelligence analysts computing aggregate levels of violence against civilians for the NIE puzzled over how the military designated attacks as combat, sectarian or criminal, according to one senior intelligence official in Washington. "If a bullet went through the back of the head, it's sectarian," the official said. "If it went through the front, it's criminal."

"Depending on which numbers you pick," he said, "you get a different outcome." Analysts found "trend lines . . . going in different directions" compared with previous years, when numbers in different categories varied widely but trended in the same direction. "It began to look like spaghetti."

One of the troubling trends is the ommission of violence attributed to Shia militias fighting other Shia militias, which has gripped Basra and last month resulted in the assassination of two southern provincial governors.

According to a spokesman for the Baghdad headquarters of the Multi-National Force-Iraq (MNF-I), those attacks are not included in the military's statistics. "Given a lack of capability to accurately track Shiite-on-Shiite and Sunni-on-Sunni violence, except in certain instances," the spokesman said, "we do not track this data to any significant degree."

Attacks by U.S.-allied Sunni tribesmen -- recruited to battle Iraqis allied with al-Qaeda -- are also excluded from the U.S. military's calculation of violence levels.

Here it might be beneficial to remember that the Iraq Study Group report that was released in December identified "significant underreporting of violence," noting that "a murder of an Iraqi is not necessarily counted as an attack. If we cannot determine the sources of a sectarian attack, that assault does not make it into the data base." The report concluded that "good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals."

They are bringing their wares to the Capitol next week and the hucksters, pitchmen and carnival barkers are hocking the cherry-picked data in a most full-throated manner.

I just have two words for my countrymen, especially the 535 of 'em that control the pursestrings: Caveat Emptor.

So where do we go from here?

***linked at Salon Blog Report on 25 May 2007

That is the question.

The bill is passed, it will be signed and the war is funded through September.

I am disappointed that the Democrats caved – but for some reason, I keep flashing back to my youth and a saying I first heard all those years ago in Britain…The game isn’t worth the candle.

You have probably never heard that adage, but it basically means “No thanks, I’ll pass on the Pyrrhic victory.” I had not thought of that expression for years, but for some reason, that was the first place my mind went when I saw that the Senate had passed the war funding resolution.

Did the Democrats capitulate; or are they trying to set up the chess board, knowing a checkers man is on the other side? I honestly don’t know what they were thinking. But I can see a couple of plausible reasons for things playing out the way they did.

First of all, we need to remember the hard-fought supplemental should not have even been necessary. That this battle even had to be waged was a final, petulant “fuck you” from the 109^th congress that did not pass a budget before their fired asses schlepped out of the Capitol for the last time, until their triumphant return as lobbyists.

If they had done their job, this drama would never have played out, and that was a Republican, rubber-stamp congress. They did not do the job we paid them to do, so this whole sorry spectacle is a legacy of failed Republican leadership.

Remember that first and foremost, and remind those who forget – or purposely try to dishonestly gloss over that part.

Now let’s get realistic and take stock. The funding resolution that just passed over our objections covers the near-term. It funds the war through September. We are already planning our Memorial Weekend barbecues. Does anyone reading this honestly think that there is not sufficient money in the pipeline already to muddle through the next 16 weeks? (If so, email me about this bridge I’m trying to unload.)

Sixteen weeks is the blink of an eye – but September is magic for a few reasons – not the least of which is that it is also the end of the fiscal year. That, and sixteen weeks is not a hell of a long time to spend debating the funding for the next entire year.

In September, before the next years funding is finalized, General Petraeus will be back before the congress, reporting on the status of the situation on the ground in Iraq.

Does anyone believe that it is going to get better between now and then? Of course not. Between now and then, the number of American dead is going to cross the 4000 mark. The Congress he will appeal to at that time will have a burr under their collective saddle called an angry electorate. And the more dead they bury the angrier they are going to be. September is only 12 weeks from now on the chronological calendar, but on the electoral calendar, September is light years away from now. By then, even entrenched incumbents will be campaigning…

Please don’t misread that as I am willing to use troops as political pawns. I have personally loved too dearly too many of them to ever go down that path – but on that note, Carl von Clausewitz was indisputably right – war is policy by other means. And frankly, in the final analysis of the cold equation – every American in uniform in the volunteer military knows that to be true. It is accepted. We all have our reasons for signing up and signing on. Some are economic, some are idealistic, some are nebulous. But it all clears up pretty quickly once you are in, or that troop is out before the end of boot camp.

