Actually 22 Democrats and one Democratic Socialist, Bernie Sanders, voted against creating a commission that could force cuts to social welfare programs in order to end deficit spending and reduce the national debt. Interestingly, fewer Republicans than Democrats supported the legislation—16 of the former (plus Joe Lieberman, naturally) and 36 of the latter voted in [...]

Politicians are a necessary evil, or an evil necessity, or a fashion accessory. Can’t live with them, can’t shoot them, as the old joke goes. The people who make government hum, though, to the extent that it does, and it does to a far greater extent than many people will ever admit, are the people [...]

Many months ago when I was writing something about health care I ran across a blog that had a number of entries on the subject, one of which I used in my piece. That web page and 70-some others are still open in my browser, which in retaliation is now consuming most of my computer’s [...]

In only 72 hours, the movement to draft billionaire vanity candidate Michael Bloomberg has amassed more than 1,000 signatures, many of them from people other than friends and family of the New York mayor and his backers. At the current rate of nearly one signature every three minutes, the movement will have garnered one million [...]

Friday’s Wall Street Journal [sorry, can't link] reported on 34 foreclosures in New Orleans, foreclosures by subprime lending companies which, it turns out, were invested in by the hedge fund (Fortress), which in turn John Edwards has been invested in — and which has hired him as advisor — all fully disclosed, never hidden, but [...]

Threatening letters to Judge Walton are counterproductive.

Two British men suffer for Bush’s sins…

If at first you don’t succeed, lie, lie again…

The U.S. military’s demonstration of “Iranian” weapons in Iraq fails to convince…

There’s a revealing tidbit in a “Sporting Scene” article in the current New Yorker that sheds some light on today’s front page Washington Post story about how the Bush administration wants American troops to start killing Iranians in Iraq…

Media Bloggers Association president Robert Cox has secured press credentials to be shared among members of the organization during the upcoming perjury trial of Dick Cheney’s top assistant, Lewis “Scooter” Libby. BTC News White House correspondent Eric Brewer is tentatively scheduled to participate in the coverage.
The witness list for the high-profile trial is expected to [...]

The Washington Post had a front-page article yesterday on the major surge in Iraqi civilian deaths that occurred during the second half of 2006. The article pins the blame for the surge on sectarian strife stirred up by the bombing of Samarra’s Golden Mosque in February.

But I was puzzled by the graph that accompanies the article…

Last week, Nicolo Pollari, the head of SISMI (the Italian counterpart to our CIA), was fired.

The Center for Constitutional Rights and German lawyers have filed an historic lawsuit against current and former US officials including outgoing secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, US attorney general Alberto Gonzales and others accused of violating international law by abusing prisoners at Iraq’s infamous Abu Ghraib prison and the US internment camp at Guantanamo Bay [...]

In his Washington Post column today, Dan Froomkin flagged a Dick Cheney interview in which Cheney appeared to acknowledge and endorse US use of the technique known as waterboarding.
Q Would you agree a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: It’s a no-brainer for me, but for a [...]

Undaunted by the fiasco that was Michael Brown, president Bush has told Congress to butt out of the hunt for the next FEMA chief. Brown, the Arabian horse aficionado who led the Federal Emergency Management Agency into the Katrina disaster, had no previous disaster management experience and Bush says he has the authority to appoint [...]

Yesterday’s excerpt from the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq documented president Bush’s success at spreading terror. So how much has it cost us to make the country less safe at the same time as a gang of criminal deviants in Congress and the White House work to bury for once and all whatever claim to [...]

A recent Pew poll shows that 72% of Republicans believe the war in Iraq is going fairly well or very well. The surprise in the number isn’t that most Republicans remain solidly in favor of the invasion and occupation; it’s that their assessment is markedly more cheerful than the ones coming from the administration and [...]

Last Wednesday, Marco Mancini, the head of counterintelligence at SISMI, the Italian military intelligence agency, was arrested for allegedly abetting the CIA’s 2003 kidnap and rendition to Egypt of Muslim cleric Hassan Nasr.

Associated Press is reporting that the Veterans Administration employee whose stolen laptop contained Social Security numbers for 28 million veterans was authorized by the VA to take the data home. Documents obtained by AP appear to directly contradict VA officials who say he violated department procedures.

“You shouldn’t be worried about being spied on by your government,” says a Los Angeles sherriff, because you already are.

Leave it to the clever Brits to come up with the perfect description of the current state of the Bush-Blair special relationship.

