The Nightowl Newswrap

Dana Perino says that the public had our chance to weigh in on Iraq in 2004 and we should all just sit down and shut up. During a White House press briefing on Thursday, Dana Perino told Helen Thomas that very thing in so many words when the Doyenne of the Press Corps asked about Dick Cheney's dismissive "So?" When Ms. Thomas pressed her, Perino snapped that "You had input. The American people have input every four years and that's the way our system is set up." What an unctuous little guttersnipe.

Bachmann Busted On March 14th, Rep. Michelle Bachmann (Wingnut, MN) published a fearmongering screed on the op-ed pages of the Minneapolis StarTribune, in which she screeched that Democratic leaders were a bunch of terrorist-enablers who were making her constituents less safe! But she wasn't quite in the same room with reality when she sat down to write, and today, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes responded with an op-ed of his own, in which he torched all of her her magnificent strawmen - including the fact that the assertions made by DNI McConnell on February 5 were retracted on February 23 - and her op-ed didn't run until nearly three weeks later.

Canadian Supreme Court takes on Guantanamo The Canadian high court ruled on Thursday that it would consider petitions on the international legality of the U.S. military detainment center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. "Certainly, what the Supreme Court of Canada says about the legality of Guantanamo Bay and the actions of Canadian officials with respect to a citizen there, will reverberate in the political sphere in terms of bringing greater attention to, and a requirement of justification by the government of Canada about why it refuses to intervene," said University of Toronto law professor Audrey Macklin, who will represent the university's law clinic and Human Rights Watch at the hearing.

Oh, please, please, please, please, please Cuyahoga County, Ohio has launched an investigation into crossover voting. Before the Ohio and Texas primaries, Rush Limbaugh urged listeners to cross over and vote for Hillary Clinton in order to prolong the Democratic nominating process. As the investigation progresses, there is a huge open-ended question hanging out there: Will county officials go after the ringleaders of apparently illegal electioneering? In other words, will they indict Limbaugh for illegal electioneering?

With friends like these Extrajudicial slayings are on the rise in Colombia. The Colombian military, straining to show results of the U.S. funded war against leftist guerrillas are slaughtering civilians and calling them rebels. Human rights groups in the United States are questioning whether the United States is upholding U.S. law and withholding funding from units accused of human rights abuses. The Fellowship of Reconciliation and Amnesty International found that military aid was approved for 11 units of the Colombian armed forces last year, in spite of the fact that there were "credible allegations regarding killings, disappearances and collaboration with outlawed paramilitary forces," said Renata Rendon of Amnesty International. "It's outrageous this is happening. It's up to the [U.S. government] to ensure that we are not providing aid to abusive units."

Fighting broke out between Palestinian factions in the Ain al-Hilwe refugee camp in Lebanon between followers of Fatah and followers of the Islamist group Jund al-Sham. One Fatah member was killed and four others were wounded in the street fighting that broke out after Fatah arrested the Jund al-Sham commander on Thursday and handed him over to the Lebanese army. Jund al-Sham is a radical splinter group, estimated to have only about 50 armed members in the camp. Given the fight they apparently are capable of mounting, their small numbers are a good thing.

Taiwanese are at the polls today to choose a new president, and turnout among the 17 million registered voters is expected to be high. Both candidates favor a closer economic relationship with the Chinese mainland, and the candidate favored by Beijing was leading in the polls...until all hell broke loose in Tibet, now it's not just a horeserace, but a likely photo-finish.

Democracy by royal decree will commence on Monday. The people of Bhutan might prefer for their exalted monarch to run the show, but he has a different notion - he wants to turn the country into a constitutional monarchy, and the Bhutanese to elect their own leaders. "We are reluctant democrats," said one candidate for parliament. "It's been forced on us, and we have to embrace it."

In a sweeping speech today, French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced Friday that the nation would scale back their arsenal to about half the cold-war number, or about 300 warheads total. When making the announcement, Sarkozy stressed that France will maintain a vigorous defense and warned against threats to Europe by Iran and other powers, but he also encouraged European powers to work toward deterrence via diplomacy. He also urged the U.S. and China to ratify a nuclear test-ban treaty that was signed over 40 years ago.

And lets end on a lighthearted note...I love squirrels - love 'em, love 'em, love 'em. I can sit in the woods and watch squirrels for hours - I could have made a career of watching squirrels. So this didn't really surprise me - squirrels have social networks. They tend toward other squirrels with similar personalities and characteristics. Read the whole article - then go to the park.

Dodd and Murray Call on HUD Secretary To Quit

I would file this under the category of 'doesn't have the decency to do the right thing and quit.'

WASHINGTON -- Two Democratic senators said Friday that Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson, buffeted by allegations of cronyism and favoritism, should resign.

Sens. Patty Murray of Washington state and Christopher Dodd of Connecticut said that Jackson's problems represented a "worsening distraction" at HUD at a time when the nation needs a credible housing secretary who is beyond suspicion.

"It is time for Secretary Jackson to go," Murray said.