I am not absolving anyone of anything, I am just assessing the knowns, and I can see a scenario or two where the Democrats might have looked at the calendar and decided that the game just wasn’t worth the candle.

[Cross-posted from Watching Those We Chose & The Out of Iraq Bloggers Caucus]

An Open Letter to Congressman Cleaver (and every sitting congresscritter, for that fact)

Congressman Cleaver;

I know I am a pain-in-the-ass constituent. I admit that freely - wear it as a badge of honor, in fact.

I am also fed up with this feckless president that has brought our country low. I simply will not abide a congress that enables him. He needs to be impeached, not placated for fucks sake.

I am just a humble-blogger – but I am getting less humble about it every day.

The hell with the press – they are all bought and paid for. We are actually watching you, We are actually reading the policy papers and We are actually writing about your records from the public record. We are unconcerned with “access” because we don’t have any; and for the record - veracity doesn't need a bio (or a byline for that fact).

I issue a friendly warning now – any Representative that backs this apostasy of a funding bill with no timelines – especially in light of the Iraqi parliament backing withdrawal plans with timelines – will face the wrath of the blogs. And any Representative that does not take that seriously is in for a rude awakening.

If this passes the House, there will be an electoral bloodbath in November of 2008, and the carcasses of Republican and Democrat alike will litter the landscape. The way the system is gamed, we are a two-party system, and only a perfect storm of feckless perfidy will change that.

Say hello to Unity 08 and the Progressives.

Check the calendar. It’s storm season.

[Cross-posted from Watching Those We Chose & The Out of Iraq Bloggers Caucus]

The Shell-Game is Afoot

At the rate things are going, we may well see a doubling of combat troops in Iraq by Christmas, regardless of what General Petraeus reports in September.

By stepping up deployments and extending tours, the number of combat troops will nearly double, from 52,500 to 98,000 - and total troops in the theater of operations will rise to over 200,000. That is more troops than have been deployed to the war in Iraq since the invasion in March of 2003.

"It doesn't surprise me that they're not talking about it," said retired Army Maj. Gen. William Nash, a former U.S. commander of NATO troops in Bosnia, referring to the Bush administration. "I think they would be very happy not to have any more attention paid to this."

And just in time for Congress to roll over and tell him the lube won't be necessary.



[Cross-posted from Watching Those We Chose & The Out of Iraq Bloggers Caucus]

We'll see your veto and raise...

The Democratic Congress saw the Resident’s recent veto of the war funding resolution and raised the bet by passing an even more restrictive package last night; one that only funds the short term and would require the Useless Tool™ to return to Congress and justify further funding in approximately 60 days.

Another veto is promised, but Congress remained steadfast and defiant, passing the legislation 221 to 205.

Now the Senate must pass a place-holder bill and then committees from each chamber will get together and hammer out the final language of the bill that will be presented to the president.

I gotta admit – the Mom in me is getting a thrill in watching the Congress check the chump. When my kids screwed up, they lost something they had or they didn’t get something they wanted. When the first veto was affixed – on Mission Accomplished Day, no less – I said that every future bill should be more and more restrictive.

I said a while back that he should have to ask my mother for the money to fund this fuck-up. And while he’s at it, he should just try telling her that it’s gonna be his way or not at all. She would put her wallet away and say “fine.” And the discussion would be over. Continue to quibble and find yourself performing some unpleasant task. (I always suspected she kept one in reserve to make a point.)

What I found really interesting was the separate bill to mandate withdrawal of all combat forces from Iraq that failed.

Democrats mustered 171 votes for far tougher legislation that would all but end U.S. military involvement in Iraq within nine months. The 255 to 171 vote against that measure meant that nowhere close to a majority backed it, but the fact that 169 Democrats and two Republicans voted for it surprised opponents and proponents alike.

"I didn't think I was going to get anywhere near 171 votes," said Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), the withdrawal bill's chief author. "This is proof that the United States Congress is getting closer to where the American people already are."

The American people are not going to suddenly, at some point over the summer, have an epiphany and rally support for a failed war effort, launched on lies for the vainglorious ego-fluffing of a small, pathetic failed man with Daddy Issues.

That 171 number is like the number of casualties and war dead – it can only go one way.

No way in hell...

Buried on page A14 of today’s Washington Post is a story worthy of outrage and page-one coverage…and this buried nugget wasn’t even penned by Walter Pincus.