In a decision sure to aggravate relations between the institutional press and bloggers, a California court has established the right of bloggers to protect their sources. The decision arises from a case in which Apple Computer sought to compel bloggers to identify individuals who leaked information about a new Apple product.

Today during the White House briefing I asked Tony Snow this question: There have been news reports this week that the FBI is using the Patriot Act to obtain phone records of journalists without their knowledge and without judicial oversight. As a former journalist, are you at all concerned about this sort of intrusion on press freedom? Tony denied the allegation…

Cynics would see this speech tonight as a diversion—pragmatists as further incompetence. Perhaps both. I find it somewhat ironic that those so obsessed with ‘securing the borders’ and protecting ‘our way of life’ care so little for their own boundaries and the decisions that actually undermine that way of life in far more subtle and effective ways.

Two items of interest in the continuing investigation into the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson, one highlighting Dick Cheney’s involvement and the other, a report that Karl Rove was indicted Friday on at least two counts in connection with the case.

Tristero over at Hullabaloo has deconstructed Bush’s seemingly inscrutable statement to a German reporter last Friday that the best moment of his presidency was the time he caught a seven-and-a-half pound fish.

Remember, remember always that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.
–Franklin D. Roosevelt
I happened to be in LA on Monday for the demonstrations—in fact one of my meetings was canceled because it was close to the downtown courthouse (near the demonstrations)and I wouldn’t have been able to get [...]

The current staff moves of McClellan and Rove are a fig leaf for an increasingly concerned Republican majority facing re-election and a desperate attempt the change the subject away form Rumsfeld’s fate. It’s not sufficient to the task and the disorder won’t be sufficient to placate Americans or focus the attention off of the [...]

In March of 2005, BTC News succeeded in gaining access to the White House press room for Eric Brewer, who instantly became our senior White House correspondent. Since then, he has attended perhaps two dozen briefings and asked some of the best questions posed by anyone in the room, knocking White House press secretary Scott McClellan off balance and off message on a few occasions, and getting some actually revealing answers on a few others.

The US state department dictionary defines public diplomacy as “government-sponsored programs intended to inform or influence public opinion in other countries; its chief instruments are publications, motion pictures, cultural exchanges, radio and television.” The effort is made considerably more difficult, and becomes correspondingly more important, when US foreign policy is as widely reviled as it is today.

President Bush has apparently airbrushed India’s nuclear nonproliferation record in his eagerness to cut a deal with the country. The Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), headed by former UN weapons inspector David Albright, says they’ve discovered “a well-developed, active, and secret Indian program to outfit its uranium enrichment program and circumvent other countries’ export control efforts.”

Former Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic has died in his prison cell at the Hague, only weeks short of concluding his defense against charges of genocide and numerous other war crimes.

Iran-Contra kingpin John Poindexter was retired from his Bush administration position at DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, when details of his Total Information Awareness (TIA) data mining prototype scared the bejeebers out of even a quiescent Bush era Congress. Most people assumed that the program lived on under less aggressive monikers even after Poindexter’s precipitous departure, and some people speculated that the NSA’s warrantless eavesdropping was in fact a data mining operation along Poindexteresque lines.

The transcript of a conference call with reporters, Joel Kaplan of the Office of Management and Budget and Pentagon comptroller Tina Jonas — and what exactly happened with Dov Zackheim, her predecessor, anyway? — demonstrates just how difficult it is to get a handle on what exactly we’re spending in Iraq.

Florida Congressman Connie Mack is exercised by an alliance between Venezuela’s state-run Telesur television network and Al Jazeera, the largest Arab language television network. The deal to share content and expertise, says Mack, “has the effect of creating a global television network for terrorists and other enemies of freedom.” Both Al Jazeera and Telesur are frequently and vocally critical of US foreign policy, and Mack wants to create a counter-propaganda network to broadcast US-friendly messages into Venezuela.

US intelligence czar John Negroponte opened a second front in the rhetorical war on Iran last Thursday when he appeared to suggest that the Iraq insurgency has expanded to include Shia militants armed and trained by Iran. This isn’t the first time the administration has accused Iran of supporting Iraq’s insurgents, but it does mark the first time any administration official has accused Shia groups, who are at philosophical, religious and political odds with the Sunni fundamentalists and Baathists associated with the insurgency and who are well-represented in Iraq’s governing coalition, of participating in the war against the government and the US army of occupation.

Terrorism hit record levels in 2005, according to data from the RAND Corporation available through the Department of Homeland Security-funded Terrorism Knowledge Base.

