Battered Bush watches as support ebbs away

Guardian Unlimited: "The interests of the White House and the Republican party have diverged. Bush and Dick Cheney are still radicals, concerned with leading a conservative revolution that transforms America. But Republicans troops just want to win the next election, and voters seem to favour a more moderate stance. 'The President has decided that his legacy is more important to him than popularity. But you cannot get the legacy without the people behind you...'"

Funniest take on Rove's latest attempt to foment hate

Does Karl Rove Hate our Liberties and Way of Life? 'At a Manhattan fund-raiser Wednesday night, the flamboyant architect of Bush's two presidential campaigns and now White House deputy chief of staff told members of the Conservative Party of New York State:

'Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war. Liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers....'

So Rove is saying this about the "Conservatives" (and I apologize to the real conservatives for bringing him up in this context, but he is the one who used these words). He is saying that they don't indict terrorists or consider them mentally ill. Right?

But wait. Is Rove saying that the Bush administration didn't prepare any indictments as a reaction to 9/11?...

So the "Conservatives" might have indicted some terrorists instead of just blowing their brains against the Oval Office walls. But surely they didn't excuse them by saying that they are mentally ill, right? Terrorists like Saddam and Bin Laden are just evil, not insane. Isn't that the implication?...

Put "the word of a madman" and "Bush" into google and see how often it comes up.

George! Say it isn't so. First the indictments. Now putting Saddam on the couch and calling him a madman. Could it be W. is a closet Liberal?...

Bush plans primetime TV address as six US troops feared dead in Falluja

Guardian Unlimited: "President George Bush will make a primetime appeal to Americans next week to shore up dwindling domestic support for the war in Iraq, where insurgents have inflicted one of their deadliest attacks in months on US forces.

Mr Bush will attempt to persuade an increasingly sceptical public to maintain support for the war in a speech on Tuesday evening at the Fort Bragg army base in North Carolina.

Five marines and a sailor were feared killed in a suicide car bomb attack on a military convoy travelling through Falluja, a Sunni stronghold which US officers had until yesterday presented as an example of successful pacification. The Pentagon reported that women marines were among the dead."

Kos is right, again

How many Marines died in the battle of Fallujah? Why was that battle fought? Mercs...

Daily Kos :: Political Analysis and other daily rants on the state of the nation.: "Security contractors were heckled, humiliated and physically abused by U.S. Marines in Iraq while jailed for 72 hours with insurgents, one of the detainees said Friday.

'It was disbelief the whole time. I couldn't believe what was happening,' said Matt Raiche, 34, an ex-Marine who was one of 16 American and three Iraqi contractors detained at Camp Falluja last month.

'I just found it crazy that we were being held with terrorists, that we were put in the same facility with them,' he told The Associated Press in an interview at his lawyer's office. 'They were calling us a rogue mercenary team.' [...]

Raiche said his colleague told him that a guard then reached down and 'squeezed his testicles so hard he could barely move.'
When Raiche first arrived at the facility, he said a guard ordered him to the ground and put a knee in his back. He said he heard one Marine say, 'How does it feel now making that big contractor money?'

Raiche said the Marines handcuffed them with 'zip lock ties.' When the detainees complained they were so tight they were losing circulation in their hands, they were cursed at and told to shut up, Raiche said."

Dirty rotten liars

To think they have the gall to preach to us on our commitments, morals and how to live our lives? Bush and Blair lie every damn time they open their mouths.

Ministers were told of need for Gulf war 'excuse' : "...The paper was circulated to those present at the meeting, among whom were Blair, Geoff Hoon, then defence secretary, Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, and Sir Richard Dearlove, then chief of MI6. The full minutes of the meeting were published last month in The Sunday Times.

The document said the only way the allies could justify military action was to place Saddam Hussein in a position where he ignored or rejected a United Nations ultimatum ordering him to co-operate with the weapons inspectors. But it warned this would be difficult.