The Bush administration is urging Congress to pass a law that would halt dozens of lawsuits charging phone companies with invading ordinary citizens' privacy through a post-Sept. 11 warrantless surveillance program.

The measure is part of a legislative package drafted by the Justice Department to relax provisions in the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that restrict the administration's ability to intercept electronic communications in the United States. If passed, the proposed changes would forestall efforts to compel disclosure of the program's details through Congress or the court system.

The proposal states that "no action shall lie . . . in any court, and no penalty . . . shall be imposed . . . against any person" for giving the government information, including customer records, in connection with alleged intelligence activity the attorney general certifies "is, was, would be or would have been" intended to protect the United States from terrorist attack. The measure, which has not yet been filed, is contained in a proposed amendment to the fiscal 2008 intelligence authorization bill.

The immunity measure has stoked controversy following public uproar over news reports of warrantless access to both telephone conversations and records as part of the administration's post-Sept. 11 counterterrorism policies. It is part of a larger debate about the proper balance between guarding national security and civil liberties and the extent to which private companies have acted as an arm of the federal government. In March, the Justice Department inspector general found that the FBI had secret contracts with three telephone companies to obtain Americans' phone records, claiming "exigent circumstances," when, in many instances, none existed.

This would have the effect of letting the telecom companies off the liability hook for facilitating the government’s domestic spying program and violating your civil liberties and mine.

The ACLU and other rights advocacy groups oppose the measure, while the government asserts that the only reason we have not been blow to bits and de-headed by terrorists is due to the patriots at AT&T who gave them access to our phone records.

Government lawyers crafted the immunity bill using terms deliberately vague in referring to activity that "would be or would have been" aimed at protecting the country from attack to avoid indicating whether a company cooperated.

But civil libertarians charged that blanket immunity would amount to a legislative pardon to telecommunications companies and others that have aided the government's warrantless surveillance, without explaining the pardon's basis.

"To let them off the hook now sets a dangerous precedent by encouraging them to continue to engage in illegal collaborations with the government in the future," said Kevin Bankston, staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which last year filed a class-action lawsuit against AT&T, charging that the company allowed the government to unlawfully monitor U.S. residents.

The measure would gut Congress's efforts to conduct inquiries into the administration's surveillance program because a subpoenaed company or government official could invoke immunity, said Tim Sparapani, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, which has sued the government to force a halt to its wiretapping program.

The government asserts that the blanket immunity is necessary to protect sensitive national security information. "If companies are alleged to have cooperated with the government to protect our nation against another attack, they should not be held liable for any assistance they are alleged to have provided," Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd said.

The immunity would be limited to assistance from Sept. 11, 2001, to the date the measure becomes law.

Yeah…this bunch has been so trustworthy and honest, a veritable Upright Citizens Brigade, that we should just go ahead and trust them on this…NOT!

Personally, I agree with Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon…"If somebody intentionally breaks the law . . . that's not something you should just ignore." Yet that is exactly what this legislation would do.

Contact your elected representatives today and tell them to give this legislation the appropriate reception when it comes up: Roaring fucking laughter.

The First 100 Days of the 110th Congress

Friday marked the close of the first 100 days of the 110^th Congress. But lets be honest – when we look at the first hundred days, the focus is on Nancy Pelosi, the first woman to hold the position of Speaker of the House of Representatives.

It turns out that Speaker Pelosi disappointed some, surprised others, and confirmed the faith that the rest of us had in her abilities and acumen from the outset. Liberals who expected camaraderie and solidarity have often been disappointed that a steamroller-agenda hasn’t been unleashed on the Republican Party, and they say she's a poor listener. Conservatives who expected her to be non-receptive to their concerns say listening is one of her better skills.

The defining issue, of course has been that of funding the war. And there is where the natural politician shone through. Democrats are a diverse party. It has always been infinitely more difficult to keep a consensus among a Democratic caucus than a Republican caucus. Democrats by definition are less dogmatic and doctrinaire, and far more prone to exerting their independence on any given issue.

A case in point to highlight the Speakers ability to form and hold together a caucus would be convincing Earl Blumenauer, a Democrat from Portland Oregon who opposed the war and had never, prior to the recent vote, cast a single yea on any legislation that supported the Iraq war.

"She convinced me," said Blumenauer, whose vote helped give Pelosi her most important legislative victory. "For me, there was no attempt at pressure. I was able to convey my concerns. She was there. She was listening."