Murray chairs a Senate Appropriations subcommittee on housing, while Dodd is chairman of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee. The pair sent a letter to President Bush urging him to request Jackson's resignation.

Jackson has refused to answer questions about his role in a Philadelphia redevelopment deal. The city's housing authority has filed a lawsuit charging that Jackson tried to punish the agency for nixing a deal involving music-producer-turned-developer Kenny Gamble, a friend of Jackson.

At a subcommittee hearing last week, Murray repeatedly asked Jackson about the Philadelphia deal and other allegations of wrongdoing, including an investigation by HUD's inspector general that was triggered by Jackson's boast that he once revoked a contract because an applicant said he did not like Bush.

The inspector general, after a four-month inquiry, turned up no evidence of a canceled contract. But the report found what it called "some problematic instances" involving HUD contracts and grants, including Jackson's opposition to money for a contractor whose executives donated exclusively to Democratic candidates.

Murray said she offered Jackson a chance to "debunk any misunderstandings and clear his name." Instead, "Jackson stubbornly refused to provide the answers the American public deserves," she said.

Imagine that. Jackson decided to not respond to questions from lawmakers and, well, basically decided that he didn't need to comply with oversight.

I'd sure like to be around when a Democrat tries that in front of a Republican-controlled committee one day. Sadly, the way things are going, it might be 2075 before the Republicans ever control Congress again.

Friday Catblogging - March 21, 2008

Charlie, doing what Charlie does - flopping around and wielding his claws,
until he finds that perfect sleeping position

A couple of days ago, Zoe's toy closet got on my last nerve, and I pulled everything out of it and put it in a big pile on the floor and commenced with sorting and organizing and donating and flat-out tossing some of the - for want of a better word - crap. So far, she hasn't noticed the missing items. Let's hope it holds - she will be four in a few days, and she is really exercising her dramatic chops these days...

And while the closet was empty, Buddy Impeachment
claimed a shelf as his very own.

No word on how many tears were shed in the writing of the op-ed...

John "Tears for Fears" Boehner took to the pages of the Washington Cageliner Times today to whine about earmarks. You remember that they only became an issue for the hypocrites in the GOP when the Democrats took back the majority in both chambers and lame-ducked the current occupant. Suddenly, it was a big damned deal that there was any such thing - even though there was not a peep of protest between January 2001 and December 2007 when the Republicans were in the majority.

The conservative watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste found that during those years of Republican majority, the Congress attached and Bush signed into law a total of 52,319 earmarks at a cost of $121.8 billion. In 2007, earmarks were $9 billion, down nearly $11 billion from the average of $20.3 billion during the first six years of the Bush free-for-all.

Now, lets get realistic...earmarks are the least of our worries. They comprise about 0.2% of the overall budget, and would comprise far less if the war spending was included.

The purpose of Boehner's screed, of course, is to fluff the GOP's nominee - who does have a verifiable track record of opposing these spending measures, and good on him for it - but he isn't all that and a bag of chips in that arena either - he kinda cherry-picks projects for dramatic effect. In November he started running an ad shining a light on his anti-pork cred, but it doesn't quite pass the smell test. Here is what factcheck.org said about it:

• He never specifically went after the "bridge to nowhere," and he was absent for key votes on its funding.
• While he tried to cut money for several other projects in the same bill, he never proposed cutting the bear study and voted for the final bill containing it.
• He wasn't present for the most important votes on the Woodstock museum, including one on an amendment he co-sponsored to kill the earmark and divert some of the funds.

The three projects that are singled out in the McCain ad amounted to less than $300 million dollars - a mere drop in the earmarks bucket, and seam to be singled out for impact and emotional appeal rather than for any direct impact McCain might have had in opposing them. In short - he overstated his case and mislead the viewers. But IOKIYAR, huh?

It is almost laughable - and definitely mockable - when the a schmoe like Boehner gets religion after the fact on an issue like this. And what possesses these morons to think that their assertions will go unchallenged? Or is it just a way to get their spin out there for a narrow and narrow-minded audience that would never even think about fact-checking or looking for context? And please - don't answer that - I'm fragile today and can't take any more bad news/reality about the intellectual state of my fellow countrymen.

Another Interesting Aspect of the Surge

"...here, in Diyala, they are slowly turning against the Americans."

80,000 Angry Men. Is the US Surge collapsing?In an investigation carried out by GuardianFilms for Channel 4, we uncover how thousands of Iraqis employed at $10 a day by the US to take on al-Qaida are threatening to go on strike because they say they have been used by the 'Americans to do their dirty work' and haven't been paid.

For ten dollars a day, we've been paying members of the "Awakening Councils" to fight against the various AQI elements that have been conducting small scale operations in Diyala. These elements are now striking because they haven't been getting paid. Is this by accident or by design? There's never been a shortage of money to throw around before.

What these Awakening Councils were doing was pushing back against the attempts by AQI to intimidate people who weren't sufficiently "Islamic" or fundamentalist. So the Awakening Councils formed up, cleared out the AQI they could find, and are now angry that the US took credit for their work. They're also angry that the Shia government hasn't been allowing them to fill jobs.

