Cheney's hatred for America

He wages war on the principles that founded this country. His weapon: calling the Constitution a rallying point for pussies and terrorists.

That's the Republican party. A bunch of fascists.

Can we afford a Giuliani presidency? He's clearly in the Cheney camp when it comes to reckless disreguard for the Constitution.

Goodling had something to hide

For Gonzales, the shit hit the fan today. I can't see him remaining in office another week.

Goodling testified that McNulty lied to congress and that hiring inside the Justice department for *career positions* was politically motivated.

Goodline stalled the hiring of a layer from Harvard law specifically because of his political leanings.

The hiring of career layers and the appointments to political positions fall under different categories. Bush and Gonzales have presided over the worst politicization of the US govenerment ever.

Both should be tried for treason. They intentionally sought to violate the constitution they swore to uphold.

Wolfowitz's statement

Hitchens summary of this non-event is spot on.

Here's Wolfowitz's statement to the World Bank.

Wolfowitz non-scandal

I'm disappointed in the media for neglecting all facts surrounding the Wolfowitz case in their reporting of it. All that gets reported are the accuasations of a scandal. "The europeans are upset over a promotion of Wolfowitz's girlfriend" is all that gets reported. Since that's all that gets reported, it seems like that's all there is to the case and anyone can draw the conclusion that Wolfowitz has acted inapporpiately. This is a terrible sin of omission.

Again, I have to admire Hitchens for taking a firm stand when no one else will: Wolfowitz has been more than open with the world bank about his relationship with Riza, and the World Bank's decision to promote Riza so as to alleviate any conflict of interest is now being portrayed as Wolfowitz's decision based on nepotism or something even less seemly -- showering a girlfriend with money.

Hitchens has two articles that should be read.

From when the "controversy" first emerged: here

and from today: here.

I have no love lost for Wolfowitz. But men should only be convicted for crimes they commit. The press's attempt to try him the court of public opinion while not presenting any facts is shameful.

Kasparov Jailed For Disagreeing with Putin

Putin is an enemy of the modern world which holds as its most important principle the free flow of ideas.

Today, he jailed chess champion Gary Kasparov for demonstrating against his regime.

Karsparov had seen ahead a few moves; he knew Putin would come after him.

Vonnegut

I will miss him.

I've stolen another link from Sullivan's website: here's an exerpt from "A Man Without a Country"

march on washington

Seriously; the errosion of habeas corpus demands a response from the US citizenry. The stance this administration has consistently taken is that they don't have to follow any of the laws/constitutions that were written before they came to power. They can imprisson whomever for whatever reason for however long and be accountable to no one.

I'm not much of an organizer, but I'll march on DC if/when a civil liberties march gets organized.

From Sullivan's website, I got this link to a Harpers story about an imprissoned Pullizer-prize winning photojournalist. He's been imprissoned for a year. No charges have been filed against him.

Redacted

Big Brother Bush tortured a confession out of a suspected terrorist, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. What did that torture buy us? What he confessed can't be trusted or believed. Bush has tainted America's good standing in the world and emboldened totalitarians like Putin and Ahmadinejad.

Nashiri described his torture. Bush redacted the transcript.

ISP

Google announced a new broadband service.

I don't think it will work for me, though.

Gag

Under Gonzale's watch, the FBI abused its power to issue National Security Letters. These abuses have not come to light because of the gag order that the letters bring with them: people issued the letters must lie under threat of prosecution about having ever been given one.

One man speaks out. Annonymously.

The patriot act would not have become permanent if the gag order rule were not in place.

It's time we got rid of this insideous peice of legistlation.

Ongoing investigation

Duke Cunningham was brought down by one of the prosecutors that got fired. Her name is Lam. She was in the process of investigating Rep. Jerry Lewis when she got canned.

This scandal is obscene, and yet so very expected.

Every time the President has fought for more power, he has abused it.

Or did his wife send him out on a junket?

Libby hand wrote notes in the margins of Wilson's NYT op-ed. He asks

"Have they done this sort of thing before? Send an Ambas to answer a question? Do we ordinarily send people out pro bono to work for us?

Or did his wife send him on a junket?"

I'm sure it must have come up in the course of the trial when it was that Libby wrote these notes, but my bet is that he wrote them the day the op-ed hit the stands. If he wrote this note before he talked to Russert, then he lied.

Libby Documents

Sullivan posted this link to the website where the National Security Archive has posted all of the declasified documents that were part of the Libby investigation.

I'm going to rumage through them later.

Today, Pants and I painted the kitchen. The kitchen gets the afternoon sun, and the deep orange had faded to an orangish yellow -- except the parts of the walls covered by pictures. Those were still deep orange. We bought some organish yellow paint yesterday at Sears. It took two coats to cover the dark orange areas and one coat where the faded paint matched the new paint.

Krauthammer's Complicity

The Plame case is too important to let Krauthammer whitewash it as just some prosecutor going bananas over a simple memory failure.

The picture that Krauthammer paints of Libby is of a powerful man deftly handling dozens of issues simultaneously, who has forgotten a minor detail on a minor issue. The minor issue is Ambassador Wilson's op-ed blasting the State of the Union claim that Iraq was close to going nuclear. The minor detail was when Libby learned that Wilson's wife was at the CIA. This is Krauthammer's first deception: "minor" does not describe either the issue or the detail.

Krauthammer's second deception is in painting Russert's testimony as the only detail of the case that actually pinned Libby as a liar. In so doing, he treats the case as a simple he-said-she-said disagreement. The jury looks awfully culpable if they sided with Russert over Libby when all they had to go on was their testimony.