Pelosi's performance on the war spending bill highlighted what has become her signature: an aggressive leadership style that seeks to put Congress on par with the White House and prove that her notoriously fractious party can indeed govern.

A lot of people “misunderestimated” the speaker as a “San Francisco Liberal.” They forget that her father was Mayor of Baltimore and a U.S. Congressman representing the city. She grew up reading the Congressional Record and Roll Call. Machine Politics went on around her kitchen table. Make nop mistake – she keeps a totebook of political favors – but she remembers birthdays, anniversaries, Bar Mitzvahs and christenings, too.

As minority leader, she kept a diverse and disparate party together. Without her steady hand, last November might not have turned out quite so well for the Democrats. But as Speaker, she appears to be in the role she was born to fill.

"She has elevated her game, which is exactly what you have to do," said Rep. Adam Smith of Washington, a leader of the moderate New Democrats. "She is a lot better leader as speaker than she ever has been."

The woman was a stay-at-home mother of five – and she runs the chamber the way successful moms run households. She doesn’t reward tantrums, she knocks the wind out of the sails of those who get “too big for their britches,” she makes small concessions to get the whiners to shut up, and she not only assigns chores, she follows up on the brats she assigns them to.

The Republicans have, for the most part, been reduced to criticizing her through non-issues. Issues like the flap over her military plane for trips back to the district. She didn’t request it, the Sergeant of Arms for the House did. And she is required to have that access as the second in line to the presidency. They new that, they just couldn't resist priming the Wurlitzer.

Then there was the determination by many to smear her recent trip to Syria and Saudi Arabia. Everyone piled on, from the big-three networks to the editorial page of the Washington Post. Dick Cheney dropped the drive-by slander that we “don’t need 535 Secretaries of State.” (No Dick, but we sure as hell could do with one. Got anyone in mind? The position has been vacant since General Powell retired.)

Speaker Pelosi has weathered that storm as well, and looking a hell of a lot better when her trip is stacked up side-by-side with that stunt contrived by the McCain-Graham-Pence clown college field-trip to the Shorja market. At least 21 people were not rounded up and executed after she completed her visit.

At what cost?

George Bush is going all-out on the war funding issue, because he is desperate to keep the killing on pace for another 21 months – long enough for him to slink off back to Texas and bluster that Iraq wasn’t lost on his watch, and then he can set about re-writing the history of his failed presidency on a Big Chief tablet with a fat pencil. January 20, 2009 is the scheduled date for the end of an error - unless we just throw his ass out now, and I'm all for that notion...

Whatever avenue the next occupant takes to the Oval, the next president will be the one charged with making the tough decisions that will have to be made to end it.

Make no mistake – aWol is not escalating the war in a last-ditch effort to salvage victory. There is no victory to salvage. The troop escalation that is currently underway is not a strategy for the elusive *victory* that is unachievable. Sending troops into violent sectors of the city is merely relocating the violence.

Yesterday, it relocated to the Green Zone.

There is no victory to be had when the only thing the warring factions in Iraq can agree on is that killing Americans is a top-notch notion, and a game the whole family can enjoy.

In March, more American soldiers were killed than Iraqi soldiers.

What bush is looking for now is not victory. Instead, what he seeks is a petticoat to hide beneath. He hopes it will provide enough cover that he can launch a few salvos at *defeatocrats* from that vantage. He pathologically clings to the desperate meme that “Iraq won’t be lost on his watch” in a thin, reedy wheeze.

The only hope he has of achieving that end is a showdown with the newly seated Democratic Congress.

But those who will pay with their most precious coin are the American troops and their families. Specifically, the Soldiers of the United States Army, who on Wednesday learned that their deployments will be extended to 15 months from 12 months – effective immediately.

The Army National Guard is being likewise exploited. Four Guard brigades got word last week that they would be redeploying, even though the contract they signed when they enlisted limited the time they could be deployed. Need troops? Change the rules. They won’t mind…

Let’s clarify something – I don’t give a tinker's damn who fathered Anna Nicole’s whelp. I don’t care who got booted from American Idol. I’m always glad when a pig like Imus gets told to grab his ankles and take it for a change, but on balance, none of that registers on my radar.

I care about the 3300 who have died for lies. I care about the 50,000 who have been wounded. I care about the families that have been left behind, and the children who are growing up with parents deployed.

What will be achieved if this clusterfuck continues for two more years? Thousands more dead? Tens of thousands more wounded? How many more dead American, war orphans, destroyed marriages and damaged psyches is this small, vapid little man willing to sacrifice at the alter of his *legacy* in history?