'It is just possible that an ultimatum could be cast in terms which Saddam would reject,' the document says. But if he accepted it and did not attack the allies, they would be 'most unlikely' to obtain the legal justification they needed.

The suggestions that the allies use the UN to justify war contradicts claims by Blair and Bush, repeated during their Washington summit last week, that they turned to the UN in order to avoid having to go to war. The attack on Iraq finally began in March 2003."

dirty little secrets...

...are finding their way to the light of day... will that light ever reach our cable channels, papers and other assorted mediots outlets?

Ministers were told of need for Gulf war 'excuse': "MINISTERS were warned in July 2002 that Britain was committed to taking part in an American-led invasion of Iraq and they had no choice but to find a way of making it legal.

The warning, in a leaked Cabinet Office briefing paper, said Tony Blair had already agreed to back military action to get rid of Saddam Hussein at a summit at the Texas ranch of President George W Bush three months earlier.

The briefing paper, for participants at a meeting of Blair's inner circle on July 23, 2002, said that since regime change was illegal it was 'necessary to create the conditions' which would make it legal.

This was required because, even if ministers decided Britain should not take part in an invasion, the American military would be using British bases. This would automatically make Britain complicit in any illegal US action...."

Stop the presses -- NOT!

But when will it be reported in this country?

Memo: U.S. Lacked Full Postwar Iraq Plan: "A briefing paper prepared for British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top advisers eight months before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq concluded that the U.S. military was not preparing adequately for what the British memo predicted would be a 'protracted and costly' postwar occupation of that country."

criminal negligence

Brain degeneration at the Dept. of Agriculture: "Since this is the time of year when so many of us head to barbecues, I want to alert you to a story you need to know. Our federal government is putting all of us at risk of mad cow disease. And the incompetence and erratic approach of the Department of Agriculture has become so bizarre that one begins to wonder if some officials at that agency are deliberately trying to get fired...."

Little exercise, little fresh food. Now the US government is forced to act on obesity

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports: "West Virginia is used to indignity. Its Appalachian hills are a byword for poverty and its people derided as hillbillies.
Now insult has been added to injury in what will be seen as an unwelcome first in the history of the United States.

A team of federal 'disease detectives', normally sent to combat outbreaks of infectious bugs, has been dispatched to the state to chart its frightening obesity epidemic. Epidemiologists from the Centres for Disease Control (CDC) have never before been deployed in this fashion, and it reflects the growing anxiety about the threat obesity poses to the health of the nation as a whole."

In pictures: How the world is changing

BBC NEWS | In pictures: How the world is changing

The Huffington Post

The Huffington Post : "Duberstein said that, in reading all the media reports of the last few days, he put himself back in his shoes as White House chief of staff. He thought, with the information Felt had in front of him, 'What options did he have?' 'He couldn't go to the White House Chief of Staff (Haldeman or Ehrlichman); he couldn't go to the Justice Department (John Mitchell); he couldn't go to the White House Counsel (John Dean). He did something responsible. The congressional committees hadn't been formed yet. What do you do? Felt put America first....'

Duberstein, for those who don't know, is currently a Washington lobbyist, CEO of the eponymously named Duberstein Group. But, more significantly, he was Ronald Reagan's chief of staff after Nancy sacked Don Regan. And, it is because of that position that he has a unique perspective on the Mark Felt/'Deep Throat' saga."

Bush's war comes home

Guardiandaily comment: "President Bush's drive for absolute power has momentarily stalled. In a single coup, he planned to take over all the institutions of government. By crushing the traditions of the Senate he would pack the courts, especially the supreme court, with lockstep ideologues. Sheer force would prevail. But just as his blitzkrieg reached the outskirts of his objective, he was struck by a mutiny. Within the span of 24 hours he lost control not only of the Senate but temporarily of the House of Representatives, which was supposed to be regimented by unquestioned loyalty. Now he prepares to launch a counterattack - against the dissident elements of his own party."