But that blame-the-jury stance is itself deceptive... Libby didn't take the stand at his trial. "He-said-she-said" doesn't work if only one person is couragous enough to say anything!

But lets get back to that second deception before I blast the first.

Krauthammer is ignoring the testimony from Cheney's press aid, Cathie Martin. Martin testified that Libby and Cheney had discussed how to handle the mess over Wilson's op-ed at great length, and had talked about Wilson's wife and her possition at the CIA as being key towards painting Wilson as a bumbling idiot who only got to where he was through nepotism. If your boss is super worried about one man and how to discredit him, do you forget?

FUCK NO!

This now is getting to the Krauthammer's first deception. The downplaying of the importance of Wilson's (AMBASSADOR WILSON's) courageous disagreement with the executive office. In Cheney's world there could be no dissent or everything would unravel.

Krauthammer is ignoring everything that Fitzgerald's suppeneas revealed about the climate of the vice-president's office. Cheney was obssesed with connecting Sadam with Nukes. Anything that could derail that opinon was locked-on for destruction: character assasination (e.g. Paul O'Niel), "expert" disagreement (e.g. Steven Hadley) -- whatever it took.

We know now that Cheney was criminally wrong. Criminally. He was resonsible for the Plame leak. He gave the order. Libby lied to protect his boss from a criminal indictment. That is a crime. You go to jail for crimes. For Krauthammer to argue Libby disserves a pardon requires he ignore the majority of the facts unearthed in Fitzgerald's ivestigation.

And here is where Krauthammer's motives should be examined. I think he feels he needs to get Libby off the hook, or else his own complicity in decieving the country into an unjustified war might land him in jail... well, I doubt jail, but he will find himself fired.

Blame Game

Now is the time to play the blame game. Not six months from now when Libby's appeal has been rejected and he begins his 2 year sentence. Now.

The White House's continued policy of ignoring the Plame case (or as they put it, of not commenting on an ongoing criminal investigation) is absurd at this, the 25th hour.

Libby was convicted. Bush can no longer hide behind his managed media stance of ignoring the bad stuff.

When Katrina hit, the talking point was that it wasn't yet time for the blame game. He said it over and over. He sent out his deputies and they said it over and over. And then people got bored and turned to other issues.

We must not let Bush off the hook. We must fervently reject the managed media stance this administration has taken. They are accountable and we are entitled to an accounting. If they will not give it to us the first time we request it, then we must ask again and again and again. We must not get bored.

Froomkin hits the nail on the head.

Do NOT follow that link

CNN's 4th most popular story was too much for me.

You got the balls for a quagmire?

Froomkin disects Cheney's interview with Jonathan Karl.

In 1991, Cheney predicted invading Iraq would guarantee a quagmire. Karl asked Cheney what it was like to be so right. Cheney answered.

Froomkin asks:

"So if I read this correctly, Cheney is saying: Yes, it's a quagmire. But after 9/11 we needed to prove that we weren't weak. Is that now the official White House position?"

Mini Speakers

There's a TV at the gym hanging from the wall when you enter. A 40" flat-panel. It's not viewable from any part of the gym except the front desk. I would suppose that the bored staff watch it, except that every time I walk by it, there's this same commercial playing.

The setting is a downtown area. People are walking around listening to their iPods. They are wearing big old fish bowls on their heads, to symbolize how the iPods are disconnecting them from their surroundings. It's subtle. Some people are just waiting for the bus, but one couple is trying to make out. Of course, the fish bowls are preventing them from actually kissing. Then one guy suddenly is holding a different form of an MP3 player: one with little speakers on it. He takes the fishbowl off his head, smells the fresh air of the city, and triumphantly smashes the fish bowl on the ground. He thrusts his tiny speakers up into the air over his head and everyone around him looks up amazed. They remove their fish bowls and cast them aside, removing their iPods as they do so. The couple that was trying to make out remove their fish bowls, too, and finally kiss. Awwww. Everyone in the city starts dancing in the streets as the camera pulls back and the screen fades to black.

This is the dumbest commercial I have ever seen. If people wanted to listen to their music through tiny little speakers, they would be doing so already. Really, though, if people wanted to listen to their music out loud, they wouldn't use tiny little speakers, they would use big old boom boxes. And people did used to do bring their boom boxes everywhere they went -- but because they weren't keeping their music to themselves that everyone else in the world pressured them to stop doing it. Why would tiny speakers be any different? Other people's music is annoying. Ever ride the bus and hear a guy with headphones turned up too high? I tap that guy on the shoulder and tell him to turn it down. Now imagine that guy with little speakers, bobbing his head in satisfaction as he spreads his perfect taste in music with total strangers. Death metal, without the base, with the screetching sound of the symbols and the upper notes of the guitar, and a singer's unintelligable voice.

Painting

Yesterday, Pants and I painted one of the two small bedrooms in our house. The old color was this bright yellow. Because we're putting the house on the market in a few months, we want to repaint everything in a neutral color. We've been using this one paint color called "bone." It's off-white, kinda greyish. When I rolled the first patch of paint onto the yellow wall, my eyes played a trick on me. Against the old yellow paint, the new grey paint looked purple. One of those color-wheel things: yellow is the oposite of purple. It wasn't until the whole room was painted that we finally realized we'd been using purple paint.

Bet

A friend of mine recently won a bet he had with himself. The loser had to cut a 1" square of skin from a part of his body, and the winner was free to do whatever he wanted with it. He's been under a lot of stress you see. I guess that ended. Currently, he's having a piece of skin grafted over a recent wound. It's convenient the patch is exactly the right size for the wound; it's unfortunate that to commemorate his victory, he had the patched tanned first.