Democrats Stand Firm and Face Down the President

So far, anyway...

Emboldened by public support for their war policy and the publics rejection of the president’s stubborn determination to stay the course and deny the reality he has indeed managed to create, the Democrats in Congress are sticking together and advancing other issues on the Democratic agenda.

The president who has only issued one veto in six years is threatening to veto sixteen different bills that are working their way toward his desk.

The bills he is threatening to veto range from bills that would allow airport security workers to unionize, the closing of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, restoration of Habeas Corpus, and curtailing the *rights* of the government under the Patriot Act.

One of the bills the president has threatened to veto covers the release of official papers from presidential libraries, even though the bill was passed with overwhelming bipartisan support. The president signed an executive order early on that reclassified reams of previously declassified information and would keep much of the paperwork that covers his presidency for years to come – in other words, they never want to share the content of the notes of the veep’s “Energy Task Force.”

A strong posture on the part of the Democratic majority has some Republicans salivating at the prospect of the Democrats over-reaching. One such Democrat is Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.). ""It's going to be like the government shutdowns. The Democrats' honeymoon is fixing to end. It's going to explode like an IED." (Okay Jack, we’ll take that under advisement just as soon as someone outside your district figures out just who the hell you are and where you think you get the authority you seem to think you have. Consult the ole Magic 8-Ball?)

"I suppose there's always a risk of going too far," said House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), "but the risk of not going [far enough] is far greater."

Senate passes war funding resolution, with deadline for withdrawal

The Democratic controlled Senate today held firm and passed a war-funding resolution that carries a deadline for withdrawal of March, 2008. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said the moment was nigh to "send a message to President Bush that the time has come to find a new way forward in this intractable war."

Of course, President Bush – who knows nothing of war himself – threatened to veto any legislation that carries any “date certain’ for withdrawal of troops, and Mitch McConnell, always a reliable Bush boot-lick said the Democrats were insisting on a “surrender date.”

"That's not surprising from a White House that has stubbornly refused to change course even in the face of dwindling support from American people whose sons and daughters are dying" said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont.

The ball is in Bush’s court now. So let him veto it. Let it be his signature that cuts off funding. Let him tell the troops in so many words that they are expendable and he will keep this clusterfuck going for as long as he chooses, and he will by-God get just as many of them killed for his lies as he wants, and Congress and the American people can just go hang. He’s the “Decider” after all.

He can try to spin it however he wants, but the fact remains, the houses of Congress are no longer stacked to the rafters with loyal Bush millions, and he will play ball, or it will be a long and miserable 21 months. Given his approval rating is hovering at 28% and 70% of the people in this country are realistic about the situation in Iraq, just let him try to play the blame game. I don’t just dare him…I double dog dare him.

Dick Keeps His Hatred and Anger Focused

The vice president lashed out like a wounded animal yesterday, denouncing the Democratic House of Representatives war funding resolution, which carries a withdrawal date.

"They're not supporting the troops. They're undermining them," Cheney told a gathering of the Republican Jewish Coalition at the oceanside Ritz-Carlton hotel in Manalapan, Fla., about 60 miles north of Miami. He also said it was a myth that "one can support the troops without giving them the tools and reinforcements they need to carry out their mission."

(I would remind one and all that the Republicans in congress were singing from a different page of the hymnal when President Clinton intervened in Kosovo to stop a genocide.)

But since he brought up supporting the troops, what the hell? I'll play.

• How freakin’ supportive of them was it to start a war with lies?

• How supportive was it to send troops into battle with inadequate armor, both body and vehicle?

• How supportive of them is it to send wounded troops back to battle who have not healed?

• How supportive was it to dismiss the Generals who spoke up early with opinions that ran counter to what the architects of this clusterfuck wanted to hear?

• How supportive was it when Rumsfeld was using a signature machine to sign the letters to the families of the fallen?

• How supportive was it to half-ass the job and cause half of the casualties because the ammo dumps weren’t secured?

You want I should go on? I mean, I could do this all day and not deplete my reservoir of examples of mendacity on the part of the Bush war machine. So are you hip yet to the fact you've been had, or are you still ridin' the short bus?

No, Dick. Mr. five-deferments, other priorities chickenhawk, do not presume to tell us how we don’t support the troops, you fetid, cowardly piece of human offal. Fucking resign for health reasons already.

Making the way for Vice President Powell?