July 31, 2007 by lonbud
This ‘N That
Full Disclosure: I’d just like to get another post in the books before July is out, though not for any lack of things to note or discuss.
I’m mindful of the New Year’s intention I had to post more regularly this year, but it’s not working out that way. C’est la vie.
Is speaking French a deportable offense yet?
Last Throes Redux: A Re-jiggered “Dead-eye Dick” Cheney was back on Larry King Live tonight, looking and acting for all the world like the recalcitrant, lemon-sucking, gnome of Darkness he is.
He had much to say — rather, he said a lot — from the seat where he opined in May 2005 we were seeing “the last throes, if you will” of the insurgency in Iraq. The rough translation of his appearance tonight would be, “go f*ck yourself.”
El Mentiroso : “Abu” (you can call me Al) Gonzales, in addition to being the first American of Hispanic providence to lead the U.S. Department of Justice — and yet completely unrelated to his heritage — has now endured more official humiliation, as recorded for posterity by The Congressional Record, than any Cabinet member ever.
From The Sports Desk: We live in times of polarity and extreme. Barry Bonds is on the brink of setting the career home run record, and even among the most loyal fans of the game — not to mention the commissioner’s office — we’ve naught but sturm und drang.
Is speaking German a deportable offense yet?
Media Matters: Thanks to Glenn Greenwald, we recognize and understand more about the mechanics of modern propaganda than we’d like to. Thanks to Ingemar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni we have a nearly endless supply of material to keep us blissfully inured to it. Those of a more funky bent can look tomorrow to PBS Great Performances for a different taste of the naked truth, or surrender completely to the summertime blues and read about growing up.
Money, Money: Two more days of lower prices have compounded pressure on world financial markets after last week’s debacle — the largest one-week decline in five years. The dollar has revisited three-year lows against world currencies. Have we seen the Top of the Bush administration’s economy?
Tell me — does it feel like recession dead-ahead, or a springboard to green grass and high tides?
Summertime Makes Me Feel Free: In the midst of the very thing Donald Rumsfeld once described as a “long hard slog,” the Iraqi government is taking the month of August off. Talk amongst yourselves.
Science News: Or Business Website?
A Ray of Hope : Notwithstanding the photo of Dr. Fredrico Mayor on the home page.
Next Steps: Has it not been ever thus? We’ll forego the opportunity to do the right thing, forever moved by fear and ignorance of the past, and wait, again, for Godot.
Paul Burke - August 1, 2007 @ 8:25 am
Hey now, don’t forget one of the biggest dicks to hide under the radar — Ted Stevens gets his home raided by the F.B.I. whoa — I guess being a complete whore for the Oil Industry has its consequences…
And Ruppert Murdoch buying the Wall Street Journal — the Prestigious, inbred, bastion of the right — will eventually clown up and Fox News the right’s holy grail of a news paper (but not change its politics). The leading prestigious newspaper tucked under every arm of the “holier than thou” will be nothing more than a tabloid — screaming its position instead of trying to nuance the same nonsense.
In the end, the right wing, conservative, monied power elites’ favorite rag will be dressed in clown makeup and drag the whole bunch down with them — leaving Reverend Moon’s “Washington Times” as the leading rag of the right wing elite.
This is fantastic I love it. That veneer of prestige and elitism of the monied Wall Street reader (most just carried it around, never reading it) have lost their flagship.
Like putting McDonald’s Arches at the front gate of all their Country Clubs — their air of superiority self dissolves into a tabloid reality of O’Reilyness and eventual rejection by the salt of the Earth whose loyalty they trounced. Leaving now only the Armageddonist fanatics and beer soaked Nascar dads to carry the flag of Conservatism as the Neo Cons implode on the Hill.
Well done — they have done themselves in quicker than the progressives can even blog about it.
lonbud - August 1, 2007 @ 11:03 am
Yes, and there are the recent revelations about the insecurity of Florida voting machines, as well as the 100% hackability of the various voting systems used by the Sate of California.