And this is not just in Diyala--Awakening Councils all over Iraq are complaining about not being paid and are either withdrawing or striking.

Anyway, check out the video--take it with a grain of salt--and see what you think. It comes from the Guardian in Great Britain and there's no doubt that there is some bias to the piece. How much is anyone's guess.

Too Easy To Forget People Who Make a Stand

Just a reminder of what could have been. These people had the courage to quit.

Love of country and professional self-respect compelled each of us to speak out, in the only honorable way open to us, by resigning. In our letters to Secretary of State Colin Powell, we opposed invading a country that posed no genuine threat to the United States. We underscored that our invasion would not be understood by our allies, that our occupation would be resisted, and that the consequences of the war would be dire for both Americans and Iraqis.

The war happened, with tragic but predictable consequences. Mistakes by ambitious, ignorant political appointees worsened the fiasco. For domestic political reasons, the Bush Administration could not adapt its policies to the reality that its “war on terrorism” was actually an intricate maze of local conflicts into which it had blundered without a guide.

The invasion of Iraq had a terrible impact on America’s relationship with the world. The tricks of totalitarian manipulation of public opinion the White House used to “sell” the war at home — simplification of the issues, repetition of empty phrases, demonization of foreigners, and falsification of history — simply did not work abroad.

By counting on such methods, Bush appointees tainted the US informational, educational, and cultural programs that once were the beating heart of America’s public diplomacy efforts. The desperate PR campaign by Mr. Bush’s Texas confidante, former Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Karen Hughes, failed utterly to repair the damage.

Five years later, we are convinced that the Bush administration is still on the wrong path for regional stability. Key officials lack the empathy and local knowledge needed to wield the tools of US diplomacy effectively in the Middle East. America’s outsized military presence is the principle around which local fanaticism organizes itself, to the detriment of the ordinary Arabs and Kurds America aspired to help. A rapid withdrawal from Iraq, coordinated with Iraqi factions and neighboring states, is the least destructive option remaining.

Our gesture earned us a brief moment in the media and the cautious respect of our colleagues. Five years later, we do not regret our decision to leave the profession we loved. Faced with a flawed policy we had no power to change, the three of us embraced the hope Brady expressed in his resignation letter, that “our democratic process is ultimately self-correcting; [we] hope in a small way to contribute from outside to shaping policies that better serve the security and prosperity of the American people and the world we share.”

Ramping up the rhetoric

As the sand slips through the hourglass, the fear that aWol might not get to start another war with Iran is palpable and his rhetoric becomes increasingly shrill and disconnected from reality.

On Wednesday, Bush conducted an interview with the U.S. government run Farsi-language Radio Farda to mark the Iranian New Year. In that interview, Bush asserted that Iran has openly "declared they want a nuclear weapon to destroy people." He also insisted that the Iranian government might be hiding a secret program (in spite of a total lack of evidence to support the allegation.)

There is just one problem - it's pure unadulterated bullshit. A veritable tour de farce.

Iran has never staked any such claim, or even stated on the record a desire for nuclear weapons as a deterrent. The Iranian government has been quite adamant and insisting that the uranium enrichment program that it currently operates in defiance of U.N. Security Council resolutions is for civilian power plants, not warheads.

Bush repeated his position that Iran has a right to civilian nuclear power, but insists that they should get the low-enrichment fuel from Russian rather than conduct their own refinement, but Tehran has repeatedly rejected that option. "The problem is the (Iranian) government cannot be trusted to enrich uranium because one, they've hidden programs in the past and they may be hiding one now. Who knows?" said Bush. "Secondly, they've declared they want to have a nuclear weapon to destroy people, some in the Middle East. And that is unacceptable to the United States and it's unacceptable to the world." (emphasis added.)

Meanwhile, back in the real world, Iran has denied repeatedly that the country seeks nuclear warheads, and in 2005, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued a religious edict forbidding the "production, stockpiling and use of such weapons."

Shortly after the White House released the transcript of the interview on Thursday, White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe was on the hotseat and spinning so furiously that he threatened to generate his own gravitational field, dismissing the presidents remarks as "shorthand" for comments allegedly made by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the "World Without Zionism" conference in 2005, where he supposedly, by one translation of his remarks, stated his desire to see Israel "wiped off the map." People who actually speak Farsi have said unequivocally that the comments that this administration is determined to hang their "bomb Iran" policy from are vague and should not be interpreted as a threat to use force against Israel.

As their grip slips, as they lose control of the message, their desperation grows by leaps and bounds. The thoroughly diseased, discredited and debunked Neocon/PNAC political philosophy and agenda rooted in arrogance and hubris that has brought our country to the brink of disaster is increasingly viewed as an uncomfortable embarrassment to the less stupid among the craven fucks who subscribed to it. The few die-hards remaining are the most dangerous of the lot - all that is left are the cornered animals. And the psychotic desperation - and flat-out, pathological delusions - of the worst president ever grow every day. It's time to put impeachment back on the table.