“I’m afraid we’re going to have to expect this to go on,” said Mr. Rumsfeld on Sunday, referring to hit-and-run attacks which have left an estimated 31 US troops dead and scores wounded since the end of major combat on 1 May.

“There’s even speculation that during the month of July, which is an anniversary for a lot of Baathist events, we could see an increase in the number of attacks.”

‘US Warns of More Iraq Attacks’
BBC News
July 14, 2003

When George Bush signed the defense appropriation bill containing John McCain’s amendment removing torture and other human rights violations from the official repertoire of the armed forces, he added his own little amendment: “Unless I say otherwise.” The vehicle through which he reserved the option to break the law is called a bill-signing statement, and as a Knight Ridder story revealed on Friday, the McCain bill was far from the first victim of the practice: he’s used it some 500 times since taking office.

Gerald Ford famously remarked that an impeachable offense is “whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.” But even so relativistic a body as the Republican House should be able to see that this president, this administration, meets any standard for impeachment from any moment in history. They’re criminals. They’re scum. They should be in jail. The president and vice president should be impeached first and then jailed. They should be crushed so thoroughly that no one will ever again attempt to cheat and cheapen this country as they have done.

Reporting for Government Executive magazine, Jason Vest — Digby’s nominee for Judy Miller’s job at the New York Times — suggests that the bribery and corruption investigation that nailed Republican representative Duke “I’m on the side of the angels here” Cunningham may reach into the CIA as well.

Two superficially unrelated stories published yesterday and today provide unpleasant insights into the Bush administration’s new domestic Iraq strategy. One, a New York Times article, identifies the seminal author of the White House “Iraq National Strategy” document as a political scientist who was hired by the White House after telling them that Americans will support the war if believe it’s winnable. The other, from CNN, reports what can only be described as a political stump speech given by Joint Chiefs chairman General Peter Pace to an audience at Fort McNair’s National Defense University.

Among the many tragedies arising from the war in Iraq is that most, if not all of the explosives and weapons being used to kill US troops and Iraqi civilians are leftovers from Saddam’s regime that the US failed to secure during and after the invasion. Indiana Republican senator Dick Lugar and Illinois Democrat Barrack Obama have introduced legislation that would fund a US effort to secure similar quantities of abandoned armaments elsewhere in the world.

US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice is set to embark on a diplomatic campaign aimed at easing European Union concerns about the existence of secret Europe-based CIA prisons housing kidnapped or otherwise off-the-books prisoners of the War on Terra^® who are subjected to abuse or torture. Her tack: “The US doesn’t torture anyone, and if we do, you’re helping us. But we don’t.”

For the sake of our Army, our treasury, our national payche and the lives of our soldiers, someone needs to tell president Bush that we’re winning in Iraq and our presence is no longer necessary. Washington Note proprietor Steve Clemons, who has good sources among disillusioned Republicans, nominates the president’s Mom, who is said to be extremely annoyed with her son’s current roster of advisors and handlers. She’s a steamroller, but one has to question whether she can take on Dick Cheney, whose four-heart-attack motto at this point must be “Victory or Death” (his), and win. Perhaps she can round up enough troops — Laura, Condi and Karen — to pull it off and purge the “Victory or Death (our troops’) contingent.

Among the pipe dreams behind the Bush administration’s determination to invade Iraq was the notion that the road to peace in the Middle East ran through a secular, democratic Baghdad. It doesn’t of course; as it has for the past half-century and more, it runs through the middle of Jerusalem. And for the first time in years, and despite the Bush administration’s lackadaisical approach to resolving the conflict, there exists a breath of hope that Israel might make a determined effort to revive the moribund peace process.

Senate majority leader Bill Frist is locked in a fierce battle with “None” at the bottom of a list of potential GOP candidates for president in 2008. A Diageo/Hotline poll asking Republican voters to indicate their preference among six GOP presidential hopefuls shows Frist at 3%, tied with None. None was not among the listed candidates.

Former UN weapons inspector David Albright has raised questions about the accuracy of a November 13 New York Times story on US intelligence regarding Iran’s nuclear program and what the Bush administration say is evidence that Iran may be attempting to develop nuclear warheads for a ballistic missile capable of striking Israel and other Middle East countries.

Dennis Morrisseau, a retired Vermont businessman who is running in the Republican primary for one of Vermont’s two House of Representative seats, has sent an open letter to Congress calling on the federal legislature to fulfill their Consitutional responsibilities regarding the commitment of US forces to combat. “The power and responsibility to declare war are yours alone under the Constitution and cannot be delegated,” Morrisseau tells Congress.