The CA Secretary of State’s report is available here.
harshmoon - August 1, 2007 @ 3:27 pm
-Chris Wallace shellacked Russ Feingold on Fox News Sunday. The party that didn’t care about Bill Clinton’s perjury is now up in arms over Alberto Gonzales, who did not perjure himself. Wallace asked Feingold if he has any evidence, and the senator had to admit that he has zip, zero, nada.
-There’s a tropical storm out there but it won’t smack the US. GM swings to a profit in the last quarter. Consumer confidence hits a six year high. Such good news must be offset by stories of gloom!
-Look for Rupert Murdoch to use his newly-acquired Wall Street Journal to take on the “paper of record,” the New York Times.
Paul Burke - August 2, 2007 @ 7:19 am
Yes and oil prices hit an all time high and the subprime market and value of our good old American dollar – more good news – yee ha – let the good times roll! How about that balanced budget by those fiscal conservative republicans – yee ha what a bunch of swell guys. I’m so happy I’m one of them and on their team because they are looking out for my best interest. Yee ha GM is profitable – they laid off a half a million employees – whoopee good times ahead for everyone!
bubbles - August 5, 2007 @ 8:14 pm
Chris Wallace – shellack this:
August 6, 2007 NYT Editorial
Selective Prosecution
One part of the Justice Department mess that requires more scrutiny is the growing evidence that the department may have singled out people for criminal prosecution to help Republicans win elections. The House Judiciary Committee has begun investigating several cases that raise serious questions. The panel should determine what role politics played in all of them.
Putting political opponents in jail is the sort of thing that happens in third-world dictatorships. In the United States, prosecutions are supposed to be scrupulously nonpartisan. This principle appears to have broken down in Alberto Gonzales’s Justice Department — where lawyers were improperly hired for nonpolitical jobs based on party membership, and United States attorneys were apparently fired for political reasons.
Individual Democrats may be paying a personal price. Don Siegelman, a former Alabama governor, was the state’s most prominent Democrat and had a decent chance of retaking the governorship from the Republican incumbent. He was aggressively prosecuted by both the Birmingham and Montgomery United States attorney’s offices. Birmingham prosecutors dropped their case after a judge harshly questioned it. When the Montgomery office prosecuted, a jury acquitted Mr. Siegelman of 25 counts, but convicted him of 7, which appear to be disturbingly weak.
The prosecution may have been a political hit. A Republican lawyer, Dana Jill Simpson, has said in a sworn statement that she heard Bill Canary, a Republican operative and a Karl Rove protégé, say that his “girls” — his wife, the United States attorney in Montgomery, and Alice Martin, the United States attorney in Birmingham — would “take care” of Mr. Siegelman. Mr. Canary also said, according to Ms. Simpson, that Mr. Rove was involved.
Georgia Thompson is a Wisconsin state employee wrongly put in jail on corruption charges by the Milwaukee United States attorney. Despite strong evidence that she was innocent, Steven Biskupic prosecuted Ms. Thompson for corruption and got a conviction. The news hit shortly before a bitterly fought governor’s race, and opponents of James Doyle, the state’s Democratic governor, used the conviction to attack Mr. Doyle as corrupt. An appeals court later freed Ms. Thompson, but only after she had spent months in jail.
The committee has requested documents from the Justice Department about those two cases. It should also look into the investigation of Senator Robert Menendez by Christopher Christie, the United States attorney for New Jersey. Based on the facts that have come out, Mr. Menendez appears to have done nothing wrong. But word of the investigation leaked out in the fall of 2006, damaging Mr. Menendez’s reputation just when Republicans were trying to defeat him. It is unclear whose idea it was to conduct an investigation so close to the election of Mr. Menendez’s lease of a building he had sold years earlier.
The Bush administration is throwing roadblocks in Congress’s way. It missed a deadline for turning over documents, and it has refused to make some of the principal actors available to testify. The Judiciary Committee should not be deterred. If Americans are being put in jail for political reasons, Congress must put a stop to it.
Paul Burke - August 15, 2007 @ 11:56 am
But wait we’ll have a war with Iran that will bump all that off the front pages – good thinking guys….